 Alan, can you please raise your hand if you can hear this audio? Mic check, mic check, mic check. Mr. Alan Alton, can you raise your hand via Zoom to confirm Zoom participants can raise their hand and can hear the audio? Well, I know you can hear us in the room. Check one, two. Check one, two. Mic check. Pablo, can we do a brief mic check? Hello? Mic check. Thank you, Pablo. Can you please repeat the following announcement? For those of you just joining the meeting, and live translation in Spanish is available, and members wishing to listen in Spanish can join the Spanish channel. To do so, click on the interpretation icon in your Zoom toolbar. It looks like a globe. Once you join the Spanish channel, we recommend you shut off the main audio so you only hear the Spanish translation. Thank you, Pablo. All right, Madam City Clerk, can we go ahead and call the roll? Thank you, Mayor. Can we do a brief mic check? All right, we'll do a brief mic check. Can you please raise your hand if you can hear the audio? Yes, please raise your hand. Mic check. Hello, Mr. Mayor. Can you please raise your hand if you can hear the audio? Thank you, Pablo. Alright, Madam City Clerk, can we go ahead and call the roll? thank you mayor councilmember tidbits councilmember schwedhelm here councilmember soyer here councilmember fleming here councilmember alvarez president vice mayor rogers president mayor rogers here councilmember tidbits have you joined us okay let the record show that all council members are present with the exception of councilmember tidbits all right thank you i want to do a really brief what we are in our second year and we're about six to seven months since we last met to talk about the city's priorities what we're really hoping to accomplish today is a check-in with our department heads and with our staff to talk about capacity to talk about what the priorities are of the city and now given our staffing levels and the budget that we adopted just about a month ago what we can reasonably accomplish to meet those priorities and meet the needs for our community over the the coming months uh with that i'll throw it over to our city manager who wants to welcome folks as well thank you mayor members of the council and first thank you mayor and council members for making the time to focus on our priorities for the next six to nine months and uh i wanted to also thank chief navarro and the police department management team who relocated to finley center from the utility field offices uh so that we could make it possible not to meet there today as it turns out and uh despite the best efforts of our technology team um they dry ran the whole thing yesterday it worked perfectly with zoom all the technology was in place and set up and then this morning as happens during these times we had some technical difficulties so apologies on behalf of the staff and and to the public for the inconvenience that they went through this morning and connecting to us we're at a crucial crossroads uh as a city and as an organization we've faced uh all kinds of natural disasters over the last four years and have been uh that have been extremely challenging not only for our city organization but for our community i think we've responded exceedingly well and we're progressing towards a full recovery from both the fire disasters and the ongoing impacts of the covid pandemic we council and staff deserve recognition for a job well done recognition of the impact that is had on our own lives as well um those responses and those uh you know goals met and the service to the community and to the city uh also take a toll in our personal lives and work lives um and i think over the next six to nine months uh our goal is to begin to get out of the crisis and response mode if that's possible and of course we may experience additional natural disasters and uh begin to return to a process where we're able to plan and allocate resources according to the priorities and the plans that we develop on a medium and long term basis in other words we're ready to fully transition back to recovery and hopefully uh a period of growth in the future and as we do so we're facing some crucial decisions as we prepare for a new city manager to join our team in the next few months i'm very honored to serve as the interim city manager and one of my goals during that time is to make sure that we have a stable environment for that transition that we take care of our staff our elected and appointed officials and that we kind of uh get things ready for new leadership to take on their role within the city and when you have a number of questions that are going to be coming before us in the next few months one of those certainly is how we're going to allocate the one-time funds from the pgne settlement that remain the one-time funds from arpa and look at those in a way that will allow us to create the most positive benefit for our community and our city organization we're going to need to determine how we create a plan to close the gap we have between our general fund revenues and our general fund expenditures we're going to be talking today about how we balance our priorities as a city council and staff with the many goals we have with the available resources we have financially and with the capacity available within our existing city employee complement we're going to be asking are we able to sustain the new programs we're starting as on a pilot basis if they are producing the results that we've established that will determine whether they're successful or not and at the same time we also need to make sure that we're able to maintain our critical core services our programs that the community relies on and counts on and the maintenance of our buildings and infrastructures in addition to new initiatives and we're going to ask do we need to identify new revenue sources in order to do so so today we're hoping that the council is going to help us narrow the focus of the council priorities so that the staff can complete those and show progress on the ones that are most important in the next six to nine months so how do we stay focused on those key priorities those at narrowed focused is also a question because we know and recognize new issues come up continually in front of the city council and to city staff and when they do we hope we can achieve an understanding of how we identify those how we present them to the council and share the potential impacts if they are prioritized for action we're very excited to share with you what we've accomplished over the last six months we will update you on the work in progress in each one of our departments related to your key focus areas and we will identify where gaps are that are impacting our ability to complete work plans or priorities to help illustrate our capacity to take on additional work and priorities once again thank you for making the time for us to have this workshop and thank you for the recognition of the commitment that staff makes to completing your priorities and focus areas I also wanted to just take a minute and introduce our two facilitators today who we've been working with to plan this workshop and prepare for today on my right is Nancy Hettrick and on my left Claire Coleman both with management partners we're very pleased to have them join us today and share some of their expertise in facilitating this session thank you again for a chance to share my comments we're going to invite staff to come down to this table to do their presentations and as each one of you come down please wipe down the station we've got some wipes here because we're going to rotate people through to make sure that the area is clean and safe for you to present from thank you all right thank you so much mr. city manager we will go on to our public comments for today's agenda this is a special council meeting that means the public comments are limited to our goal setting madam deputy city clerk if you could please facilitate via zoom thank you mayor the first public comment will be from Gregory Gregory I've enabled your speaking permissions please identify yourself a public record if you choose to do so and your time begins now greetings my name is Gregory Farron I want to nominate expand communication capabilities in the city as a tier one goal most other goals that I support depend on a robust and varied set of communication tools and initiatives which help us talk to you and you talk to us and us talk to us a healthy and vibrant city is one in which it understands what its residents think want and how it expects its government to act I have two objectives one all public recordings including zoom by the city should be easily and quickly found on the city's media pages I want to repeat that all public recordings including zoom by the city should be easily and quickly found on the city's media pages board community services cab downtown subcommittee cultural heritage boards zoning administrator bicycle and pedestrian advisory board and art and public places are sometimes on the city's legislative website and sometimes not sometimes on the city's youtube site and sometimes not and hardly ever on both of them in a timely manner second a comprehensive redesign of the city's communications tools should be undertaken to upgrade their capabilities content and ease of use this includes access by residents to the xxfinity cable television channels and equipment held by the library under a contract with the city we need to communicate better again us to you you to us and ask to us let's talk thank you thank you the next public comment will be from Jen close Jen I've enabled your speaking permissions please unmute and start your comment uh yes I apologize this is actually Stephanie Picard bowen with generation housing good morning mr mayor miss vice mayor council members and mr city manager I am Stephanie the operations and development director of generation housing where we advocate for more more diverse and more affordable housing we submitted a comprehensive letter this morning with generation housings recommendations regarding development of your priorities around housing in short we have encouraged this council to be bold in addressing our housing scarcity and affordability crisis we urge you to end exclusionary zoning to incentivize affordable multifamily housing in high resource neighborhoods to build smart and sustainably and to reduce cost and time barriers to development today we'd like to highlight one policy change that could have immediate impact reducing or eliminating impact fees for permanent supportive housing and deed restricted affordable housing this could substantially reduce the barriers to developing this desperately needed housing the city's current regressive fee schedule levies development impact fees on a per unit basis citywide regardless of size or whether it's a psh unit or luxury condo making these changes could also qualify the city for hcd's new pro housing designation which would support the city's application for several state grants and what about water obviously drought is here and requires substantial attention and action by all but please resist fear-based knee jerk reactions or the nimby's argument du jour for halting residential development county officials have made clear that our water supply and infrastructure can handle increased growth up to 52 000 units in fact whether this current prediction holds true is of no matter we cannot simply throw up our hands and instead need to be solution minded drought does not reduce the red burden of our residents it does not solve the problem of low wage workers spending hours in a car to support our industries it does not help the family paying too much for housing who cannot afford medicine dental care tutors or to save for emergencies it does not help businesses struggling because of workforce shortages these are problems that cannot be ignored halting development is not a solution to build or not to build in the face of drought is a false dichotomy there must be a third option build for and enact policies that promote water conservation and environmental sustainability and last but by no means least generation housing brings a commitment to do equity in its work we applaud this council for prioritizing organizational diversity equity and inclusion in the past and encourage the council to double down on this goal increasing de i in the city as an organization will increase opportunity for the city to do equity through its outward facing policies and practices to this end we encourage the city to follow the county's lead in creating an equity department and direct our level equity officer by elevating the city's de i officer to an assistant city manager level with their own department so as always we thank you for your service thank you mayor there are no additional hands raised in zoom and no one in council chamber wishing to make a public comment lastly we did not receive any voice message public comments okay thank you so much we'll go on now to our workshop agenda i'll turn that over to nancy all right i think the mic mic is working uh good morning a little bit delayed from our original start uh thank you to all for being so adaptable and flexible as we've had to to change our our program a little bit this morning uh i'm nancy hettrick i'm joined by claire colman we're with management partners uh and you have worked with prior facilitators for management partners in preparing your your existing set of goals greg larson was here in february uh and so i'm stepping in on his behalf as he's moved on to uh brighter brighter pastures i suppose we say in a very positive way uh so i wanted to just take us through the agenda and our approach for today and we have a slide deck that i think we're going to be bringing up here we go okay so the agenda today we will move through some of the formalities at the beginning of our meeting in a quick pace because we've lost some time and i want to be sensitive to the presentations that have been prepared by staff uh so we will do a very expedited start-up with that with the icebreaker that will not take much time at all uh we will do a quick review back to february uh to remind ourselves of the nine uh goal areas priorities that were identified during your goal setting workshop at that time and we'll walk through that uh we'll then hear updates from staff touching on progress that has been made items that have been completed but also importantly to your comment mayor about capacity and so we've asked staff to to talk to that specifically uh as well as other efforts that are high on their list of to-dos um that may reside outside of the council set of priorities uh so for our objectives for today we laid them out um pretty succinctly this is uh intended really as an update uh sort of a mid-cycle mid-year check-in given all of the changes that are underway the city is experiencing a big period of transition uh this is an opportunity to sort of level set and review and affirm the priorities uh and to prioritize some of those for staff's benefit so we'll hear updates uh really the goal to ensure a smooth transition through the next six to nine months and then discussing the top priorities which will spend time this afternoon really much more in a workshop setting this morning is going to be more presentational next slide please because this is a workshop it may not feel like it since we're sitting in a formal council chamber setting uh we do have some some basic ground rules we like to always include uh first of all listening to understand different perspectives uh through the presentations through the council conversation this afternoon participating and staying focused we want to make sure we're we're making able to get through our agenda uh which is lengthy and we will try to move things along in a way that is still engaging but allows us to keep to our schedule for the day assuming good intent seeking consensus uh that will be especially important this afternoon where we're looking for um council's collective perspective on top priorities and if we need to do a course correction you know like narrowing the ice breaker then please let me know those are ice breakers are we are our ground rules are we okay with it perfect uh and also the next slide we use what we call a bike rack to capture ideas that might come up that really warrant additional time and energy that we just don't have time for today so we've set that up over here to my left uh so if there are items that we want to explore further council wants to bring back we'll capture them there so we don't lose those thoughts but we can stay on schedule okay next slide please right so that our ice breaker and I promise this will be this will be quick but I do want to emphasize that this is really a workshop this is not intended to be um just a presentation to council feedback but really engaging to the degree we can in the setting uh so with that I would still like to entertain the ice breaker but just simply uh off the top of the head and there's no pressure here uh to share you know your favorite thing about Santa Rosa and there's no right or wrong answer and if you think of things later that are different that's okay too uh so just quickly we'll do around the horn uh and then we'll come up uh to our zoom to share um one of your favorite things about Santa Rosa mayor you want to start us off I'll start off by saying uh the thing that I like the most about living in Santa Rosa is the pockets of neighborhoods that provide a distinct flavor uh depending on where you're at you've got a different different culture you've got different uh a different feel to it and how they those roll up into one vibrant city ice mayor rogers um I would say the uh activities that my children families like the activities my children can get involved in terrific so the the opportunities for your kids uh in the community yes okay we'll just kind of come around the horn if that's okay councilmember Sawyer thank you I think I would say that the one that stands out to me is even though we are a city of approaching 200,000 people in 185s 186 right right in there um that we still have a sense of the of a small town that can be that can be a negative and a positive depending on the way you look at it but I think that's that that flavor of a small town that that is um not the size that we are and maintaining that can be difficult and I love the weather absolutely wonderful thank you my three things actually the people you know as evidence of after the Tubbs fire how this community came came together like I know others have had to experience it but it's really incredible when you see it and then also the diversity neighborhoods um of Santa Rosa having been an employee I really love the difference parts of Santa Rosa are different and then the geographic location we're in the middle of everything sorry raise I missed the step I missed the comment here in the middle of everywhere whatever that one is but I love our geographic location for myself it's it's equating everything that's been said prior probably the only thing that would add to that list is the natural beauty that we have here in Santa Rosa we have mountains we have hills yes thank you I'll never take for granted again my my favorite site which is the the parades of children walking to school in the morning that is just the coolest thing and and it's really great that they're back at it I really enjoy the resiliency of the community and the staff and on a personal note I love that there's a commitment to cycling in the community and the wonderful terrain and natural open spaces and beauty to enjoy it terrific all right well thanks that I appreciate that and um there's our there are so many reasons that Santa Rosa is special I think that that's true in fact uh Claire recently relocated up here so uh the the draw is is is significant Nancy that council member Tibbets is on the in the meeting if you want to call on him also sorry sorry shoot um is he I didn't say that word sounded like it I know I did not his his camera is not activated but he is showing and in the meeting so he may be calling thanks Nancy um yeah no worries uh everything was said except for me uh familiarity with Santa Rosa it was where I'm from it's everybody I know my reason I like to do this type of a setup in icebreaker because it reminds us why we're all here right and so thank you for sharing you know what what you love about your community and so many things that come to mind all right so that's that's our table for the conversation of today let's go to our next slide and just if we're gonna do a quick we're going back to the slide deck quick refresh on pardon me on the the priorities that were set in February so take your time back and I know time is of a warp these days so we're going back to February I know you've done budgets and you've done a lot of things between then and now but next slide please when you were convened and did a workshop with Greg Larson in February you came up with nine priority areas and we're going to switch the slide there we go here they are you all received advanced copy of the the workshop report as a reminder to take you back which summarizes the focus areas the priority areas as well as all of the policy goals as they were identified that support those that's all contained in there so this is just the nine priority areas you'll see I'm calling them focus areas as topics these were actually ranked in terms of priority when you were together and so in February COVID-19 response was top of mind and all of these were discussed and prioritized but they were in sequential order so we'll want to come back to that later this afternoon when we review it so here's where we were I'm going to pause and I'm going to hand over the the mic so to speak to stop as we go through the updates in each of these areas the work that has been achieved the work that is underway capacity limits and other updates that we'll go through so we will take a break if we need to as we're going through after each presentation if you have short questions or comments we can take those but we'll try to move through quickly so keeping in mind the schedule and we'll have time for a wrap up before we wake for lunch sound good wonderful all right good morning can everyone hear me it's really nice to be no we can't eat the microphone okay all right thank you can everyone hear me now okay great well good morning and it's great to be back here in the chambers with you and I'm glad it's for this occasion because it's very important to go over our priorities on a regular basis because there's a lot of work particularly in our portfolio community development and engagement to support your priorities as well as all the daily operations that are expected by our community our applicants and ourselves in terms of of managing the city and the all the external services that come out of community development and engagement so just as a reminder this is a diverse group in this portfolio we have building planning engineering economic development we have housing which includes trust and voucher programs we have community engagement and we have recreation services i'll also be presenting on the homelessness division of the city but that has been elevated to the city manager's office but i've included in in here because we have done quite a bit of work to support that through my position as the interim assistant city manager next slide so a little disclaimer i probably have the longest presentation i will touch on these slides quickly um because i want to get into questions and discussion and also we have a long day um but i'll start off with and i don't think the other departments will have as long a presentation so bear with me this is um probably going to be the bulk um uh in in terms of the the front end of your staff updates so i'll start with completed priorities um and this portfolio touches eight out of the nine priority areas that you just saw so we and we touched them a lot so in terms of COVID response probably the um a couple of big shout outs here in terms of what we were successful in in the last six months since we last met um we've been very successful in our virtual public meetings as you've witnessed yourself there's been increased participation but not just attendance increased and actually commenting on agenda items so which i think is great and we'll continue that that journey particularly as we start to head back into hybrid where we'll have um virtual meetings supported with in-person opportunities we've also um created virtual public counters so 99 percent of our development applications are turned in and processed electronically now and we we kind of did that at the get go and we've really fine tuned it the customers really like it um and it makes us more efficient now we do offer in-person uh appointments because we have to be flexible not everyone can participate electronically um another highlight i'd like to note is our quick response we did have an outbreak at sam jones hall and um that was recently and it was really an all hands approach um and also inter-jurisdictional approach at what to do um during that situation and so i'd like to commend um all that were involved in responding quickly including the flexibility of our team and our facility staff to isolate those that were impacted directly while we waited for the county to open up an alternative care site it was critical that we all work together and communicate um and so that was a real success um to an unfortunate circumstance uh in terms of homelessness priorities i am i'm happy to say that while it was temporary shelter we did shelter 865 individuals and we did um support almost 200 individuals into housing now our program is earmarked for housing so when we do take them out even temper with temporary shelter we do try to wrap around services to get them into housing that's a big leap to go from temporary shelter to housing so you can see we need to do more work here and then i think one of the other biggest um achievements in the last six months has been elevating homeless services to city manager's office it has done a great deal to improve our communications with the county with the continuum of care with the cdc and also across the organization that is really the model that we need to be at right now until we have a regional strategy and a local strategic plan next slide in terms of housing um we work a lot in housing in this portfolio in a lot of different ways um production is up so you can see some of the stats there we've also were successful in supporting the council in their decision to allocate 10 million dollars to the renewal enterprise district housing fund um which was quite a leap and quite exciting because it's going to go um to downtown infill housing and support some very important projects that will come downtown um some of which will have affordable housing but some of which will be market rate and what we're looking at is really turning the market if our of our urban core to support higher rise development so what we've accomplished is we've made the allocation and we set the terms and we'll be working through the process for that the rebuild is in process we are still working on the tubs fire um we're doing great but there's still the harder the lots to develop are the ones we're still working with we also have the glass fire rebuild to work on and then we completed our first phase for the general plan uh we did our existing conditions report and then we brought to you the visioning plan um and i'll talk about next steps with that next slide in terms of economic resiliency including child care i'd like to commend the recreation team one of the most creative teams i've worked with in the city they stood up our summer rec programs they got sports back online they are nimble they're quick they're creative um and uh they were excited uh from their own right to actually publish a fall guide it's something that we we missed out um on last year and they're very proud to be able to do that as well we completed our phase one of our child care support programs and we also supported the county it just took a lot of staff time in coordination with the city council to support the county in their efforts to look at downtown as a as a site for their government center so i think that was one of the successful endeavors in the last six months is is acknowledging that sometimes you have a timely opportunity there so we we took it we we had to set some work aside so we can put work on that and and that was successful because they were able to look favorably at looking at downtown um in terms of diversity equity and inclusion the community empowerment plan was published and presented to the public and we've been rolling out um on an ongoing basis our multicultural roots project next slide now i have five slides of in-progress work and i'm not going to go through all of them um but i do want to say that there's a lot behind every item on this list and you'll see the other departments have several slides too with one line i have we have so much work to present to you today i'm glad that you got the packet in advance i'm just going to highlight a few things but just know there's a lot of work behind each of these items and are very proud to work with these with these employees so in terms of in progress we are again looking at an all-hands inter-jurisdictional approach at looking at how we can safely but openly open up our sam jones hall annex um and uh our our shelter again it's it's essential that we get it up and running and we balance safety of the residents but flexibility of having it be in a um with with as few barriers as possible for for folks to come in um and and seek that shelter so we are working on that and hopefully soon we'll be able to reopen that shelter in terms of homelessness all of these items here we're presenting through this portfolio in this presentation but they literally could be on every other department's slides we work across the organization on homelessness it is time-consuming and there's a lot going on and it's all timely so we have made the space to work on this we are looking and supporting for a regional strategy but we're being nimble about imminent funding opportunities i really appreciate the work of the council ad hoc we're meeting every two weeks because there's so much work to do and then by the end of the year we hope to have three rfps out um first we'll be safe parking the second will be homeless services that's our um rfp that supports a provider that we connect with for sam zones hall and our other facilities and then like to get started on an rfp for this a city strategic plan that will dovetail with the regional strategy that we hope the continuum of care will be successful with um and then next slide okay in progress for housing and affordable housing you can see that housing is up we have a lot under construction 681 units half of which are downtown uh we have a lot more that are in process that we anticipate based on conversations with our applicants that we could have 700 to a thousand more units under construction in the next six months so there's a lot of work to do to get them up and issued and under construction um but this is what we see as the work ahead of us you can see there's quite a bit of affordable housing we have no shortage of affordable housing applications which is great there's been a lot of funding available to them it's a lot of work the process them and they do expect prioritization and expeditious work and that's been a challenge uh we're getting the red housing funds um started up we're preparing the loan documents getting the board appointments in order and we will support if if needed to support the NOFA the notice of funding availability by the end of the year as as they desire um i also listed some of the pending entitlements downtown you can see we're starting to get a lot of investment that's looking at multi-story building so um hundreds of units and at the five six seven we even have an eight-story um structure that is a airmark for downtown next slide okay um ongoing we're into the next phase of the general plan update uh we also have a number of housing oriented um and sort of catalytic initiatives we have missing middle we have the downtown historic surveys which um specifically looking at catalytic sites downtown that weren't already surveyed um and again continuing with our rebuild effort and as you can see on the right we are doing an awful lot of work supporting funding which is local state or federal just opportunities to get funding from those sources to projects so projects that are mixed market with affordable units projects that are 100 affordable supportive housing projects we're also looking at lots of different ways to get vouchers into the hands of people who would like to live in santa rosa we're attaching them to projects we were lucky enough to get emerge 131 emergency housing vouchers so now that we have them we have work to do to get them to the hands of those that need them and to get those folks into housing next slide uh economic resiliency um economic development strategic plan is on order for our division we're excited about that we're all that's our city's strategic plan we're also coordinating with uh the sonoma menesino economic development district on a regional strategic plan we've been busy um working on phase two of the child care support program and lots and lots of business support small business support and also um particularly our latinx needs and supporting roseland creation of a roseland community benefit district we're also working on a long-term policy for our park looks program it was very successful on an interim basis and there's a lot to do to make that a permanent option next slide public safety and reform so sometimes there's things that just emerge um and this is one of these items the short-term rental urgency ordinance it just got to a point where we were there were so many nuisance factors we're in the middle of fire season it's getting quite real um we have a housing crisis that's not going away and the short-term rentals are essentially exacerbating all our efforts and so we've come together and at the recommendation of the economic development subcommittee we're going to be going forward on short order to the city council with the urgency ordinance i think we're targeting october 12th and again this is an item that could be on many department's pages we're facilitating it but we require the help of police we require the help of finance um and water and we're all on board um but it's one of those items that happens quickly and then we all rally and we do end up having to move some items aside to make it happen uh diversity equity inclusion you see a long list here they're very active um right now they're got a lot of different um elements in the works um of particular interests we're trying to do more collaboration with our city's equity officer community engagement is externally facing so we'd like to couple that effort with what we're doing internally through our um equity officer um and there's a lot there's a lot of opportunity there to work together there's also been a lot of effort to work with police and the violence prevention partnership to do better about crisis response okay so now next slide please so that is all the work that we are engaged in it's quite a bit and that's on top of our daily operations and as i mentioned a lot of what we do is facilitative um but we rely on all the other departments to help us get the work accomplished i'm going to um talk about now the needs of our of our particular departments in our portfolio so for homeless services i mentioned it we need a strategic plan right now we are spread fan we are doing imminent priorities chasing funding we are responding to community interest council interest we know we're housing first but we need an action plan we need to know how to measure success how to move along how to feel like we're accomplishing towards their goal of housing first we know what the end goal is we need all the steps in between that's really important so we're looking at that and right now we have two staff members that are in that facilitating department we need to evaluate is that is that the model that we're looking for in the future or are we going to have uh are we going to amend that staffing and program um to fit a different model in the future so those are questions that we have in terms of um recreation just the acknowledgement that it's it's not easy but it is easier to um cancel programming and and issue refunds and it is to stand up programming and staff up they need a lot of time so when the the council or the community wants programs back up we need to know as early as we can so we can set up the program advertise it staff it up get those folks trained so that we can open up um in time for it so we can follow through and so that's what we need we just need a lot of good coordination up front about what the expectations are and then in community engagement just an acknowledgement here that right now it's just staff they have no program budget this but this year they have no pro program budget they have some remaining dollars from last year's in an account we're spare using to do a strategic plan they're trying to be as efficient as they can but this division needs some programming funds we've seen what happens like with economic development division when they only had staff once they get program funds they can leverage it it's not that they're going to use it all within internally they're going to use it to leverage programs and then that's what that community engagement team really needs next slide uh housing and community services planning and economic development and recreation have one thing in common we have very long standing vacancies and acting assignments so as you know i've been in this position for almost 12 months and it's been an unusually challenging 12 months behind me i had acting deputy director bill rose who's now no longer with the city so i no longer have a backfill behind bill was several others all the way down the line where you have a lot of folks that also have been acting in different roles for the last 12 months and the way that works is at the end of the acting assignments there's usually a position or two that fall off meaning that you don't have that staff member to do that work so you are short staff when you have when you have this model you are short staffed at the get go for the length of the time that you're doing the um the interim and the acting and