 All right. Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to the January 5th, 2021 City Council meeting. Madam City Clerk, I'm noticing a quorum. Would you please call the roll? Yes. Council Member Tivitz. Here. Council Member Schwedhelm. Here. Council Member Sawyer. Council Member Sawyer will be joining the meeting later. Council Member Fleming. Here. Council Member Alvarez. Present. Vice Mayor Rogers. Present. Mayor Rogers. Here. At the record show that all Council Members are present with the exception of Council Member Sawyer. Great. Thank you so much. We had no closed session today and no study sessions as a little bit of housekeeping before we jump into our full meeting. I just wanted to remind Council Members to go ahead and keep your audio on mute unless you're speaking. You will have an opportunity to unmute yourself if you need to and we'll be asking you to as well if it's time to speak. As Members of the Public join this meeting, they'll be participating as an attendee. They'll have their microphones and cameras also muted and only be able to view the panelists for today's meeting on the items as they're being presented. If we are calling, if folks are calling in from their telephone, telephone, we will be renaming your phone so that we can have your privacy continue. We'll still have an opportunity to speak at the appropriate times on each item and on public comment. And then just as a reminder, the City of Santa Rosa is committed to creating a safe and inclusive environment and we will not tolerate any hate speech or actions. Staff are monitoring the public comments that are coming in and if somebody is disruptive, they will be removed and asked to participate in another way. And also we'll end the meeting if we need to go on forward. So hopefully everybody sticks to it and we have a good meeting going through. Now Madam City Clerk, can you walk us through how the public will be able to participate in today's meeting? Yes, thank you Mayor. After each agenda item is presented, the Mayor will ask for Council comments and then open it up for public comment. Next in Zoom will be lowering all hands until public comment is open for the agenda item. Once the Mayor has called for public comment, the Mayor will announce for the public to raise their hand if they wish to speak on the specific agenda item. If you are calling in to listen to the meeting audibly, you can dial star nine to raise your hand. The Mayor will then call on the public who have raised their hands. Public comment will be limited to three minutes and a timer will appear on the screen for the Council and the public to see. Once all live public comments have been heard, the meeting host will play voicemail public comments. If you provide a live public comment on an agenda item but also submitted an email, e-comment, or recorded a voice message public comment, your e-mail, e-comment, or voice message public comment will not be duplicated, read, or played during the meeting. I do want to say that any emails or e-comments submitted by the deadline of 5pm yesterday, those have been uploaded to the agenda packet as late correspondence and that those comments were emailed to the Council. Additionally, there are two public comment periods on today's agenda to speak on non-agenda matters. Item 12 and 16. This is the time when any person may address the Council on matters not listed on this agenda, but which are within the subject matter jurisdiction of the Council. All right. Thank you so much, Stephanie. As I mentioned before, we had no closed session or study session items. We have no proclamations or presentations today as well. Sitting in the City Manager seat today is Jason Nutt, our Assistant City Manager. Welcome, Jason. If you would like and you want to lead us through item number six on our agenda, staff briefings. Thank you, Mayor Rogers. Would you not have a COVID response update under item 6.1? But Risa De La Rosa, our Deputy Director of Economic Development, will be talking about our community empowerment plan update. I'm sorry. I actually have an update on the economic recovery task force related to COVID. I think Magali will be giving an update on the other item. So, Magali, tell us, do you have an update for a community empowerment plan? I am not seeing Magali on the meeting at this point. Let's go ahead and shoot her a text and let's jump in with Risa if you're ready to go, Risa. I am ready to go. Good afternoon, Mayor Rogers and members of the Council. I just have a very quick update just to let you know that there will be a Council study session next Tuesday, January 12, regarding options related to the expiration of Santa Rosa's COVID specific temporary paid sick leave ordinance. Our ordinance as well as the state supplemental paid sick leave and the Federal Emergency Paid Sick Leave Act expired on December 31, 2020. There are a couple of existing and ongoing programs that still cover employees, but we will be giving a study session next week to discuss our own response. The economic recovery task force discussed the options at yesterday's meeting but have no recommendation to forward to the Council as part of next week's study session, and that's the end of my report. Okay, do we have any questions from Council on that update? And then Mayor Rogers and Council item 6.3, the glass fire recovery update, Paul Lowenthal, Assistant Fire Marshal will be reporting. Good evening, Mayor Rogers, Vice Mayor Rogers, members of the Council, Paul Lowenthal, Assistant Fire Marshal with the fire department, helping to coordinate both the watershed and debris task force for the city manager. So some highlights starting off on the debris side, private and the public debris removal program are both underway in the city limits. Happy to report our first cleared site that is ready for rebuild. And with that, we are moving forward with plans to host our first city only community meeting that will focus on the needs here locally. As we discussed in the past with 1150 parcels affected by the fire. Our goal now is to provide a direct outreach to those residents through a survey, figuring out what exactly their needs are and helping both our rebuild, as well as all of our impacted community members with their recovery needs moving forward. And some of the lessons learned in 2017 with concerned with contractors we've continued to monitor the debris removal activities taking place in the city limits, especially with the number of homes that are still occupied immediately around the debris sites to making sure that the activities are taking place as they're supposed to only had two circumstances with some contractors, and we're both given verbal warnings and let him know that we'd rather keep that here at a local level and working with their local agency reps, than hoping to not escalate it to what happened in 17 where the state came in. With that, for our ongoing tree issues are happy to see that the tree assessments have started by Cal OES, primarily up in the Brigadon and Scotland areas off of Los Alamos Road. We will now provide two updates on the PG&E issue. PG&E has responded to the letter that was issued by the city manager, as well as the county administrator. With that, they have invited the city of Santa Rosa County of Sonoma Cal OES Cal Recycle and other communities affected by the fires to discuss our concerns. We've accepted the invitation and provided them with a list of staff that we'd like to attend and have hope to have that meeting scheduled soon. We're looking on a meeting with the CPUC. A tentative date to discuss the PG&E concerns here locally has been requested with the CPUC and select staff, including Mayor Rogers will be part of that request as well. On the stormwater side of the shop, the house we have discovered an issue that is in the Skyhawk open space. As you know, the Skyhawk open space area was heavily damaged by the fire and has remained closed. However, residents have continued to use that. Following this recent rainstorm similar to what we saw in 2017 with the storm drain issues that were burned away and created a sinkhole and other concerns in the Fountain Grove area. The burned storm drain was discovered in the Skyhawk open space near a walking path that was damaged by the fire and is being used. We're looking at members from transportation public works, parks, as well as streets, and our stormwater and debris task force members have been back up into the area and have put together an outreach plan with our communications team. Reminding residents to please adhere to the warnings that are in the area and stay out until we can make all the repairs needed. And that message is going out with a video tonight. I have a report that we're down to only two homes that we have left to get into a private or public debris removal program with the deadline set for the 15th and there is no anticipated extension of that deadline. And that is it unless you have any questions. Councilor, are there any questions for Paul. Council Member tidbits. Thanks Mayor. Paul, I'm sorry if you said that I missed it. What's the date that you're going to be sitting down with PG&E to have this conversation. The PG&E responded back about a week and a half ago or so with the request and said that we would hear back from Melinda Rivera. Scheduling the date after the first of the year on the 28th of December, we acknowledge the request and provided Melinda with the staff and she acknowledged it and said that she'd be in touch soon. So we plan to follow up again next week if we don't hear anything by then just to try and stay on top of it. Just really fast. Okay. Just as a little bit of context for the public, could you explain what the letter from the city and from the county was a request on and I apologize Council Member tidbits I'll come back to you in a second. Yeah, so we first brought a concern forward to the council early last month. And then we became concerned with the number of trees that were felled by PG&E that fall under their phase one and phase two priority one and priority two tree removal process to their vegetation management program. They're related to fire damage trees and or trees that are in close proximity to the repairs that need to be to take place following the glass fire. With that, upwards of 9,000 priority one trees and several thousand priority two trees were felled by PG&E on both private and public property majority of them being on private property. That being said PG&E has a standing rule that the wood that is felled by PG&E is ultimately the responsibility of the homeowner who has the tree felled on. Any wood that's over four inches in diameter is left on the property all wood under four inches is chipped and removed. The bigger concern for us is all the debris that's over four inches in diameter that we have seen. So in 2017 those trees had a process that you think that residents can go through after the tubs and nuns fire where people can opt into a program that allowed PG&E to remove trees you would essentially sign the rights to the trees over and they would remove them. That program does not exist this year where the real conflict for us occurs is that this is the first year that Cal OES has a tree removal program. This is something we fought for in 17 and we're not able to get and a lot of that fighting and work that we did locally helped push the state to implementing a program in Butte County, and then ultimately was brought here. The issue we have is that once PG&E fell their priority one and priority two trees they're no longer eligible for the state's debris removal program so a number of our residents both in the city and the county have been left with wood that they are having to now remove with their own tree debris removal money is typically pretty minimal. I can speak from experience and from a lot of residents that I've dealt with since 2017. So we're working with Cal OES, the county of Sonoma and upwards of 11 other counties that have expressed similar concerns to us to get PG&E to re-institute a tree removal program here locally or a wood removal program locally. And we're also working on future potential legislative and policy changes that will help hopefully get the CPUC, PG&E and Cal OES to coordinate these issues in the future so that residents don't experience what they're experiencing here. Thank you so much Paul. Council Member Tibbets, do you have any other questions? Yeah. Well, first of all, thanks Paul and you know I hope you'll keep keeping us updated on this and Sue I had a question at the last meeting we discussed this about what if any legal recourse we would have and potentially banding together with other jurisdictions that are having the same issue. I'm going to do some research into that and report back. If you sent an email I may have missed it, but I was curious if you had done any more research. Council Member Tibbets, I was actually out the last two weeks. So I have not done the additional research, but I have been involved in the various communications in coordinating with PG&E and trying to reach a solution through PG&E and through CPUC. So we'll continue to keep you updated and I'll continue to look at all options possible. Thanks. Councilor, are there any other questions for Paul? All right, I'm not seeing any. So with that we will go to public comment for item six on our staff briefings. And for those who are just joining our meeting, if you're interested in giving a comment, click the raise hand feature on your zoom and then we'll call on you and you'll have three minutes. Once you have your voice active, three minutes to give your comments on the item. Again, for item number six updates for the council. I'm not seeing any hands raised. Did we have any emails or voice mails to play? Excuse me. Yes, Mayor, we did not receive any voice mails on this item. However, or I'm sorry, we received two voice message public comments and we did not receive any emails. So I will go forward and play the voice message recordings. Hello, my name is Kim Kelly. I am calling regarding the agenda item 6.1 regarding COVID-19. I am a retired registered nurse. I'm interested in finding out if we could get our city and our state to consider putting a call out to all retired RNs who can come and be an aid in administering the vaccinations. I'm a 64 year old retired nurse that retired from UCSF. I would like to get the vaccine prior to doing it myself. So I'd feel safe. I have not left my house since March practically. All food delivered. Absolutely zero gatherings of any kind of most are outdoors and well more than six feet apart. So I've been doing my part in not spreading the virus and I would like to feel like I'm actually doing something to beat this virus. So my phone number is 415-509-6575. If anyone wants to contact me about how we can put the call out to RNs who are retired and are able to volunteer their time. I'm sure it will be well worth it for anyone if they can get themselves vaccinated. It'd be quite a few people out there that could aid in getting this vaccine distributed to people who need it. Thank you so much for the time. Bye-bye. Thank you to you. Dwayne D. Witt from Roseland commenting on staff briefings 6-1 COVID-62 community environment, 6-3 glass fire recovery. Essentially the COVID situation in the Southwest Santa Rosa area may be one of the more difficult ones to solve because there's a lot of people who have a different culture in which they don't believe they should abide by any of the guidelines that the state and federal government are putting forward which the city is attempting to abide by. Specifically at Southwest Community Park every day first thing in the morning a group of drinkers arrive not wearing masks beginning to drink all day long at the park benches making it difficult for folks who just perhaps may want to walk through and those folks without their masks and getting drunk probably going to be people who have spread COVID rather than stop it. You