 1104, 1104, so I'm going to call this meeting to order. According to Secretary, can you please take roll? Board member Anderson. Present. Board member Feutrell. Here. Board member Renteria is absent. Board member Rumble is absent. However, board member Myers is present and is the alternate for board member Rumble. Chair Rivera. Here. Let the record reflect that all board members are present with the exception of board member Renteria and board member Rumble. Thank you. All right, moving on to item two is public comment. So this is a time when any person may address matters not listed on this agenda, but which are within the subject matter of the jurisdiction. The public may comment on agenda items when the item is called. Each speaker is allowed three minutes. Do any members of the public wish to make comments on items not listed on the agenda? Chair Rivera, we don't have any attendees in person. We don't have any attendees these days. Thank you. I have a recording secretary. We'll move on to item three, which is the approval of the minutes for our August 10th, 2023 meeting. We have minutes from the August 2023 meeting. Do we have any changes to the minutes? I'll move approval of the minutes. One second. Oh, well, we, yeah. So all in favor say, aye. Aye. Aye. The minutes approved. And then just say you guys know we don't need to vote on the minutes. Right, yeah, that's all right. So Chair Rivera, if you could just make a statement saying that the minutes are approved as submitted. The minutes are approved as submitted. Perfect. Thank you. I'm sorry, I don't mean to belabor this. It does say approval of minutes. How do we approve it without taking a vote? I reached out to the city attorney's office a while ago. To be honest, I don't remember off the top of my head all of the logistics, but we don't need to take a vote on them. If there are amendments, then anybody can state these are the changes and then they just become approved as amended. But we don't need to take a vote. Todd, I've been at this a long time. I've heard of that before. But anyway, whatever it is, it doesn't hurt to take a vote. And yeah, so this came up, this is something new too. And I think it's also having to do with post-COVID, but we should get some, the language from the city clerk's office to write exactly where no longer need to approve the minutes. So thank you. Moving on to item 4.0, new business. We got 4.1 event support reporting. This item's gonna be presented by member Myers, who is the VP of Marketing and Communications for Visit Santa Rosa. Basically, I had a requested member of Myers to provide more of a detailed report of the 13 events that were supported throughout the first part of the funding cycle through the event support program and totally close to $83,000. She'll go ahead and provide some more details about those events that happen. Yeah, so I pulled together the recap that I have. Um, can I see that annual report? No, I can get it. Just pull together some of the main topics that I thought would be most relevant to those of you here. So he says 82,000, some of these were from last year though, like the Winter Blast, Beer City and Pino on the River. Those were actually in Q4 of last year when he says 80,000. So that's why my totals are a little bit less because they're just for the calendar year 2023. So I just pulled together all the event recaps and gave the number of attendees for each event, how much we awarded and how much they requested as well, event dates, and then what they used the funds for. One of the things that I kind of realized after going through this process, we have Lindsay Musco who's helped us get all these processed in the beginning of the year before she won on maternity leave and she did a great job as a first year that we've done it this way. So kudos to her for that. And then, as I look through the event support recaps, there's just some things that I think I'd like to improve on it for next year and for this next round, which is actually due in a couple of days, the 30th. You know, just having the event promoters give us a little bit more detail on the overnight stays I think would be beneficial because we don't require it in the event recaps. We just kind of ask, did you partner with hotels? How would you partner with them? How many attendees and zip codes that they can provide it? And then what they use the money for. So yeah, I'll give a little bit more detail in that. Yeah, any questions? Yeah, are there any questions from the board? Questions only. We got a couple of questions. So how much of this is coming from the VSR side and how much from the city side? This is all just, this is in Rosa. Yeah, the, and then the city matches that, right? So this is our amount and then the city matches that. Well, sorry, this is half and half. This is the total. So half of this is VSR. So it's split in half. Yeah, sorry. Yeah, and then there's the community event. I mean, that's separate. I didn't do a recap on that. Sure. It's done to the city. How does the partnership thing work? Noting that a couple or three of these, including, I don't really know the answer since a couple of our hotels are partners on the marathon, but how does that work? Yeah, so basically we reach out to them and ask, we reach out to the promoters, to try and the hotels to try to get some sort of packages put together. And it goes through our CRM. And that's, that's what Lindsay, that's kind of Lindsay's function as a sales director. And then we market it for social media channels. And then, and so do they as well. So any hotel could be, could try to be partner. Yeah. And they would have access to same information and all the other hotels have. Yeah. That's great. Okay. Got it. As well. Do you have a question to know any a percentage when we fund these events, some the purpose of funding the event also has to do or a portion of the fund is actually for allocations related to marketing and promotions. Do you have a number or a figure as to how much went into marketing and promotions in addition to some of the else they do in relationship to logistics for each event? Yeah. Some of them break it out like that. And some of them don't. So that's another thing that I think we could improve on the application process for next year is having them be a little bit more detailed in that if we want it to or even say, or even on the front end, if we want wanted to say, they can only use it for these things. And then they need to give us a detailed report on how they marketed the event. Because I did notice in the report, some of them use it for other things that, like if you see in here, it helped with events expenses such as player, water, fruit, lodging and meals for one of