this has occurred in planning but also in housing community services we lost dav guine another veteran employee that was director of housing community services um that acting director will be in place um in december it will be it will also be a year and behind that person some of it has been backfilled and others we just don't have anybody in those roles recreation we lost lost another um to retirement veteran uh deputy director kelly magnuson uh we have an acting deputy director now if we go out for a recruitment it's still be six months before we can fill that position so it has a detrimental effect on our capacity it's also challenging because the leadership is interim um and so I just look to the council I know you're working on getting a new city manager we can't wait for you to do it soon enough um because the trickle down is felt pretty specifically in this portfolio because it starts at that interim ACM if we can get a assistant city manager we can start figuring out strategy and leading this team it's a lot of work to do it for a lengthy amount of time on an interim basis is a challenge um another thing we're noting with our hybrid meetings and I know we want to get there just a state of the state but pre-covid we had one admin that could stand up a public meeting and we do a lot of public meetings we do formal board support meetings and then we do neighborhood meetings focus group meetings this portfolio does a lot of meetings so pre-covid we had one admins could stand up a meeting during covid we have virtual meetings we need two admins to stand up a meeting if we move into hybrid and add in person which we would love to do that's you need a third person to have because we do actually get a lot of public that wants to come in person so it's not that you're just offering that you offer and they will come and we'll need that third person to manage that we're budgeted for one admin per meeting so we are really deficient and as we start ramping up we're going to feel that so we will be looking for some help on that um also public records we have probably the highest amount of public record requests are funneled through our portfolio we did have to make some decisions about budget reductions last um last fall or sorry last spring and we did lose the position that would have centralized our public records act um for our portfolio um but in addition we were relying on that position that position also we need some technology to make it streamline um and that's something that we'll be looking um as we turn the corner we'll be looking for some assistance on all right next slide and this is my last slide i believe oh no i'm sorry and i'll wrap up um we talked about uh the permits being up and again we're facilitating department so if permits are up you can't just solve it by fixing plan review and inspection at planning and economic development it's a good start because we could use the help we are short staff the workload balance the staffing a workload balance is out of whack we have too much work we've doubled our timelines but you also have to look to fire and water and transportation um the transportation section they we need them just as much as we need ourselves to process these permits so you will hear today from those divisions that they're likewise feeling that pinch now some of that could be solved with professional services especially if it's ministerial um but there are exceptions and i would say planning's an exception because they live in the world of interpretation and discretion it takes some time so the ass there would be a limited term um city planner to help with the workload where the other sections could could be supported by professional services um and then you can see on the right there's a long list um that we basically goes into our bike rack things that we get pushed aside because we are working on more timely opportunities like short term rentals like home key like you know all those types of things that sort of come up that you want to jump on and do which is great but it does have a consequence so this is a list of things and and there's items on there that have money attached to them that we could lose like minnesino avenues avenue specific plan we we we had 600,000 in grant funding we need a little more to make something happen with a specific plan they cost more than 600,000 um but we don't have time to even chase that money or manage that project so it gets set aside and at some point we might lose the money all together same thing with cannabis program support the state has given santa rosa not printing dedicated money if we if we need it we can set up a cannabis program support and it's and it's several hundred i think it's six at least 600,000 but if we can't spend time working on that we don't get the benefit of it so those are the kinds of things that happen other things have deadlines like the hazard mitigation plan update just has to get done i don't have capacity to do it so i reached out to the organization and um i just want to come in uh emergency services um and britney miller she is stepping up to help us so while we were working on some more immediate needs she's going to help us finish that project and get it to council so that's how we work together to get this work done um it is a lot of work and there's all these great ideas coming to us next slide and this is my last slide a lot of great ideas coming to our portfolio because we are engaged with the community with our residents our our applicants investors people are just creative about how to do community development how to do housing um and so there's a lot of ideas here that we would love to work on that you you may be familiar with some and not so familiar with others um but uh you know these are things that are of a great interest to us and i know you heard today a public comment and might have received some letters regarding supporting supportive housing and affordable housing outside of downtown downtown we have a lot of tools and people are using them they're definitely attracting development but outside of downtown you know really putting some effort into figuring out how can we provide a fiscal incentive like we do for ad use um so whether it's impact fees by square feet or some other way that we can do it reducing impact fees can be challenging but there are a lot of different ways to support supportive housing affordable housing we'd love the opportunity to work on it but we're so busy with all these other other items so that's what we look for you today is to help us prioritize our work um it's all exciting work and we're ready to do it we just have a lot of it so thank you okay thank you claire uh so i wanted to just um first of all i'll ask counsel if there are questions that you have for claire and some conversation and a reminder this is really to help us inform us at the table for our conversation this afternoon where we'll be talking about priorities uh and the the pinch points if you will so this is not a budget meeting but it's really about you know capacity and we'll talk about that more this afternoon so are there any questions that we have uh for claire i guess mine's just a pretty general question for you claire and that's given the staff constraints the budget constraints what are the things that we have on the priority list that you feel like staff is putting a lot of time in and not able to get a lot of return from what would you remove from the priority list well that is uh that is one heck of a question well you get to go first so everybody gets to hear it before we ask everyone i know but this is like a test what are the nine what are the nine items what i know it's it's sophie's choice like i know that what are we not getting a return on well i think housing we're doing i mean i let me start with the positive i think we could do better with homelessness we're just unfocused um so i think it's not fair to say we're not getting a lot out of it i think there's a great potential there so i wouldn't want to say that that we're not getting a lot out of it we're just we're working hard we're not necessarily working smart um housing i think we're doing really great but i think there's still room to improve we focus on downtown which has been very effective extremely effective if we can be that effective the throughout the rest of the cities not just everywhere but really in transit oriented areas i think in particular we could be really effective there so i think those are those are good returns on investment i think well climate uh we it's too soon we we really need a climate action plan update we're just kicking that off so you know you you've heard me speak before you know i think we will fold that in so we have had to pull back we're looking at um uh jason that's portfolioed for assistance and even supporting the subcommittee because we don't have capacity to do that we'll we'll be there with with items but we've had to pull back so we've kind of already made some decisions like that like where should we invest our time and we have to and we have to pivot so that's one and i can't remember all of them this is a test most mostly i'm just wondering from all of the things that you're being asked to accomplish what do you think are the things that are most from from your perspective and from your staff's perspective could potentially not be the highest priority but that the council is prioritizing well so you see what makes it into that uh the parking lot list it's uh like on slide 23 um on slide 23 you see you know there's things that we wanted to do gas station ban ordinance it's on hold um we want to do a telecommunications ordinance it's on hold um we would like to pursue our cities our own cities government complex we need to get started on that at some point it's on hold um so we we do make those decisions to what to pull back and we will continue to do so as things come up so the question the question really is about the next six to nine months right how to allocate capacity that's beyond the regular duties of the day and what actually has to get pushed to perhaps you know next year or farther along in terms of the the bulk of the work i think it's your question right yep that's ma'am were there other questions or comments thank you and i think i know the answer to this but we're we're going to be discussing other um resource um resources what we might consider as far as raising money because it sounds like if you had the support staff that the list of things that you those things that would be moving along more rapidly would move even more rapidly and i'm so i'm i feel like the the conversation about revenue directly affects of course your your ability to get things done because it's all we are a service organization and we have less people providing that service than they were before so to me it all it really has to do with funding and whether we have a conversation about fees what the what the end is what the um uh what the businesses the people in construction and etc what they can what they can absorb as far as fees that help us pay for the expedition of their entitlements which is really what it's about so i think it's for me um i'm wondering if that if that conversation about your ability to get the job done and that's going to affect every department in the city comes down to money and how what we are not going to be able to afford because we're going to move those funds into particularly i'll suggest your department for instance so to me it's a it's a it is a resource issue um clearly a resource issue that has to the weird that we're going to have to tackle one way or another and i i've assumed that that's correct yeah i think and i think there's room there's opportunities um to increase revenue and i i know they're on the list and i know we'll be coming back to council with the bigger picture of not just revenues that we can um consider and look into and plan for but also budget expenditures how to be smarter and just strategically in the organization but in terms of revenue master fee study yes we need one we've spent a long time since we looked at it i know we'll hear that you know if you raise the rates too high then it will impede some development so we'll have to be strategic about what we raise the fees for but it's the cost of service and i think that is almost non-negotiable you you need to be able to sponsor the work that you need to process the work but you need to do it smartly so we we have some responsibility on our end um to evaluate that uh cannabis tax we are on the lower end there's an opportunity for discussion there and that's in our control i think that would help and you know the cannabis tax and the program we were able to staff up because of that and and they did pay for that staff and that there's been a great way to look at it short-term rentals still be processing fees and we're already looking at how we can support implementation and enforcement by by when we give you the ordinance we'll also give you information about how much it costs to stand up that kind of program and also how much it costs to enforce it so i think when we bring initiatives we really do need to think it all the way through because otherwise we're creating more work but we don't have this the support system that's also sponsored and so we are starting to really think about that as we bring items to you well said thank you well i think as we move into the afternoon thinking about the six months to nine month time frame some of this is sequencing right and so and when you're prioritizing how to spend collectively time and energy um there are steps maybe the council provide direction on to move forward up with it can help the longer-term strategies and the opportunities that you've laid out right other comments council member Fleming or Tibbets no i i'm uh listening intently but don't have any questions at the moment thank you i think my last comment uh i think claire really started this off with what i think is the most important thing when she said this is going to take the bulk of the conversation because so many things fall in your portfolio i just want to acknowledge that and i understand how how how tight things are with the vacancies and in particular with having such a broad uh issue base that you're dealing with and so i just want to say thank you for the work that you're doing in that interim position and we all recognize and see the impact that it's having not just on you but on the whole staff it's going to come down next to transportation and public works and then we'll follow that by water with a similar update uh and question i'm sure that you will want to follow up in terms of what should be prioritized or come off the table all right good morning council members i'm jason that i'm the assistant city manager and of the operations and transportation portfolio and uh today i'm going to focus my comments on the transportation and public works department and i'm going to be followed uh directly by my my my favorite colleague over here director of santa rosa water jennifer berk and she's going to walk you through the santa rosa water department um we we work in a as a pair as a tandem uh to deliver services throughout this community and uh i think it's important that she has the opportunity as i do to be able to talk about the important things that our two departments are trying to focus on during this time and while we both are working hard to support the council priorities these this list of nine um the majority of the services that we provide to this community are are based on maintaining managing and improving the five billion dollars worth of public infrastructure that this city owns and that is our focus point and so um you're going to see a lot of similarities a lot of duplication from what claire showed there at the heart of what you're trying to accomplish with these priorities we are providing services and support to them throughout the course of their operation and you'll and and so between both of our presentations you're going to see a lot of similar bullet points um that are going to carry their way through because we have staff that are in that supporting mode in looking at the first slide i'm thinking about some of the priorities such as homelessness um the public works department supported housing community services and especially homeless services in an effort to try to create the sam jones hall annex you challenged us council to deliver this in a breakneck pace there is no building we've ever built in four and a half months but we were able to accomplish this with the support of council and allowing us to utilize the design build concept that helped us drill this thing forward we hired a great contractor we had a great service team and we were able to deliver that at the peak at the time when we really needed it most which was the early december and we were able to start moving those that needed it out of sam jones hall to start separating our services but to be able to maintain capacity and that was a really great feat in working together between the two departments to accomplish this the other thing we did at the beginning of last year as we created or the beginning of this year is we created a debris response team that was a team where we drew staff from our street and park maintenance programs in an effort to provide services and support in cleaning up debris not just homeless but also regular community oriented debris throughout town to try to improve the aesthetic of our community you'll see on the slide i show that we we collected 1500 cubic yards during the first six months six is a typo that's actually four months as staff has as explained to me and our six month total is just under 2300 cubic yards and you compare that to the 2020 time frame where we in total for a 12 month period we did 1900 cubic yards i would say that team has been incredibly successful in addition we've also been able to maintain more or less that 24 hour window that we promised the community we would between monday through friday this is a critical component that we put in place they've been serving and supporting our police our homeless services as we do encampment cleanups as we start to clean up and support the encampments that are currently existing they are there to provide that service and support for those operations moving forward in addition you'll see that we were able to work with with planning and economic development and the attorney's office in order to get cornerstone and lot two squared away we did finalize a dda uh development and disposition agreement with free bird for 60 low income housing units that will go on the site of the former benefit senior center we're very excited that that's moving forward and we expect that process to be complete sometime uh in middle of next year and so that process is going forward uh as well next slide please climate action is really where you're going to see most of the services that we're providing and we've been able to do quite a bit uh we're looking at our transit team is really taking a leadership role they've implemented an unlimited ride for k12 students on honestly i just uh rachel shared with me a letter that she received from one classroom um that just was a thank you to not just city bus but to the council and saying thank you for making this happen this has made our ability to be able to get to and from school so much easier and these were not high school students these were elementary level students that were providing this this thank you letter we've also taken a significant initiative on the on our zero waste um ordinance uh council adopted the foodware uh compostable foodware ordinance uh in july and we're in the process of looking at at moving into implementation here very soon um it's an exciting time and while our our ordinance is similar to those around the county it was council's direction that actually caused the baseline ordinance that zero waste sonoma created that others have adopted to change you uh pushed the envelope and you created bullet points you created initiatives that were above and beyond where they originally started and zero waste sonoma adopted the program that you put in front of them and so the team did a great job of bringing this to conclusion and they're looking forward to giving that implementation implementation underway i didn't show on here but we've also initiated the purchase of our first four all electric buses we're very excited about this we expect to take receipt of those buses around the new year and and get them into service probably next spring um that will be a kick off into what is likely going to be a significant shift toward electrification of our entire fleet our buses are the first four that are really going to highlight the work that we're doing but you're going to start to see is in future slides that we're going to bring forward a more aggressive implementation plan for other fleet programs next slide please we've got a lot in progress again just a lot in support of the things that are happening and planning and economic development and the community development and engagement portfolio in addition we're also trying to get frame on park master plan underway you'll see that we'll be coming forward to council with award of a contract to a design firm this is going to be a downtown focused initiative to try to get our community spaces in the downtown more oriented toward the increasing number of residential units that we're really pushing for and this is the first one with eight eight eight four street going in we want to make sure that we're creating that public space that is really going to support the activity of that new residential space once we're finished with freemont we'll be working our way around the other downtown parks such as julyard and gateway park in an effort to make those places special for those new units as we start to populate more residential uh families in the downtown um we are continuing to look at how we can support both planning and economic development and the redevelopment of city properties in the downtown area our real estate team is working especially hard to try to better understand along with the attorney's office this the new state lands agreement and what the program attic challenges are for surplusing and selling off property and making sure that we're following the protocol necessary so that we don't violate any of the conditions that they've established in there this is taking quite a bit of time because we're we're kind this is this is somewhat of a new program for us uh so making sure that we're clear we understand and we develop good guidelines and protocol for moving forward uh that's what we're in the process of doing right now uh and we expect that we're going to have some very successful operations and uh moving forward we're very excited to see city works um we haven't talked about city works a lot but jennifer's going to get into a little more detail city works is a is a computerized maintenance management system um in the past or for the last decade or more we've utilized the system that works very well for santa rosa water and the lineal aspect of pipeline maintenance and management it's very difficult when you think about area oriented products such as street maintenance or park maintenance or facilities we utilize it predominantly as a work order tool and not necessarily for a management tool city works is going to be our first fully functional management tool for all operations uh within the maintenance aspect of the city and it is going to be critical and crucial as we see that implemented to the benefit of our metrics on how we're doing moving forward councils asked me over the last five years what's the metric what's the target and it's been very difficult to be able to explain that partly because most everything we do is hand-based we have hand-based spreadsheets we have hand-based work orders this is going to provide us with that next level that next uh uh electronic support so that i'm going to be able to in a year answer your questions more succinctly about how our maintenance operations are functioning and we're going to be able to better balance the efficiencies of our organization in an effort to provide the most the best possible service at a cost that we can hopefully afford at that point in time next slide please so we're continuing to work through the economic resiliency with work that's supportive of predominantly economic development in the downtown they've done a fantastic job of creating space through the course of the pandemic but our team's been in the background helping try to understand what closing the street might look like how would you implement a parklet program and that's taken time away from other activities that we've been doing during the course of a regular work day absolutely critical and important and the success story that you've heard from the planning and economic development department is is really is really well deserved it's a great initiative and we've been in the background supporting that to the best of our ability our primary aspect here though is climate change and this is where you'll see mostly public work stepping into the fray we're actively working to try to better understand the solid waste arrangements that are coming forward sp1383 uh please take sp1383 very very seriously moving forward this is not just some bill that's moving uh this is a bill that is going to dramatically and and historically change the way we do business with our solid waste programming and it is the it is something that is going to kick off new and other initiatives that are going to be very time consuming and costly for the organization moving forward that is why you're seeing joey henowitz and our and well he is our team uh bring you so many conversations relating to sp1383 zero foodware um and and and recycling and um uh composting these are critical components and sp1383 takes effect in january of 2022 uh and it will have implications for us there is more to come um you'll hear more in october and november of this year about what the implications are one of the things we've concluded is that we are lacking a sustainability team within this within this organization santa rosa water has done a phenomenal job creating establishing and operating a high functioning sustainability team for their operation and it demonstrates to us the the need for the rest of the organization to have something similar in february you heard many many folks comment about needing a sustainability director i believe a director isn't necessarily the target but having a team that's focused in on being able to support whether it's more pace program initiatives whether it's as claire mentioned this climate action plan update whether it's being able to do consistent tracking of the initiatives and this and the strategic objectives that we've got in our climate action plan so that you can actively see the progress we're making towards the goals that is what a sustainability team should and could be able to do pulling in all of the departments and divisions that are ultimately responsible for that we don't currently have staffing for that we're working with uh i'm working with jennifer to try to identify folks that can help us start to kick some of the programming off but ultimately we're going to need to identify a dedicated specific person to carry the city-wide initiatives forward not just the santa rosa water initiatives so you're going to be hearing me bringing some of these components forward over the course of time in the meantime we're working collaboratively with our partners and planning to try to create an interim program with staff that we're going to borrow to make this happen moving forward so that we can start to outline what that long-term alignment should be as i mentioned earlier we're talking a lot about fleet right we know that 40 percent of our greenhouse gas emissions in this community are caused by passenger vehicles the first order of business is to lead by example and make sure that our fleet is starting to electrify in a consistent and appropriate way our fleet managers actively working on creating a procurement and implement and phase out program so that we can bring more electric vehicles into our fleet so that we can start to tip the needle on things that we have direct direct access to do that we're responsible for and so we're going to be seeing that come forward starting in in october we're going to have a draft and i expect that we'll be coming to council in december hopefully for at least a study session to talk about whether this type of program actually makes sense and then our parks team is doing a phenomenal job they've just got a massive amount of work on their desk we're very excited that the additional position that's measure m funded that council authorized this budget season is now on the street we're very much hoping to see that new position come forward and that's going to help break loose all of the activity that's lined up and ready to go whether it's new all whether turf fields over to place to play whether it's completing the roseland creek community park master plan whether it's finishing fremont park master plan or a multitude of other things out there there is a ton on that list that is queued up and ready to go we just need the additional hands to make that happen next slide please the gap analysis really is the challenge this is where the problem lies and you heard a lot of that from claire as she was talking about her portfolio it's no different than the operation and transportation portfolio on the slide when i'm showing you are things that are directly relatable to the council priorities that you've outlined but as i said a majority of our operation is not considered does not specifically do day-to-day operation within those priorities when we think about plan check as part of the priority set there are four divisions in public works that work on this on a day-to-day basis as you increase the service requirements out of the planning team for additional housing units we reduce the day-to-day operations that those individuals are able to support and supply whether it's traffic engineering responding to phone calls about speeding or new signage to the support that a materials engineering team can provide to our own capital improvement program if you don't know they provide direct service to all asphalt and concrete that goes in under private developers installation we make sure that the quality control is there so that when we accept that facility it meets all of our standards so as those increase as those pick up less and less of what we would normally or historically considered core service for those goes into place that is part of our initiative to support priorities but it does impact rest of the organization as i think just a little bit beyond the council priorities you've heard this in a couple of different ways right now our capital projects engineering team is 25 short technical staff that's engineers and technicians that is having a direct direct impact on our ability to deliver the capital improvement program that the council adopted this year right now we have a growing backlog of projects and financing in Santa Rosa water that we are not able to be able to draw down we're looking at options and an effort to on a short-term basis address by utilizing likely consultant staff to come in to try to attack that backlog and we're in the meet and we'll be starting the meet and confer process on what that might look like but even to Claire's point about the the hierarchy in the organization i've been without a deputy director of that capital projects team for over a year there has not been an individual within the organization to be able to fill that and i've taken on that role so not only as the assistant city manager but the public works director also the deputy director of capital projects engineering during the course of the last 12 months we are our depth is growing but we're struggling right now to fill in some of those gaps i did just recently have an individual step forward that i think is going to do a great job and starting next week they'll be filling in on that actor and in the acting role so that i can step away from that day-to-day operation of that capital projects team we're seeing similar issues with our maintenance program a high rate of turnover we have a lot of people leaving we are still getting fairly healthy applications but we have a lot of folks walking out of the organization whether through retirement or whether there are other opportunities that they're taking advantage of so the turnover is great that is that is that is creating a challenge with our delivery ability because now we have to start training a lot of those individuals because most of them are coming in without a hundred percent of the skill set so we have to train them before we put them in as an independently operating individual similarly on our capital pro on our maintenance strategy we are very underfunded when it comes to maintaining the five billion dollars worth of infrastructure it is a big big number and just to give you an example we talk a lot about pavement maintenance because i've talked so much about it you all understand when i talk about pavement condition index our current pavement condition index is at a 61 in order for us to sustain that we need to invest roughly 19 million dollars a year our current implementation our current expenditure plan is only 11 million and that's been an average for the last two or three years since the implementation of sp1 sp1 gives us almost four million dollars a year in and of itself no general fund goes into our pavement maintenance other than the pothole crew and the crack seal crew that's where our general fund investment goes in order for us to actually start to achieve what mtc would identify is a standard we would need to increase that investment to about 23 million dollars annually to get to a pc i of 70 on an average throughout our community and then last thing i'm going to mention on the gap analysis slide is there are a number of other initiatives that are coming forward that are being uh that we're trying to figure out how to fit in and the one that seems to be getting the most talk is the southeast greenway we are at a point where we need to begin the negotiations with our partners at caltrans to try to acquire that acreage the challenge is is in order to spend the time to do that i may need to pull away from other initiatives that are within the downtown if that is not the case and if directed to do so then unfortunately southeast greenway will likely have to sit in the background waiting for additional time for our real estate team to break open in order to be able to support that operation so i wanted to give you that quick update if you'd go to the next slide and i'll make this quick on a departmental update the team's doing an outstanding job i've highlighted a number of things over the course of the last five slides we've got a lot of stuff moving forward and there's some very big exciting things on the horizon and i want you to make sure that you've got a very committed part of your you've got a very committed organization to trying to deliver as much as we possibly can we talk about all of these acronyms up here in the second bullet this the the staff has diligently worked to try to bring new money in uh as we reported last week we had 12 million dollars through the active transportation program to build a bridge over highway 101 connecting elliott and edwards for bike and pet improvements we were part of the team that was instrumental in making sure that the community development block grant mitigation infrastructure money came in not just the component that the federal government initially mentioned but also supporting congressman thompson's initiative to increase that amount so there's been a lot of work from the public works in santa rosa water team to make that happen as well as finance and the attorney's office so a lot of great things on the horizon we're just in the process of getting ready to work with scta on their recent call for projects which is about a 70 million dollar total we're looking to hopefully see at least our 34 percent share that would normally come our way based on population and then we recently started a conversation with the federal highway administration in an effort to try to bring somewhere between 10 and 14 million dollars into the community for the benefit of fire survivors on our arterial and collector streets in the coffee park and fountain growth neighborhoods this is an area we've not had substantial success with fema but the federal highway administrations in cal trans seem very eager and interested to work with us on this and so we're taking dramatic steps to try to make that happen to bring those additional funds in our space and that concludes the conversation or the presentation that i have for transportation and public works and happy to answer questions i'll ask for questions as you can see there's there's quite a commitment from staff in all levels in maintaining and working toward the priorities that were established earlier this year so let me ask if there's questions for jason then i'll do a process check on how we're going to move forward but questions first um thank you for your presentation what do we need to do um in order to have a more robust uh engineering to get that department where it needs to to be yeah that that's a great question vice mayor i think this is a question that agencies all over california are starting to ask we are unfortunately not alone many agencies are suffering from uh engineering losses uh and um it's a function of trying to really evaluate the series and the classification what what is it what are our job duties what are they what are they supporting uh and do we have the series organized properly um i think we've got very exciting projects uh more so than a lot of the smaller cities around us no offense to our our partner cities but but we've got some really big exciting things i mean we've got a 60 million dollar ultraviolet project i mean i mean that that's a career builder just in and of itself and so um why we're not able to attract folks i'm not exactly sure uh what we've learned is uh of late is is folks are um not seeing the compensation package adequate to move to our area and so we are either seeing folks stay in their current positions or because there's such a drought of engineers we're seeing employers offer promotions or more money to those