could have some community empowerment by actually putting some sort of a monitor who comes through that park and cleans out the drunks. It's them out of there and then let community volunteers come in and help clean up the park. And then those community volunteers could be working together to become more empowered by working with city agencies. All this could be done with social distancing six feet apart wearing masks and abiding by guidelines. Now also on the update from the glass fire. Apparently one would think the funding that will come from any state agencies will just come through the city and there'll be no discussion of how it'll be spent. It would be nice if the city would work to put forward fireproof fencing. There is such a thing as fireproof concrete and that fencing could go in after the fire of 2017. Cal fire recommended there be no wooden fencing rebuilt in the fire prone areas. And yet the first thing to happen was wooden fences rebuilt out by Larkfield out by old redwood highway just to the north of the city and then wooden fences in many other places. You folks could help by pursuing fireproof fencing looking for funding doing the things that you do. Thank you. Mayor that concludes public comment voice messages received. Right. Thank you so much, Tina. I'll bring it back to the council council members. Are there any other questions for Paul or Raiisa on these two items. Okay, seeing none, we will move on on our agenda. Thank you to both of you. We'll go to item seven, the city manager and city attorney reports. Who wants to start. Thank you, mayor. I'll go ahead and begin and state that I have no report on behalf of the city manager tonight. And I also have no report for this evening. Okay, now madam city attorney, we have one change that we made to the agenda since the public posting for the preliminary agenda the addition of the emergency for the glass fire. We have obviously our new sunshine ordinance that was passed a couple of months ago to discuss sort of the procedures for adding something at the last minute. Can you walk us through what that looks like, and what the council would need to do tonight to add that to the agenda to be able to discuss it here at item believe it's 11.11. Certainly, Mr. Mayor, and I would recommend that the council's action take place immediately prior to the reading of the consent calendar. But I'm happy to give the background. Now, so item 11.11. It's a consent consent item. It is the extension of the proclamation of local emergency due to the glass fire. It did not appear on the preliminary agenda that was published several weeks ago. That omission was due to an inadvertent staff oversight. We nevertheless recommend that the item is heard tonight. So as to avoid any potential assertion that that proclamation of local emergency has lapsed, we do receive a number of benefits by having that proclamation in place. The current council policy, which is in effect at this point, policy number 0035. The council may consider an item that did not appear on the preliminary agenda, only if it finds a good cause. And this exception to the requirement for posting on the preliminary agenda that is continued in the continued and strengthened in the new open government ordinance, which will formally go into effect next July 1, but we'll begin to roll out the implementation a little later this month. So in order to consider the glass fire emergency declaration this evening, you would the council would need to find good cause to take it up despite it not being on the preliminary agenda. Good cause is defined under the policy and will be similarly defined under the open government ordinance as that as a result of exceptional circumstances beyond the control of the council. So compliance with the nine day currently nine day notice requirement it will be a 12 business day notice requirement. So compliance with that notice requirement would impose a substantial burden on the city's ability to conduct its business or result in prejudice to a private person. So that finding in order to make that finding a member of the council would need to make a motion have to receive a second and then there would be a vote by the entire council. In order to comply with the current policy and the future ordinance that finding would have to have the concurrence of at least five council members, or if not all seven council members are present, it will need a vote at this point. Those numbers will change a little bit once we're under the new ordinance but under the current policy. Again, at least five council members if everyone is present. If we are still a shy one council member it will require a unanimous vote to take that up under the noticing of the final agenda. I'm happy to answer any questions and again I recommend that we address that and take that action immediately prior to the consent hearing of the consent calendar. Okay, thank you so much Madame city attorney are there any questions from the council. None, we will come back to that item when we do agenda item 11 so that we can have that discussion at that time and perhaps we'll have our seventh city council member joining us. With that we'll go on to public comment for item seven the city manager and city attorney's report, folks in the public would like to speak on this item go ahead and raise your hand now on zoom. We'll give it a couple moments here to see if anybody does. Okay, saying none. Madame city clerk, did we have any voicemail comments on item seven. No, we did not. Okay, then we'll move on to item number eight. Are there any statements of abstention by council members on any item tonight council member tidbits. I have to abstain from item 11.2 declaration of homeless emergency standard practice for me at this point, it creates certain concessions for the nonprofit organization that I work for their beneficial to our operation. And that's Sue I had a question for you on the deterred winery village that's less than 500 feet from the 610 Wilson street location and same incident Paul owns do I need to recuse from that one. Yes, I would recommend that you recuse from that one as well. Okay, they haven't mayor I'll be recusing from those two things. Okay, thank you so much council member tidbits. Are there any other other abstentions for tonight's agenda. Okay, saying none we will move on to item number nine. That's the mayor's and council members reports. Does anybody have a report that they'd like to deliver tonight. I'll go ahead and start with you council member Fleming and then I'll come to you council member tidbits. Yeah, I would like to announce the appointment of Maria pretzels to the cultural heritage board. Right. And of my announcements. All right, thank you council member tidbits. Thank you, mayor. I've got a couple here of one I'd like to announce manny balkan agro junior to the community advisory board for me. I also wanted to bring something to this council. I recently had the chance to speak with the owner of village bakery, and he has been speaking with a lot of restaurant tours and Santa Rosa, and he brought to my attention, and I don't know if the owner or I wasn't, but certain companies like grubhub and door dash will charge sometimes up to 30% of the tab of the meal that somebody orders to the restaurant for that delivery service and of course during COVID-19 everybody's ordering with grubhub or door dash. I just wanted to ask me to look into some ordinances that were passed in red with city San Francisco Oakland and other areas that cap the fee percentage of 15%. So I spent some time this week taking a look into it trying to, you know, determine did seem to have an impact on grubhub or door dash and their ability to deliver and from what I can tell it did not. I may have some speakers tonight on this topic. I'm not sure, but I wanted to refer this over to Victoria and and john on the economic recovery task force because I think it is something that we can do to help some of our local businesses. Mayor I don't know if you want to just refer it or if you want me to seek a second. I'm happy to go through that process but I think we should take this up. Thank you council member. If it works for you, we have our goal setting coming up in a couple of weeks here. Are you comfortable if we have a discussion in there about putting it on the agenda. And if not, we can certainly have that vote and assign it to the economic development subcommittee, as we are going to be continuing our ad hoc here shortly. Yeah, let me let me actually just ask if there is a second on the council because I hate to wait a handful of weeks I think if it's of interest to the council and it's a benefit to local businesses, especially for getting rid of those ad hoc, we should probably take it up sooner as opposed to later. Is there a second to add that item to the agenda and for the public since we're in a new year, given the Brown Act constraints the way that it works for the council is a motion and a second to add something to the agenda. Discussion will stop at that point because it is not a publicly noticed discussion topic and we would be depriving folks in the community from participating. And then we would bring it up at our next meeting as a discussion on whether or not to actually move forward with crafting a policy on the item. I have a question for Mr Tibbets. Just a clarification on the process. Is he requesting a second to move this to the economic recovery task force, or second to move it to the economic development subcommittee. Fine with either I thought this would because related to COVID this would fall I think beneath the purview of the economic recovery task force. And my logic is that we may not want to limit grubhubs percentage beyond COVID-19 but I think during COVID-19 you know they're taking 30% of the of the profits away from this is the gross income away from our local restaurants to do those deliveries. And I think that's one of the things that's really important for us to do is to make sure that we don't have to go to the city of Oakland, San Francisco and a handful of others. They seem to be capping that at 15 grubhub still making a lot of money doing these deliveries but the restaurants aren't struggling as much. So I was asked by again Village Bakery for John who's here. I think Mark Stark is involved in a handful of our restaurants and they asked that I bring into the council. Sure. That's great. Yeah, and I don't know if we need a formal vote I am I'm happy to push that along to the economic development subcommittee, but in just a second here I'll be announcing the committees and the community chairs. And I just asked that committee to take it up at the chairs per view for that, if that works for you council member seeing a thumbs up great. Yeah, thanks. Okay. And I think that was a great question. Council member, Mr. Spudhelm, did you have a council members report. Yes, I just welcome council member Sawyer. Yes, I had two appointments I wanted to announce one for the general plan update Community Advisory Committee. I'll be appointing any barber from District six. And for the design review board I'll be appointing Warren Hedgepeth. That's all to report. Thank you. My question is more in regards, it's more of a question in regards to the appointments concerning the VOT area for the different council members. I would like to point, what came to sensual to the to the community advisory board, but we are noticing that that there is a discrepancy with area both one and six with the areas that were designated. I'm also seeing that Natalie and I need to redraw our areas and I'm wondering what is the process for this. Yeah and that's a that's a question for Sue and so as I understand it, our community advisory board districts which were created before we were in district elections they do not overlap with our new current council districts and traditionally how those districts for CAD have been assigned is by random lot. Is there a process in place Sue to better align those with our council districts or is this something that potentially needs to be addressed in our charter review process. I think there are avenues in both there may be actions that need to be taken in both certainly in our in our charter review. That is the place where we can redraw those lines for CAB, but in terms of in the meantime giving at least some a general alignment between between districts and and the CAB districts, the council districts and the CAB districts. I'll look at whether we might be able to make that change without a without a charter amendment, but I will have to to look at that. So okay if you could do a little research and then I'll do that. That'd be great. Thanks. Does that work for you council member Alvarez? It doesn't I appreciate it. Perfect. In the interim if you like council member Alvarez, I do have that seat and I can appoint Jorge Anacincio. Would that be your request? I would appreciate that very much council member. So I therefore appoint Jorge Anacincio to the community advisory board. Awesome. Thank you everybody. Are there any other council member reports? Just as a general reminder for folks and it was great to see some of it happening today. If you have not had a chance to fill your board and commission appointments, please try to do so in the next couple of weeks. We do have a lot of important work before our planning commission and design review board. And in the meantime, I just wanted to remind many of our appointees, some of whom I do see are in the audience for the meeting, that you do continue to serve until you are replaced by a council member. So we do appreciate the work that's being put in and asking you to do it for just a little while longer while council members get those appointments in place. For my report tonight, I did want to report out on the committee appointments for the city council subcommittees. You will also see an item 9.2, some of our additional appointments that will happen on regional positions. I did want to start with the BPU liaison committee. I will be appointing council member Tibbets and council member Alvarez to that committee. For the economic development subcommittee, I will be appointing council member Sawyer, council woman Fleming, council member Alvarez, and council member Sawyer will chair that committee. For the climate action subcommittee, I will be appointing myself, council member Alvarez, and vice mayor Rogers to that committee, and I will chair that committee. For the public safety subcommittee, I will be appointing council woman Fleming, vice mayor Rogers, and council member Schwethelm with council woman Fleming chairing that committee. For the downtown subcommittee, I will be appointing council member Tibbets, council woman Fleming, and council member Sawyer with council member Tibbets chairing that committee. For long-term finance, I will be appointing myself, council member Sawyer, and council member Schwethelm with myself chairing that committee. For the violence prevention partnership, both the steering and policy committees, I will be appointing council member Schwethelm and vice mayor Rogers to both of those. For the city's cannabis ad hoc committee, I will be appointing council member Sawyer, council member Tibbets, and council woman Fleming with council member Sawyer chairing that committee. And then for our open government committee, I will chair that committee myself with council members Alvarez and vice mayor Rogers joining me as well on that one. And with that, we will move on. I will open it up for public comment on mayors and council members reports to see if there's any comments from the public. I'm not seeing any hands. Dina, were there any voicemail comments? Yes, mayor. There were. One moment. Okay. If it's for item 9.2, do we want to jump into, yeah, I guess we will take public comment on item 9.2 first. So I will come back to the Zoom after we hear this comment from Mr. DeWitt for item 9.2 as well before the council deliberates on