individuals to stay in their organization um that is not an area that's easy for a government agency to do and so we see losses where we can't necessarily make those same type of of recommendations for maintaining those staff that some private employers can i i think we need to show them our lists that we came up with at the beginning of this so they can see why we love being in san rosa and i think that's why we're going to try to use consulting services to help bridge the gap we're going to we're modeling it after the permit center that was a huge success the planning team just did an amazing job of getting that set up and i think that that provides us with an image of something that should work for us as well yeah my question was was pretty similar though much more broad than one position are some of the cracks that we're seeing shared across jurisdictions or is some of this or how much of this would you attribute to having interim positions with vacancies behind them waiting for the new city manager position and overall staffing and budget levels i think on the engineering and technical side of the house um i'll stay with the engineering side i don't think that's an implication of keeping interim positions i think where the the greatest challenge as you heard from claire in the interim rule is you've got a significant number of interim positions at your higher mid to upper management in a particular department or two i don't necessarily feel that's the case on the public work side of the house i think for our standpoint it's being able to draw folks with the appropriate level of compensation to bring them in i have offered the job offered the deputy job to two candidates both candidates told me we were significantly under what they were offered by their own employer to stay in their place and so it's it's challenges like that there's just only so much we can do within our within our organization to be able to attract those folks and we are trying a number of different active ways whether it's the remote work policy whether it's flexible schedules we're trying a number of ways to try to encourage folks to come our direction and as someone who works a lot of organizations in recruitment as well i can tell you that engineering and certain technical classifications are hard there's a lot of demand out there and so that's part of the equation but it's never as simple as one answer i'm afraid i'll say the i'll just to add one more piece in we actually don't have an engineering school within 60 miles of us so we can't actually grow our own we have to hope that those students that are going out to engineering college are coming back to our community and you know we've been successful in some areas but it's still it's a very small pool of new engineers that are available to us whereas if we had an engineering school in the general vicinity we would have a higher level of success because we'd be able to partner with that organization to try to grow engineers and bring folks directly into our organization through internships or other junior level entries it's just it's very difficult when they're not here yeah as you've heard for the first couple presentations the vacancies and the impacts that that has is significant as we're thinking ahead to this afternoon and the priorities you know focus on hiring and strategies for dutchling vacancies might be something that in the near term would be important to prioritize the staff level and and how that can support ultimately the the priorities you have in front of you okay thank you jason any other questions before he steps away okay so my suggestion is let's go through um water uh santa rosa water since it's sort of a dovetail to the presentation you just heard uh and then we'll pause for lunch and we'll come back and we'll pick up with safety and then the internal departments okay that's better thank you and uh good morning mayor rogers and members of council um i'm jennifer berke the director of santa rosa water and i'm here to give uh a short overview of where we fit in with the council priorities for santa rosa water i think jason nutt did a really good job explaining that we do provide more of a support role and for our department our our main focus is really our core service of providing water collecting treating and reusing wastewater compliance with our stormwater permit and then enhancing and maintaining creeks so you'll see here on this slide a list of a number of the items that we support in terms of the council priorities and i'll just um note a couple in particular we had a number of big items that we brought forward to the council earlier this year including uh completion of our urban water management plan which has our water supply and demand projections as well as how we respond during a drought the adoption of our four-year water and wastewater rate schedule and then also updating our water and wastewater demand fee study and uh fees which included a new category for the smaller high rise development next slide please in terms of the priorities that we support that are in progress we are continuing to look at a number of different funding solutions for our customers that are experiencing bill arrearages so looking at not only a number of acronyms the liwap programs the liheap programs the e-wap programs but we're also looking at potential funding coming from the state uh from the state budget as well um i'll also highlight on the climate change we uh completed uh working with your board of public utilities and energy optimization plan analyzing uh all of our systems and we found that our systems are very efficient and in terms of energy efficiency and the low hanging fruit has already been implemented but we did identify a number of possible feasible options for increasing efficiency as well as generation and we are reevaluating the cost benefit analysis based on being in the new evergreen energy rate schedule and we'll be bringing an update to the climate action subcommittee this fall um i also want to note not on this slide but our stormwater and creeks team does provide a huge support on the homeless priority um they do a number of different activities uh spending about 60 to 70 hours per week on that team supporting homeless and particularly focusing on creek cleanup activities we go to the next slide please the gap analysis so you'll see on this slide and i think this was covered well by jason before me really uh in focusing on the council priority our priority that we support where we're seeing the biggest gap is the workload and impact to our team that supports uh development um and so we are seeing about a 30 increase in workload it is making it difficult for us to meet turnaround times we have a small team that's dedicated to that work but we've also had to bring in professional services as well as ask from help from our engineering team and the asset management team to support this work i think jason also covered a number of things very well before but i will just echo as you heard actually from claire and from jason and i'm sure you'll hear from others that we do continue to see uh quite a bit of turnover in the water department due to retirements and resignations i think right now we have 22 positions that are vacant that we're actively trying to fill and we are seeing in some of the more technical positions a lot of difficulty in filling those vacancies often having to do multiple recruitments to fill those positions um and i think also jason mentioned the need to invest in our infrastructure it's uh no secret that our infrastructure is aging in particular our treatment plant and we know that we are under investigating in our infrastructure uh currently every year we invest uh 13 million in water 12 million in wastewater and we're at eight million in the regional system and we should be investing double that amount every year to keep up with the needs of replacing our infrastructure and right now we don't have the ability to do that because we don't have the staffing resources in the engineering team to get that work done and as jason mentioned we are looking at options and solutions but right now we're continuing to maintain the investment at the level it is hoping that we can find solutions so that when we next bring our rate increase back to you i'm hoping that we will be able to bring a more investment in our cip at that time if we go to the next slide these are a number of activities that the water department is working on i think for us as as i mentioned our core service is really the main focus and everything related to operating and maintaining a 24 7 highly regulated water wastewater uh storm water recycle water systems so that is um our main focus and really takes a lot of time and effort especially with the challenges that we've been experiencing over the past years including the pandemic which for my department two-thirds of our staff has to come in day and day out so really dealing with the pandemic keeping them safe and then also now that we have the drought layered on top it has been a real challenge and we've needed to shift focus uh for a number of of our staff to really focus on ensuring that we get through this current drought so all the activities that we're doing right now to get to our 20 20 percent reduction in water use and i'm really happy to say and we'll be coming to the council in the future to let you know that we saw a 22 reduction in the first month which is great so our community is doing a fabulous job and the santa rosa water team has been supporting that effort phenomenal phenomenally but we're also looking at what if we have another dry dry winter and another dry winter after that so preparing for higher stages of our shortage plan really working closely with our regional partners on resiliency for our water supply i think jason did a good job covering our city works implementation i will just let you know that that's a really big effort for our asset management team uh leading the way but it impacts all departments and there's a core group of staff throughout the whole city that is working on this implementation we should see as jason mentioned go live for all of the other departments except water in fall of this year and then waters go live for city works will be in the fall of 2022 uh we're also actively working on the uv disinfection replacement project this will be the largest uv project i think in all of uh the united states i believe i could have that wrong but we're very excited about that replacement it's needed for our regulatory compliance and we are working on a new stormwater permit as well as development of a groundwater sustainability plan for our region uh that is my update and i'm happy to answer any questions you may have there we go any questions we have no okay all right i have no questions but i did want to say thank you to your team i went by the drought drop by event on saturday and everybody it was a smooth operation even with a little bit of dew on the ground which was nice to see so just want to say thank you to your team for for everything that you're doing around the drought thank you and thank you for attending and the good news is we handed out 1300 kits after all so that was a great success so thank you so much well you can hear there certainly some themes that you start to hear filtering through here we'll summarize these and come back to them when we begin the discussion about the priorities this afternoon but it's a little before noon and i do believe let's see if i can find liz here that we have lunch available and so maybe we can just take a 30 minute recess for that so people have a chance to get lunch have something to eat and then we'll resume we'll go through the balance of the presentations and then get serious about talking about what does this all mean and and get some council input and direction first after that sound okay all right so it's five till so 25 after we'll reconvene great we'll go ahead and recess the special meeting we'll be back in a little bit all right madame city clerk let's go ahead bring us back let's call the roll okay council member tidbits council member schwedhelm here council member soyer here council member fleming present council member alvarez president vice mayor rogers president mayor rogers here council member tidbits have you joined us here thank you let the record show that all council members are present thank you we're back on uh we're going to work our continue our way through the staff presentations we'll go through the safety departments and then we'll come back to the uh internal support departments then we will break and then we're going to come back to council for discussion good afternoon mayor rogers vice mayor rogers members of the council scott westrop fire chief for the city of santa rosa so i just want to start off our slide decks a little bit different and the way i approached this was looking at the fire department uh as you know we're an all risk organization and so really that relates to all council priorities um is that the ability to serve and protect the community is is the basis for being able to supply support the uh all council priorities so one of the council priorities that we've completed and you know i'd say this is a little bit nuanced perhaps but um in the in the terms of completed they're implemented and ongoing so um they're not they're not ever really going to be complete in that regard this is just where um we've actually made some implementation progress the first is in the vegetation management program which as you know was funded by the pgne settlement for five years work is in progress on that um we're making good qualitative and quantitative work in the vegetation management regard and what we've been able to do and i'll talk about it in a couple slides is leverage the vegetation management program for grant funding where we've almost doubled our ability financially with having a vegetation management program in place the wildland response resiliency strategic plan has been implemented and moving along very well that was also funded out of the pgne settlement our first fire engine that we purchased with the pgne funds is actually due to arrive potentially today um or if not this week so our first type 3 engine um should be here by the end of the week and we already have the supplies to put on that fire engine and put it in service immediately so having the cash on hand was invaluable because we were able to buy a spec engine of the engine we were looking at buying anyway um with all the same provisions and warranties and everything so um and then we were able to buy a second one under that same regard that should be here in january so all in all we're making good progress on that on that plan and we're making some good improvements there and then as you know we've implemented our recruitment and diversity strategic plan it remains unfunded um however we're using current staff as i have explained to all of you um in one regard or another we're using current staff to make good progress on the recruitment and strategic recruitment and diversity strategic plan next slide please so current priorities that are in progress these are some things that we've added to the slide deck um really since february and that's looking at different revenue opportunities the fire department's never been very good um at bringing in revenue and that's something that we want to address and change so two of the things we're going to be bringing to you this winter are first of all a fire impact fee and we'll be bringing this to you as a feasibility study session um in the winter and it's looking at a fee related to new construction um this is pretty much an industry standard at this point and it's something that we are looking to add on to the fee structure and the second is an ems subscription fee again we'll bring you a study session on the feasibility of that program and the nice thing about this is again it's an industry standard but it doesn't affect the day-to-day citizen it's a it's a bill that goes directly to the insurance company um if they're unable to collect due to inability to pay or no reaction from the insurance company then it's taken as a write-off so there's no impact directly to the community and then also we're uh planning on putting a new strategic plan into place we're currently writing the scope of work on that our last strategic plan uh is expiring this year in 2021 so we want to have it in place prior to 2022 uh calendar year obviously um it's the first plan post tubs and glass fire and you know as you recall the strategic plan that we have in place now we did have community input sessions and in 2016 those were not very well attended i have a funny feeling that there's going to be a lot more community involvement in that uh this time and that's what i really want i want this to be a community-based approach to building the future fire department next slide please i broke our gap analysis down by a bureau so the three bureaus of the fire department starting with operations and the first gap we have obviously and this is something that you've heard time and time again is on capital projects both in infrastructure and fleet we were asked to throw some ideas um on the table as how we might approach um resolving these these issues some of the ideas we listed are a general obligation bond i've been talking to the cfo about the the possibility of something like that one time monies the new fire service sales tax measure and then potentially via measure over form and then personnel um you've heard that story loud and clear from all staff today is is the need for additional personnel and some ideas to resolve that are increase our ongoing revenue which i just presented those ideas to you and you'll be seeing them again this winter and then out of the fire service sales tax measure that is proposed to be on the ballot june of 2022 and the fire prevention bureau um the gaps are in vegetation management um like i like i mentioned early on the the five million dollars that council invested via pgne funding has given us the ability to go out and apply for grants and currently we have over five and a half million dollars worth of grants applications out so it doubles our money um the issue with that is some of them come with a grant match and currently with the grants that we have applied for there's a one-time gap of 1.25 million dollars what we've discussed with fire prevention bureau is we're going to go ahead and just keep driving forward on this if we can double our money great we will figure that out but um but that is going to be a gap down the line if we're successful with these grants and then on the permit approval front which um i've talked to a lot of you about we've sent quite a few um communications out to council in general but that's where we're trying to close that gap in the permit application process from a backlog of 400 due to covid i'm happy to report we're down to about 250 with the short-term goals that we put into place but that mid-term solution of a 500 000 psa to different vendors who can help us in a contractual way close that gap and get back to where we're we don't have a backlog anymore if we can actually expedite plans and then ongoing the long term would be the addition of a second building plans examiner through the vegetation management program funding next slide please and then under administration um the work that we're doing in diversity equity and recruitment or diversity equity and inclusion particularly our plan there is a gap with the ongoing soft costs um it's about 40 000 a year for really the educational um and video type productions that we would engage in and then as you recall the the plan itself actually called for two fte's to go with it it was a full-time fire captain at a full-time s a to go with the plan obviously for shortened suppression and operations this isn't a priority but um just to bring it up that it is a gap to make that make sure those programs are funded and this plan is being as you know looked at with the seed collaborative they're very happy with the work so far but we're going to continue to expand and look at that plan with a fresh set of eyes in the seed collaborative and see where we need to go with it and then really what i call our change of risk matrix or change of our business model um and it doesn't necessarily have to do with expenditures and revenues but it's changing the way that the fire department does business and adjusting our risk matrix for more we were pre-2017 to where we are now so as you all know the world has changed dramatically and we have to adjust to that it's just going to take time and resources to get there but some of the things we're looking at in that regard are alternative service delivery obviously we're involved in the in response program with the police department some of the ideas behind how to bring on different um sources of service delivery than what we normally do is measure over form through the ambulance franchise EOA RFP process and through an EMS subscription fee and then sort of the growth of the city without adding public safety resources for instance we haven't built a new fire station or added personnel since 2009 and if you look at the growth of the city both in population and the risk matrix density you know we need to we need to change that and that's one thing we've talked about it exact staff is and you've heard everybody mention it so far as planning so darn good at their job that you know they add 700 to a thousand new uh parcel or new uh homes that by the end of this year well public safety has to be able to protect that streets has to be able to put people on the roads you know buses have to serve that population so it's really looking at it holistically you know some ways we can address that in my opinion are through a fire impact fee through measure over form and through the sales tax measure last slide please and then on just additional updates as you all know and you've heard it from the city manager when he kicked this meeting off throughout the course of it is I just sort of put this global emergency management you know it's the four phases of emergency management preparation mitigation response and recovery it's just sort of the general sense of as you all know and we all know in this room we have a hard time being proactive when we're always being reactive to the next crisis an emergency so that is ongoing we still have the tubs fire we still have the glass fire recovery um covid the drought all those things affect every department so that just takes a lot of time and resources away to deal with that reactive approach so we can't get ahead of the curve and be proactive and then again the change in our risk matrix or our matrix or business model it's just going to take time to get there but we are working on it we're not sitting on our heels and and hoping for you know something to come around for us we're going out and doing the work employee health and wellness this is a big priority for all of us in the fire department we're really trying to make systematic and programmatic enhancements with the with the resources that we have on hand and from a business standpoint you know this is where we talk about where we can decrease the risk we can decrease that over timeline is to make sure that our employees are getting exactly what they need as far as physical or behavioral health and we're still working on any strategic improvement we can we're looking at infrastructure and fleet replacement programs we're making great strides in both of those arenas in my opinion now we're making some changes to the fire prevention bureau and we have some opportunities to maybe do some reformatting of the bureau coming up and then an emergency preparedness in general under the two emergency managers we have you know using federal dollars to give us a first class to you see is something that we're we're pretty excited about so it's just going to take a lot of work and then lastly is um I kind of tied in tied it in together it's collaboration and communication it's this idea that I've really tried to instill as a culture within the organization to we want to get to a point where we're sending the same message to everybody in our community at the same time where they're an emergency or non-emergency function so so really wrapping our hands around that that's tied into the recruitment and diversity plan that's tied into we'll be 2.0 and it's tied into a lot of the side projects that we're doing as far as how we're going to try to communicate in that emergency a non-emergency setting with every single member of the community at the same time with that that's the end of my presentation have an answer any questions questions or comments my only question chief you mentioned the 1.25 million gap for vegetation management obviously none of us like to see dollars that are potentially coming into the city go away because we couldn't make the match is that currently being proposed as an option within the one-time funds correct that would be my proposal at this point and um knowing those funds are going to be limited what i've told the team is hey you know we're going to go after those grant funds five and a half million dollars we we can't turn away from that we're going to go after and we're going to have to figure that problem out so if it doesn't get resolved with one-time funding or even if we were to hold that 1.25 and if we weren't to get the grants or we found another mechanism it goes back to council decision is something we discussed but it would be proposed under under that just because it was sort of that enhanced vegetation management that was brought up we had to make some business decisions on how we were going to go about it but in order to get the work done now and make cumulative and qualitative work done right now we decided to move forward and then we'll have to figure out that that funding piece on the back end i guess just as a point of clarification uh so when we first discussed the one-time funds we did put on there some set aside for some additional vegetation management funds just in case the original five million wasn't enough is this 1.25 in addition to what the council talked about setting aside or is this on top of that discussion it would be you've got the the five million that was already allocated right and then when we discussed the one-time funds we did talk about setting aside i think it was two million for additional vegetation management it would be tied into that okay it would be part of it's not it's not in addition to right all right that's that's helpful thank you so the way it was working out was there was a decision to maybe hold some of the 5.25 back in order to have that grant funding match and we decided that was not the greatest course of business because we want to get the work done so we shifted to full speed ahead and then so the the additional funding that you discussed in the one-time funding opportunity would be dedicated to the grant match funding right i was just making sure we didn't need an extra 1.25 off of what we were already talked about with the one-time funds yeah we we just we had to we had to invert the process by which we were getting it done and i'm fine with that thank you okay other comments or questions yeah um if i may through the mayor um thank you so much for your all of your work i want to extend a sincere thank you also to your team for what is you know already we're a few months into this fire season i was wondering if you could speak to staffing issues i'm sure i'm not alone in the council and in carrying requests from the your labor groups and staff members letting us know that you're feeling or that they are feeling short staffed and wondering if you can help reconcile for the council so we can make wise decisions about resource allocations as what's coming to be like a year-round fire season yeah absolutely it's a great question and definitely a pressing topic so currently where we're at is in this budget cycle this year we are at constant staffing meaning that we have one body in every riding position on our fire engine so we still have 10 engines on the street two ladder trucks on the street and a full-time battalion chief on the street on the suppression side so the the positions that were we all decided to eliminate out of the budget were those overages overage positions so that would provide two people per shift over so that eliminates some of the mandatory overtime and and issues that we run into when we send strike teams out or when we have COVID related issues or industrial issues so those two positions were that that slack to take off where people weren't getting force hired into working you know four or five six days in a row and those are 24-hour shifts so and then we have a staffing plan we have a staffing study that was completed in 2018 I believe or 2019 that that what they showed was we needed to hire those those five positions and an additional 14 which is a lot that eliminates our overtime problem that gets us well below constant staffing but so staffing is an issue and the summers are always hard this year is no different you hit the nail on the head is we've had at least two engines if not three engines out of the city engaged in the Dixie fire or the Caldor fire or the other fires throughout the western united states for months now and so that's resources that are there are people that are gone out of the city so it gets backfilled by overtime which is all all covered under California master mutual aid but but it just it it weighs heavy on our personnel because they get stuck at work a lot during the the summer season and then you throw in you know the pandemic and and when we have to put people in quarantine and we're doing contact tracing things like that it becomes you know it just becomes burdensome on on our personnel and then fire prevention is no different you know we're short staffed in fire prevention due to some retirements and some upcoming retirements and obviously we're really leaning on them for that plan review and making sure that we're getting people into their homes or into their businesses and again we we actually have believe it or not the same problem that you hear out of planning and tpw and water in those technical positions where we're not getting a lot of response to people coming here and filling the building plans examiner or filling the assistant fire marshal jobs things like that where we need them in that development technical phase we're having struggles with that too it's just an industry-wide problem it is a California you know statewide problem so so yeah there's there's definitely some staffing issues but as you know our personnel are always you know the first of the fight and and they want to be engaged but you know we're just in that we're in that phase operation only where our employees are are working a lot of hours and working hard and getting kind of beat down by the season okay well I hope that you can pass along my sincere gratitude for all the work that they're doing and that we are working to try to to address these problems that's taking some time but they're they're front of mind absolutely appreciate that anybody else yes please thank you chief for for the report uh in regards to diversity could you uh maybe elaborate with uh in regards to any obstacles or successes that you've had recently absolutely I I would say there's been no obstacles um we're really moving full steam ahead and so what we did with our strategic plan and recruitment and diversity and this is where um we've worked with the DEI officer to really expand um where we're at with that so she's been fantastic as far as opening doors for us making connections you know once a week she's doing an e-interduction between me and somebody in the community and and we're making those connections which has been great but we took those strategies and we assigned it to personnel within the organization so there's a lead and then they have a team to work with so in regards to really our engagement piece which is is one of our biggest ones where they're going to be involved in school civic programs civic organizations uh they the lead on that's captain cori rickert and she has taken the bull by the horns and she's going after and and making those connections and getting involved and we're already starting to see some of the effects of that where we're getting people into our mentorship program really before the the things even off the ground we had people in our mentorship program which is run by our personnel and so we're helping mentor people through we're we're engaged with the junior college and a lot of different arenas that we didn't think we are going to be in um the liaison to the junior college happens to be an army veteran so not only did he engage over the fireside he went to the veterans affairs office is engaged with them there so so our organization's really taken this to heart and I really believe in it and I feel that deeply and they're really going out and making those those broad spots one of the greatest success stories we have is we currently have an academy of three personnel at our training facility they're all lateral employees and one of the employees is a local santa rosa born and not born in brady was actually born in mexico um was raised in roseland was working for central or a member in not only did he see this city in this community and this fire department and their response to these large scale disasters he heard about this plan and when we interviewed this young man who happens to be firefighter alvarez by the way um when we when we spoke to him what he said was I believe in this plan so much and believe in what you're doing so much I want to help you on it even if you don't hire me and it's the first time I've ever made a job offer within an hour of an interview because his interview was that good and he was such a good candidate and he was exactly what we're looking for homegrown wants to serve roseland wants to serve santa rosa I asked him what his long term career goals are and he says I want to be a captain on engine eight and so it was it was one of the few interviews where I've gotten chills and but that's the success we're seeing as people hear about this we've shared this plan with other departments and they really like where the santa rosa fire department is going and the city of santa rosa is going and they want to be part of it let's go to gears to police that's teamwork right there let's try that again good afternoon mayor rogers members of the city council reyner navarro chief of police thank you for having us here today to discuss where we what we've been doing over the last several months and where we're going for as chief westeros said you know many of the things that we're doing right now that are in our completed slide here is things that are going to be ongoing and so we've implemented several several aspects of of the projects and plans that we've had and they're going to continue to be priorities as we move forward so you'll see them going through and then several of these as some of the other speakers department heads have talked about these are collaborations between our department and many of the other city departments as we address community engagement address some of the the the huge issues such as homelessness within our city and it definitely is a it it's a team effort across the city organization so for us some of the bigger the bigger highlights over the last several months that we've done is we have as you know in may we came in front of city council and we we had a study session on the after action report and use of for use of force report and so we've implemented many of those recommendations affect most of those from both of the reports there's just there's just a few left and most the ones that are left are really tied around working with other jurisdictions through radio interoperability and you're making sure we have technology as we as we move forward we're continuing to work in some of the areas that you have seen and the public safety subcommittee has seen with several policy revisions and that we've reported out to both of the bodies from a technology area we've we have started early in doing our data collection for the racial identity profiling act which we were due to be due to be collecting data in 2022 and so we started that six months early we worked very closely with the consortium to to make that happen and our staff led that effort to make sure we were beginning data collection early on you know some of the things around our downtown or our department we we created our department operation center last fall which has been just a tremendous asset for the response to our local emergencies and we have been working very closely with some of the other departments again if I think we are doing things you know collaboratively and one of those things is in these empowerment meetings that we've had with the officer community engagement which has allowed us to reach out to many of the community members who we have not normally had access to and then in addition to that we've also created our chief's community ambassador team that's a member it's 15 members of the community they just finished their community police and experience and we are looking at how we can use utilize that team to enhance our community meetings next slide please so some of the things that we are working on is again we're continuing our work in the recommendations to the after-actual reports and use of force our police auditor is something that is a priority and we're currently the city is currently in the selection phase and again that's a collaboration working with the city attorney's office in the city manager's office our in-response model we've heard we've done a lot of work in the mental health response as we are trying to prepare a program this fall and we're still in the preparation stages we've actually created a website and I wanted to give this have an opportunity to push this out it's srcity.org slash in response and you can find all the information regarding our in response and the the progress we've made with that program we hope that'll implement that in the fall and we are having an ongoing strategy to see how we can expand that to a 24-7 model which will take additional funding the the council did provide funding for the pilot program this year and that will allow us to work seven days a week 10 hours a day but it does not it does not allow us to do a 24-7 model yet some of the things that we're doing in the area of recruitment and hiring and retaining and inequitable workforce we just I just signed a 30 by 30 pledge which is a it's a national program and basically what we're what it is that the goal is to have 30 percent of your workforce that you are hiring to be to be women we are actually using those same goals and principles across the board to try to be more more broad in our hiring and recruitment process and so we're working with not only other agencies throughout the nation but also our equity officer here at the at the city to to work on on strategies we work weekly with city comms team to assist us in some of the social media to push some of the our recruitment strategies out we've we've also are implementing an internship program a more viable one it's not currently funded we use we use vacant position funding to assist us at this point and so we hope to have additional students from both Sonoma State and also the SRGC helping helping out around the department and we hope that that will further enhance our hiring practices in the future our strategic plan we do have a strategic plan we this is something that we've done for several years and we have three pillars it's focused around safety personnel and infrastructure and we we maintain three priorities and that is violence traffic in our quality of life quality of life really is homelessness and mental health issues and and we it's a tremendous strain on our staff and also staff throughout the city some of the other things that we're currently working on is we we we accepted a grant and we were currently in progress of of creating a curriculum and we're working with community matters to on a cultural awareness training program for for all of our staff and we are developing a proactive team because of some of the violence that we've seen over the last several months we're developing a team to to address some of the guns the issues with guns and the issues of shootings that we've had and that should be implemented in September our next update for our strat plan is going to be probably in February of 2022 and then we're on we have an ongoing COVID response our incident management team has done a great job developing protocols which has been adopted by numerous law enforcement agencies throughout the country and has been highlighted nationwide in several types of publications so we're very proud of of that especially during this emergency the the pandemic that we're in next slide please as far as gap skill we've heard it from several of the other department heads we're also facing issues in an area of recruitment hiring and retention we're currently 12 staff members down that includes seven dispatchers which is a huge hit four officers and a senior admin assistant which helps with some of our our administrative staff work in the in the department it's important for us a priorities to have a workforce that can respond to emergencies at any given time you know which we have seen throughout the last several years with the fires some of the issues that we're seeing are we have a smaller applicant pool for new newer officers so we saw about 88 applicants for trainees which were we used to see an upwards of 500 and then we have we are also searching for lateral applicants coming from other agencies but you know we face trying trying to dip into a pool that all other agencies are trying to deal trying to hire from and what we've seen is we have seen a trickle of laterals coming back to the Santa Rosa but they tend to be already living in Santa Rosa so the difficult piece of it is you know trying to sustain a move into our into our city we have a we expect to have a stuff staffing study completed in early 2022 that's going to assist us as we look at what our allocated unallocated time for officers are what our future needs are and then also we're doing a holistic view of of our department and we're including what our clearance rates are for some of our investigations to see what that what that looks like we are you know as we have seen some of the budget issues that we've had we've seen some reduced response time to our priority to all of our priority calls and we are currently in the middle of looking at the types of calls that we're responding to and what that what that may look like we're also employee wellness is a significant thing that we've seen a huge issue in and again it comes back to some training and funding for for wellness and fortunately we do have an onsite wellness coordinator and we've been working with resiliency first and we've we've had opportunities to to get people to some resiliency training as they need but it does cost money and takes time but wellness for our employees is a priority as we continue to work through emergencies and community engagement one of the things that we have to balance is having this a number of staff available to actually engage with the community and our priority is to use overtime for emergency needs and not for the community engagement aspect so when we pull people to do in community engagement it limits it we're limited based on how many people we have available for calls for service um we are a lean organization we've lost we lost three officers of based on our measure row reductions and measure row is a critical piece to provide service within our community and so as we move forward we're seeing some gaps in the staffing our infrastructure our facility is aging and technology is getting more expensive and training is getting more expensive so those are things that we're we're trying to keep up with what we are trying to do is see grants and those grants will help us with some equipment maybe some training but it's hard to find find grants for staff because there's usually a match and then usually have to sustain that after the grant is over and so those are difficult to do to maintain a workforce next slide please so with again we have a ever-changing COVID response I wanted to make sure I pointed that out we're working with human resources the fire department and the department of health to make sure that we have a safe working environment environment for both our staff and also our community we're going to be looking at again increased population in our calls for service which we'll be looking at in February and then the mental health response model is again we're close to implementing our equitable policing strategies we're working with the seed collaborative we're expecting to have some type of recommendations by the early 2022 we don't know what that impact is but we are committed to it and we have several staff members who are working with seed collaborative during the initial phases right now again training and technology those are increasing budgetary item issues we are continuing to look at how technology can be leveraged we do have a body work camera system which has been it's been excellent for us as far as reducing complaints and increasing accountability however we are going to be facing the end of our contract here in 2022 so we have to come up with a solution to to continue that program but we're also looking at several other technology items to do be more efficient for our staff members in the street we try to leverage technology with our consortium the the issue with that is that because we're the biggest agency in the in the city we are often tasked with doing a lot of the legwork so staff hours training and testing are often done by our staff and it takes a lot of effort and a lot of time to do that and then in the area of transparency we're continuing to work on our addressing public records acts we did create a new admin tech position that you funded earlier this year and that's going to help us as we continue to get more PRAs for body work cameras and and and some of our other requests and then we're continuing to have needs in our area of our website and we currently have a pio sergeant that helps us and we work with our comms team for the city to make sure that we're trying to do as much as we can in that particular area that is all i have from my slides and i'm happy to answer any questions thank you chief for that report uh first i want to commend you on on a recent appointment of a sergeant of yours uh in regards to community outreach and engagement uh in respect to a project uh that was performed with a bunch of our youth over at the camp or by the camp or the yakiama secondly the same question that i posed to chief fire chief is uh what obstacles and successes have you seen in regards to diversity thank you yeah that's a great question so we've done a lot of work in our recruitment and in hiring um one of the things that we did specifically with this 30 by 30 initiative is that we are um we have a regular meetings uh with with other agencies throughout the nation it's facilitated by um this program and we're able to talk about some of the recruitment strategies and we've actually identified several areas you know there's a physical attribute to our hiring process uh there's a report writing uh background checks and so what we created actually was um we created some videos for our applicant pool uh to talk to them about um you know how to be successful right so you were working and mentoring with our applicants now to help them be more successful in the in the testing process so we have a greater pool um at the at the end so that's helped out tremendously with some of the um with with uh bringing that pool up because we do lose a lot at the very beginning uh we still have some areas that we we want to create more opportunities so instead of just working on our applicants now what we want to do is maybe utilize the video and social media to push that out to people before they even apply and then that will even broaden the pool so those are some of the things and ideas that we've got through this initiative um I think a lot of times what we see are um you know decision you know just good decision making right and so early and often what we used to do with our with our SROs and with uh you know even when we're talking to youth at any time we're talking about trying to make those decisions early on uh because nobody's perfect but we're trying to make sure that there's some time and distance between a mistake that you might have made and um and applying but uh and and and sometimes just people don't they don't see themselves as you know because they think they made a mistake where uh they see they see a version of what a police officer is or technician or dispatcher in in the movies and um it's understanding and trying to have those conversations to bring them around and let them understand that hey we're just like you and um to to give them that um I guess their realism that they could do the same they could do this job so we're we're working in those areas a lot of it is just uh ongoing communication with individuals as we move forward comments yes uh the the data that um the department started to collect six months earlier I'm sorry it's going past me um how will that be available to the public and exactly who is collecting that data and how are you going to continue to collect that data forward yes so that that's good question vice mayor so it is a it's a state mandate that was coming into effect and so we had to create a a system to be able to create it's a it's a series of questions for the officer and so um it's based on perception so we don't ask the questions of the person that has stopped but it's a proactive if there's a proactive stop the the officer goes through a series of you know why was a person stopped what what was a perceived um you know um it could different perceptions um and then that is put into our um our records management system and then that is we worked with the consortium the county consortium to work with our vendor to make sure that information is reported to um reported to the state and so the state will have the the access um every year we have to report back at the end of the year and so we're continuing part of the reason to start early was to make sure that we're working all the bugs out make sure our equipment's working there has been some uh some some bugs with um you know the marrying up you know all the technology to to do this and so those are some of the the things that we're working on but at by the end of the year we should have the data collected and there will should be a report out by the doj they're the ones that have don't hold all the all the information i think part of the reason why i i asked that question is one to see if the public would have the information um probably more frequently than annually um but also because one of the meetings that we had um we were talking about the um in response team someone had made a comment uh to see how often the in response team would be sent out to what calls sure and i was wondering how we would keep track of that also and so to me those kind of went i know it's two different two different programs but kind of hand in hand like how do we keep track of that well how would we be able to keep track of that i'm in thinking that the we asked for a lot but how do we keep track of all the data um and then how do we get it out to the public to say this is what we're doing that's a very good question and again that comes back to staff time so we you know what we're trying to set up is an automated system where that information is being collected and moved and and it's it's there um and there's certain things that have to be done by law um anything else is gonna that's going to require extra staff to develop whatever i'm not a computer person but you have to develop a program or you have to develop a you know a language for the computer to spit spit whatever you need out and so um that's that takes a it's a heavy lift and we have we have two crime analysts that are um you know they we're trying to get them focused on analyzing criminal activity um it would probably be within that team where that would fall where they would be dealing with trying to develop the data on in a more um more frequent fashion thank you my my question um for you chief um has similar to what the vice mayor was talking about it has goes back to your you're talking about the the tension of resources for emergency services versus community engagement i'm just wondering if you could paint for us a clear picture on what resources specifically you need in order to to complete those tasks around community engagement because i i do think that we've seen that they if they're not done that it creates an emergency and when they are done really well as your team did with the in-response model and the cahoots that they they're really fantastic and can divert emergencies and and create trust that's a that's a great question um it it comes back to staffing um having the available staff to engage with the community having the available staff to um allow for someone to respond to a call for service as you know you know we've talked about where our priority one calls are and where they're where they're they're creeping up and so having the having staff members available for that and then being able to pull some off the street to go do community engagement um while while keeping resources available for those priority calls so it really does come back to staffing um we're we're doing you know our your staff at the police department just like everybody else in this in this organization is we're doing tremendous work um they do they wear a lot of hats and uh they're asked to have to be doing to do a lot um but it's really about you know where do where do we want the priorities and so uh we have borrowed from some of our special assignments to try to keep our um our our calls for service um to try to maintain our call our response to call for service uh but then you lose some of the other areas um in you know such as some of these proactive teams and then also being proactive and community engaged okay thank you chief chief uh set of questions in regard to the i believe it's c cat if that's correct uh if you could elaborate on the duties of c cat as well as the the formation of it please sure the the chief's community ambassador team was uh we had initially had it was something i wanted to do when i when i was first appointed a few years ago um however with with a lot of emergencies it was delayed uh last year with uh the uh the um calls for police reform uh it was completely appropriate time to get that started so uh we we i i enlisted the officer community engagement um and uh several nonprofit partners to push out information just to let them know that we're looking for people to provide feedback to me um on what we're doing how we're doing it and uh where we can where we need to be in the future uh so we uh i think we received 44 applications from throughout the community uh we needed to be a manageable uh group and so i had a interview process we selected 15 uh community members and we provided that information to the public safety subcommittee i at our last meeting um it's a uh a diverse group of individuals throughout um and they there are there is somebody from each of your council districts they've gone through the community police experience program which was a seven week virtual program where they learned more about the department that way they're a little bit more aware of what we do and uh helps them make more help them make more educated uh provide educated questions to us um and and help us as we move forward so the next step is we are i have a meeting actually uh this week with them and we're going to talk a little bit about um we talk about policies uh we talk about community engagement we talk about uh we're going to be i'm going to ask them uh how can i leverage their help in uh future community meetings the chief voice wrote mentioned he had a he had community meetings where not a lot of people showed up in 2019 we tried the same thing very limited amount of people showed up and we had five of them so i i'm i'm hoping that utilizing this team uh going to their groups um the people the networks that they have uh will provide us uh immediate groups that we can talk to they can help facilitate they can help provide questions so we're really i'm really excited about it and i think it's just another opportunity or venue to um to to get that feedback and they have access um the community can go to our website uh they can go to uh um srpd info dot org ask a question that information will go over to our ccat team and we'll be disseminate disseminated out to them for the next meeting that we have if there's a community member who has a question and the follow-up question we spoke of the future how do you envision this the ccat or those energies uh efforts moving forward in regards to the police auditor or c collaborative if there's a correlation that you see or or something of that nature sure uh so the police auditor again it's in the uh final phases of of uh selecting uh that position uh the ccat team will have you know we're going to ask the auditor to have be accessible for the ccat team um they will again they provide information to me and feedback to me we actually uh they provided feedback on our public address announcement system that we had and that helped us provide a better our improved information and make some changes as we took it to the public safety subcommittee so it's community feedback on on policies and procedures on what we're doing uh so we can make uh we can make the best best decisions uh and again the auditor will have that opportunity to speak with them um and that'll be another way uh to be able to you know there'll be that accountability and transparency through the auditor the c collaborative is an equitable policing program and uh we're still waiting on what those recommendations might look like but i i fully assume it's going to be incorporating some of our community engagement strategies and the police auditor as we uh go into the future your questions or comments okay uh seeing none thank you very much chief so we're going to shift gears now and listen to sort of the internally facing departments do we need to take a quick quick break or we keep going all right just wanted to double check can't show the need all right we're going to shift over to the city attorney now good afternoon and uh mr mayor and council members yes as uh we mentioned we are moving now into the internal services uh group and we'll start with the city attorney's office and this morning or the and this afternoon you've really heard about all of the tremendous work and the variety of work that's going on in the different departments across the city and across the organization and that work both keeps the city moving all of the day-to-day operations and it also is in pursuit of all of your top priorities so our office is integrally involved in so many of those efforts uh and virtually all departments um but we are lead on only a few because most of our work is done in partnership and in collaboration with each of the departments and most of the areas where we are leads are concerning the government and council reforms so i will start and i'll try to go through these fairly quickly because i know we're we're running a little bit behind schedule and you've heard a lot of information and again so much of our work is uh was in support of the departments with respect to government and council reform what have we completed thus far we have initiated the charter review as you know and we'll talk a little bit more about that on the next slide we have initiated the process for redistricting working closely with the city clerk's office and we have had the initial six months of implementation of the open government ordinance and of course we came back to you with some revisions and refinements to that ordinance and that continues to move forward the other element that's not listed on here is we are one of the leads on the open government task force or the open government subcommittee and there are a couple of new initiatives that are coming out of that after our meeting last evening including a look at our lobbying ordinance and campaign uh of financing and as i mentioned we are um providing legal support for the key departmental initiatives and i just to highlight a couple of those covet 19 response i'm sure you'll hear more of this from uh human resources department our team members of our team have been very involved in that um we were also very involved in the reports and the litigation that arose out of the protests last may and june and that includes the after-action report the use of force and the human rights commission reports we are very involved as is almost every department in homelessness policies programs and of course we're the lead on the homeless litigation and then in the housing we also worked closely with the teams on the cornerstone purchase and sales agreement the red housing fund and a whole variety of planning initiatives next slide so things continue uh in progress the charter review committee will begin its work in september the council has identified 12 areas uh for us to review research and potentially draft charter amendments um we do anticipate that that will result in ballot measures for the council's consideration next spring with respect to redistricting we have selected the demographer um and that process will begin next month and that will uh be in quite a few months of work with final maps will have to be completed by spring in the spring next year in order to be in place for our november 22 election and then of course we have the continued implementation of the open government ordinance uh a couple of different elements of that the um appeals and enforcement some of the public records elements the open data portal quite a few more elements to implement on that COVID-19 is of course continuing and evolving just as we thought we were nearing the end we are ramping back up so so next slide and again uh just we anticipate we will be continuing to provide support um for the departments will be continuing to work in collaboration and partnership um i know uh virtually everyone who has spoken thus far has talked about that all of these initiatives all of your priorities reach into a number of different departments and we are part of those efforts includes homeless of course uh housing real estate transactions are really ramping up so we're uh devoting significant time to that house we have project entitlements housing initiatives uh you heard from miss hartman some of the ordinances that are expected to come forward some of the plans that are expected to come forward will be very much involved in all of those uh the police chief mentioned the police auditor we have been involved in that process as well and of course economic resiliency looking at the eifd the exclusive negotiating agreements disposition and development agreements all of those efforts climate change as well and then with physical stability um we will be looking at some ballot measures the city will be looking at some potential ballot measures um and other revenue enhancements uh as we progress through this year and we anticipate being involved in that i'll note also um that we you know we'll have an election next uh next november and we will be there's a lot of work that of course entails a tremendous amount of time from the city's clerks office and also from our office in making sure uh for for candidates getting the information getting all the paperwork doing all of that as well as any ballot measures both for revenue and for if there are any policy uh efforts that the council decides will be very much involved in that along with the city clerk next slide so what are our gaps i really looked at this as what are we balancing when we look at the um the work that's being done specifically towards council priorities what are we balancing we're balancing our ongoing day-to-day responsibilities and mandates and that includes litigation and legal defense that includes uh defending the city against claims uh pursuing um affirmative remedies uh against um uh um you know if there's a a breach of contract or tort liability for example the pg and e litigation also code enforcement weapons hazards materials uh and others that is ongoing at all times and that involves almost half of our attorney staff is focused primarily on litigation and legal defense contract review similarly a really broad range you think contracts so should just whip on through easily but it's a full range we're involved in the uv project we actually have two different attorneys are involved in that project um we are working on a new design build uh templates and uh we're working we're updating all of our emergency contract forms so that we're ready in case there's an emergency again and those change every year as a FEMA requirements evolve as other state laws evolve and then of course just the day-to-day general services and professional services agreements a lot of work we provide support for the council and for the council subcommittee a number not all but a number of the council subcommittees we support uh the board of public utilities a planning commission design review board chb and others um we staff those we're reviewing all of those agendas we are present at their meetings of course a general department support and partnership really is probably the bulk of our work um labor negotiations this year hopefully we get those wrapped up before too long um and then a public records uh several folks have already mentioned public records act those are very time consuming those responses city clerks office also is the lead on public records we are also um in a support role but review uh it does take tremendous time um reviewing documents to ensure that they are properly disclosed um and I would say that we could use some um additional uh technology and additional systems I think across citywide uh to have that run a little more efficiently in addition to those kind of day-to-day operations there are a couple of things that I just wanted to mention that we internally are looking at for our office this is in light of some upcoming um transitions one of our actually our most senior lawyer in terms of length of time in the office is retiring in october we are looking to replace him um and it is it highlights our need um to ensure internal staff development and cross training so that we remain very nimble in being able to respond to the needs of the city to ensure that our strength um as as an office so that is one of our priorities it is time consuming it does take attention you need to be able to focus and then similarly um an internal priority um to really uh improve our efficiencies update some of our policies look at reformulating um some of our procedures some of our technologies and again that that just has to be balanced against all the day-to-day operations as well as the efforts um in the specific priority areas of the council next slide um and these are this is to be additional department updates this was just to kind of give a little bit of context of where we've been this has been a really challenging year and I think a couple of um the folks that have spoken before me have mentioned it but it really has impacted the entire city as I know it's impacted all of you individually uh as well um and you've seen a great response we and other departments have shifted into electronic um processing we've developed efficiencies and working uh with remote work for those who are able you've heard from departments that are not able to work their operational folks all need to be here in person um and then for the operational teams and for those of us that have been in the office their issues of masking socially distancing cleaning testing all of that is on top and um so many of our families are balancing both being at work and having young children uh trying to learn remotely so it has been a challenging year um but some of the highlights just very quickly PG and E settlements both tubs and Kincaid um we did resolve um what we believe is all of the claims that have arise that arose from the protests um successful defense of the all-electric reach ordinance we've already talked about uh reform council reforms emergency response and then as I say the ongoing solution focused partnership with the departments with the boards and commissions and uh it's it's really been an impressive year particularly given the challenges that we've faced and I mean that not just for our department but for all of the departments across the city thanks thank you very much any questions for the city attorney or should we continue on and work our way through all of the internal way we go through all those departments and then we can wrap up if there are there questions in these areas all right so we have next up communication good afternoon council members adrian merton's chief communications intergovernmental relations officer for the communications and intergovernmental relations office um and so similar to uh what city attorney gallagher stated about her department supportive departments we also um have a unique role in and how we support the city uh we support the communications and the legislative advocacy and interagency coordination needs for all of the departments across the city so we have work that's connected to most of the items that you've seen on my colleagues department's work plans already today um so we've accomplished a lot this year as others have stated too much to capture all in one slide so i've chosen just a few things to highlight here um a few months ago we did produce the wildfire ready website an outreach campaign this was a significant achievement for the department and helping our fire department to implement some of the action items of the community wildfire protection plan um we have a new centralized site where homeowners can go to get resources and guidance on how to better protect their properties specifically those that live in the wildland urban interface and we do have an ongoing outreach campaign as part of that we also implemented the noa weather radio distribution and outreach campaign associated with that uh that was an important step in the community wildfire protection plan as well expanding on our emergency alerting systems throughout the city and we got just about 12 000 weather radios into the hands of our residents which are expands our alerting capabilities gives them another tool in their toolbox and ours in the event of an emergency as part of that we also were able to do a citywide mailing that included a emergency preparedness guide a nine page bilingual booklet something we never would have been able to do without the funds from that FEMA grant um and then we have established a drought website uh an mandatory conservation kickoff campaign um you know a drought emergency requires significant communications and certainly this is uh not totally completed priority getting the website stood up was quite a feat it's another centralized resource center for residents to get ongoing information about the drought and also on ways that they can conserve water um and then campaign efforts are ongoing and we've also stood up an equity santa rosa website uh this was in collaboration with our human resources department our diversity equity and inclusion officer and this is really just the start of our outreach and communications around uh those in our diversity equity and inclusion efforts within the city and both internal and external communications around that and then of course water rate setting and prop 218 noticing is a very big deal it's a complex communication um and involves multiple elements to that outreach campaign and that was completed earlier this spring next slide please uh so supporting for ongoing uh priorities uh now and in the next six to nine months a COVID-19 communication support and that says public information needs but it's really also internal communications this will remain our highest priority this has been a significant lift for our team dominated much of our time um at different months of the pandemic when we've seen peaks and changes in health orders and um how that translates locally um and so that remains our top priority um and and we continue to push on the vaccine campaign as well as uh changes that we're seeing here locally recently with the delta variant and the need for more testing um we also expect to continue with uh a great amount of support for the economic recovery around the pandemic moving forward uh open data portal enhancements um so this was identified um in the open government ordinance uh as as one of the action items and to be honest this is an area that we have had to put on hold the last few months we got a start on it really our focus was on taking the data that exists and some that's not yet there um and getting it up into a place that's in a presentable format on a dashboard that people the general public can better understand and make sense of um so that is something that we have on our work plan but again um has kind of fallen more recently just with competing priorities uh our human resources web redesign um we try to implement a website redesign a couple different departments a year human resources did rise to the top this year because it aligns with our diversity equity and inclusion work and we look forward to doing more work on that with the human resources department um our state legislative platform development as so last year or in february council adopted our federal platform first platform that we've had for the city on our legislative advocacy interests we hope to do the same thing with this going into next legislative cycle and we'll be meeting with department heads and bringing forward a proposed platform to council in the next couple months we did just bring on a new state lobbyist contract that council approved last week and so we'll be working with them to get that together we'll also be updating the federal legislative platform um at the same time that we're doing the state platform and that'll really help to guide us in our interests um around all of our different priority areas um and then tracking legislation and potential funding opportunities that is ongoing and certainly will be when we implement our new platforms as well and again this supports all priority areas of the city um where we can make sure that we're getting what we need locally um to move forward in our goals and efforts next slide please um so as I mentioned we we pretty much touch most things um that have a communications need in the city and so this list while not comprehensive is it really captures the biggest items that we intend to be working on um over the next six to nine months and I won't go through all them but just to highlight a couple the drought will remain one of our uh most important priorities uh in terms of implementing communications plans um I did want to touch on the zero waste foodware ordinance um you know in the work plan that's a the the staff work with council to complete that item is certainly done but we're actually just getting going with the communications need behind that um you know that is a significant communications plan your it's a behavior change and a business operation change for our food service providers in Santa Rosa and so we're gearing up for that and we'll be working out with some working with outside support to help supplement our efforts in that area um and then other big big ticket items redistricting process there'll be a huge public information need in that area as long with charter review and we'll be working closely with community engagement the city attorney and the city clerk's office on both those items the safe parking program rollout and really all of our homeless initiatives um require significant communication support um I'll say just in our our recent COVID response efforts around the outbreak at Sam Jones hall that's been a great deal of time and energy spent there just making sure that um we are able to provide updates to the community and remain transparent in what's happening there um communicating with our media partners as well um and uh next slide please so for additional department updates um these are other things when I was looking at the work plan didn't they didn't quite fit anywhere else but I think they're important to capture because they're things that are ongoing in our department um fire recovery as one of those we still and it's rink and ridge up there it should actually say for ridge park I apologize for that but um that's one park where we are still doing recovery work and there is public information needs