the appointments. Comment 9.2. Also liaison positions. These appointments that are going to go forward should have representatives from our districts who are most impacted by the activities occurring such as the Sonoma County Transportation Authority, the waste management, the alternate to the Sonoma Clean Power. The people that serve on these boards and commissions to represent us, the elected, excuse me, the electors to you folks, the elected officials, these people should be willing to talk with us citizens and voters, find out what's important for us, and then act upon that. Actually do the best possible to be budget hawks and cut the costs of the taxpayers while getting the best efficiency from the highly paid bureaucrats that operate these things. And then making sure that things are done in a transparent manner so that sweetheart deals aren't possible, so that things are done in the best possible manner to help the taxpayers of Santa Rosa. Thank you. Good new year. Voice message public comment on item 9 and there were no emails received. Great. Thank you, Dina. And I don't see any additional hands from the public. So I will bring that back to the council. Now, council for item 9.2 and items 9.3, traditionally the mayor appoints and the council approves is the way that this works. So I have recommendations that I will present as a motion and we'll start with the JPAs and then we'll move on to the regional entities first. I'll make my motion. I'll see if there's a second and discussion and then we can go to a vote on that as well. Madam City Attorney for the JPAs, can I do them all in one go or do you want me to take them each individually? I'd recommend that you take them each individually. Okay. I will start with item 9.2.1. My motion is to reappoint myself as the city's representative to the Sonoma County Transportation Authority and council member Alvarez as the alternate for that entity. Is there any comments from council? Okay. Madam City Clerk, can you call the roll? Yes, thank you. Council Member Tibbet? Aye. Council Member Schwedhelm? Aye. Council Member Sawyer? Aye. Council Member Fleming? Council Member Alvarez? Aye. Vice Mayor Rogers? Aye. Mayor Rogers? Aye. That motion passes with seven ayes. Thank you. We'll move on to number two. That is Sonoma Clean Power. My motion is for me to start in the primary position with Councilwoman Fleming as the alternate for Sonoma Clean Power. I'll second that. Any discussion? All right. Madam City Clerk, call the roll. Can you who second that? Was that Sawyer? I saw Schwedhelm first. Schwedhelm second. Thank you. Okay. Council Member Tibbet? Aye. Council Member Schwedhelm? Aye. Council Member Sawyer? Aye. Council Member Fleming? Aye. Council Member Alvarez? Aye. Vice Mayor Rogers? Aye. Aye. Oh, sorry. Sorry, Vice Mayor. I'm getting used to it, you know. Mayor Rogers? Aye. That motion passes with seven ayes. All right, great. I'll try to vote for you often, I promise. We'll move it on to number three, Zero Waste Sonoma. My motion is for Council Member Sawyer to be the primary representative from Santa Rosa with Council Member Alvarez as the alternate. Second. Any discussion? All right. Let's call the roll. Council Member Tibbet? Aye. Council Member Schwedhelm? Aye. Council Member Sawyer? Aye. Council Member Fleming? Aye. Council Member Alvarez? Aye. Vice Mayor Rogers? Aye. Mayor Rogers? Aye. That motion passes with seven ayes. Great. And finally, for the Renewal Enterprise District, my motion is for Council Members Fleming and Tibbet to be the city's primary representatives with Council Member Schwedhelm as the alternate able to fill in for either if they can't be at a meeting. Second. Through the mayor, I have a question. I'm not clear that the Renewal Enterprise District allows for an alternate. Did you really have to clarify that? Yeah, it was listed and Council Member Dowd was the alternate for last year, but between yourself and Council Member Tibbet, I think the two of you had it covered sufficiently, so we never saw him at the meetings. Okay, thank you. Are we ready for roll call vote? Yes, please. Council Member Tibbet? Council Member Schwedhelm? Aye. Council Member Sawyer? Aye. Council Member Fleming? Aye. Council Member Alvarez? Aye. Vice Mayor Rogers? Aye. Mayor Rogers? Aye. That motion passes for seven ayes. Thank you. We'll move on to item 9.3. It's the Mayor's Appointments to County, Regional, and State positions. I believe so I can do all nine of these in one go on this motion and then ask the Council for approval. Correct? Yes, that's correct. Thank you. Okay, so for the Association of Bay Area Governments General Assembly, we are required to have the Mayor as the primary position and my motion is for the alternate to be Council Member Alvarez for the League of California City's North Bay Division. My motion is for Council Members Sawyer and Vice Mayor Rogers to be the City's primary representatives on that entity. For Holmes Sonoma County, the City's representatives, primary representatives to be Vice Mayor Rogers and Council Member Sweathelm for the Mayor's and Council Member's Legislative Task Force for myself and Council Woman Fleming to be the City's representatives. For the Russian River Watershed Association for Council Member Alvarez with Council Member Tibbets providing support as the alternate. For the Water Advisory Committee for Council Member Sweathelm as the primary, with Vice Mayor Rogers as the alternate. For the County Health Action Committee for myself to be the primary representative with Vice Mayor Rogers as the alternate. For the Library Advisory Board for Council Member Alvarez to be the primary, with Council Member Tibbets as the alternate. And for the Santa Rosa Plain GSA for Council Member Sweathelm to remain as the City's primary with Council Member Sawyer as the alternate. Can I get a second from the Council? I'll second that. Thank you. All right. Any discussion before we call the roll? I do have a clarifying question. Correct. For Holmes Sonoma County, I don't, I'm not sure if that still exists. There's a new COC. What role and there's only one City of Santa Rosa as a entitled jurisdiction. Yeah. I apologize. We should have corrected that, that on the agenda. So my motion is for you to continue as the City's representative with the Vice Mayor as the alternate for it. Thank you for that clarification. Do we have a, I think we had a second. Any other? I did second. I did second. All right. Let's call the roll. Council Member Tibbets. Aye. Council, excuse me. Council Member Sweathelm. Aye. Council Member Sawyer. Aye. Council Member Fleming. Aye. Council Member Alvarez. Aye. Vice Mayor Rogers. Mayor Rogers. Aye. That motion passes with seven ayes. And Council Members, I did to the best of my ability plot that out on a calendar to make sure that nothing that you've been assigned to conflicts with anything else you've been assigned to. But some of these things are a moving target. And so if there is a need for us to make some adjustments, please feel free to reach out and we can do that as well. And with that, we will go on. We have no approval of the minutes for item 10. We are to the consent calendar. Council Member Sawyer, you were absent when the City Attorney went over one discrepancy on the agenda. We have to actually go through a process of potentially adding item 11.11, the proclamation of emergency due to the glass fire. So I will entertain a motion from the Council on whether or not to add that to tonight's agenda to be considered. So moved. Sorry, go ahead. Yeah. And if I may, what we'll need is a motion to make a finding of good cause. Again, what is defined as good cause under the policy is that as a result of exceptional circumstances beyond the control of the Council, compliance with the nine day notice requirement would impose a substantial burden on the city's ability to conduct its business or result in prejudice to a private person. That's the finding that the Council will need to make in order to consider item 11.11. Okay. And I thought I heard a motion from Council Member Sawyer. Yes. And including the language just articulated by the City Attorney. Thank you. And did I hear a second from Council Member Schwedhelm? Yes, you did. Okay. Are there any questions from the Council on this item? All right. I'll take us really quickly to any public comment on this item. But I do not see any hands from the public. So we'll go bring it back and go to a vote. Council Member, I'm sorry. Are we voting on the finding of good cause? Correct. So we are voting on the finding of good cause to add item 11.11 to the consent calendar. Thank you. Council Member Tivitz. Hi. Council Member Schwedhelm. Hi. Council Member Sawyer. Hi. Council Member Fleming. Hi. Council Member Alvarez. Hi. Vice Mayor Rogers. Hi. Mayor Rogers. Hi. That motion passes with seven ayes. Excellent. Mr. Assistant City Manager, could you please read the full consent calendar with the addition of item 11.11? Yes. Thank you, Mayor Rogers. Item 11.1 Resolution North Village 2 Housing Allocation Plan Contract Amendment. Item 11.2 Resolution First Amendment to General Services Agreement Number F001805 with Coney Incorporated. Item 11.3 Resolution Authorization to Amend General Services Agreement F001318 Generatorial Supplies. Item 11.4 Resolution Approval of Purchase Order with Ramsey Glyce Corporation, DBA Leet Generators for the Purchase of Multi-Quip DCA220KVA Portable Generators Under a Sourceful Cooperative Agreement. Item 11.5 A Resolution Approval of Fourth Amendment to General Services Agreement F001438 ADS Myers Incorporated. Item 11.6 Resolution Approval of Use of Design Build Procurement for Charging Infrastructure for the City Bus Electrical Fleet Electrification Project. Item 11.7 Resolution Correction of Clerical Error to Approved Resolution for Affordable Housing and Sustainable Communities AHSC Program for the Roseland Village Housing Project. Item 11.8 Resolution Adoption of an Extension Agreement Extending the Memorandum of Understanding for and on behalf of the employees in the City of Santa Rosa's Unit 5 Police Officers represented by the Santa Rosa Police Officers Association effective January 1st 2021 through June 30th 2021. Item 11.9 Resolution Adoption of an Existing of an Extension Agreement Extending the Memorandum of Understanding for and on behalf of the employees in the City of Santa Rosa's Unit 9 Police Safety Management represented by the Santa Rosa Police Management Association effective January 1st 2021 through June 30th 2021. Item 11.10 Resolution Extension of Proclamation of Existence of a Local Emergency Relating to the Threat to Community Health Posed by COVID-19. Item 11.11 Resolution Extension of Proclamation of Existence of a Local Emergency Relating to 2020 Glass Fire. And Item 11.12 Resolution Extension of Proclamation of Local Homeless Emergency. All right, thank you. Are there any questions from Council members on the Consent Calendar? Okay, seeing none, we will go to public comment. If folks have a comment on the Consent Calendar, please hit the raise hand function on Zoom. You'll have three minutes to discuss the items. And Madam City Clerk, I'm not seeing any. Do we have any voicemail public comments tonight? Yes, we do. Did you want to hear it before we take the live public comment? Yeah, I just saw a hand pop up from Bonnie. Let's go ahead and hear from Bonnie and then we'll move on to the live public or the voicemail public comment. Go ahead, Bonnie. You've got three minutes. Can you hear us and can you speak? Yeah, thank you. Can you hear me all right? Yep, go ahead. Great, thank you very much. Thank you for this opportunity to address the Council. I appreciate it very much. I just wanted to say something regarding the Item 11.12. It's the extension of the Proclamation of Homeless Emergency in Santa Rosa. I hope everybody understands this is the 48th extension of this Proclamation of Emergency. And it used to be that every 30 days the Council needed to review that. Now it's every 60 days. And it's very impactful to me that we have really this situation that's now becoming status quo. My understanding was that the Council did this because it enabled the city to procure funds from the state to help with the situation. And I hope that's true, even though that wasn't reflected in the staff report under fiscal impact. You know, I know that everybody's doing the best they can, but I'm hoping that with the construction now of a new Council, this is a new year, there are new members on the Council that, you know, maybe this is an opportunity to really feel the impact of this. And to take an opportunity to rethink some of our strategies and to rethink some of our commitments, you know, because there's new people and maybe there's not, you know, people aren't so wedded to programs or certain things that perhaps have not performed quite so well. So I just wanted to bring that up and I just wanted to make that statement and hope that we all have an opportunity to really feel this and to maybe rethink it. Thank you very much. Thank you for your comments, Bonnie. And just so you know, and the public knows, we do have a full study session on our homeless services coming up on February 9th as well. So I hope you'll join us for that discussion. At that time, Dina, do we want to go on to the recorded comments? Sent items 11.5 and 11.8, 11.9, Dwayne Dewitt from Roseland. There is an item discussing the Portland Lou 11.5 stating that the compensation will be a total amount of $2.5 million after a $28,000 increase. If this is that steel restroom that's been locked ever since it was put up in front of the City Hall Annex at 94 Santa Rosa Avenue, the public's getting ripped off in a big way. If this is truly that Portland Lou, it's a racket. You know what? Any Lou that costs $2.5 million is a racket. You've got porta-potties down by Freemont Park for the bums and hobos there to go use for free. So why don't you just put porta-potties around the town and see the taxpayers a couple of million dollars? You've got porta-potties at the parks over in the Southwest. Bayer Farm has never had the restrooms open since the opening day. They were locked the next day and porta-potties have been in use the entire time porta-potties are at Southwest Community Park as the restrooms are locked. Stop throwing our money down the toilet on this situation regarding 11.8. The peace officers, the police department should be respected for the work they're doing but you should ask them for a wage freeze. We don't have enough money for lots of big wages like we keep giving the top management people. Thank you. Good new year to you. Consent item 11.7, Dwayne DeWitt from Roseland. Regarding the Roseland Village Housing Project, there's no documents here in the city bulletin boards for the public to understand what the clerical error was that you folks claim to be correcting. And this is very important because there's an award amount of over 25 million dollars of taxpayer's money involved. It would be nice if you folks would put these documents where they could be accessible to the public even though our government is no longer really accessible due to this virtual exclusion that's been occurring with no physical location for our meetings. Something just is not right about this situation. I haven't been able to access the documents to read them but that whole Roseland Village Housing Project is a boondoggle. It hasn't been going forward after the county taxpayers were flummoxed and to buying a property that was still contaminated with toxics that now the taxpayers have to pick up the tab on. So this whole thing stinks to high heaven and it'll be nice if you are elected officials in Santa Rosa which step up and bring it into the light of day with open government. Thank you and have a good new year. That concludes the voice message public comments. Additionally we had no voice or email public comments uploaded to the agenda. Great thank you Dina. I'll go