around input and updates on that project and that's a park located in the fountain grove area and then we are actually just initiating the debris removal insurance collection outreach for for the glass fire and while we have a small number of uh households that went through that process we still want to provide them the same level of support we have for others fire survivors and make sure that they are able to get through the recovery process um and then the PG&E field tree removal advocacy and also outreach around that um that's an ongoing effort and we are working in partnership with the county to ensure that fire survivors have the information they need um if they are in fact eligible for the PG&E field tree removal program and then 2021 fire season PSPS forecasted weather events we're all familiar with these things and they have a significant impact on our department um even a single weather event sometimes you know where we're getting information from PG&E that there may be potential PSPS where we've got a red flag warning or significant what you know multiple weather events forecast over a week um those are definitely kind of drop everything and and get the immediate messaging done for that so they can be an interruption to the work that we do and I wanted to note it on here because during you know the July to November timeframe um we we do have a lot of interruptions over the last few years we've come to know that um and the website redesign so we are working with a planning and economic development department to redesign their website uh well it's not a specific priority on the list it's actually really important and helpful to that department being able to achieve their priorities um it will help them to provide better efficiencies and customer service with some of the work that we're trying to do there to create more of a virtual permitting counter experience um and then I did capture our SB1 uh road and measure and road projects and our CIP projects on here as well um significant construction projects require a great deal of communication we want to make sure residents are not caught off guard that they've got plans for their commutes every day and keep them updated on what's going on in their community and we do have some significant ones happening this year next slide please um so recreation program marketing uh we've heard uh from uh assistant city manager Hartman that programs are ramping back up it's great and we've been supporting the recreation department through that uh and Claire did mention um that we were able to publish the fall winter activity guide and um I'm glad she did because it reminded me of something um that the production of the guide in a normal year which our team is developed is involved in you know it's a 50 average is about 50 pages that publication with all of the upcoming opportunities for the city for a six month span usually that takes five months to produce we work with an outside designer um who helps to supplement our work um we weren't we didn't have the luxury of time this year because of COVID we didn't know what programs were going to be offered the recreation team as Claire described it was kind of working last minute to figure that out as things were changing um we only had a matter of weeks and so we actually weren't able to utilize outside services to support that and our team developed that publication all in-house for the first time uh and we have a 40 page digital booklet online and we're looking like we'll probably uh be doing that for the spring summer as well that is not something we want to continue doing forever but um that's the environment we're in right now and it does add a significant demand on our team's time um and so it's just something to be aware of um and and we're working through it and I'm really proud of our team for being able to get that accomplished and we'll do it again but um that that definitely has had a strain on the communication side too um and then we've been in uh helping HR with job recruitments including uh significant major recruitments like the city manager um I wanted to add merit awards on here we did not have a merit awards last year because of current conditions in the community we're not going to be doing an in-person event it doesn't look like at this time but we are trying to figure out a way to still honor those in our community that are doing great work um as volunteers on their own time and so we are um working with uh the merit awards committee to figure out how to make that happen in a digital environment um and then internal communications has become really critical to the work that we do um we're supporting the city manager each week with ongoing internal communications needs there's been so many changes during the pandemic but just with other stuff happening in the city that will continue um and we do spend a great deal of time making sure that we're putting out information that's really helpful to the organization um and then lastly I wanted to mention um you know we're a uh on the communication side of the house the the team is a group of seven communication uh communication staff who used to support five different departments exclusively in the city um about a month before the pandemic happened is when we centralized that team and now are stretched to support communications work across the city so that is a big change uh we didn't have a lot of time to grow into how how that operation would work we were certainly interrupted by the pandemic and we really would like to be able to carve out some time to get some vehicles in place that'll really help us with the work that we do and and help uh the rest of the the city um to be able to better work with us and just make sure that we have consistency and efficiency across the city so I've named a few things up there our social media policy translation guidelines you know our operating procedures for interacting with the media and standardized outreach templates um those were things we identified right when we came together as a team but we just haven't been able to um really get much movement on yet um and I think the only last thing I'd like to say is that um you know for us we have a lot on our plate and it's obviously dictated by the work of other departments and we we work hard to get it all done and and it is a very hard working team and I think when we are stretched that then sometimes you do lose the ability to put the creativity and innovation and your communications plans that we would really like to um and so always for us the more time we have to plan on those the more we can do there and the more effective the communications plans can be in return thank you all right we're going to keep going and then we'll come back if there are questions on any of the internal but just to kind of keep the momentum going I'm going to invite Amy to come down and talk about HR okay thank you good afternoon mayor and council members I'm Amy Reeve the director of human resources before we get started I wanted to give just a brief overview of the multiple divisions and responsibilities that human resources is responsible for and that includes recruitment and selection training and development diversity equity and inclusion including equal employment opportunity initiatives employee relations leave administration risk management benefits administration safety employee negotiations and policy development for local state and federal compliance with laws regulations and orders so the two council priorities that the HR department has primarily focused on are the diversity equity and inclusion and COVID-19 goals so in terms of diversity equity and inclusion some work has already begun and has been completed so see collaborative as you know was selected and hired to create diversity priorities and to produce equity plans across the city we also created and hired a diversity inclusion an eo officer and with that person on board now we've begun brown bag lunch and learn trainings various departmental learning opportunities and awareness campaigns and we're in the process of additional opportunities as well such as the equity Santa Rosa website and outreach plan next slide please so this slide gives an overview of the seed collaborative deliverables and those will include the city equity task force work the police equitable policing task force and a fire equity task force plan next slide please so I think before we move on I also had a slide that may not have been included in this version related to our work on COVID-19 so if I could just speak to that for a moment so as adrian's team mentioned the COVID-19 response has created quite a significant workload in human resources so we have been working on creating timely policies such as the COVID prevention policy the remote workplace policy and various employee communications based on the changing guidance health orders and recommendations we've received those from cal osha the cdc and sonoma county health office we also have worked on a leave management and tracking system which incorporates the family's first coronavirus response act f of c r a um emergency paid sick leave quarantine pay and workers compensation were applicable since the start of the pandemic we have also worked to establish and communicate various cleaning protocols enforce personal protective equipment like masking and established safety protocols across the city so in terms of council priorities in progress work has begun on the three equity plans with seed collaborative and those will help us prioritize and make recommendations for future dei work interviews and focus groups have been conducted with staff and community members and various stakeholders and the next step will be a city survey which will be sent out in the coming weeks in terms of work underway on city-wide dei initiatives those include policy review recommendations are being made in terms of recruitment to attract and retain a highly qualified as well as diverse workforce and we're using a kind of a diversity lens in hiring that's kind of a new practice for the hr department as i mentioned we're doing trainings and lunch and learn sessions the first session went very well and i think we had 40 participants across the city and that was intended to educate staff about a different subset of our population communications and presentations on dei work across departments are ongoing and we've been coordinating with community engagement on dei initiatives this work will influence current practices and procedures and include an equity lens and a lot of the work that we're doing across the city amongst multiple departments next slide please in terms of our departmental gap analysis with the c collaborative work underway we will need to come back to council to request funding at a later date when strategic priorities are identified and work is ready to begin that will likely include additional dei initiatives programs and projects and right now we're not at the implementation phase there as i mentioned we're currently working closely with the community engagement team to support complementary dei work community gauge engagement as claire mentioned focuses on outward facing initiatives and the hr department focuses on internal dei work including the c collaborative recommendations policy development and training opportunities it's important to note that we are being strategic in our rollout of priorities and that we need to manage expectations in terms of the time it takes to really make an organizational change so our organizational culture didn't occur overnight and so we won't be able to change it overnight next slide please so in terms of additional department updates work continues on our coven 19 response we're in the process of policy development and communication that continues as we contemplate requiring vaccination and or weekly testing we're in the process of identifying testing resources and tracking mechanisms for that weekly testing and we are in the process of tracking attestation forms and we'll be tracking vaccination records as well we are in process of labor negotiations with all of our employee bargaining units and we are in the process of handling several key recruitments for the city including the city manager we're also in the process of transitioning to a new online benefits portal which will provide a self-service mechanism for staff and we're in the process of a new neo-gov module implementation for learn on board and perform so those will increase efficiencies and create a system of record for benefits administration training and employee performance next slide please okay thanks Amy all right so we're going to go on to information technology Eric is joining us from virtually okay Eric are you there he's just being promoted thank you yes i'm here okay you guys hear me okay now yes please go yeah thank you mayor members of the council i'd like to talk about the information department technology department next slide please some of the council priorities that are woven into a lot of the tasks that we do are around using technology to help us through covid but also to improve the level of our services to our residents and also help improve the operational efficiency of our departments you've heard throughout i think almost all of the presentations today some aspect of technology technology used to address those goals and and pretty much all of those we have been involved the one that's probably the most um relevant especially for today is the hybrid meeting technology you know a year and a half ago year and uh a little bit more our community and our nation did not understand how to use meetings like zoom and so we've gone from a place where that was a new technology for us to one that permeates everything we do just i was looking at some day to the other day and our city just our city holds roughly 500 zoom meetings a month it's 500 a month and that does not count the number of meetings that are done over our internal communication platform uh microsoft teams and so the distilled this hybrid technology has been a significant body of work for the information technology department working with the city clerk and other departments um but we're very pleased with and we hope you are as well the second bullet is about the technology solutions that support the key community initiatives and i have a list which i did not put on the slides but you've heard a lot of them already today each one of these had a heavy involvement and or a project lead by the it department they go from building related permits to scheduling inspections and results over web and ivr and text for economic development and permitting permit lookup tools queuing and appointment systems for when people come into the office uh parking citations cannabis registration even city bus store and bus pass sales uh real properties maps that the real estate agent used so pretty much behind every one of those are things that we've had to put some work into and we've absolutely loved it it's what we enjoy doing and it adds a great benefit from a week until two of the departments and to the public next slide please so our our priorities that are tied to to the council priorities are pretty much that you know we really want to continue to expand and improve the hybrid meeting technology what we're learning now in our city as we contemplate and begin to move more to work for the administrative functions is that we need rooms that can do what you're doing now where some employees can be on premise some employees could be remote and remote might just be across town the days when a meeting would require five or six people to come across town to join it are probably over it's a much more efficient and i can tell you the people that uh they used to have to drive across town uh in a lot of ways enjoy not having to do that if they don't need to the next one is one that we're really excited about starting to work on and our city of a county of Sonoma is working and we're part of a group of agencies to work on broadband uh access to underserved areas this is something that has been on the council priorities off and on over the years i've been here but we're really happy now that it looks like there may be an opportunity to make some material progress or the federal dollars have been um the promise of federal dollars have been something that's made this possible also the county's shift in our shift to redefining underserved areas used to be the underserved meant you didn't have enough to do internet uh 10 megabits per second now as we've learned through covid so many people in our community just to do their basic schoolwork need more connectivity and needed a price that that they can afford so we're really happy to be partnering with the county to hopefully move something forward next slide please when we look inward at the IT department as i mentioned earlier we're really happy with the work that's gone on it's been in our wheelhouse and we've really enjoyed helping helping out i will say though that when this started a year and a half ago we all kind of expected this to be a relatively short term thing it's it's not been so our gaps are that more and more people are asking us to do more technology work support for hybrid meeting rooms configuration uh just support for our employees and to some extent the public and some of our governing bodies elected bodies to work with with the with remote meetings and documenting and making sure that it's included in the public record and the help desk and field technician support what we're seeing is that uh as people return to work or they've already been at work they really often have two two configurations that we need to help support in the configuration in their office which we've always done for our 1200 or so employees but they also have a configuration at home that is one that's very personalized uh from an IT perspective a support perspective we don't have very good visibility into how it works or we can't control it remotely and so it's been a bit of a challenge for us to to help people support those two systems and do it in a way that's secure i'll talk about cyber security in the in the following slide but this dual system support has been something that we think is here here for the uh for the stay and something we have to somehow be able to cope a little better with as our employees return to work and to help manage their expectations of our ability to support next slide please and and again remote work again this is a really big thing for us you know we we sort of had all geared up like other city departments did for something that was probably going to be uh short term temporary now it's clear that this is a model that will continue to exist and it requires an unprecedented level of support and that's not just in computer support but it's also helping to deploy more technology solutions to help our public to help our departments the things you've heard in the last three hours or so on top of that of course is cyber security i think that every member of the public and the council has heard of at least one or two cyber security attacks not just on large companies but on cities our size and smaller that have had a significant impact to either personal privacy or impact on delivery ability deliver services or even in some cases a significant financial impact and so one of the things that our city has done and we generally don't talk about this a lot in open discussion but we've put a lot of effort into trying to protect our network and protect our infrastructure from cyber security threats a lot of them come from from our employees who unwittingly click on certain things and that exposes their credentials which becomes the the next step for successful attack every employee in the city for the last six to nine months now goes through a mandatory cyber security training training process it's mandatory and they get tests delivered to them and if they fail the test they get to do some more education around cyber security and then they get taken another retest it's almost like a certification i'm pleased to say that we're getting better but there's still a fair bit of work to do to make sure our employees understand not to click on certain items or to request help or assistance so that's it in a in a summary for the information technology department so i'll hand it back to moderator and so next next slide yeah thank you eric yes demonstrating the remote opportunities that are available all right so our last but not least by any means very important department of finance and council members i'm jan mzik next slide please thanks so in terms of priorities when i joined the organization back in january this year the budget process was underway and these were the deliverables during that time period what i might add is that concurrently you know understanding a budget also fundamentally means understanding the businesses that drive the budget so a lot of what the finance department does obviously in addition you know being an internal services provider is also deliverables to those departments so a lot of my own learning happened in the first six months perhaps just in line with the budget but getting to know departments whether it was public works you know what do you need sort of on an infrastructure basis you know what happens with vehicle replacements the golf course visiting you know the homeless services um departments um secure families sam jones hall and really getting to see firsthand what those businesses require need and how we best fulfill those priorities next slide please so um one of the early requests um i know from the long-term planning committee was you know how can we better deliver communication about the budget you know a lot of it is delivered in financial speak how do you take that and translate it into what i call management information um one of the things about that though is having timely communication you know quarterly that's something that we have implemented this year we'll see how it goes we're in the first quarter of that priority um i think from a budget strategy basis overall you know there are lots of things that are churning currently where we go with measure oh from a polling perspective do we keep it the same do we alter what it looks like and you know where do we prioritize you know making that happen um budgetary practices and policies you know mid-year review we talked about the quarterly review but getting to a place where there's a formal decision mid-year do we stay the course do we alter the course um and what does that mean for an upcoming year and then resulting fund balance with a budget deficit i think all things ought to be on the table what we look at but that also means how do we spend money how do we fund projects we're sort of a cash fund pay as you go process only and perhaps some diversification of that strategy would serve the organization well so part of what we're looking at is whether or not perhaps one of the most costly expenses we have secondary to salaries is an unfunded liability um related to calpers it's 400 million how do we do that effectively and we'll be coming back to the city council with that in mid-september similarly with one-time monies there are more requests than they are one-time funds and we'll see what that looks like on october the 19th next slide please so i you know i don't spend a lot of time talking about or thinking about what gaps are but just the gaps i would say are largely technology and time and how do we effectively use both of those things to communicate with the goal of really getting you know how do you make decisions on an informed basis putting both of those tools together and so we're working on some technology it may not it means something to me when i say taking financial information which is what comes off of a system and putting it into terms mostly with charts or diagrams or easy to understand communication so that we all can use it for informed decision-making without a lot of complexity so we're giving that a try we'll see what that looks like and you know hopefully have that underway soon next slide please break thank you presentations first of all let's just say thank you so much for all of the effort that went into providing those updates i would like to hear some reflections we can do that first and then take a break and regroup or does that sound okay to go around the horn i would like to hear from each person just kind of your observations some of your takeaways we've been taking clupius notes as well and have some themes so we will report back as well just to think about priorities and the discussion that will follow and we'll preview that is part of is that better oh that's a lot better thank you claire um we have a preview of a the recommended work plan that staff is prepared it's still a lot and so we'll want to have a conversation about that and then in light of the additional updates that you have heard today but before we take a break and before we get there uh we'll just do a quick around the horn on your takeaways from the staff presentations and claire will take us some notes um let's see who would like a volunteer to go first please vice mayor ruggers all right um i just would uh like to thank all the staff i think that is something that really stood out to me is the hard work that everyone is doing and that um all the departments are doing a lot more with less um and so i just like to thank everyone um for that and what was the second question coffee is still on my on my thing i just see coffee right here uh it was just your takeaway your observations from the staff presentations oh my takeaway um my takeaway is that we need to figure this out because everyone is doing a lot with with less um they're doing a lot more with less and so we do um strategically need to to figure figure it out in a a budgetary sound way thank you we'll just come around this way is that okay councilmember slayer sure thank you well you said it when you talked about priorities we have a plate that is full and a checking account that is not and so hold on to your hats we have some really major discussions major decisions to make here we are in mid-year and past that so it's um it it isn't easy um of course but that's where we are and it's going to be some some some tough decisions we're going to have to make some major uh concessions and and um uh i think it's for those that have been through it before it doesn't get any easier i mean just because we've done it before it doesn't mean that it is not difficult and lots of compromise on the horizon but it's the it's it will be it's important work and i'm glad we're doing it it's just not fine thank you yeah and this is going to be a balancing between the short term and the long term right and how to bridge that i think that's an important um visual bridging to the future yeah so for me it's almost like deja vu all over again because every time we do this we realize the tremendous amount of work that our staff is doing and also don't want to ignore the tremendous amount of work that our council is doing because i know i'm is busy i thought things would calm down a little bit for me after becoming mayor i'm sure mr rogers is uh experiencing that now but it doesn't because there's so much going on and i heard several of the presentations mentioned about regional approach so it's not just our priorities it's the region's priorities that intersect and collaborate with what we're trying to do and balancing that is a big challenge um and one thing that i would really like to see and i know we had done this a couple years ago where we get the smart goals because i think that's a language we can talk about so i know we don't have the specificity here but if we're going to do a council says this is our new we really want to prioritize then tell me what the impact with specific dates we're not going to be able to get this done until 2024 and that's the little piece that i'd love to have entertained some of those discussions you know maybe for the city manager what are those impacts going to be not just it's going to go lower on the list let's have specific information so we can really laser focus and be very strategic in the next six to nine months about what really we have the capacity to accomplish but i really appreciate all the work that staff has put on because these type of presentations just don't happen overnight so i really appreciate the depth of and the information that is contained in this presentation so far yeah we heard a lot about long-term planning and a variety of departments and areas and it's about bringing those pieces all together i think as well at a city-wide level um we'll come back around here councilmember alvarez thank you uh for myself it's it's really the realization that we have a large group of san rosen's who are really dedicated to providing a great service to to our neighbors uh for me it's evidence with the with the slurry project in rosalind my mom actually had the schedule of the road repairs before i knew what day they were going to be and for her she actually decided to take the day off close the business down took day off and she actually called me she said do you know when the sabbatical road is going to be repaired on the 11th she actually knew the information before i did and it just shows how how dedicated the staff is to really doing that outreach in the community and it shows the love that we have for senator rosen that's that's really my my takeaway uh from today thank you thank you very much mayor i think that the biggest takeaway is that we're still in crisis mode at least that's how we're responding to most of our priorities is as they're a crisis and what i heard a lot from staff specifically in the gaps discussion was better processes better technology better planning that allows us to get in front of a lot of what we're dealing with so that they're no longer crisis their their normal course of business that provides some breathing room for staff building in the time to create those systems to be more forward-thinking and less responsive thank you all right councilmember fleming thank you it's pretty obvious that staff is feeling under resourced and it's pretty obvious that the council is looking at a financial picture that's not going to change the resourcing you know in any short order and that what we're really going to have to do is improve our tax basis in order to solve these problems which is going to mean that we're going to have to demand more creativity and more synergy and so what i'm looking at you know councilmember schwedhelm mentioned this when he was a mayor we sat down and did smart goals and the the benefit of of sitting every department down around every goal and every initiative is that each group comes together and thinks about what they can contribute but also what they can draw in terms of resources from other departments and creates efficiencies and also opportunities for for synergy and creativity and rather than what i'm hearing a lot of is it is understandable and i have a lot of empathy for but is a defensive crouch against what the council is asking and really what we're asking is is to get us around this inflection point this bend so that we can be the vibrant and frankly fiscally sustainable agency that that we can see just around the corner there is a light at the end of the tunnel it won't always be like this thank you thank you do we have councilmember tidbits with us also yep i'm here um i you know after hearing this it's it's funny but it's actually not funny you know we talk about crisis every year and of the now five of these gatherings i've been part of we've been in crisis every year and the gradations of crisis vary depending on the year they also certainly vary compared to times before i was on the council when we arguably had real crisis in the 2008 downturn of the economy so i'm going to try to focus my comments beyond the concept of crisis but i i guess you know i think we need to be be careful about you know what's happening to staff i guess my takeaway is is you know the lack of resources sure financial they're always financial we always say that and then sun keeps shining but what i am noticing is that maybe the sun keeps shining because we keep not refilling positions as they come available in the budget and that's the greatest concern to me is i'm seeing a lot of staff turnover at the city right now a lot of really key leadership that is leaving and leaving very quickly and i think that's going to be our single greatest problem this year and whatever we need to do whether it's bringing on a city manager more quickly and prioritizing that so we have hands at the helm of the ship and leadership from the top down to support a strong bottom up culture and work ethic among staff then that's what we need to do but yeah staff resource thing is going to be my prevailing concern thank you uh yeah sustainability and longevity is what we're talking about here i think in order to be able to achieve the the goals and the priorities that council has laid out which i don't think anybody would dispute as important and desired by any means it's how do you build a bridge to ensure that you have staff that are not so burnt out and have the bandwidth to support those things as well as the ongoing practices and processes okay thank you for those comments let's take a quick break so we can kind of regroup our things here uh and then we will come back let's do 15 minutes or so so it'd be 22 we'll come back and we'll try to regroup on the topic of prioritizing the priorities if you will okay here councilmember Fleming here councilmember alvarez president vice mayor rogers president mayor rogers here let the record show that all council members are present okay nancy okay welcome back uh now is when the fun really begins right just kidding uh okay so we are going to spend the next part of our afternoon together really reflecting on a recommended work plan and the priorities um highest priorities from council's perspective and so as you can see from the staff presentations this morning first of all a lot of work went into those but a lot of work goes on every day and i think that's quite apparent when you look at the nine focus areas that council identified in february there's being progress made in all directions despite the limitations and that's to be commended of staff so we do have a little presentation we'll kind of walk our way through we might modify a little bit as we go through but i want to start off by asking the city manager to make some comments and thoughts from this morning thanks nancy um you like i have been sitting here listening to the last few hours of presentations from our departments about their ongoing work efforts their accomplishments and some of the gaps they see in the next six to nine months and one of the themes that stood out for me and intent talking to nancy the same thing is around the sustainability of our efforts and many of you have recognized that um you heard almost universally from our departments that they are facing a surplus of work and priorities and projects and a shortage of staff resources and so that means there's a concern about the ability to just sustain that for a long period of time and a need to look at some alternatives things like professional service contracts maybe limited term positions and making sure that we're being responsive and providing an environment that both recognizes their contributions and their challenges but starts to provide solutions for them so that they see that we are responding to what we're hearing here um we will have an opportunity coming in up in october when we talk about the allocation of the remaining pg&e funds the seven million dollars that's there as well as the arpa funds the reason i say that's an opportunity is the pg&e funds are very flexible they don't have a lot of restrictions on their use and they may allow us an opportunity to create some of those bridges that nancy talked about it may allow us to allocate some additional resources to reduce the backlog in our permitting and plan checking operations it may allow us to bring in some limited term staff to bridge the next couple of years as we look at longer term revenue opportunities and ways to streamline our operations so i just wanted to highlight that for you kind of get it front of mind as we're preparing to look at those recommendations and options for use of those funds uh i also think we heard a theme around um investing in our infrastructure it it's not something we talk about often enough or frequently enough and it's not front of mind in many cases as we deal with you know one urgent item or one urgent policy item after another but as uh our assistant city manager mentioned we have five billion dollars worth of infrastructure that this city is responsible for and our community counts on us to deliver to them for things like water and sewer and transportation um we need to pay attention to that investment we need to do a better job of identifying how we're going to provide adequate resources to maintain it and to make sure it stays up to standard um i talked a little bit about those core services um we have started a number of new initiatives over the last couple of years things like community engagement dei a communications team a whole host of other programmatic things that are very important to the community in addressing the changing dynamics and and makeup of our community and the needs of our community and yet we have all of these core services that our community also depends on us delivering well inconsistently and so we need to have find the correct balance between those things and as we move forward um we need to recognize that we need to maintain our capabilities around emergency response and public safety that is a non-negotiable item as far as i'm concerned and i think you share that as a city council if we're going to fail that's not one of the areas where we want to fail um and so we want to make sure that we maintain our preparedness and our capabilities for emergency response and public safety i also heard an opportunity uh perhaps to look at uh using technology more effectively and we've seen a number of uh examples identified during the staff reports uh from our departments about that how it's already been incorporated and i think there's additional opportunity to design more public facing technology that perhaps allows us to redirect the staff resources to other services and and needs within the city equally important is this next exercise is going to have you look at some recommendations for the next six months in terms of work plans focused around your focus areas or priorities and we're hopeful uh that you're going to be able to narrow that focus a little bit we think what's listed up there even though we ask staff to be realistic and identify the things that need to occur in the next six to nine months it's a pretty ambitious plan we hope that you'll help identify what are the crucial things to get done in the next six to nine months and what are those that if they didn't get done would be okay and then once we get that agreement which i think we will i'd like to have a conversation about what happens after we come back to the council and have this adopted formally so it's a public facing document and you've all agreed to it and then 30 to 60 days down the road when that next good idea comes to a city council member or that next urgent need is identified by the public and it comes before us how do we address it how do we bring it forward to council and have a discussion around how does it compare to those other priorities and work plans what are the impacts if we decide to move it up on the list of priorities to a first tier priority what what what are we sacrificing what's the impact and i think we need to have an agreement between staff and council about how we handle those on a regular basis and i i think we're it's just reality that we're going to have those kinds of things coming up all year long even though we do regular council goals setting we do budget sessions all the other stuff you're going to have a regular series of requests that just don't fit into that timetable in those processes and hopefully we can reach an agreement on how do we handle those in a way that allows council comfort and flexibility to address them and also gives certainty to staff that you recognize the impacts and accept them thank you okay this is in part going to be distinguishing between what can be on the longer-term horizon longer-term plan and what really is urgent and needs attention in the in the near term in the next six months or so well you were on break i did hand out the work plan we're going to take a look at so you'll have that as a resource i just want to make sure that you see that we're going to come back to a walk through it through the slides in a kind of in a bridged version but the content there that's what we'll be reviewing to help us prioritize but before we do that i thought we just set up some context and i had written down some of the themes that i heard this morning but jeff has already articulated them so nicely i don't know that i need to even recap them but this is you know really again that period transition so let's go ahead and move through our slides here quick so long-term goals versus short-term priorities i had an opportunity to speak with but nearly all of you and i appreciate your time and one of the things that i heard consistently was an appreciation for the ambitious nature of the nine priority areas some of them are by their very nature long-term unfortunately we're not going to be able to solve climate change in six months as much as we would like to do that but certainly making progress in that direction is critical and important and you'll see each of your goals are reflected in the work plan that has been brought to you before so to some of the specific guiding principles if you will for our discussion today is first of all ensuring a smooth transition through this transition period until you have a new city manager permanently in place and the staff that comes with that and so additional leadership positions that are currently vacant so the transition to that point and maintaining organizational stability within that time period organizational sustainability generally was quite a solid theme i thought this morning whether it be with staffing and that includes developing a plan for filling those vacancies or addressing staffing capacity needs but also the care and feeding of city employees so the staff organizational sustainability in terms of resources and understanding what the roadmap is to either identify new revenues or address opportunities for doing things differently that's part of organizational sustainability infrastructure looking at the investments that you have made in the city and ensuring that you don't have some crisis down the road that could be avoided by investing perhaps one time funds or other resources in that direction so this is kind of some some context in terms of thinking long term and then looking at the short term priorities so next slide these are some of the themes that i heard when we had a chance to to meet ahead of our workshop this is similar to what we've covered already today but i'll hit some of the highlights first of all there was a recognition i think universally that the city is in a period of transition and there's a real strong commitment and support of staff and providing stability that came through clear in all the interviews we had and i think it's important for everybody to understand that to hear that because that's part of why we're here and so that we can ensure that going forward prioritizing mandated work or things that you are required to do core services mandated work including response to emergencies of which there are many i'm sad to say today we have a drought we have a pandemic we have wildfire season all of which are pressing and urgent and so that requires attention housing was also certainly identified as an emergency in the area and the and homelessness as relates to that concern about staff capacity and morale fear of turnover we've already covered this we've talked we've heard a lot about it we've reflected on that i think already and prioritizing organization health and sustainability is important agreement that the set of priorities that were identified in february will take time and that's okay and so this is really about right setting the timeline on some of these things and so you can continue to make progress and also prioritize the items that are most most urgent to focus on there's also a specific interest expressed about making sure that you have a clear work plan your council wants to see what are the priorities look like in the form of a work plan what you have before you today is a starting point it probably requires additional information but it kind of frames the items into a document that identifies who's responsible sets the priority for you and provides some action items on there and lastly you were interested to hear the pinch points that are being experienced and i think you've heard that through the staff presentations this morning recommended solutions were also requested and i think that some of those have been introduced some of them just will take time to put into place staffing and funding resources in particular so those are some of the themes from the council interviews if we go to the next slide and this this was really more for discussion i don't know we need to belabor it today but i will leave i will still make mention of it when i was meeting with the executive team and we were talking about the council priorities there was some confusion simply on on naming you know what's a goal what's a priority you know how do they fit together and so this is a little bit of a construct and i will leave you only with the the observation that as you're planning forward and thinking of doing smart goals or thinking about a long-term strategic plan of some sort that there may be some construct that bridges between the topic COVID response and the action items that you're going to be doing which you'll be reviewing today so right now you don't have the what are we trying to accomplish in between those pieces priorities level of urgency is a what a priority is what you place on that and that can be at the focus level that can be at the strategy level today we're going to talk about it more at the action strategy level okay next slide okay so the recommended work plan which is what you have in front of you identifies short-term priorities that have been identified by staff now these are focused around your council focus areas the priorities from February so it does not include additional items that you may have heard about today that are underway or that are sort of off that radar so they're organized by those focus areas they include the action items and strategies that reflect council directions so where you've had some input of what you'd like to see they're reflected in the work plan it's identified and organized by departments you can see how that plays out recognize please though that many of these large priorities touch many departments and you've heard that this morning if one department has primary responsibility it doesn't mean that it does not involve others as well this work work plan that was drafted assumed a six to nine month horizon so we're going to keep that time frame in mind and I will also note as you can see it's still quite long so these are just the the priorities there's a lot that's still on there and so our task today is to reflect on these and to ask questions about what can be pushed out a little bit farther not removed but pushed out a little bit farther and what are the things that have momentum our opportunity or just our critical path priority and so we're going to walk through each of these sections and what I will do is I'll give kind of an overview but then I'll ask for comments if there are observations within that priority of things that maybe are longer horizon not as urgent and the opposite if there's something that is on your mind where you're like we have to really focus on this that would be helpful for staff to hear as well okay does that make sense as to process and what we're going to do awesome all right so let's go to the first one then COVID response and so these are organized in the order that you had prioritized them in February just for a point of reference that could have changed but that's the way we're going to walk through these so COVID-19 on a lot of people's mind then on a lot of people's mind today thank you Delta variant so here are the items that were identified by staff and you can see in your work plan the departments that have responsibility on these specific items that were for the next six to nine months and so I'll let you maybe take a quick review I don't need to read every line because that would be tedious you can take a moment to reflect on it and then I'll ask for comment Nancy if I can ask a question is this slideshow available to us somewhere sorry I thought it was on your pads so we are on slide seven does anybody else that would like copies and while we're not in the in the interest of trying to add a lot of things to these things if there are other if there's work underway or areas that we need to make an observation about that should be listed we'd love to hear those two and we can add them to the priority list so this is open discussion currently around COVID-19 response and the priorities for the next six to nine months on the outside and I do think it'd be helpful for me I know we just went through each of the sections as well it's obviously a lot of information but if the city manager if there's anything major that was left off the list that you know has been a council priority or has been a focus up to this point but was left off due to capacity I think it'd be helpful for us to to hear that as well I'm pouring a clarification excuse me when I look at this this is a work plan I don't believe well correct me if I'm wrong that the council moved into this kind of specificity when it came and we didn't develop the work plan that was done by staff and what concerns me about us starting to take pieces out of a work plan as opposed to the putting of I assume these dots are going to be used ultimately okay so COVID-19 response if someone puts a dot what does that dot is that going to include all six items on the work plan because what it concerns me is that we would as a council for the first time be micromanaging how the staff would accomplish a particular goal so I don't know that we've ever gone into the work plan and and decided that certain parts of that work plan we wanted to pull out or leave in so how do I that's it's a question and it's very long-winded question but it is a question how do we deal with this process it's a very legitimate and a fair question and I'm sure that everybody in the room appreciates that question I think that what we'd like to hear are if their thoughts or observations about key elements of the work plan that have been identified that are from your perspective the highest priority or or or not for the next six months to provide some input into that so I mean this is the the thought of the document that was prepared by staff for your observation and insights you're right the document that was put together in February really had strategy level items on there I think the interest here with the detail in the work plan is to sort of reveal the specific nature of the work that's being accomplished by staff and so maybe it's better to have comments go ahead thank you and this is more I guess a question for the city manager so with this document if we were to say yep we're good with this these are reasonable expectations with the due dates barring any enforcing another suggestion from council or other sort of significant challenge that the city would face I think it's an ambitious list of work plan tasks and and efforts some of them on here are contingent on funding an example a point is out is taking the in response team from 10 hours to 24 hours we're not going to be able to do that unless we identify funding for it and there are several others on here that are based on the ability of additional resources we we know they're in a council identified priority or part of the the focus area but we haven't identified the resources to do them and so I think there's it's a combination it's a statement of what we think we need to do to accomplish the focus area and what given some additional resources we could address the next six to nine months what what we're looking for I think is Nancy mentioned is if there are some of those things that are more important to you to see happen in the next six months to nine months than others we'd like you to indicate that if there's a whole focus area that you see up there that you say you know given all these other ones that were ranked higher in February if we didn't see significant progress on this whole group of things for six to nine months that's okay we'd also like to hear that or on the opposite no they're all important we want to have you keep working that means you may see less progress you know we won't go as deep into the list on some of them if we then if we had a narrower focus in my question the reason I brought that up is consistent with what John brought up I don't want to say you do this not that you know and try to keep at that higher level and that's why we hired us intelligent city manager help us implement these goals in a reasonable time frame so I don't mind telling you guys what I like and don't like shall we start and if we keep in mind that this is your input in providing observation on the work plan not as a do don't do but as order of magnitude in terms of priority then I think that would be a long way to building the the bridge between concern over providing over direction into staff day to day operations and but providing clarity around council interest in terms of these priorities was that a no Nancy you don't want to hear what I have to say no I do want to hear what you have to say oh I'm just checking so I can start please okay um so return to campus policy I think that with the rise in COVID-19 cases I think that I would prefer to see how we can have people continue to work remotely except for the departments that we need to have on campus like uh in order to operate um and maybe like city manager said invest in technologies that allow for some of those uh departments to work remotely um in order to get some of those tasks completed so remotely right so you're saying that there may not be as urgent because you're suggesting that the return to campus maybe needs to pushed up because of current circumstances well yeah I think that we we thought that COVID was uh departing and we see that that is not happening anytime soon and so that may be something that we can kind of push to the back burner as far as the return to campus um policy but that that's just my my take on it I don't know how everyone else feels this is just for clarification is it safe to assume when we say sam jones hall we're talking about this whole footprint both the annexing and sam jones hall or just sam jones hall both both thank you yeah I'm comfortable with the plan as staff as staff is presenting it I think even if we have the return to campus policy I think it's something that there are broader conversations that are happening whether it's just city staff or in conjunction with the health officer in the county and our businesses and what they are doing and if this ends up being uh tragically that it's not something that we need within the next six to nine months that is an area that potentially then creates some space for staff as well to have a less urgent deliverable on the work plan thank you council member Fleming or tidbits do you have any comments on yeah um you know I I want to just say that you know not to be a naysayer but I really struggle with uh whether or not it's appropriate for council to be getting into the operations at this level and really trust that our assistant city managers and our safety chiefs and our city manager are are in place to make these decisions for us so on this one I'll limit my comments to a policy matter which is I believe that the council should be another council excuse me that the city manager ought to be instituting a mandatory vaccination requirement for employees and that would remove a lot of the risk around and whether we should or should not come back those things would be a lot simpler if we could take those bold steps it certainly wouldn't put us in a leadership position around this we'd be following and I think that that's really critical for the safety of our employees and the residents that they serve so I think there's a lot of stuff around this one it's it's pretty clear what we need to do to get to where we need to go and if I can answer I just want to do a quick little reframe uh because we've heard from a couple council members now that we're telling staff what to do I just want to reframe that that this is what staff is delivering to us as what they think is achievable within the goals that the council has set and part of that is a collaborative conversation and to me it's almost permissive it's it's staff saying this is what we think that we can achieve and so all of these other things that you like to throw on our plate just know that those aren't happening and so for me I'm not trying to micromanage staff I'm trying to hear what is actually realistic within the capacity and within the goals that we are asking them for that's kind of why I asked the city manager to point out if there are significant things that he's heard from council members that we would like that did not make it onto this list so that that way we can discuss if we have to create capacity somewhere and how to prioritize so I just want I just want everybody to give it a shot I know it's different than how we normally do it but this is what staff thinks they can achieve exactly thank thank you for your comments and I think well well said this is what was presented up to say here's what we think we're going to be able to accomplish in the next six to nine months is there anything missing is are there major areas of focus from the council priorities that we want that you want us to pay attention to council member tibbetz did you have any comments on that COVID-19 yeah thank you I'm going to offer quite the comparing position to a lot of the things my colleagues said respectfully I think that I think that we do need to have a conversation publicly to our employees to our staff about vaccination requirements if the city manager is ready to take a unilateral action about it I'm fine with that but I suspect that he's not and I think that our employees are going to look to us as the council that you know dictate the ebb and flow of the city for kind of the the ultimate word on on this issue I wish we didn't have to to divert step staff time and resources to it but I think that we have to it's for for whatever reason it seems to be a question that is really important to different people depending on their position about the vaccine um the the other thing that I wanted to to offer a contrary opinion on was the remote work policy I do hear where the vice mayor is coming from completely we probably are gonna be continuing to do hybrid meetings or remote working as the delta variant it kind of comes out but one one opinion or perspective I want to share too rather is uh first I think that our employees as they are working from home would probably like to know kind of what's coming or where they stand vis-a-vis returning to work I noticed that as we started to get reopen at the city before the delta variant really emerged I know that I was on my own facebook feed and talked to our employees there was a lot of kind of concern and questioning about when are we going back to work what's that going to look like what's my work experience going to be like and so I think from just an employee morale perspective we should take the time to to publicly discuss that do a study session on it um I and then the other thing too is you know I what I hear a lot at these goal-setting meetings is Santa Rosa needs to be a regional leader we need to you know show in the north bay that we create innovative policies well you this this particular remote work policies a something that it sounds like our planning department has already implemented and we should hear about what that looks like at a minimum but be this is an excellent way to pick low hanging fruit doesn't have a significant cost of operation in the city at least I don't think it does but a study session would help me better understand that but show the rest of the region as we eventually come out of covid that there's some really easy yet innovative work to dramatically help all of our regional climate goals so I don't really want to put that particular conversation on hold for those two reasons testing and vaccination waivers at sam jones hall is very very important in my opinion that we as a council develop a policy around and it's not fair to assume the catholic charities should shoulder the political burden of making that decision either way as an operator that has dealt with covid outbreaks at our facilities um the it's so important to have a protocol and a procedure in place we were blessed at our shelters because we offered financial incentives to people to get vaccinated who are in our care so we had a high vaccination rate and we're also non-congregate by definition so when we had an outbreak we were able to squash it at just one infection um we absolutely need to talk about our congregate shelters and vaccination status and that's it okay councilmember alvarez do you have any comments on this one for me a couple of points were brought up uh the part of the mandatory vaccinations if we were to require them and I believe the statement was made that a lot of the other issues would would not be as as high on the priority list with that being said would that allow our staff to free up and if so how much so I'm pretty much in the listening stage at this point okay thank you let's go to our next area uh and what has been identified as a work plan for staff for the next six to nine months um bearing in mind the observations made previously about the level of detail but this is what was uh on the work plan presented by staff so the topic is homelessness you can see the list of eight items listed here part of the I'm sorry to interrupt the thinking part of the observations by council during our interviews was homelessness is a large problem but it's a regional problem and it's going to take longer term regional solutions so some of these are reflect about that yes ma'am I think my question is actually for councilmember Schwedhelm uh because these goals that we have in place how do they line up with what the continuum of care is trying to accomplish as well and going back to that regional conversation and uh regional response to to an issue like homelessness what I was going to start with was the the first bullet there the housing homeless ad hoc um I feel very well informed and we have been having those very conversations so I'm sharing what I learned at COC with city staff and so we can try to coordinate all of those efforts so I think they are very much in sync did you have another question because I had one question somewhat related to that no just from my perspective for for the next six to nine months I want to be making sure that we're driving in the direction of those regional partnerships and so if that's the mechanism to do it to get everybody on the same page I'm fine with the work plan I think it's definitely going in that direction we'll see if the vice mayor agrees with that um but the other thing is are we anticipating any other funding streams because to speak what you're speaking about uh Mr. Mayor the COC strategic plan has kind of shifted a little bit to focus on uh HAP round three funding which will be coming in a couple months and rather than doing an emergency we got a month to figure out how we're going to spend four million bucks let's start doing it now are we anticipating because I know the city does not get HAP directly the COC and the county does but is there CDBG funds or ESG funds that in the next six to nine months will be coming in our direction because if so I would say that needs to be in the priority rather than let's we got to make this decision real quick there are there's going to be another round of funding coming available and so we we can add that to the the work plan because it speaks to the mayor of St. Tuner you and I have had that conversation let's involve thoughts of the COC about how we are going to the decision rest with this body but at least getting that input and feedback from the COC so that we are looking at regional approach although the decision does rest with this body so that would be just the other thing I'd like to add then thank you and Claire you're getting all these items right there not okay thank you okay thank you just a question for clarification Councilmember Schwedermann are you are you suggesting and I and I go to my committee members because I consider them this dais there are subject matter experts are you supporting all of the elements in the homelessness section because of the how they're interdependent they are for success absolutely again at the ad hoc we've talked about the order and I agree with the prioritization of the RFP orders you know and I could be as the city manager said cautiously optimistic the complete encampment strategy because I'm looping out to some other members of HUD related that they may have had other cities have found success so if we find a model that I believe would fit here we'll enter that in in the conversation but yes I'm very supportive of the direction that we're going here Vice Mayor Rogers did you have anything you wanted to add on this one Councilmember Fleming or Tibbets do you have anything to add on this one yeah so this might be a small point if Councilmember Schwedhelm and Vice Mayor Rogers are satisfied I'm good with this with one question which is have we opened the Portland Lou yet and if not let's get that open we shouldn't have a piece of infrastructure that could be serving people homeless or otherwise who need to use a restroom that shouldn't be closed when so many other places have been closed lately could you could you restate the question again I missed a portion of it is the Portland Lou closed yes it currently is and we're looking for a dedication date for it yeah yeah I'll just offer that I'm much more concerned about it being used than it being dedicated as nice as that would be like we need to get our services I don't feel like we have the luxury of just withholding services because we can't dedicate them I'm seeing a lot of nodding head in activity from our directors perhaps the assistant city manager wants to respond yeah thank you thank you Councilmember Fleming I think we're happy to go ahead and get that open services are ready to go we had recently just opened other public restrooms in our facility in our parks that was really the threshold for us getting to this point we had hoped we would be able to have a little bit of freedom to do an opening for the public as well as get it open but if the Council's preference is just for us to open the doors and social media post it as an open facility we're happy to get that done ASAP okay I wish we we could do something grander but I think that that may be where we're at but things of the city at this point the at least where I'm at okay thank you all right we've got that added over here on the work plan item that Claire's taking notes on okay Councilmember Tibbets sir I'll just quickly chime in I I I question the RFP the spending for the homeless services strategy to me it it would seem like we should be following kind of the regional CSC model but if there's a reason for that somebody please let me know and just as just as in this side I definitely want to hold the scissors for the ribbon cutting ceremony of the Lou mayor if I could respond to that that particular question the RFP for the homeless services contract is for the operator of our homeless shelter and so this would be similar to the services that Catholic Charities is currently provided so it's intake supervision and operation the homeless shelter etc and we're developing the scope of those services that we're looking for a contractor to provide got it okay so we're not going out and determining the kind of what would the aggregate approach should be so it's not so much a strategy it's just a homeless services contract actually if I may I may I clarify because there are two there's actually three different RFPs that are being prepared one is exactly as a city manager indicated which is for homeless services for Sam Jones Hall outreach and and other similar services second of course is for the safe parking pilot program but the third is for a homeless services strategy for a city strategy but it is intended to follow the COC strategic plan so that although we may be begin to prepare the outlines of that RFP that RFP would not go forward until the COC strategic plan has been adopted and it would track the regional approach but be a little more city specific that's the thank you region followed by city correct councilmember alvarez did you have anything okay any other comments on this priority area okay we'll move to the next related but different housing and affordable housing here are the items that are being proposed to be on the staff work plan for the next six to nine months and I believe the Mendocino Avenue specific plan is in need of additional funds and I'll just pass that to Claire to confirm and she confirms that that one is dependent on additional funding a question the water demand offset policy it's a real broad concept and I'm not sure I understand I can imagine what it might mean but I'm curious a little more specificity as to what that would what that would suggest so I think either our assistant city manager or water department director probably best to sounding like in lieu and I'm concerned about in moving it to an in lieu concept so the water demand offset policy is spelled out in our water shortage contingency plan and when we hit shortage stages of 30% or greater we need to have new development basically be water neutral to offset their impact to the system so we are working on a policy that we will bring forth to the council it'll go to planning commission and board of public utilities first before going to council but we are looking at a fee that would provide for the ability to implement conservation savings at existing sites so that development can continue to occur when we don't have enough water supply at the moment during a drought so does that mean that person a is building a home and they don't necessarily want to put in certain energy efficient items that they are in another building that they own they want to retrofit that building to put in water saving items is that would that end up being a possibility or must it is it contained within the new development so they would the fee would allow us to implement savings in existing development to save up in essence enough water so that the new development would be demand neutral or water neutral and I would just add to that that all new development and all redevelopment has to meet current code requirements for water conservation okay so it's not a it's not an optional on one in one building it's required that they put in when they're building that they put in water saving technology it's not something you can do over here and like credits like water like buying water credits this is in addition to the code requirements for all construction so as an example you build a new home you've got to put in low flow toilets shower heads you know you've got to use drought tolerant plants and you know a technologically advanced irrigation system that knows when it rains and all those things every one is going to have to do that in the stage five or the 30 percent or more conservation requirement level new development is also going to off have to offset their water use through additional conservation measures that could be applied off site I think I think I've got that correct okay mayor well first of all mr. city manager I was corrected over the weekend that we don't say low flow anymore we say high efficiency so I just thank you thank you mayor I am uh stand corrected here and uh Jennifer's staff I hope is chuckling uh because I learned something from the the drought drop by event uh my question I've got two actually specifically for Claire uh if if you can uh grab the mic for the housing and affordable housing section there's two things that are partially missing to me that that you had brought up or that we know that are coming that I wanted to get clarity on one is the uh short term rental program urgency ordinance that's coming forward does that fall within this section I know it falls within your portfolio we have put it under public safety because it's an urgency ordinance so I would suggest adding in it if it's not already on our work plan but for under public safety because that is the approach we're taking if we were just doing a short term rental ordinance for the sake of land use planning um and preservation of housing specifically we put on here but that that's why it's on public safety okay all right that makes sense and then there were two things that you mentioned in your presentation uh that you were interested in saying one was the master fee study and one was some of the tools we've developed for downtown and expanding those across the city I don't see either of those reflected in the in the six to nine month time frame are you comfortable with that or do you need us to make room to be able to do some of that work as well my understanding is we don't have the capacity to do that unless something else comes off I know that we do not have enough funding for the Mendocino Avenue specific plan so that that should come off I think it's something we could start exploring I don't know if we can accomplish it in the next six to nine months because I think we'll have to look at capacity to see if we can fold it in there's a reason it didn't make it on this list if we had the capacity we would have put it up there but I think we can reevaluate and see if that would work part of the issue is the resource demand on plan review and inspection frankly so planning is assigned to a task like that and we're trying to make efficient use of our resources so you know where do we put them do you want them in development review processing permits because we have deficiency in staffing to support that or do you want them to do a policy initiative and looking at fee incentives for supportive and affordable housing that's the kind of choice that we have to make and I'm here to seek your direction yeah well I'm happy to follow the the lead of the department on what you think you can accomplish it just also strikes me that something like the fee nexus if you end up reading reaching a sustainability point you add staff that's able to accomplish other goals long term so it's sort of a chicken and the egg and I understand that I think the master fee study is going to be shared across department so to me that's an organizational move to look for new revenue and so I don't know where that will fit city manager can speak to that but that's something that is not specific to us to to housing it would be citywide okay thank you and that that would be included under one of the fiscal stability funding and services items where we talk about present a plan to the city council for a package of revenue increases and expenditure reductions okay thank you and it may be somewhere involved in some of this past discussion but I don't members of the community have contacted several of us and my understanding is clear you've been having some discussions about the impact fees for permanent supportive housing or at the same level of market rate housing is that something that we are going to resolve within the next six to nine months because I didn't see that specifically called out anywhere here no and I think that was similar to the question that the mayor raised about broadening our policy to be more citywide that is a major task for us it's not just as easily easy as saying we're going to waive impact fees for affordable housing that would cause us to have to go to a different methodology overall for calculating the fees and understanding what the impacts would be to the rest of the systems customers if we did so great thank you for that thank you for that clarification the master fee study which is what city manager was just referencing and that is very comprehensive and that that's going to take time the other experience that we've had in santa rosa is we've been a little bit more nimble and we've activated pilot initiatives we have we have