ahead and bring it back. Madam Vice Mayor do you want to put a motion on the table? Yes. I move items 11.1 through 11.11 in way for the reading of the text. Okay we have a motion and sorry go ahead. I was going to mention that we do have two items where we have a council member recusing so we will need to take separate votes on those two items. I only had in my notes and remind me if I'm wrong I only had 11 point one two for council member Tibbets as a recusal. We can take that as a separate vote. Okay great thank you guys. Great so we've got a motion we have a second. Do we have any additional comments or questions about the consent calendar from the council? Okay seeing no hands. Stephanie let's go ahead and call the roll. Council member Tibbets. Hi. Council member Schwedhelm. Hi. Council member Sawyer. Hi. Council member Fleming. Hi. Council member Alvarez. Vice Mayor Rogers. Hi. Mayor Rogers. I. That motion passes with seven i's. All right Adam Vice Mayor. I move items 11.12 in way further reading of the text. Second second. We have a motion and a second from council member Schwedhelm. Let's go ahead call the roll. Council member Schwedhelm. Hi. Council member Sawyer. Hi. Council member Fleming. Hi. Council member Alvarez. Hi. Council vice mayor Rogers. Hi. Mayor Rogers. Hi. That motion passes with six i's and council member Tibbets recusing. Great thank you. We will move on to item 12 on our agenda that is public comment for non-agenda matters. It is past five o'clock so we will roll right into it. For those in the public who would like to speak hit the raise hand feature on zoom. And as a reminder because these items are non-agenda items the council can't discuss them tonight but we can ask staff for some clarification or if we need to can come back later for discussion. But this is an opportunity to really talk about things that are not yet on our council agenda. So I see our first hand will go to Emily. Emily you'll have three minutes. Hello can everyone hear me? Yep. Good evening members of council and the public happy new year to all. I hope you had a safe and happy holiday season and appreciate the opportunity to speak tonight. I'm Emily Ramey with why green energy fund. We are a leading paced finance company based in Sonoma County. We were headquartered and born if you will in good old Santa Rosa and headquartered there for many years before moving to Petaloma because we hadn't grown. So I have been working with staff very grateful for the opportunity to get our program on an upcoming agenda to allow for financing options for residential and commercial property owners to make important disaster preparedness resiliency energy efficiency upgrades to their homes and properties. The reason I'm speaking tonight is I have a few folks that are here to show support for bringing our program forward. Santa Rosa already has another paced option in place but why green is a leading paced finance option that has not yet been approved by Santa Rosa and operates throughout Sonoma County and throughout the state of California. We have a few projects on the commercial side the small commercial side that are very very eager to get funding finalized this month in January and so if there was a way to expedite our agenda item. I just have rescheduled for late February that would be very much appreciated if only for these commercial property owners. It is especially important for them to schedule their debt and their cash flow for the coming year and so they have voiced a opinion of wanting to work solely with why greens program and they're sort of waiting on approval in order to move forward and so I'm making the request simply on behalf of the small businesses that really want to use our program based on a reputation locally and the difference between our program and some of the other commercial paced options is that we have a very low project minimum threshold and so we serve the small to true small medium sector of the commercial businesses in in the state that are otherwise not served by existing paced providers and so thank you for letting me share that with you hope you can understand my need to relay that sense of urgency to you all if there's anything you can do to help make that happen I would greatly appreciate it and I appreciate your time today thanks. All right thank you Emily really appreciate you being here we'll move on to in-kit and I apologize if I just butchered your name but you'll have three minutes go ahead and unmute and speak with the council. Hi council members happy new year my name is Ankit Panchal I'm representing 365 hospitality I hope you guys can hear me fine I would express just what Emily said we are one of the property owners in Santa Rosa we have a small hotel in Santa Rosa which is called HealthSide and and you know we've been talking back and forth with wide range to put solar as well as we have some cap needs and as you guys are very well aware that you know hospitality industry has been heard the most since last year because of COVID-19 we've been struggling with cash flows and all this other stuff and you know we were expecting this program which would help us out with you know not just with solar which will help us with utilities but also some capital that can ride us through in this time so if we can somehow get this agenda post earlier it will greatly help us in our business and once again we have worked with Whitegreen at several of our other hotels and they're they're a great company and they have delivered things on time and I'm here on call just to advocate to make sure that you know we get this done in a timely manner thank you all right thank you sir thank you for your comments Stephanie I'm not seeing any other comments from our live public comment Dina do we have any voicemail recorded comments tonight okay then with that we will keep moving on our agenda we do not have any report items tonight so we will move on to our public hearings Mr. Assistant City Manager do you want to introduce item 14.1 for us yes thank you item 14.1 is public hearing tax equity and fiscal responsibility act of 1983 known as TEFRA public hearing and issuance of bonds by the California Public Finance Authority in an amount not to exceed 50 million for deterred winery village eight west ninth street and 806 Donahue Street uh Angela Morgan program specialist uh reporting or it looks like Megan messenger reporting I see both on here we're going to hear from both of them good evening council the item before you today is to request a is to request to hold a public hearing and approve the issuance of bonds for the deterred winery village project next slide please jurisdictions are required to hold a public hearing receive public comment and approve bond issuance consistent with the tax equity and fiscal responsibility act of 1983 and internal revenue code this action will not result in any fiscal impact to the general fund and the financial responsibility shall be of the borrower in this case the borrower shall be Donahue 808 LP and the developer is meta housing corporation next slide please the proposed project will create new affordable housing units located at eight west ninth street and 806 Donahue Street within the downtown station area plan and near the railroad square smart train station shopping food and transportation the site was previously approved as a market rate housing project but has since obtained approval by the and the necessary entitlements to build 185 excuse me 135 units as presented to you today next slide please once the developer has obtained and closed on the necessary project financing uh to complete the project it anticipates the commencement of construction by the fall of 2021 and the completion by july of 2023 the project will further counsel tier one goals by meeting housing needs within the city's jurisdiction furthermore the housing units will be restricted to households with incomes ranging between 30 and 80 of area median income next slide please the recommendation before you today is to one conduct a public hearing under the requirements of the tax equity and fiscal responsibility act of 1983 and internal revenue code of 1986 as amended and two by resolution approve the issuance of tax exempt multifamily housing revenue bonds by the california public finance authority in the amount not to exceed 50 million dollars to finance deterk winery village at eight west ninth street and 806 Donahue street next slide please this concludes the presentation and we are happy to address any questions thank you angela council do we have any questions for staff i'm not seeing any angela i did have a question for you we have seen a number of different projects at the council level where the income limit or the income restriction is for the application phase but not a limit on how much that entity can charge once they have residents moved in so for example there's at least one project that i know has come before this council where only folks who qualified had to be 35 percent of the area median income but then they were charged 40 percent of the area median income once they actually moved in are there any types of guarantees for the council built into this that individuals will be charged an appropriate amount for the affordable unit that they are occupying it looks like uh megan is actually going to address this question thank you great thank you good evening mayor rogers and members of council i'll be happy to build this question so in addition to the requirements that will be imposed by the california debt limit allocation committee which is the bond issuer if the project is awarded bonds the project is also subject to a regulatory agreement from the housing authority of the city of santa rosa which initially committed funding to this project in june 2020 so we will be restricting the 135 133 affordable units with two managers units for 55 years and that is for initial movements and for all subsequent tenants and those are verified on a quarterly and annual basis great thank you so much uh council any other questions okay we will go on to public comment mayor please be sure to open the public hearing all right good uh good catch dina so we will open the public hearing uh and go on to the public comment portion of it and i see uh gregory is up first gregory you'll have three minutes go ahead and unmute greetings this is gregory farron um my agency saves and i'll apply village services actually is a tenant in the uh current building that's being uh converted and we'll be glad to come out uh to end our lease uh before they need to get in and and convert the building but i'm a little concerned about a 30 to 80 percent spread on that i mean what i just read was they could basically put everybody in there at 79 percent and and i don't think that's really what the intention of trying to get affordable housing into santa rosa was so i guess along with chris trying to figure out a way of you know making a permanent i'd kind of like to see something that defines it as how much 30 how much 40 how much 50 how much 60 i mean is anybody going to be below 79 percent and still be valid anyway that's my comment all right thanks gregory do we have any other live comments for our public hearing okay seeing none uh madame city clerk do we have any recorded public comments public hearing number 14.1 dewayne's wit from the sonoma county housing advocacy group speaking in favor of this item being approved for the bond sale to occur for the housing to be built at what's known as a deterg winery village we have followed this project since its inception many many years ago and hope that now it could be put on the fast track to actually be done one would hope that the city staff and city elected officials will work hard to remove all the obstacles that may come up once this financing is approved so these kind people trying to get the project done can finally go forward and get it built it's very important during this new year where many people are facing the prospects of homelessness that there'd be opportunities with more housing in the city center in that railroad square and downtown area this would be the first big positive step forward to get something done after that working on the cannery project on west third street would be another big step so please approve this work hard to get it done and also have a good new year all the best to you here that was the only a voice message public comment for item 14.1 and there were no emails received um by the 5 p.m. cutoff yesterday great thank you dina i will close the public hearing then and bring it back to the council for discussion uh megan or angela could either of you chime in and help answer the question that we heard from gregory during public comment about the spread of who is going to actually live in there is there uh any guarantees that the council has or that the community has uh that they won't just have entirely folks who are at 79 percent of area median income about will be more equitable in their distribution. Mr. Mayor this is angela i will take that question uh so in preparation for this tougher hearing today um i i did i followed up with the developer and the proposed units um are 25 25 of the units to be restricted at 30 percent of area median income 14 percent excuse me 14 of the units to be restricted at 50 percent of area median income 30 units to be restricted at 60 percent income and uh and 64 to 64 to be restricted at 80 percent of media median income so we do have uh various tiers of affordability uh programmed these are just it's it's under this proposal it is a little preliminary we have not closed on any financing and as megan indicated there will be affordability restrictions in place for 55 years and ongoing monitoring and compliance as well okay so what i heard from you is uh 25 units at 30 percent 14 percent at 50 percent so you've got 39 out of the 133 units at under 50 percent of the area median income and you have 94 units at 60 percent or above 60 to 80 i should is that correct i just want to make sure i got my numbers right that is correct yes and then we have two unrestricted um resident manager units for a total of 135 great okay uh are there any other questions from council okay then i will go to uh council member soyer uh i believe you have this item council member soyer looks like he stepped away from from the zoom uh council member sweat helm do you have uh the staff documents and would you be able to make a motion for us sure um whoop i do have i'm sorry there we are thanks tom i do have it and i apologize this has been an evening um i've introduced a resolution of the council the city senate rose up approving the issuance of multifamily housing revenue bonds in an amount not to exceed 50 million dollars but a california public finance authority with the deterrent winery village in accordance with section 147 f of the internal revenue code and the joint exercise of powers agreement relating to set authority and wait for the reading okay so i heard a motion from council member soyer a second from council member sweat helm uh let's go ahead call the roll okay council member tibbetz uh council member tibbetz has recused from this item thank you council member sweat helm hi council member soyer hi council member fleming hi council member alvarez right vice mayor rogers hi mayor rogers hi that motion passes with six i can council member tibbetz recusing okay but that will move on to item 14.2 mr assistant assistant city manager thank you item 14.2 public hearing street light pole banner policy 000-71 and associated banner fees rafael revero economic development specialist reporting you hear me there you are go ahead hi okay great all right uh well good evening everyone and happy new year good evening uh honorable mayor rogers honorable vice mayor rogers and distinguished members of the center of the city council my name is rafael revero i'm with the economic development division and i am an economic development