several temporary i would say temporary because they have a sunset date in our downtown and and that's the type of initiative that I I know that that the letters of support have been about you know trying something new even if it's on a pilot level not dissimilar to how we evaluated adu's when we did it with the accessory dwelling unit ordinance we evaluated is there a square footage threshold where we a sweet spot if you will where we can afford because you're still receiving impact in new dwellings where you can afford as a city to accept those impacts but streamline that specific type of development by doing uh exempting or significantly reducing the impact fees that's that's what that initiative is it's more short term testing something out maybe even on a pilot level it's not on the list because we don't have the capacity it's a great idea clear move the microphone out thank you it's not on the list because we don't have the capacity we we would probably have to look at taking something off to fit in in the next six months uh we can check back in next year and we can if we don't take anything off um and we can start on it when we have more capacity um i did have a quick question about the mendicino avenue specific plan um additional funds needed i'm wondering ballpark because what happens if we don't uh have that funding about how much time are we bringing up with staffing not on purpose claire not on purpose i'm just processing the mendicino avenue specific plan does have a timeline in terms of the grant that we did receive which we have six hundred thousand dollars in grant money and we we do have to expend it on a specific plan by or towards housing production by a certain date um it's possible we can reprogram that funds um but certainly to do a specific plan you're looking at adding another four hundred five hundred thousand dollars to to cover the environmental costs and the and the program costs plus the staffing to oversee the project so it's not just money it's staff time to oversee the project and and facilitate the engagement even when you work with consultants it's still a lot of staff time um and so because of those two reasons i would recommend we take it off of this list i think it's overly ambitious um one thing i know that we are looking at is alternatives um with using that six hundred thousand and reprogramming it and something else that would still be housing initiative and we would be able to find capacity to do that kind of work and we would come back to the city council with what we would come up with that we could do that we could accomplish and not lose the money and maybe partner it with some other funds that we have um within our means okay so i'm pretty sure this is not going to be the first time nor the last time that i am very confused um i thought that this was a list of things that our staff felt that they could could accomplish and so now i am very confused because what i just heard was even if i said here assistant city manager here's your five hundred thousand dollars you you're not sure if your staff could with all these other projects complete this very large undertaking of the mendicino avenue so now i'm confused of what these lists exactly are and i think we're going back to the city manager um because now i'm talking about all the departments so this this is an example of one that got put on the list in error i don't think it should have been on the list in terms of a project that could be completed in the next six to nine months each of these were sent out to departments to update and i think in some cases they were being a little optimistic and so uh just a reality check i want to make sure as we go through them the ones that need additional funds in order to accomplish i want the departments to call those out or if there's a extraordinary staff impact i will also want them to call those out so then are we able to add something else in lieu of that i don't think we're saying that just checking i mean yeah okay it was worth a try all right thank you it was a good try though okay okay well and staff has heard the message so if there's an item that has made its way here and there are concerns they should be voiced and then we can talk about if there are solutions or strategies or if it should be removed okay all right any other questions for anyone or comment i'm here ready to to make comment and just say that uh we along the men of the seno corridor do do anxiously await housing but understand that there may not be capacity and encouraged staff to hire contract where necessary to get that done but my comments are more around the general principle of you know we don't have enough staff to get it done on the housing front and i it's it's very clear to me that we don't have enough staff but the only way we get more staff is by increasing our tax revenues and the only way we do that is by getting shovels in the ground and getting housing done so i implore you to come to us with a plan to hire um contractors or whatever to figure it out in the as far as the fees go and getting this master fee study done i mean i've seen compelling arguments from permanent supportive housing advocates from low-income housing advocates about how our per-door fee structure is just not working and i i get the reflexive response to say you know we need this money or we won't be able to afford this stuff but if you look over the past 10 years when stuff just hasn't got built you're getting zero percent of nothing we gotta make it so that shovels end up in the ground and we're not you know cannibalizing ourselves with fear so i'm anxiously await um an answer and a response to this that that gets the housing built and um and and also at the same time assures residents the services will be there for them to correspond with with the new housing that i know is coming we move to our next topic you'll see the second item there which is specific to revenue more inclusively and that i think is where was intended to present options which would include presumably a master fee schedule as a part of the options that come forward but before we move there i want to ask uh council membership is our council member alvarez if you have any comments on housing and affordable housing or i i do if eddie doesn't want to jump in yeah go ahead and then he'll follow you okay sorry eddie um i have a couple of comments um and chris kind of touched on them one is definitely uh i think we need to have a way to regulate and permit uh vacation rentals in the city and that seems to just be a growing issue for us all that we should address um and uh i i guess the other question i have for claire is what is the fremont park master plan there's a couple of things on here admittedly that i don't know about and i'm curious you know what what it is yeah hi council member tibetz with jason that uh actually a fremont master plan is one that the park's uh division is actually working on in an effort to provide greater outdoor living space for the residential units that we're looking to build downtown and so uh we are working with uh the planning team as well as the developers to utilize the park in lou fees or the park development fees that are developed in the downtown per the council resolution that was adopted about three years ago as claire mentioned there are some temporary initiatives that were put in place as a pilot test to see if it brings on additional development and utilizing those park fees to help invest in the parks that are downtown for that outdoor living uh area is is exactly what we're doing with the fremont park master plan okay thanks jason um and quick question for sue so we all know that uh the organization i work for is engaged in a permanent supportive housing uh construction project and i'm precluded from weighing in on the impact fee uh discussion if it's unrelated to a specific project uh yes i would recommend that you recuse from that discussion since it the sense it potentially impacts your project your organizations project okay um then i will follow up by saying uh that i agree wholeheartedly with everything that uh councilmember fleming said and that is that if we're not hitting a lot of these council priorities because we're understaffed in planning we need to upstaff in planning i've said this before and in my opinion this is one of the most important things to the ebb and flow of the city investment in the city residents ability to have an affordable city um and i just i just really want to make sure that we're getting everything done that the council uh seeks to get done in this department councilmember alvarez there was a statement that you made a little bit earlier where where you describe that a lot of these issues are overlapping and i was actually way to the to the point of resiliency but uh for me it's the arpa funds and and for example rosalind which would really qualify and check off a lot of the boxes and i'm wondering when it comes to grant and and and different funding sources how much of those could actually be used for the different housing issues that we're facing so it's more of a comment than a question but nonetheless though it's definitely uh speaks to the truth of how compounding and how overlapping issues are as we face them so we we've got a council session scheduled for i believe it was the first or second meeting in october where we're going to bring back recommendations on arpa along with a more detailed explanation of eligibility and i think we'll address your questions there about um what kinds of housing projects if any could be supported with arpa funds let's move to our next uh area uh and we've already touched on some of the content in there so this is the fiscal sustainability funding and services focus area um so there i think there are actually two slides uh yes that contain um the work plan items that have been identified by staff and you'll see that second bullet there i think ties back to the discussion around revenue and options and so present a plan the city council with a package of general fund revenue increases and expenditure reductions and so there's a plan to bring that back to council for discussion on options other comments related to fiscal sustainability so i had a couple here um so the third one down the incorporated screening or evaluation process incorporate the values of diversity economic impact fiscal and environmental sustainability is there a reason specifically with the dei we couldn't incorporate that a little quicker um and i'm looking even the very last one guiding principles and uses for one-time PG&E settlement funds because i know the county initiated a process where you're making a recommendation what is the dei impact and i would just suggest that could we potentially add another category with every staff report just like we do fiscal impact environmental impact dei impact so that not only staff is filtering everything through that dei lens but council every time we read a staff report we're filtering it too because it's a learning curve for me and my fear is that if we wait to the end let's start it now because i'm not sure exactly what it looks like um so and with that mr. shamanich because i'd like your input too so it shows that finance and city manager is responsible for that um this department where eeo officers within the hr department and i know a lot of other organizations have directly reported to the mayor and the mayor former governor of the city manager and i'm i'm just wondering if there's a little disconnect because just like we've talked on a lot of issues dei work i think has got to be organizational stuff and not just hr related stuff even though hr touches every department i'm interested in your thoughts about that but also those are the specific suggestions regarding dei work on staff reports and on this issue and the pgne settlement dollars so we we have planned to follow the council's direction on the arpa funds and pgne funds which was to have an evaluation process that includes the diversity sustainability and i believe the final one was uh economic impact and so we've put together a set of some screening criteria and a point system and a committee that reviews them that includes uh our economic development uh staff and a team of staff that would run them through that evaluation criteria um we also plan to do that in development of next year's budget adding that to every staff report um i think would require an additional level of resources just another step in the process training on how to do it development of the criteria and the screening and analysis part of it so that that's one part of your question the other part is um is our dei effort in the right location organizationally within the city structure we're taking our cues and directions from the city council and the last direction that we had was based on the february um priority setting um exercise that that you went through and the indication then was that dei was focused on um the uh inside look of the organization it was focused on our recruitment efforts our employee development our training and so it was uh combined with the seed collaborative contract and placed within the hr department as an internal uh organizational effort um based on that i think it's the right location it's the right place the job spec was developed around those uh directions and and requirements and so the level of the classification is um not at a department head or a higher level within the organization it's um reports directly to the hr director okay so then just my feedback would be i would like because if we're to me this is going to be long difficult work and it has to start with the individuals including council members and i think if we kick i don't mean to say kick the can down the road but if we don't deal with this regularly when do we ever uh because i heard you might even said a culture doesn't change overnight or i think gaming might have said it's it's happened a while so if we don't put this in our forefront i don't think we're going to change that culture so i would be an advocate and i'd like to know okay if we were to do that on the staff report that if every staff member when they did a staff report coming to council had to talk about the impact of dei what would that impact be because i don't know and again i'm just thinking away if we're going to change culture we have to do it a step at a time but it's got to be regularly in front of the council and for that reason i think it may be a better fit for that position to be with the city manager's office because everything should be looking at through that lens so thank you yeah i couldn't agree more with council member schwedhelm on his points um i i don't i i can understand why it may have been why perhaps the dei position was put in hr but i i think that it's really problematic for a couple of reasons one is that the position that would belong in hr would be an eo not a dei person a dei person's a director level person and you know i i lose sleep one you know worrying that you know there's going to be a problem where the the dei person and the hr person disagree i mean the dei person needs to to report directly to the the city manager because it's not just internal it's it's external it's it's all over the place um with with equity work and it can't be it can't be you know three levels down under hr the hr director should have an equal employment officer working for them not a dei employee and further um i i would suggest that we we've really missed or needed an operations a coo an operations person a deputy whose job it would be to help all of our departments work through uh beyond their silos and evaluate everything so that nothing gets to the city manager or the council without having been vetted for equity sustainability and environmental um uh sustainability as well economic sustainability equitability and so forth those principles and and i'd love the idea of every staff report looking at those things i think if i could ask every staff report to include those things it would be great but we we need some sort of staff stop gaps so that just nothing goes forward without people making sure that they're working together and working sustainably within and asking themselves is what i'm bringing forward in line with council goals not just in line with making my budget pencil in my department hearing too as a part of this is kind of thinking fast forward we talked about how this is kind of a period of transition as you're awaiting the rival of who's going to be your permanent city manager and when you're thinking about some structure options and alternatives i might offer the suggestion that that would be something that a new city manager might want to have an imprint on or what that would look like and who could fill it so you know that's not so far off i don't know if that's something that might be considered as you're thinking about kind of that internal structure and operations piece kind of to the points that were made earlier in terms of overseeing the operations from the staff perspective please just a quick question on this this is still the third one down on the second page of the public of the fiscal sustainability and this looks like a city manager issue to me and it does say march of 22 so that is out there already and probably you know seven months so and i don't think the council gets involved with organizational structure so unless we were asked to and i don't think we're often asked to do that so is this was meant to be in there or is it miss worded it was meant to be there and it was identified as a march of 22 time frame to allow the new manager time to assess the organization and the reason it would come back to council is if there were any new positions identified or reclassifications determined that needed some council approval to implement but the but the actual work in developing that structure would come from management correct okay thank you mayor jim coming yeah i appreciate the the work here the only thing that i noticed that's missing that we've had some conversations about is creating the space within the long-term finance and policy committee to do a deeper look into our departmental budgets each year and we had talked about potentially starting that in september or october to have that work done in time for next year's budget i'm just wondering if you consider that part of the normal course of business since i know that the department heads are always looking at the budget and already always retooling or if we need to carve out some specific space under this priority for the long-term policy and audit committee to do that work so i think that would be a new work product if we're going to ask every department to do a detailed review of their department budget with the long-range finance committee um i don't think that's been done in the past it would be a new step in the process and um you know it might bump something else and i'll you know look behind me to see if there's a difference in opinion on that i recognize that that is an impact to every single department i also recognize that there's a lot of value in having that conversation before we go into next year's budget i'm very cognitive of the fact that we do essentially a cattle call come budget season a couple of days where everybody goes through their budgets and by the time we're halfway through everybody's so burnt out and exhausted that it may or may not be as meaningful as it could be uh so i'd be interested in carving out that space for us to do that work so i think it'd be helpful uh for us to understand um is the purpose to look at the current year's budget and understand what's in it and where gaps are is it to have a early discussion on how to approach next year's budgeting process is it both or something else i think it's looking at what our staffing level uh looks like to be able to achieve the goals that we're doing to better inform our goal setting next year and the budget and budget process and so on and so forth uh typically we're behind the eight ball on that we do our priorities without this level of a deep dive into what we can actually accomplish with it and then we roll around to our budget year where this last year we asked everybody to take a cut across the board and it was going back to councilmember schwedhelm's comments during budget it was not the surgical approach where we see that certain departments are overburdened more than other departments are and really making strategic investments in our staff to be able to accomplish the priorities that we need okay that's helpful thank you other comments or questions if i may this is jack um one one thing that i was hoping to see on this fiscal stability funding and services section um was we've talked about it a few times at the council and that was uh looking at our tax structure to get rid of regressivity and our tax structure as well as increased resiliency to recession um i'm hoping that can still be done somewhere maybe start with the long-term sub financial subcommittee and then the other thing that i wanted to say um i just wanted to back up to the last slide i'm sorry to bring us back but yesterday i had the opportunity to speak with the golden state manufactured owners league and um this is more for megan basinger and housing authority but we have seven hundred fifty thousand dollars and the uh revenue that we levy on mobile home uh owners uh that is just sitting there and i think it was originally created to help us develop a rent control ordinance for uh the manufactured owners only there's about six thousand of them in the city of santa roza and i wanted us to have a discussion about that money i know a lot of folks in mobile home parks are experiencing um you know the need for making repairs to their units uh and that might be maybe a loan program gets developed out of it something but there's that's a perfect example to christ's point about doing deeper dives into our budget we've been sitting on three quarters of a million for about five six years and we should talk about how to spend it and it's low hanging fruit for the council remember flaming did you have anything else on this item uh no no i made my comments thank you okay and i will i just remind that we are taking notes up here on the discussion items and so this will be coming back to you uh in a final version okay let's move on then to the next focus area which is economic resiliency including child care so there are a number of items on this slide that touch a lot of dimensions a lot of uh areas of the community i'll just i'll jump in and i'll say it's a very ambitious list and if it's one we can accomplish in six to nine months i'll be incredibly proud of it so i have nothing to to add to it uh best of luck risa i'm wondering um the city hall civic center multi-year plan um six to nine months i don't i see this i mean i just don't see that as a possibility we might move the needle a little bit we need it it needs to happen we spend a lot of money on for all the reasons we know deferred maintenance etc we need to tackle this and we need to tackle it soon but i'm not sure if it if it really lands in six to nine months it just it's going to take years and years of process so whether or not to make movement on it you're thinking to pause or you're thinking just to recognize that it's going to take a long time to move it all the way through i think given this list and i agree with the mayor it is very ambitious um there are there are that subcommittee and that's that very small staff of two which i would like to increase but you know that goes back to the money issue um i just i just it's a it is a very bold project that i don't think belongs on this list at this time as much as i am for it um i just don't think it should sit here okay are there other comments on this specific item so this is the city city hall civic center multi-year plan concerns shared yes i will say this because i think that there is some interest that's out there and folks to help us with this that i think we need to at least do some care and feeding over the six to nine months so that we don't lose that interest and so i'm comfortable with leaving it on the list and understanding that staff knows we're not asking them to solve this in six to nine months but that we're creating some space for them to put us in a position to be able to to get this across the finish line down the road sounds like a good compromise and and the item was intended to just indicate that we were going to develop a multi-year plan not complete the multi-year plan and so it's likely we would have a fairly modest segment of that multi-year plan that would take place in the next six to nine months and we have done a fair amount of work already with our consultants in that endeavor so it's certainly not something i want to see languish uh i just it just concerned me to see it um in the six to nine month area but i agree with the mayor keeps some energy under it but maybe not the full speed ahead okay other comments councilmember phleming or tidbits you know this is um ambitious but i also you know want to just give my support to all of these efforts and and how efficient this department is i think that you know with very little staff and very little budget their impact is outsize and and is an excellent example of how some departments are able to work um release synergistically across the organization councilmember tidbits did you have a comment no comments on this one thanks uh for myself i look forward to the following weeks where we can discuss those arpa funds in regards to the the resiliency as well as those uh check checkmarks and uh also incorporating temporary staff in that conversation uh with with regards to some of these items but we'll definitely look forward to that conversation well with respect to the temporary staff which is something we heard as a theme as an option arpa funds being one also the pgd funds when you have those opportunities ahead of you to look at those uses that's something to keep in mind uh yeah there's a one-time funds but they can help with the bridge right to to get yourself over the hurdle here okay race mayor rogers did you have any comments on this one okay let's go to the next which is climate change excuse me on this one um i think we wanted to highlight the southeast greenway it was one of the questions i think that uh assistant city manager nut mentioned was uh we currently do not have the capacity uh within our property and right-of-way team to pursue this and uh we just want to make sure that the council is aware and recognize that and it is not currently included in the next six to nine months and i do think that that's one given the community energy and the amount of time that's been spent on that but uh i don't want us to miss an opportunity there particularly given where they're at and after all of the work that staff has done on that one so i'd be interested in potentially moving something else off of this list to make room for the southeast greenway um i do know how important sb 1383 is uh to the city i know that there's a lot of movement in sacramento to push back some of those deadlines so if that were to occur perhaps that creates a little bit of room i've seen shaking heads from from the assistant city manager is that effort now dead is it is it a done deal that january is going to be the implementation date no mayor i think the issue is is it's the staff that's involved uh they are not they're not the same staff members and so the challenges is the real estate division um has uh they've been heavily impacted by both the downtown initiatives but also the capital improvement program and so adding the southeast greenway is above and beyond the current program for that team and so the question is how would we reprioritize the in the requests to that specific division if we're going to incorporate what looks to be a fairly significant effort to be able to bring southeast greenway into the into the fray and if we don't have southeast greenway on here for the next six to nine months what's the impact to that project's ability to get across the finish line realistically probably a lot of emails and phone calls to each of you from members who are really supporting and pushing this um we are at the point where we're submitting uh the final uh the final um maps to caltrans which is really the beginning of the negotiation to acquire that property um if we delay uh it's it it may just uh chill the initiatives that we've already been able to put in line with caltrans um they do seem willing and interested to begin that conversation and they are only willing to work with the city they're not willing to work with any of our private uh or non-profit partners so um it is a risk if we choose to cool it for the next six to nine months um but it's it's all a function of the number of individuals that we have able to deliver the vast amount of requests that are coming forward with these priorities and so if we choose to prioritize it uh on the flip side what are we giving up from the city's perspective so it's it's probably either a combination of reducing some of the downtown strategy by not moving forward with some of the rfps with our vacant properties uh or it's looking at reducing the amount of support for capital improvement program um those are the two primary aspects of support um and it's just it's legitimately just a limited number of resources uh we've tapped out of all of our private and consultant services um and we're utilizing them to the greatest extent to extend uh but um it's it's just it's at a point where we're we're overextended and this may put us too far over to make it uh to make it work okay so even if in the one-time dollars conversation if the council were to allocate a little bit of funds for an outside consultant to pick up some of that slack it's sounding like we're at capacity with consultants as well we have not at this point suggested that a consultant try to pick this up but every time we've gone with other requests uh we've been told that they're they're at capacity okay thank you okay other comments related to this priority area thank you i just need to record the reflect i have to accuse myself of any discussion about the southeast greenway so just like the record that too we reflect that i left the dais uh during that conversation thank you thank you if we miss anybody who would wants to provide comments on this proposed set of work plan items i i did have a question about a sustainability team and what that looks like as far as uh staff time sustainability in a specific approach or well instead of having like a director but he knows what i'm talking about but having a sustainability team and what that looks like as far as staff time is concerned and if that is something that we could do um what does that look like yeah so thank you very very much vice mayor uh right now um if i try to model off of some of the programming that the santa rosa water department has done uh they actually have a sustainability coordinator within there um within one of the divisions that i i can't remember which one within two of the divisions the idea would be to try to support that with a third sustainability coordinator that we focused in on the pub on the general fund aspect um so that they would be able to take on those items that are outside of the water funds um while we do have some overlap and we utilize the team members that that are in jennifer's department as to the greatest ability um there is a difficulty with uh prop 218 that we can't go over and beyond and so that's why bringing in an additional staff resource to be able to support that that could be as simple as transferring an individual if we could identify someone as part of other services that need to be adjusted or whether we bring on a limited term individual to see how this works and if it's something we want to incorporate into the future so we could bring someone on temporarily to get that going that would be that would be our suggestion is to is to try to bring someone in um that would be even if we identified it as limited term for two years or so a one year limited term is very difficult to hire um but bringing someone in for a multi-year limited term to be able to show that that particular person is necessary to keep those initiatives moving forward could be beneficial obviously a permanent full time is the is is our favorite solution but we recognize the challenges financial that we have today so if there's an alternative for a two or three year into a limited term that would be proud that would be okay thank you so i i just wanted to interject at this point um some of the conversations that we're having are are good ones and we we need to have them uh and we're in august of a new fiscal year and we've just approved a fiscal year budget in june and many of the items that we're talking about are new resource requests whether they're for an interim position uh contract resources or uh you know elevating a position or a program within the city structure and um they all have impacts in in most cases on our general fund budget and so these these are going to be difficult conversations as we move forward doesn't mean we shouldn't have them we should but recognize that um i'm not aware of any surplus funds uh you know increment that's set aside over here that we haven't identified these are going to be hard choices around new revenue sources or changing the things that we are currently doing in the organization to free up resources to redirect things um city manager so i don't know about everyone else but one thing that i always tell the staff when i meet with them is just to i ask them to be honest with me about what it is that they need to do the job that we're asking them to do and so it's really important for me to always have my eyes and ears open to one be able to hear that and be receptive of what it is that they need from me um and hoping that my other council members hear that also of what we need from them and what they need from from us and so i'm always trying to brainstorm not saying we have this large pot of money but saying i hear you and maybe we can think out of the box to try to find ways to make things to make things happen so um and i say that respectfully because i know the position that you're in um but we got to sometimes just try to think out of the box to try to get some of these things done or we're going to like council woman Fleming said we're going to get zero percent of nothing if we don't start thinking out of the box and starting to tackle some of these tasks that we want to tackle so and i i support incur and encourage those conversations as well uh i i just wanted to make sure that there was also an understanding of the challenges that we may face as we try to move forward and address some of those concerns and and needs um and i too agree that um economic development um done appropriately can positively impact the bottom line of the city organization it takes time uh you're not going to see the benefits of housing development impact your budget next year or the year after and so you have to plan plan to invest upfront both in the policy development and the incentives and allow time for the development to occur the residents to move in and then for the retail and commercial activity to follow which is where the city receives the majority of its revenue from we do not in most cases receive revenues in excess of the cost that we have to serve uh residential development yeah i i did want to provide a little bit of additional specificity to my comments around the the greenway and john's recused but i am i'm particularly i'm comfortable if we have to allocate some staff time to the greenway and that does create a time impact on some of the other things like rfps for the parking garages i'd rather keep both of those moving forward albeit a little bit slower than risk losing either of those opportunities so like the civic center it's about pacing and keeping some energy there not just putting it on ice well i just comment too you know this is we're having a conversation about mid-year where things are and some recommendations by staff about what can be reasonably accomplished in the next six to nine months uh this is an ongoing conversation and it's just a gentle reminder that you know some of these items are long term as jeff just mentioned that it's it's a matter of kind of staying the course you got to take the long view in order to realize the benefits on the long run the concern is the pressures that are being experienced internally given all of these demands not just from council priorities but from other external factors as well and so it's really trying to find that sweet spot if you can for the next six to nine months and moving that forward so anything else on on climate change okay uh let's shift over then to public safety priorities and reforms this is a two slide uh set of work plan items some of which which were covered in the presentations earlier and on this list i would highlight that um although it's outside of the six to nine month time period um replacement of body worn cameras um is a significant financial item that we will have to address at the time that it's needed in the next fiscal year thank you um mr colin for that i'm curious are we um are we putting in budget line items to start building some cash to deal with that it's i'm sure it's a fairly expensive endeavor is there like a fund that we're that we're starting on like we do our vehicle replacement fund or are we just going to have to bite the bullet in 23 in this case it looks like we bite the bullet i don't believe there's been any work done to set up a technology replacement fund for body worn cameras or investigation room uh video audio recording and filing systems okay thank you city council i can provide a very brief uh information on that so our uh body worn cameras program is funded through a supplemental uh budget that we received that budget is or that uh line item is going to be uh depleted this next coming year um and then our other camera systems within the department they're aging and they're just they're it's coming time for new technology and infrastructure within the department thanks chief chief when you say depleted this coming year do you mean like january around the corner right after christmas depleted or do you mean like may june july the uh the contract ends uh at fiscal year so we have uh we'll have the program and the funds through the fiscal year and then we have to identify funding for fiscal year 22 23 i just had a question