specialist here at the city so um the item before you this evening is in reference to the street light pole banners policy program regulations application packet and associated fees and our recommendation uh next slide please all right so um as i continue i want to share a little bit of background related to this uh particular item um currently the city of san rosa doesn't have a street light pole banner policy streetlight pole banners are typically used as promotional and place making enhancement tools in many cities as well as their downtown districts and other areas over time san rosa has allowed banners citywide on city on streetlight poles on an informal basis for programs and projects directly associated with city departments and divisions as well as for select nonprofit organizations that have worked through the city manager's office or have used all banners prior to the recognized need to develop a citywide policy within the city that the demand for banners displays has generally been driven by the economic development division for seasonal and event related uses an example of uh non-city use of a streetlight pole banner may be highlighted with the ones displayed in railroad square the ones used during the rose parade and the winston eye market to name a few new requests for banner placements have increased over the past few years from events and organizations such as sonoma county pride and the san rosa junior college as well as place making interests from organizations such as the museum of sonoma county sonoma county library and memorial hospital the economic development division staff in coordination with the public works street maintenance division were charged with facilitating the locations hardware purchases scheduling and and installation of banners on streetlight poles installation and removal of the banners has been performed by public works which has impacted their core services delivery over the extended period of time with banner interest continuing to rise namely from event producers but also from neighborhood groups and non-profit organizations the proposed streetlight pole banner policy is intended to provide a clear and fair process where non has existed while san rosa zoning code 2038 regulates the temporary hanging banners not related to streetlight poles and council policy 00-70 outlines the city's advertising policy and guidelines for promoting non-city services on city on facilities equipment social media sites neither one address a comprehensive streetlight pole banner policy designed to establish uniform regulations and associated fees for banner placement by non-city entities the adaptation of the streetlight pole banner policy would fill this gap and would also establish program regulations and procedures ensure safe use establish an application process with associated fees provide place making enhancement and promotion of community oriented activities next slide please so some typical banner uses would be for recognition and we have the examples of pride month u.s. armed forces events such as ironman wins the night market place making the community benefit districts which we now have two of them seasonal historic uh recognitions non-religious and public facilities such as museums libraries junior college junior college and so on in that ineligible banner uses would of course uh violate the um uh violation of the center of the city code uh violation of council advertising um councils advertising policy as that content relates to banners activities not open to the general public commercial political religious content images or messages inconsistent with these guidelines next slide please in um while we were um drafting the policy we also had the opportunity to do some research just like many of other staff members uh conduct and we learned that other municipalities already have established well-established banner programs but the interesting thing I want to highlight here is that many of the municipalities that we spoke to are completely out of the banner installation uh process or business therefore they have contracted with independent installers and uh typically they also go through an encroachment permit process uh and as you can see there in uh that slide uh some of these municipalities such as sunrise only has two streets uh designated for banners and those are fairly inexpensive however we learned that through other city through other through the other municipalities throughout the area the cost could be perceived as significantly high to to place banners on street light poles next slide please okay so that leads me to the process and as part of the process and to exercise quality control and street light pole availability proposed banners will be reviewed by city staff via the street light pole banner application packet for content and design dates and pole availability upon application these will be assessed and an encroachment permit will be issued to the applicant's installer following the installation and in special will be performed by a city staff member to ensure proper installation and the safety of the public through a clear regulate through clear regulations and shifting the responsibility of the installation and removal of banners from our streets crews to the private sector the banner program provides an accessible pathway for banner placement in support of placemaking and promoting community oriented events the city's role is to facilitate coordination among organizations minimize scheduling conflicts and ensure public safety banner applications will be available at on the events uh uh city website here at city hall and obviously well obviously online and there you there's a a brief diagram of the flow chart application permit issuance and installation uh next slide please all right so um as we were uh drafting the policy we identified three areas where fees will be applied the application itself at permit issuance and for installation inspections the 45 dollar application fee and the sliding scale installation inspection fees are new and not currently listed on the city's fee schedule as such we are pulling these two fee elements from the schedule attached to the resolution as exhibit b and will uh bring them back as part of the city's general fee schedule update during the springtime the encouragement permit and traffic control elements listed under permit issuance to do exist in the city's current fee schedule and will move forward with this item with city's approval and as you can see there again it's a flow chart regarding on how this permit process would play out once again when we return to to the council during the spring to talk about those other additional fees so there's the 45 dollar fee permit issuance 128 traffic control 147 and the inspection fee based on a sliding scale depending on the amount of banners that are installed next slide please okay so um in regards to requirements and specifications basically that's a layout of the measurements of the banner there is an opportunity in the event that the private party seeks the sponsorship from a particular entity that allows that entity to have a logo placed on the banner but it cannot be any bigger than 15 percent on the banner but in addition to those requirements the maximum time limit for banners on street light poles will be based upon availability and the purpose and promotional focus of the banner banners with general promotional messages and place making banners uh designating a geographic area of the city will not have specific time limits but will be subject to periodic reviews following their installation banners that promote date specific activities shall be limited to 30 days the banner shall be installed not more than 25 days prior to the event and shall be removed within five days after the last day of the event since there were also uh some concerns regarding neighborhood groups and for folks who may be participating by listening if they recall a previous banner program that was spearheaded by CAP many years ago a city-funded neighborhood identification banner program such as the original funded by CAP is what i'm trying to say would not be subject to the policy if the banners are considered city banners in addition to the in addition the policy states that city sponsored banners have precedents over non-city organization banners for the use of street light poles so i just wanted to make that clear uh next slide please okay so us we were again uh working very uh diligently on this policy um uh we um made tremendous outreach effort and beyond reviewing the proposed policy and regulations with city staff members from public works recreation and parks and others we focus our outreach and policy development engagement efforts on event organizers such as the winston eye market winter lights and sonora county pride staff also met with the santa rosa metro chamber and the hispanic chamber of commerce the downtown action organization realm of square association the museum of sonoma county rosen uh business operators and representatives we also delivered two presentations at the downtown subcommittee meeting where members from nearby uh neighborhoods were present and had the opportunity to ask questions staff also delivered a presentation in december to the community advisory board and gather feedback from members representing the various uh districts throughout the city uh next slide please all right so uh before i read the recommendation i just want to reiterate that the associated banner fees reference in the recommendation referred to exhibit b in the resolution that has been modified to list only the encroachment permit and traffic control fees again the application fee and inspection fees will be brought forward to council as part of the city's fee schedule update in the springtime with that we'd like to make the recommendation by the economic development division and transportation and public works department that the council by resolution adopt council policy 00-71 streetlight pole banners and associated banner fees and um as myself uh we also have uh terra thompson our arts and culture um manager available for uh questions and gabe osborn which is um our development services division director um as well for uh responses all right thank you rafael uh i've got a question just right off the bat my my biggest concern with this item is the cutting out of neighborhood groups or volunteer organizations or nonprofits that might not be able to raise the funds uh for the different fees that are being charged uh or you know if they've already struggled as we've seen time and time again the difficulty in raising the funds to actually do the banners uh but that doesn't mean that there isn't value within our community i know that our historic districts in particular have worked really hard to do place making uh and these banners do give neighborhoods a sense of community in a sense of place that we've been trying to coordinate in and and develop in san rosa how how would this policy enable them to continue to do that work um and is there additional steps that we can take to make sure that this doesn't just become a privatized entity or a privatized process uh where groups with money uh are able to have access to the polls but not others no that's definitely uh thank you for the question that's definitely a good point to bring up um uh i you know i i did some research and the that the cost uh to to create to create these banners isn't necessarily uh tremendous um i have some quotes that that i gather over time and um uh in many cases um from the two organizations that we um did sort of a pilot run with uh sonoma county pride as well as uh there was another one um some of the some of the fees related to the creation of the banners were offset by uh the print shops so they um uh did in kind services and they also uh help uh you know cover the cost of the of the banners um if i might i might jump in here just with something to add yeah this is part of thompson arts and culture manager i work with rafael and have been a part of this policy development and um the the thought process that we took with this policy was really to establish um a process that didn't exist before or the placement of street like pole banners um it really doesn't change uh the access necessarily to those pole banners to neighborhood groups there really wasn't a clear path for that prior to this policy and i would encourage um the consideration of um some other resources for neighborhoods to um get pole banner uh banners like pole banners up such as the previous programming that the community advisory board offered through their neighborhood improvement grants or other types of programs like that i believe that's how many of them were created in the past um and and we really encourage that but perhaps separate from establishing this policy which sets forth the procedures um that are that are needed thank you yeah i don't i appreciate that i was on the community advisory board uh five six years ago when we first approved many of these neighborhood banners for for funding but my understanding too is that at that time these neighborhood groups that came together and put together the applications to seek the funding then we're able to rely on the city to uh put them up uh and with this new process we would be forcing them to to find a private entity to do that for them and to raise the additional funds for encroachment and and others um the other fees that we have in here so i i guess i guess so my question is is twofold one is how do we make sure that they are still how do we help foster that level of community involvement in this without putting additional barriers on people and then just as a follow-up to the original banners that some of them are still up uh they have been up uh who who retains ownership of them at this point and if there's a need to to change um who would who would that be on the city at this point or is it on those neighborhood groups um i'll jump in rafael just first then please go ahead um i don't know exactly the ownership issue you you referred to in terms of the banners that currently are up i think it would probably be dealt with by by the city but the other thing i would add is that i think that i imagine a couple ways to address the cost issue which is either for a city entity like cab or others to provide grants for a banner program that cover the full cost um including installation or um i also know that the policy the way that is the way that it is currently written exempt city banners from the policy and so if the banners are considered city banners then they do not fall under this policy and can be dealt with differently um without the procedures and fees as established so i just wanted to add that in as well and if i may this is racy delarosa economic development division director um any banner that is up in the city currently predating this banner policy is the responsibility of the cities to remove we put we place them and remove remove them uh the public force department has been fantastic at uh removing most of the banners and uh getting us back to a blank slate in preparation for this policy i can also just give an update here uh to if uh division division director osborne wants to speak up it is something we can look at for nonprofits through the encroachment fee the encroachment fee is the method by which we would be able to provide permits and get the insured the needed insurance um for access to our polls and i believe there is an opportunity to look at have look at the nonprofit element through future fee updates but if mr osborne would like to comment on that i would welcome it good evening mayor rogers and vice mayor rogers absolutely as we go through the process of taking a look at our encroachment permit fees through future future fee updates what we can look at is different programs for and banners that go up um and we do have the ability to uh really kind of flush that out and figure out if there's can be a different program for really the different scale of the banners going in or the different community groups that install those that will be very similar to what we're looking at for outdoor seating and some of the other more common items that we have seen and you know the more immediate past so we will be taking a harder look at our encroachment permit fees in general to see the applicability and the total amount through that next fee update right thank you thank you go ahead rafael yeah and i mean we're willing to work with with groups uh non-profit groups neighborhood groups and identified resources uh that may become available to cover the costs uh and of course in partnership with the city you know it could potentially be sort of a city sponsor pioneer and therefore this policy wouldn't apply to to the in those particular cases so therefore uh the cities that will be installing the banners right okay i appreciate that and i think that that is a a direction that i'd be interested in going i'd like to hear public comment on it from other council members that particularly for our neighborhood groups to me placemaking within our neighborhoods is a city function and so for those that help with that feature i would be much more comfortable if they were classified as city banners and we still did the installation and were able to help with those fees particularly given that i i do know many of the people who have worked on these projects in the past and it does take quite a bit of coordination and volunteer time on their part i want to be respectful of that and i and appreciate that with with uh with our community uh so councilmember soyer i'll come to you and then councilmember alvarez i'll come to you next thank you mayor um my question is kind of almost a piggyback on to what you've been just been discussing on as far as the i will i will see with with placemaking i would hope that we could come up with a special compass special consideration for for the for the for our neighborhoods that choose to have banners like my question and first and also i want to thank everyone that had anything to do with this with this um banner policy because they're as simple as it may sound there's nothing easy about coming up with a policy for banners um and so special thanks to everyone involved i know that this took a great deal of effort and time um my question has to do with aesthetics um there especially with the placemaking those neighborhoods are not going anywhere i mean they're going to be there for quite some time and the banners could unless they choose to change the the um the the image of their of their banner um or the colors or whatever they they will deteriorate over time and so i'm curious about and that's true with both the public facilities and the placemaking banners which could have a fairly long life um can you know you know possibly um so who will be managing the aesthetics who will be managing the condition of those banners as they age and there becomes a need to change them out or or repair or replace how was that going to be handled well uh yeah the purpose of the um of this is to better control uh and monitor the banners that are up um rafael i'll give this back over to you but you know i think one of the issues that we did note was that banners were placed up but they were not monitored there was no department that was in charge of it and they were not monitoring so they did not come down um and through this application process there is we would know where the banners are um what the duration of the banners are uh the better placement would be um and then also uh the requirement through the encroachment permit um as to the duration so who the installer is uh when they would be putting them up the one they would be taking them down so um again it takes the onus off of us to decide when something comes up and it and it becomes more of a programming and scheduling uh process so uh rafael is that uh if you want to add anything to that yeah and again uh just to reiterate the uh the the goal of the policy is intended to provide a clear and fair permit process where none has existed before but in an event where you know such group uh receives the funding and and again it turns into a sort of a a city sponsor uh banner installed by the city uh I I would think that the city over has oversight of that that of those banners and uh over time if they begin to uh get old and faded uh that the city would eventually need to you know pull them down or yeah so again it's um I will tell you it's taken I think about eight years perhaps to get us to the point of having some kind of a process for banners for um any kind of policy for banners it has been batted around from uh between multiple departments I think it might even be for 12 years um so maintenance again is something that we do not want to as a city um be responsible for um public it would uh scheduling took a long time through public works it took public works away from other core duties in order to put them up maintenance was another thing that diverted public works crews from um their core duties and so again both in terms of placement and maintenance it's something that we wanted to privatize and put on to the um to the private sector again um we noted that we need to look more closely at neighborhood uh banner programs um and I think we can find some compromise in that but they're they're uh not the main um requesters of uh banner placement number one they're a minority um so we think we can find something that would be suitable and number two um uh short of because we've had no banner policy nobody has had access unless it has been a city department taking responsibility solely for those banner placements and so again it's an equity issue equity access issue and I'm sure also that it's going to be as time goes on we will start to learn what different materials last and what materials do not last it's a you know given how long it did take to do this and I understand why um so we'll just you know I think that the the community or the individuals can see a banner that is is that is in decline or is uh has been you know potentially vandalized um that will let the community kind of inform us and take care of it as as as necessary but it is there's there is something to be said for maintaining the the quality of the banners because we we've all been in communities where the banners were up there probably four or five years too long and um it really detracts from their original intention um to to to gain a respect for a particular part of the of their city and their neighborhoods so I think that maintaining maintaining the quality of the banners is it is is as important as putting them up in the first place so I appreciate it we'll let it we'll let it play out um and and let time dictate what we do and how we do it thanks council member council member alvarez thank you mayor uh first and foremost thank you for the energy that you put into this uh project I know it has been about 12 years in in the making now I finally but I believe the last time that I that I seen you you were run down to the basketball road with a couple of those banners it tucked in your arm trying to show up to different business owners so I definitely appreciate your efforts now you mentioned that you had done some comparables with the cost to produce these banners uh would you know any of those numbers off the top of your head yeah I mean some of them I listed them on that on that slide um I'm not sure why the city center file is not inexpensive but again they only allowed banners to be uh displayed on two particular streets uh city of napa has a very robust program but they they have a fee of 178 and they go through an inclusion process city of san francisco of course much larger as soon as you drive in there's banners everywhere they have a very robust program but they the city is broken into various districts so some of those districts manage their own uh banner policies and such and uh on one of the districts that I spoke with uh it's 275 or 20 banners and then um it goes up from from from there on no so the fees that so the fees of that you stated in the in the in the report or the presentation these are the fees that the printing company is charging oh the printing company uh well actually no I'm sorry I do not have those specifically but I will tell you that uh the Sonoma County pride boats uh went through this pilot phase while we were putting this together uh they went through an inclusion process and uh they got assistance from a particular print shop uh I don't have the figures specifically but um um you know they were able to install 52 banners last year they did it since they had such a great experience and great success they went ahead and placed another 52 banners again uh from july uh from the first of june to the end of of june uh this in in in 2020 and the dao went ahead and followed suit and installed 72 banners just recently uh during the month of december and rebel square has also uh installed now 42 banners uh with the help of uh another print shop that again is providing a discounted rate and just basically helping them in a sense so with the in time contribution right yeah okay approved and the reason I asked is I am interested in the idea that you came up with which is a city sponsored uh helping with the pay paying the fees for the neighborhoods uh and and to correct um or actually to to clarify uh the neighborhoods would be uh omitted from this policy within my correct consensus no I mean if if again uh the neighborhood is working uh closely with uh the city and uh eventually receiving funds through a grant or something very similar to what existed in uh when when the cap provided this grant uh for for the creation of these banners then uh if there's a obviously uh a partnership involved then uh uh uh uh Raeesa Tara feel free to jump in then it would be some sort of uh city sponsored banner therefore that the policy wouldn't apply in this case what I was thinking just off the top of my head a hybrid program where we do have the name of the neighborhoods such as Roseland and if we could have a sponsorship from one of the local businesses which would be approved by the neighborhood themselves uh it that would be my might be a way for for their every uh covering of the fees but again it would have to ultimately be the approval of the neighborhood but nonetheless I do think each and every one of you for your time and dedication to banner program I believe it adds to the pride of the neighborhoods that we live in and the beauty of the city of San Rosa and to have the banners surround city hall of the different of 11 different uh communities I think speaks greatly to who we represent and what we're here to do so thank you Mr. Mayor if I may I just want to add a little bit more clarification on the um the cost of the banners so if all things considered somebody wanted to use all of our pool banners and they're you know they're uh when we adopt the additional fees of better inspections for example you know the potential could be that someone might be charged up to $545 for all elements of the fees that would be equivalent to what Vallejo charges for example the likelihood however is lower because um there for example in community benefit district areas or any area where an association or a group wants to pull an encroachment permit and do multiple uh banners through that permit including that traffic control uh fee um they could do that so it is not every time a banner goes up that they would be charged every single one of these fees it is um it is uh only when um someone new has something that would be uh not covered under a pre-existing encroachment permit of traffic uh traffic control fee um the other piece of it is there are only certain areas where we have um uh the hardware uh to put it up the most common place where people want to have banners um again for events mostly um has been in the downtown area um and um there are a finite number of uh uh pool banners uh pools available for banner placement in the downtown area the second area of interest has been on uh Santa Rosa Avenue uh we have an interest in placing hardware in roseland area because it is such a um a key commercial corridor for us there has not been hardware there the city may pick that up economic development may pick that up again um to to allow for better access but at any point in the way it may be that um there's either shared costs or reduced costs based on um um who's pulling the encroachment permit or what encroachment permit exists so the maximum cost yes would be five hundred forty five dollars but the average cost would be much less than that okay council member are you uh all done with your questions great i'll move on to the next member of sweat helm thank you mayor thank you rafael for the presentation and the rest of the team for keeping on this for the last more than decade um rafael was there any discussions about a waiver fee uh application process in other words we have right now the current um policy the way the draft policy it gives certain discretion for the city manager and or his or her designee was there any discussion about a fee waiver process just adding to that discretion or one whether it be a neighborhood group or a non-profit or anyone else if they say we can't afford this okay give us the reason why and have a city staff person who understands the competing potential interest of timing remove all the other things that they could have that uh make that decision any discussion about that process being set up or added to this thank you uh council member sweat helm that's actually uh good question and um that was not discussed uh i okay i appreciate that um i would be supportive of something like that because again i think if we start just saying neighborhoods or non-profits words if this is the process for a fee waiver and it's rest with this person so it's transparent everyone understands what the process is i think it might be an overall uh benefit for the city and understand yes there is a way if your group or individual cannot afford it it can still happen in this community so that's my own question and comment thank you okay all right council member tidbits thank you chris you know i i hope my comments don't don't seem negative about the program i think that it's great i love the place making concept i love the idea of bringing identity to certain neighborhoods in that sense of of pride and belonging but i i'm just really really reluctant just to support a program as reissa i think was alluding to that is going to divert public work staff greatly in a way that they're not um you know that the program's not getting compensated for the reason why i bring this up folks is we have needles and parks graffiti on graffiti on the prince memorial greenway we've got more pressing issues that our public works folks should probably be dealing with with the limited resources that we have so i i mean i'm supportive of the program um if we're going to be doing i agree with tom that there should be a transparent and universally applied formula i don't think it should be staffed a staff person's discretion about who to give waivers to but i like what tara said where we maybe direct that person over to the community advisory board then becomes a meaningful way to engage the community advisory board um and they can you know to make these determinations as a publicly uh notice transparent body who's going to be getting the cab grants to do these sorts of banners and place making but i i can't support a program that's going to cost us money and take public work staff away from things that are frankly more important in the community mayor can i yeah go ahead jump into that i i just there there may be public works costs for existing city banners or any future city sponsored banners but i will say that this policy greatly takes the load off of public works