six and nine months with the uh in response team 24 hour response team implemented my understanding that was year three two point five million are we gonna is the expectation we're gonna do that within the next six to nine months i i guess my suggestion would be because i know there's some of us that are working on that outside of the city um let's be surprised if we're able to achieve that with outside funding was versus put is a responsibility for staff to prioritize 24 seven because that's that's a heavy load just even to the vehicle uh snafu we're running into versus because it says implement i was going to suggest that um we give him the microphone so that it's a part of the recording thank you i was just gonna say we can hold the chiefs to it and if it helps um staff can use one of the two podiums also i can activate that microphone because it does affect the recording yes so the um be reviewing how we can get to that 24 seven model um and uh we don't have a we don't have the funding at this time to go to a 24 seven model uh so we will not be able to to uh go to that model within this next 69 months correct so i'd be surprised taking it off the list is what i'm hearing is that your intent mr city manager yes thank you council member claiming council member tidbits should you have comments no comments from me i did have one that i don't quite see in here we've done a little bit of it already but over the six to nine months it also feels like that's potentially the the time when we'd have to do the most education around measure oh uh which this this council has pushed forward as well so i just want to make sure between adrian and scott and rey uh that you feel like you have the capacity that you need to be able to do that type of outreach work and magali who's not in the room but i know is watching okay great thank you let's go on then to uh de i organization on diversity equity and inclusion we've had some discussion about the this uh topic already um here is the work plan that's being proposed and that first item i think reflects the earlier conversation about the initial anticipated rollout which was through police and then fire and then citywide which would include council yes council member alvarez definitely a comment the the the thing of the d e i is you can't have equity without having inclusion and although the the acronym would spell die it's important for us to point out that it's definitely important for us to invent or invest into bringing the people to the table before we start deciding what is equity and what is inequity council member tidbits do you have a comment nothing for me i think we've probably touched on the interests of council throughout the course of the day on that topic all right so then our last one uh is count is government council reforms so this included things you know including with the city charter review um and some other items that i had heard about in our conversations redistricting again my my comment is it's a very ambitious plan and i know that there's a lot of things on here that we have to do uh and so i just want to appreciate the workload uh and uh and for everybody who's working on it and if i may um i just want to note i did note um in my presentation that um the open government um subcommittee did suggest two additional items yesterday which is last evening which is the lobbyist ordinance and campaign fine financing revisions to that ordinance um so i do want to note the those if those go on the list i think some of these other items uh will slow down would have to slow down i don't want to speak for the city clerk and for the community engagement but that would be my my take we've uh mentioned a number of different times say the city manager recruitment and i'm just wondering jeff and sue would it be appropriate to give the updated timeline for staff for council to kind of understand what that looks like over the next few months sure i think i think that's fine okay so the the subcommittee has been working the recruitment will officially open this week uh assuming everything is still on target and it looks like it is uh the recruitment is set to close september 23rd uh or around there we i know we wiggled some of the dates a little bit there'll be two interview panels that'll include internal staff and external community members in early october as well as uh council uh full council interviews as well with an intention of the council selecting somebody by the beginning of november and an anticipated start date of january first uh so just wanted to make sure because that will all fall within this six to nine month window and there have been a number of conversations that sort of rely on that timeline uh so just wanted to make sure and i've been meaning to report out to council but we didn't have our council member comments today so hopefully that's helpful for folks in terms of planning i think it's an important it's an important driver in context to all of what we've been talking about today so i appreciate that those comments okay do we have any other comments on the the last of the priority areas which was a government reforms yes council member soyer i could just sort of clarification the open government ordinance implementation the open government task force uh given the work that's been done to date is there uh is that a long enough period of time to actually produce the ordinance january of it's it's going to come really fast so i'm just wondering about the date um and what it really in what it entails what the ordinance of it i'm sure it codifies what the task force has produced so far i i think if i understand this is the sunshine ordinance that the council approved and has been implementing uh and then as we have found pitfalls and made some changes and allowed staff some more flexibility if i understand correctly madam city attorney this is what we've already approved this is just giving staff time to implement it that's correct and the council i'm sorry i don't remember the deed i think it was in july the council did extend the the effective date of the open government ordinance the sunshine ordinance it was originally going to be effective july 1 and is now effective uh june uh january 1 2022 and there are a number of elements that we still have to be ready to implement as of january 1 but i think we're all comfortable that we can meet that that date um with the for the remaining items so given the the changes that we've made so far through experience through our own correct in the process do we will we have enough uh we've already learned that that's we created some difficulties with our with some of the recommendations that came out of that task force will we have enough time to analyze those if we start in january once it is in an ordinance um do we have how flexible how nimble can we be um once it's in an ordinance like if they're let me clarify we have implemented the new agenda deadlines those were changed at the council in july so we are now operating under those new deadlines again the ordinance is not yet effective but we have implemented those early we will see how that we will have the opportunity for the next well six months from july but now whatever four or five months to further evaluate whether that schedule works in addition we'll be looking at some of the public records act provisions the open data portal you heard um miss merton speak of that earlier today and then implement get or get in line to implement various appeal and challenge procedures that are in the ordinance um we would not in we may implement those as we move forward certainly the open data portal as soon as we're ready we're going to be building that public record the same way the appeal and challenges we would not we would have that all prepared and ready to go but we wouldn't actually implement it until january first because until january first the ordinance isn't itself effective and so there would be no should be no legal remedies up until january first so we can in this interim period if we're finding that there need to be further adjustments to the ordinance we could bring those to council um as ordinance as amendments to the ordinance um and once the ordinance is in place if we find there are difficulties we can always bring back um amendments to the council if if that's warranted and that's what i was assuming i just want to make sure that we i mean it would be nice not to have to say you know not january it's going to be now july of 22 because we need more time i just i wanted to be able to adjust the community's expectations uh so that we're not you know pushing it yeah i well so we'll have time to experience the the tenants of the of the um of the language and and be able to respond to that if there are changes necessary right and i and i would uh say council member that we are as staff i believe that we are all comfortable that we will be ready and prepared and able to implement as of january first and we did appreciate um that extension that additional six months has been very helpful excellent the only other question i had to do with civic engagement videos i love the idea of producing videos is very very costly and time consuming do we is has that i don't remember a conversation about videos but is that um is that something that we there's no date there but something that we could actually um really dig into in six to nine months the production of videos hi sorry um mcgally taylis um our community development division director she's on the zoom if we want to elevate her but just promoted her good afternoon council members um i think they is here and yeah i just wanted to let you know that we have already paid for um with our contract with for the arts productions we paid for five videos in english and five videos in spanish so um those have already been paid for but the subsequent ones we've not identified funding for yet so it's it's a um a hope but not necessarily uh it's not written in stone that there'll be that's why there's no date because it's something you want to achieve but we're not sure about the um the resources or a planned date of of completion oh the scripts are are done we are just um going to be launching in into the actual filming of them so the hope is before the end of this fall we will have um we'll have those delivered for sure great thank you so the date was the missing piece on that one sounds like okay all right any other comments on this all right well then uh thank you for for walking through all that and for asking such good questions thoughtful questions um of staff about what it takes and and what's realistic uh and the appreciation on that uh we will forgo for a number of reasons and you kind of dot voting but i would like to take an opportunity just to ask of each council member to share from your initial perspective uh your highest priority what's on your mind and i recognize that it's no single thing uh necessarily but i think it will be helpful for staff to hear uh where there where there are items that are particularly important to you so we'll do that and then i have one kind of final question i want to take us through and that is how can uh staff be supportive of council how can council be supportive of staff through this transition period uh in terms of holding each other accountable but also being supportive of limited resources um for the next period of time so starting off with a question uh about top priority and i won't call anybody directly because i want to give you a chance to think about that let me know when you're ready and we'll go around council member albarez thank you for for myself understanding that money makes worlds go around and money definitely helps our staff as well as our departments for for me it's the opportunity and as word is as the word sounds the opportunity to make lemonade out of lemons which is arpa and how can we as a city tap into arpa funds to help a district that i feel qualifies for a lot of those opposed to tapping into our general fund which i what i i would hope that those funds are readily available for the other issues that we have santa rosen's face and that's i believe that's what i take away from today is really seeing what can we qualify through through the intention of arpa and although roselin is the newest member along with district seven of the city of san rosa it just might be the opportunity that we've been waiting for i would like to go next to saw hand okay well i think it's kind of twofold for me um never in my experience have we lost so many employees other than the big layoffs in 2008 which were very painful of course or at least the not rehiring so we are a service provider the city of san rosa provides service that's our that's our job we don't make a product we don't make a profit we provide service and every reduction in in what an employee is a reduction in that service provision or it makes it harder on the existing employees to do the work um and provide that service so i have a and we haven't talked about um the fiscal piece of it as yet and we talk about all the time but you know as far as trying to solve this this fiscal dilemma we find ourselves in and it's very complex and multifaceted so my probably my biggest concern is the loss of our employees and our ability to provide the service that we are that we that the citizens of san rosa all of our residents have come to expect and as they should come to expect that's our jobs as a city so that's probably one of my biggest concerns because without people we can't get the work done and if we don't get the work done we can't serve the the the community so i think that's my biggest concern okay i so flip to a priority it's addressing the the staffing issues the staffing issues and the and the effect of our reduced staffing on the entire city thank you great okay go down the food chain um you know for me keeping our efforts on the homelessness um because i've been dealing with this ever since i've been on council and i haven't seen the level of cooperation with city county other um other cities are much more engaged than they ever have been so i think we cannot distract from that because we are making progress probably slower than some people think and i really wish we had more members of the community hopefully they're all on youtube where we don't know they're watching but to hear the first part of this presentation about the tremendous work that the city staff is doing it's you know we've all commented how much how appreciative we are but unfortunately i don't think the majority of san rosen's know the work that's going on right now and homelessness is a great example they just see some issues you guys aren't doing anything why don't you do something and it's it's somewhat frustrating but you know we need to keep the course you know for me and that other top priority is the dei working the questions i brought up about that because if we're going to be changing um our culture we need to start working on that now and even if it's not applicable what leads someone to whatever we're talking about because to me if we are going to change make our city more inclusive it's got to start with us and so that would be a big priority for me and and the other thing your other question is what can staff expect for us or what can we expect from staff i i go back to you know mission vision values our mission high quality public service if ever we're not providing a high quality public service i'm much more of stop trying to do everything for everyone and some of our discussions that we've had with homelessness i wanted what we choose to engage in what we can't afford to it's got to be high quality public service so if there's anything that we don't have the resources we just can't do i would love for that to be brought to our attention so we could have that discussion because our mission is high quality if we're not delivering that then we need to come up with some strategies to either change it or stop providing a non non-high quality service thanks and what i'm hearing you say too is asking if there are issues raise them right and let us know okay let's see why don't we go up uh councilmember clemming sure thing thank you um and thank you to everybody who made today possible i'm constantly impressed i'm never really surprised because i've stopped being surprised by how much amazing work our staff does across all the departments and you have you know i think sometimes you hear me asking for more and more and more and if you don't hear me saying thank you i want you to hear me say thank you and that is not lost on me that you get a lot done with very little and uh that's what we're really asking of you here uh the thing that that is most important to me is and it touches on environmental um sustainability economy equity is that we take care of our of removing every single barrier to housing production possible i hear the city manager saying that it's not going to result this year next year even the year after and and i respond with saying you know the of the parable of um or the anecdote around when's the best time to plant to plant a tree well a redwood tree is 100 years ago the second best time is today we got to start now if we want to have a livable affordable and sustainable santa rosa so i come back to let's figure out how to make it happen as our number one priority thank you councilmember tibbetz um i think for me i'm just gonna i think be really really honest about it but this process was um right i don't want to say disheartening i think it just really underlined our need for staff resources i thought that it was a little bit uh it was difficult for me to hear that we had priorities um of that the council had uh that just flat out couldn't be addressed and meanwhile as john said this is probably one of the most significant um staff attrition times that that i can certainly remember um so i hope that one of our priorities actually becomes how do we stop the brain drain from the city or how do we come up with creative ways to enlist the help of of people who can help drive some of these council priorities because the selection of a city manager or a deputy city manager should not stop our ability to move projects forward and one thing that and i'm not saying that they do i recognize that there's a lot of priorities on those lists that are getting done and i am deeply grateful for that uh but i just i hope that we can come up with a creative way to maybe i don't know if it's hiring independent consultants to basically on a contract basis take take something and work on it or if we need to farm more stuff out to consultants to help through an rfp process but uh you know that or we just really need to put front and center getting a city manager in here as quickly as possible thank you appreciate that uh and and focusing on strategies to build the bench rebuild the bench uh is in the long-term interest obviously and creative solutions to do so um is is going to be important to consider for sure okay vice mayor fodgers um i would say my highest priority is to continue to provide services to the community including services that people don't see or take for granted and that includes staffing those positions um and what can we do and what can staff do i would say continue to communicate to work as a team and to be innovative um to see our way out of this uh thank you nancy uh i i think that my favorite part of this process today and it goes along with what i think the the high priority is and and that's all of us working together and working on our staffing issues as well but i know that the majority of the staff and pretty much most of the staff who are here today presenting our santa rosa residents and so while the seven of us get to set the priorities and what we're hearing from our community and our constituents i'm also very cognizant when i talk to staff that they live in the community as well they see the cracks just like we do and they have an innate understanding on how to tackle those problems and part of retaining good staff is making sure that everybody understands that their voice matters uh and that they're working on issues where they're going to get to see the impact in their own neighborhood as well and that that comes through in spades when i start to see the prioritization within each of the the programmatic areas as well many of the department heads are subject matter experts their staffs are subject matter experts we're really talking about broad concepts and the end goal that we'd like to get to and sitting here and listening to the work plan from them is the roadmap on how they think we can best get there while also understanding that they're exhausted that they're overworked they've been asked to do a lot over the last couple of years and that this is achievable i think we'll go a long way to not just meeting our goals but also uh working on make sure that staff feel uh supported and and want to continue to work for the city excellent thank you all right i think i think i've heard everybody on that last and so i guess i would just open this last question in the final minutes we have which if you have additional thoughts or ideas uh about ways to support each other in terms of what counseling is from staff with staff needs from council if you have any closing thoughts or ideas on that i think if i can i think that the city manager brought up a really important question for us to leave here with earlier today and that's now that we've gone through this priority list what happens when the next thing arises how do we as a council hold each other accountable for sticking to this plan and not getting so sidetracked and putting more on staff as each little thing pops up mr city manager i just want to give you space to have that conversation because i think it's a really important end cap to what we've done today thank thank you mayor um so this is a conversation i hope it is a two-way conversation between council and staff we want to uh have that conversation so we can reach an understanding and establish the center of principles that we can use and understand together um in some other experiences you know we've set uh or discussed uh an estimate of the amount of staff time or resources that might be needed to accomplish a a new task or program and uh talk about a threshold limit um if it's more than you know 10 hours of staff time or 20 hours of staff time then it triggers um another level of review where we would then write a short staff report uh estimate the the amount of work required and identify the potential impacts and then bring that forward for discussion uh with the city council that that's one approach uh and there may be others that we want to talk about in design i'm just curious i don't think this has ever come up in any of the meetings i've attended but a um a new issue moratorium where unless it's an emergency unless it is a an absolute need as opposed to a want that we at least for a period of time agree to a new issue moratorium and i know that it's hard to swallow but when we look at the when we look at the the work plan already before us if we have to take something off to put something else on and we have to create a staff report to do that and you know that 10 hours of staff report time is 10 hours that they're not going to be working on this so i'm wondering if i'm in if we can restrain ourselves as a council and um unless unless it really rises to the to the point of almost an emergency situation um which probably going to be brought to us by staff and say you know we really need we need help here um what's you know moratorium is a is a kind of a scary word in most in most cases but if we at least are willing to to embrace the concept of being very diligent or not diligent but very sensitive to the work before staff right now and careful not to throw more more work at them and have them and and then well even if we can justify it because something else is going to have to come off and we did we've we've actually done pretty good about doing been been good about doing that in the last few years with mr mcglenn and he was made up was very he was very clear about you know if you well you can ask for this but this is going to come off and but it takes work to know what's going to come off and i'm sure what the whole idea is to allow staff to do the work that we've set before them and as a council not to to just reach and grab an idea that that we don't really have we don't have to do the work we just have to set the policy and say this is what we're going to do i think we should be just agree as a body to be very very careful when adding more work load to our already reduced staff i just think we need to be more careful thank you for saying that john there's a question that i once heard when i was a department head at a class and it really resonated with me and it ties into just what you're saying and so i'm going to ask you the question mr calling for all the department heads too i'm not expecting to answer but where does innovation occur in the organization is here we have all these to-dos where do you have the free time to actually get creative and innovate and i even look at it amongst the seven of us we're pretty busy too and where does innovation that new thought so i'm supportive of that and i will try my best to take that moratorium pledge because i think innovation and giving employees space to innovate actually is job satisfaction and that's nowhere on the list was there just give us some free time to focus on making the city a better place to live work and play well in the comments earlier about moving from crisis to being able to be innovative and forward thinking that's the shift that's the long-term shift that you're trying to move toward but it does require some space and commitment to be able to say we have a lot going on great stuff and doesn't mean that things stop you know full full stop but that you're not adding more and you've got some reasonable expectations about the timelines with which things can be achieved and i think i think what i'm hearing and jeff and i have a weekly meeting where we go through everything and i think what i'm hearing is unless we're hearing something substantial from pretty much all of the council members and from community members and from department heads we're sticking to this list particularly when we do our agenda setting and when we talk about staff resources and if something were to arise that's outside of this we'd talk about it and if the two of us agree that it is egregious enough or important enough to bring to the council we'd bring it for a discussion that am i saying nodding heads okay council member fleming do you want to weigh in yeah i i don't agree i i agree with the the spirit and the the principle i think that that we need to i keep coming back to if if we come up with something and it can't be done with the resources we have the city manager's job to tell us what the resource would be that's necessary or what we need to give up to do it i we all came here to advocate for um various issues on behalf of the the residents that elected us and so i i'm not willing to not do that i'm willing to be as restrained as possible but i i think that's fundamentally not not great governance to to not govern um i get that there's a countervailing principle of being restrained and that i can get behind so restrained but not moratorium is your your your thoughts on that yeah and you know frankly if i need to bring something forward on behalf of of the residents i'm even willing to bring something forward that i think we could sacrifice or put on hold we have a long list of items today and i'm happy to go through and pick something out that i don't think is as important as you know like the short term rental stuff there's going to be a lot that's going to go into that and could expand and that's really important i don't know if the mayor and the city manager together will agree um with with me or with the the residents of my district who are really suffering um so i it's it's too much power to place in in those two individuals and we when we work as a body i think we would it would benefit us to have a working parking lot or um bike rack um where we can constantly see it i know that i have received uh emails or voice messages where things don't particularly uh happen within my district and it's like but i've been reaching out to this person and they don't respond oh my gosh you actually responded thank you right so i bring it forward because i'm the one that returned the email or returned the call and it's not necessarily something that even occurs in my district or something that i even have knowledge about except for the the phone call or the email um so i i understand what you're saying and i and i think that we do need to keep in mind um staff time but it would help me if we had a bike rack because as jeff will know on wednesday when i talk to him and someone brings something to me i'm like jeff this is it on wednesday and then the following week when i've had my other 20 meetings and i talk to him next wednesday i'm like jeff i have one two three and i have three more things and then when i talk to him the next week and then i have four more things so um it would help if we just had something where we could all see it and when we're bringing the same things we can all see when things are are similar to of what things that we're we're bringing forth and i want to be really clear i'm not talking about constituent services i feel like constituent services is covered in everything that we do and particular when council members have an issue like for example a pothole we all know how to deal with pothole requests at this point that's not what i'm talking to what i'm talking to is major policy issues major funding issues big shifts in terms of what we're trying to accomplish i don't mean constituent services no and to that end though mayor i think that all the time we you know we get so many requests to do things and we always are filtering those things out i mean if i brought forward everything that i was asked to work on that i thought had some merit to it i mean this we'd be dealing with like thousands of things so you know i think that that just being restrained is is about as as good as you're going to get from from me on this count i'll continue to be restrained or constituent issues may seem like there's something small but like the mobile home thing that's going to take staff that's going to take staff time or to look at the the unit sizes and what are the fees involved in that that takes staff time but that's also an issue that we're looking at right so things that that may seem small they're issues that take staff time to actually look at it and to implement something so so if i might if i might jump in it sounds like an appreciation for the need to be mindful and thoughtful as items come before and to have thoughtful discussion about where to provide direction and where to have you know have things on a bike rack or some other place to see for a later date potentially but i'm hearing you know consistent agreement that being thoughtful and attentive to the additional items is with merit and so i didn't hear any disagreement to that if you do now is your time but it's not not a flat out never it's more of a let's be thoughtful and considerate about this and if we are asking for something new to the work plan in expectation that there's going to be something offered in exchange an opportunity cost right this is a great opportunity we don't want to miss it okay that's fine but that means that this one's going to you know fall to a later timeline or something so so recognizing and getting everybody in agreement that that's important and that's something to attend to i think is helpful to everybody here in the room yes i think it's it's important to note that the only time we have this conversation is when we're talking about the budget and we talk about showing that restraint and then we don't necessarily follow through and i like the idea i mean i i think that restraint is really what what i'm looking for moratorium is over the top and that's too restrictive um but restraint is really what we need and we need to be reminded of that restraint that we that we've agreed to show that restraint how i don't know how we remind ourselves unless someone says unless someone brings it up like today but we talk about restraint twice a year and then we start then then we move into our year of of new new ideas and not that they're bad ideas but i think that just we need to try to try to hold the line for the next six months or a year and things are going to get better i'm not a pessimist but i just think restraint is something is easily forgotten what about um john what about subcommittees and ad hocs too what about their restraint because i think sometimes we bring things up also that will take a lot of stuff and i don't i'm new i don't know if i'm speaking out of turn but i think that we bring things that that can wait um that will take a lot of staff time and we're like oh well we can work on this and it yeah it's something that we could work on but it's not imperative that it happen in six to nine months i think that this kind of captures that too because we the the subcommittees there are a lot of subcommittees and they do generate ideas from the community i mean this is some of the some of the best things we've done in the last year have come from the work of subcommittees so i don't want to stifle that work that's not that's not the intention because if you look at the list if you look at the recommended work plan there's plenty on here and a lot of it if not all of it came from uh from subcommittees or the community and staff people have had a long opportunity to bring things for us to work on so it's i think i'll just you know i'll stop there it's it really is that showing that restraint that is important to me the word of the day as they say right restraint i think there can be yes some some self moderating here in terms of when items are coming and having you know holding each other accountable but also having staff empowered to say that's fine if you want us to look at that this is what it's going to take and that's going to take extra time so you're informed of those choices right and that would make it easier there around so okay well i did put it on the bike rack already as an item so as you practice this and we'll have it documented in the report that we summarize the outcomes of today so hopefully that will be a a gentle reminder and and i think i heard uh the mayor and the council say um let's be more aware um let's be restrained uh but let's not lose the opportunity for innovation or to address um urgent needs that are coming forward from the community or through the ad hawk or committee process and um this is a responsibility of the city manager and the mayor to communicate with each other and work together to manage uh both the agenda process and for the city manager to identify the impacts on the organization and so i think we've gotten some good guidance today uh and when we do the final report we can try to define that clearly in the written report for you and then nancy i think uh i'm going to ask another question if i can take a little bit of liberties and i want to turn it around on staff department heads assistant city managers uh is there anything in hearing this discussion of the work plan that you it triggered a reminder of or that wasn't said or that is missing that you want to make sure it's out in the open for us to discuss as well i thank you for the opportunity mayor i do want to say i appreciated uh council member schwedholms comment about being able to provide a little bit of gapping for staff to be innovative i mean we're at a place where you've heard staffing issues become a major issue the way we're going to work one of the ways we're going to work out of that is to be able to come up with new efficient mechanisms to be able to put in place that allow us to do the more with less and so i think giving us a little bit of that latitude to create the innovative process is going to be uh appreciative and i think it's going to be going to be beneficial in the long run i would like to add that shortly you will be deliberating on one time funds and there are a lot of additional needs requests from all the different departments that will address certain um efforts that some of which are on the six month work plan um few of them and others are not because we didn't put them on because we there's just not a lot of predictability if we would get the funding um so that may open up additional work opportunities or different initiatives that aren't on the work plan right now so i appreciate the restraint but not moratorium because we are we live in a creative space and we do want to be nimble and flexible as as funding opportunities come whether it's through one time funds or whether it's through grants just the ability to to communicate i think somebody you know communication is going to be key getting to council or getting through subcommittees and and talking about it and weighing those those opportunities as they come up as opposed to just a blanket moratorium so i i mean i i really appreciate the comments that that i've heard tonight thank you anyone else all right okay well then we run over slightly but i appreciate the extra time i think this was a very important conversation to kind of round us out for the day uh as was mentioned we'll be taking the notes and summarizing and bringing back a report that will come through you so it'll reflect the conversations and the final work plan uh and hopefully that will you know give some guidance for the next six months um six to nine months or so uh any final closing thoughts before we adjourn that's a good one jeff did you want to make some comments uh just once again um thank you for taking the time and having the candid conversations with us uh and being willing to work with us as we go forward to the next six to nine months that's probably the most important thing uh that i can emphasize is uh we are deeply appreciative of the support that we get from every single member of the city council and the recognition that we receive for the work that staff does that doesn't occur in all organizations and i just want to say from the bottom of my heart on behalf of your staff we really appreciate you and the role that you play in leading our city thank you all right thank you so much Mr. City Manager and thank you everyone thank you Nancy and Claire with that we will go ahead and adjourn our special meeting