by shifting it on to the private sector so it is a huge step in the right direction albeit perhaps not perfect yet and that was sorry to the mayor that was my take tara but i just wanted to give my express my feelings to the council because they kind of see it going um in a direction that could cost us staff time and and you know financial resources and and mayor if i could chime in in response um as the director of transportation and public courts um this this policy does go a long way it that's that shifting that responsibility to the private sector back in 2018 we actually as part of our staff reduction program eliminated the staff members that were associated with our banner program that doesn't mean we don't have staff that are capable and able to be able to do the work but we did have to reduce our program back at that time and this was the area based on your comments councilmember tidbits that we elected to to innocent sacrifice for other programs that were more core and more focused on the council's priorities so i thought it was appropriate just to chime in at this point on the public work side all right thank you mr assistant city manager councilwoman fleming thank you mayor um i got a couple of questions um one is um sort of related to what council member slayer was talking about about the degradation of um banners over time and just curious to know um you know how long does it take a banner to look kind of careworn in a way that would um degrade the the neighborhood or the business corridor in which it were to be placed i think the um old cab neighborhood oriented banners have been up for maybe 10 or so years it's been a long time those are clearly degraded um we tried in economic development when we when we designed and purchased seasonal banners to try we tried to move them around every sort of quarter or if not three times a year and we found that we could place banners up probably three years in a row before they started to look a bit worn so i would suggest it would be less than three years i would also suggest that through this program allowing more people access to the polls um we will not have the issue of placing banners uh that would not eventually come down after the event um because again economic development will no longer be placing banners up just to have place making banners so what i'm wondering is if it wouldn't be less onerous in the long run to have a solution as part of this ordinance wherein we said you know a particular banner can be up for a sum total of like let's say 18 months or something like that to be generous fine if you put it up for three months you know every year then you could do it for six years or whatever your recommendation would be on the amount of months sounded like you're closer to 12 months in your recommendation and i defer to that but my concern is putting forth something you know that's going to be a problem down the road and just sort of waiting and seeing and then you know burdening staff by saying hey we're getting these complaints about these raggedy um street poll banners um can we make a policy to address that well i believe um the encroachment permit is uh generally for one year is that correct again that is correct so based on our current city code the encroachment permits typically do not go beyond 12 months they can with a specialized agreement but under most circumstances they would have a maximum of 12 months okay um and that's 12 months for that permit but not 12 months for that flag meaning that someone could turn around and get another one i guess i'm just trying to say that i would like to see you know a limitation on the duration that you could fly a particular flag you can replace it and put another one up but not have the same one out for 10 years that just seems like kind of defeating the purpose but yeah the banners would be tied to that encroachment permit number one um number two i think the only place other than the old cab neighborhood banners where um we see banners that have been placed up a long time or may potentially continue to be placed up for a long time is for example railroad square or the railroad square association has placed their banners that though uh but we are encouraging them through the community benefit district to do seasonal banners and to change them i guess i'm just wondering if it wouldn't be simpler to come up with a policy here rather than deal with this as a one-off so that when somebody signs up for um for this you know their their first permit um if their first permit's only gonna last them you know six months or whatever that that starts taking you know those six months that it's up for takes off whatever the x amount that staff recommends the total time so that that we're not just sort of like playing one off whack-a-mole but i sounds like that's part of this and maybe i don't have a great understanding of it um my my other question unless you anybody wanted to jump in about that if i mean i just wanted to um to note that the policy is in the current draft does have a provision that the city manager may reduce the time limit in consideration of specified factors including the physical physical condition of the banner so this does give the city manager that ability to uh uh to require that a policy uh i'm sorry a banner be be taken down if needed and my concern would just be that the discretion gets taken away that we don't have um you know extra burdens and some people feeling like one group is getting treated differently than another you know it just sort of creates problems um the other um question i had um is again about discretion which is how well um and perhaps this comes because the the whole you know idea of scoring cannabis applicants is so burnished in my mind for my first days on council but what will we do if we have multiple applicants for the same street polls for the same time um i heard that staff will you know uh make their decision based on you know the appearance and the quality but will this be a process that's transparent how will we deal with conflicts um and so forth i'll jump in well that's a really good question and uh i mean there's a lot of polls available uh we would you know do the best we we we you know could for availability to accommodate uh those parties uh given the uh approval of the application and such but um there's a lot of polls available so i think uh we we could be able to accommodate if you be developed criteria in addition to graph which is all design quality like the perhaps like um the benefit to the community the general you know um uh accessibility of the events or stuff like that like things that are would be easy to sort of for the public to understand why one one thing would get chosen or another when they can't all be accommodated yeah we do have some experience in this and that um we have had events where um so for example we have some legacy banners that were allowed to go up uh despite the fact that we don't we didn't have a policy um so um Wednesday night market is the one i was thinking of Wednesday night market last all summer um and had historically had banners placed up iron man would come in twice a year in the summer uh they would go up on some of the polls uh and then so they would take down um the uh the market banners put the iron man banners up take them down put so there was a coordination and we recognize that there is going to be a coordination of events um number one um you know we do have multiple events that could happen in the given week um and they want some of it so with enough banners we've also done it to where we will assign certain polls uh to certain groups um and then um so that they can all be up at the same time and then we have done it to where um depending on the timing we'll take one down and put them back up um so that's the experience that we've had thus far um we haven't had um so many requests waiting for this um that indicate that we're going to have multiple requests um that will necessitate something other than that but but we think that we can address it so banners aren't as exciting as cannabis i suppose to prospective applicants thank you so much for your responses i just want may or if i may real quick uh when when the sonoma county pride um awareness month uh came about last year um the installer and by the way uh uh all the the dao rebel square sonoma county pride have used their own uh installer which again that the work hasn't been performed up by our services uh or our public works uh crew and and once again they went through an encouragement process as part of the the pilot run for this program um so they were able to um the installer for the sonoma county pride rolled up the ironman banners and kept them stored and then as soon as the awareness month finished they were able to replace to to put up the ironman banners again thank you great thank you so much are there any other questions from council all right let's go on to uh public comment and i'll open the public hearing on this item so first up we will have share followed by gregory so share go ahead and unmute and you'll have three minutes for public comment can you hear me yep go ahead okay good evening mayor rogers and city council members thank you for the opportunity to speak my name is share ennis and i'm a longtime resident of the west end regarding aesthetics dependent on location the neighborhood banners looked great for about five to seven years material longevity has come a long way in the last decade so that time frame might be able to be extended i'm asking you to specifically exempt neighborhoods from the financial aspects of this new banner program and have the installations and removals continue under the auspices of the city unlike other commenters who wrote in i asked that this be a permanent exemption neighborhood banners are distinctly different from commercial or events related uses they'll typically go up for a long period of time and don't need to be taken down or put up repeatedly in a short time frame the banners give a sense of the flavor of each neighborhood they let visitors know what part of the city they're in and show that we care about the place where we live the neighborhoods and the historic districts in particular should be a source of pride for the city and should be supported in this small way i don't think many of the neighborhoods will be able to come up with the costs proposed which could easily mean that only the wealthier neighborhoods would have the banners that would reinforce a toxic belief system we've all heard about for years so please let's make sure that doesn't happen thank you thank you share Gregory good evening my name is Gregory Farron and i want to second share his comments just a few a minute ago but what i want to do is also take you a little bit different direction and that's about fairness and equity both rafael and rice talked about that but and you've spent quite a while trying to guarantee equity around the financial aspect of it how this can't become and how you want to prevent it from from becoming a kind of rich and poor battle over who gets to put banners up but i want to add one more dimension to it and ask you how you're going to deal with it which is it's kind of an insider outsider whose message gets to be approved you set some guidelines on you know sort of encouraging the old messaging everything we've already thought of is not very political and and certainly supportive but what happens when a group comes in that has the money to pay for it and has a process knowledge and has a message you don't like has a message that that is offensive to people what happens to that permit in its process i have not heard anything about an appeal out of the staff decision i think there should be one but more than that i'd like to see a little more clarity on what you think is not going to be approved it's clear that if it's divisive to a huge degree and we've identified religion or you know really radical politics but as you all know i'm sort of on the edge of always being a little more radical and a little more you know innovative than most people and i would imagine there'd be some some issue some group some message that wants to put it on a banner on a poll in the city and won't be beyond not having the money to pay for it it's not going to be approved and i'd like to see that minimized to a great extent thank you thank you gregory i'm looking to see and i don't see any additional hands for uh leslie go ahead go ahead and unmute you'll have three minutes thank you mayor warehouses and thank you to the city council members for hearing about banners i second call for the permit exemption to be a permanent exemption for the city neighborhoods i want to encourage neighborhoods to have placeholders i want to encourage neighborhoods to have an identifier as well as something that they're proud to have and i want to encourage more neighborhoods to do that as more neighborhoods are going to hopefully spring up in our city so and i do feel that that is very different than events or business organizations as they may be like the dao or the railroad square association the railroad square association just put up new banners and they look lovely um i would also encourage maybe a policy in this that would have permanent placeholders for an association like the railroad square association or the dao for let's say a certain number of their polls to be specifically for them so um that they could retain those polls retain those banners maybe switch them out once a year um but when an event comes in that they don't have to take down all of their banners that their placeholder is still there because i think that it's a value for um for us as a city for our tourist population to see that as a placeholder as well as to see the event coming in and having that shout out and that promotion so i think that um some other things to address in this is that i don't know that the cab necessarily has a grant put it put aside for banner installation or for banner production and so that might want to be coordinated before policy like this comes forth um even though i know that there's been a lot of work on this policy i can remember it being talked about for a number of years so uh and i also want to give a shout out for the sponsorship and that word just keeps kind of getting floated around but not necessarily defined as to what a city sponsored banner would be and that would be a great definition to have in this policy uh lastly last 30 seconds is to define the uh time frame for applying for the banner placement because right now we'd say that there is a um number of days that you can have the banners up and have them beforehand and afterwards but when can i apply can i apply a year beforehand or two years beforehand for those pools thank you very much i've used all three minutes first time ever thank you all right thank you leslie appreciate that uh do we have any other comments from the public on this item seeing none uh dina do we have any recorded voicemail comments yes we do oh no we don't surprise all right great i will go ahead and close the public hearing then and bring this back to the council for discussion um so there were a couple of questions there that i'm hoping staff can respond to uh one of them was the question of what is the objectionable content and is there an appeal process process of somebody is denied one of them that i heard uh was specifically about whether or not there's funding within cab so who wants to jump in and try to take some of these to start well i will say in terms of content and we do defer to the pre-existing city policy on advertising which is policy 000-70 and i don't recall when that was put into place but i think it was about seven years ago perhaps five years ago and then it outlines that content that violates that policy includes um um i'm sorry i'm just sort of blanking right now um it includes uh political items um uh pornography guns drugs that type of thing um and then the other thing is because these are for uh generally public good um unlike the advertising policy we are looking to not have strictly commercial oriented sales type of advertising on the banners and we do allow for you know for profit you know commercial entities to be sponsors on the banners but we don't want them to say you know shop at safeway or something like that right thank you and and the uh offenses uh if that's what we'll call them it's consistent with the policy that we have for advertising on our bus system for example that's correct that's correct we defer to that policy in this policy well social media and if somebody has uh it denied do they have an appeal process can they go to the city manager or is it just a blanket denial from the staff member who was working on that well i mean we would likely work with them on why it was denied and see if we can get that back into compliance um and then there after uh yes i i meant we do uh state that um the city manager can override on a number of things perfect and then the question about cab grants uh if somebody could take that one could you remind me what that question was uh so the i think uh some of the discussion has relied on the assumption that the community advisory board would allocate funding from the community improvement grants for some of our neighborhood groups or or whatever have you can you just remind us when that process starts uh and and i already i already know the answers that no there's not a clear pot of money for this within cab but those community improvement grants could you remind us when that that starts and sort of if neighborhood groups or nonprofits would be eligible well um unfortunately don't have a member of cab here and i'm not familiar enough with their schedule for when they review grant applications but to your point there is not a dedicated fund specific for this and i think it is at the pleasure of the cab board if i recall so unfortunately i i can get back to you on that but i don't know the specifics of the timing and may or i don't know if the community promotions grant would necessarily apply to in a situation as such uh i don't know tera the criteria for those yes that that could be considered a part of that application um it has been a part of many event organized events um request to the city through the community promotions fund in the past so that would be an eligible use of those funds if that program continues in the future okay all right any further questions from the council on this all right not seeing any we will go ahead and lay a motion on the table and i do believe councilwoman Fleming that this is your item yes thank you mayor um i'd like to move a resolution of the city council of the city of center is adopting council policy number 000-71 titled street light bull banners and associated banner fees and way further reading of the text second we have a motion by councilwoman Fleming a second by councilmember soyer uh councilwoman i'm wondering if you will entertain a friendly amendment to clarify in the policy that neighborhood banners count as city sponsored banners indeed i will councilmember soyer are you okay with that yes okay great is there any further discussion from the council all right through the mayor um go ahead could i just ask staff what the additional costs of relating to a city sponsored banner would entail in terms of staff time and and money i guess i would need clarification in terms of would be we be required to actually print the banners and deal with design elements so what is your intention in that and then i would ask assistant city manager net to weigh in on the ability of public works to install neighborhood banners and to add to that maintenance piece yeah my my intent is not for the city to bear the cost of creating the banners but continuing how we have in the past of working with neighborhood organizations that do raise the funds or get the cab grants to help install those and and get through the these now permit fees that we are in the process of discussing so director net could you jump in yes and i i think given the the nature of what a neighborhood banner is is as was stated by many of the community members as well as council members they tend to last five to seven years because of the particular locations and the fact that they're not rotating with different images or different programs i i don't think it's going to be a huge burden if those particular banners remain with the city and have public works continue to do the installation um i my concern and the issues that we had predominantly were the constant and consistent rotation of banners that that really became the staff level burden for us and so if if the council members feel that this is that they approve of the amendment then then we can certainly incorporate that into our our routine through the mayor director nut would it help you to have us place a time a minimum time limitation for rotation to reduce impacts to your staff well i think i'm just wondering if there's go ahead as i say council member timmett's thank you for for suggesting that i i think within the policy where we will have to address these as the ongoing maintenance and should a particular banner become damaged or look tattered or get hit or knocked off and we'll be addressing those as needed through the course of the community given the fact that we don't have a large proliferation of community oriented banners through the right now i don't see that being a major lift or a major additional lift if we start seeing an interest in having banners on every poll within the neighborhood um you know we start to see a substantial increase in the numbers that may have a direct impact on our staffing availability and so i think at this point given the the current methodology that we're using to deploy banners we can we can cover the the staffing need um but i would say if if we start to see a substantial change we may have to ask additional questions of council in the future okay thanks for helping with that i hope that if i don't think it's going to come to that like you were saying but if it does i hope you will just because for me it's a priorities question as far as what your staff is tackling on a daily basis but thank you you helped me um with this one okay any other discussion from council and uh madame city attorney are you clear on the motion um i am not i would like a little more clarification on um what we're carving out so and do you want it to be an express exemption from the policy do you want it to simply be that fees will be waived uh you want it i gather that your preference is to have city staff install those banners and maintain them and take them down at appropriate time um and i would suggest that we that we we clarify what we're carving out of this policy um and does it include just place making banners but if a neighborhood is going to have an event uh will the city also um uh take on the cost of installing event banners as well um so i guess those are the two the two areas do you or three areas do you intend a waiver of any application fees and installation and encroachment fees do you intend city staff to have responsibility for installation and maintenance and removal and do you intend it to include both place making banners in any other banner that is requested by a neighborhood association yeah my my intention is the waiver of the fees for the application and the installation and the encroachment as well as um yes the the city doing the installation and and having that responsibility know for events i'm specifically talking about place making banners within our community which i do see as a core city function if we're if we're having volunteer groups step up to help us to put together those banners i think the city should have that role in it mayor can i further clarify that question um sure just simply because you said throughout the city as opposed to neighborhood at that point sorry the difference between neighborhood and business district for example i i so for me it's the volunteers for the neighborhood groups that i'm most concerned about for the business districts they have uh dedicated funding that they've been able to go out into secure which is a little bit different than a volunteer effort but if we hear that concern from from business districts perhaps they could bring that to us uh for a revision to the policy down the road but the concern that i've heard with this policy coming forward is specifically from neighborhood groups uh those the historic districts and folks who volunteer their time thank you for the clarification mayor can i clarify one thing i um so the way that i heard some of the comments um i think from council as well some of members of the public was to consider the neighborhood identifier banners consider those city banners so that they're exempt from the policy and that might help with like not needing to deal with waiver of fees because they're if they're exempt from the policy they don't fall within the policy regulations yeah and that was how i originally phrased it my one uh concern in hearing sue lay it out is exempt from the policy i want them to still have the ability to put those up and for us to partner so if the intent is for us to have a policy that we can rely on for predictability my concern is the the additional fees and having to go out and find a private supplier to to put them up and so if we can waive them from those fees and retain responsibility at the city putting the banners up with those neighborhood groups and partnership that to me seemed like a more efficient approach but i'm open to i'm open to other options and then i'd like to also confirm that you would be comfortable that the council would be comfortable giving this direction whichever whatever we end up with and that staff and uh and my office could work together and and putting the language into the policy uh that you would delegate that that responsibility to us and councilwoman fleming i know you wanted to jump in here as well let's go ahead um my question was really very trivial which was that if we were to exempt um or uh we were to do a carve out however um the council decides to proceed um would we then if the city maintained the responsibility of taking those up and putting them down then if um if there were to be a private event or something that did that fell under the the permit then to take those down could we um make it such that the private company then has to do that taking down and putting up of the thing that's that's usually always there if that makes sense i mean i would say just to that point um we generally don't get especially event uh producers seeking to place banners in residential neighborhoods um so that is that differentiation between commercial districts and neighborhood uh but yes if that were the case then that's what the expectation at this point would be thank you for the clarification council member soyer thank you mayor one can see why it took so long to put the policy together in the first place um it's these kinds of details that that can um extend the conversation i'm curious about as far as the the neighborhood banners um some of our neighborhoods are small some of them are our historic districts are smaller than others um and some neighborhoods like the jc neighborhood is fairly um sizable compared to the the burbank neighborhood for instance um so i'm wondering if we should consider and let staff consider um putting a limit to the number of banners that are used for the neighborhood um that could be quite numerous and some of our neighborhoods also are bordered by major um uh boulevards and like the jc for instance and has you know medicino avenue uh borders it on it for a considerable distance so would would those be the neighborhood banners or would those be the the more the event banners there's you know i'm not sure i don't want to slow this down but i think that we should believe i'll have have the ability to consider options um in the future it's as as as issues come up and this this actually might be more one of those more um kind of a living uh and and breathing um uh document as opposed to something that's set in stone because it's bound to have as time goes on we're bound to have the need for making some of the changes but i i think that if if we don't have some kind of limit um to the number of of banners for for a either a neighborhood association or a historic district etc there could be issues around fairness and equity um that we either deal with now or we deal let let it start to play out and and deal with it later but i i think it's going to be something that we are going to have to ultimately tackle thank you um if it would help mr mayor uh i think we can add a definition on neighborhoods versus commercial districts one and then um i think uh we can um clarify the neighborhood identifier identifier banners as um being place making banners that would be installed and maintained by the city if i'm understanding assistant city manager net correctly and that these banners would not include especially vent banners but what we limited to place making our identifier banners and i think if we add that definition and then add that clarification i'm hoping it would um address the issues that city attorney gallagher brought up yeah and if i can just ask a question because i that sounds like a good approach to me but we the city does recognize neighborhood associations uh and if if we wanted to we could tie the definition to place making brought forward by those associations and that would also encourage other neighborhoods that were interested in having the same uh ability to organize uh and create that apparatus and we did think about that um we did um some neighborhoods have associations that are non-profit some don't um some have uh commercial areas in particular have community benefit districts others don't um so it brought up again that question of access and fair access uh in terms of resources for uh organizational abilities um and so we backed away from that okay that makes sense uh councilwoman fleming i was simply going to say what uh my concern about fairness and access and advantaging already organized neighborhoods okay yeah i'm i'm uh perfectly comfortable with the more broad suggestion that you made raiza i hesitate to ask this again but did that provide the clarity that you need sue yes that's sufficient thank you okay so as i heard again that that we may craft the language uh after this meeting that that sounds good and so uh i heard the motion from councilwoman fleming with the additional discussion here about uh neighborhood uh neighborhood banners which will be distinct from the commercial banners and event banners uh that john was was asking about is everybody good great uh then stephany if you could call the roll thank you mayor councilmember tibbetz hi councilmember schwethelm hi councilmember soyer hi councilmember fleming hi councilmember alvarez hi vice mayor rogers hi mayor rogers hi that motion passes with seven eyes and may i i apologize for not catching this earlier i just want to also confirm that this is with the amendment uh uh discussed by rapial during his presentation that this is taking that it is going to the fees are going to be limited to the encroachment and traffic control fees for now with other fees to be determined uh at a later time that's my understanding all right sounds like that's what the motion was thank you great uh well thank you everybody thank you rafael and raiza and and tara uh we will move on now we have no written communications and we are on to our second public comment for non-agenda matters discussion if there is anyone uh who would like to speak go ahead hit raise hand on zoom seeing none and i know we already did our voicemail comments as well uh we'll close public comment and we will adjourn tonight's meeting so thank you everyone for participating and we will see you next tuesday