the events. So that's something that we want to change. We can do that too. How does the city decide whether to use its econ funds? Is it just through this process? I'm just curious about that. It's 50, 50, but if VSR committed 200,000 to events, would the city just automatically commit 200,000? Or is there a different kind of process? Yeah, it's a good question. Well, historically it's only, and we split the portions, but historically it's only been 50,000 and 50,000. So copying it at $100,000. Just kind of organically happened. Yeah. I see. Interesting. We could definitely review that. I wasn't asking for it to be reviewed. I was just trying to understand how it's done. Yeah. But that's been a standard since I've been part of this board and I think even since 2010. I mean, yeah, I would be open to discussing a different amount if we wanted to do that. This was last year, I was in first year and so that's kind of what was decided. But there have been other events that have come up that came outside of the timeline. And so, like the beer, what was it? The Breastful, we funded that separately just through VSR. So, because we wanted to help get that event off the ground. So. So these particular events all came through in an application process. And we rate them. To the BIA, is that right? Correct. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Got it. We each give them like a number of ratings on like a Likers scale or various questions. And then if you see down here, the scores. Sure. So who decides what applications to approve and how much money to allocate? That's how we do it. Is we each look at the applications. So each of us that are involved. So on our side, it's Peter, myself, Lindsey, I think that's it on our side for VSR. And then the city, we each review them. I don't have all the questions, but it's, you know, how they, you know. Is that criteria that would follow? Yeah. Okay. There were some that didn't get approved for various reasons that maybe it wasn't in the city of Santa Rosa or certain things like that. So this board doesn't vote to approve. It's done at the, what you might say, is the staff level, is that correct? Yes. That is my understanding is a change from last year. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's just, I'm only asking. Yeah, yeah. Understand how we do things. We can go back to the further discussion, but let me chime in because we have a member of the public announced that part where the public gets to see if they have any questions. So, but we'll go back to the discussion just a minute because I do have a couple more things to add. I will now ask for public comment on this item, but you can get a chance to hear the item. It's the reporting on event support for SRT-VIA. I'm welcome by the way. Then move on to board member discussion. Recording secretary, can you please provide instructions for public comments? Yes. So if you're attending in person and wish to make a comment, please raise your hand. I'm seeing no hands raised. Okay. So any further discussion? So yeah, so we revamped the event support program because we went ahead and combined it with the community promotions portion of the funding that happens through that program. And we also decided to go with an online application process instead of the paper copies that were submitted. Sometimes it would be submitted late. And then we also moved the process to a more internal strategy. Prior to that, board members used to do sort of a run Robin and vote in a public setting. And we're just trying it this way. It's been pretty successful thus far and we're now about to close the second cycle. I don't know how many applications we have received but I imagine there must be quite a lot. And then those will be once again, assessed by the internal staff and business center of staff. There is a criteria and the eligibility has to do with the event needs to happen in Santa Rosa. I think there were two or three events in the past that would happen outside Santa Rosa. It needs to create overnight stays, some of the funding needs to be spent for marketing and it's again to promote economic vitality, placemaking and so on. So they can also be a nonprofit or not a nonprofit whereas in four committee promotions they all need to be nonprofit organizations. So hypothetically, excuse me, if... Let's say country summer. Requested a million dollars for a weekend that Santa Rosa sold out anyways. Could they still hypothetically receive up to 50%? Or is there some sort of safeguard in place? Yeah, if our staff, I guess, no, I don't... Because they typically... I guess we don't have a... We don't say there's a cap on it, but we do discuss it. We not only do we just look at the numbers, based on the criteria and the scores, then we didn't have a discussion. It's also based on how much funding there is. There's only $100,000 and there's other applications in line and country summer is asking for $100,000. Well, I remember in years past some organizations would ask for an absorber amount of money and others, not so much. That's what we say up to. And then are you tracking... And I always have been an issue in the past where we've tried to get the numbers. The roommates that are actually consumed at the hotels for these events and then kind of put some weight on that for next year when they ask. Yeah, yeah, and I kind of started digging into that these last few weeks after I started looking at all the event recaps just to kind of get a gauge better, because and that's the other reason that I wanted them to give more information on the recap that relates to the overnight stays because yeah, I can look into it, but I can't get like a super accurate number, you know? So I think that there's a better way to do that in the future for sure. And I definitely plan to dig into that a little bit more. Yeah, and I would agree with that because it's just good to show the numbers, but I remember that on the application, and I think even on the new online application, they do an estimate or maybe not, but then on the recap, I never saw many other recaps. Yeah, look at the million hotel nights stays, and I never see them. It's kind of hard to really get a solid number though. I mean, so like country summer, for example, or they all have a link to all of our hotels from their website. And so you never know how many people are going to be booking outside of it, but we can at least get them to say, you had this many click-throughs from your website, and we know the country summer website gets a lot of hits, and so maybe they don't book that day, but at least it's getting visibility. So there's other ways to gauge the success of the event. I know on the hotel end, at least at my property, we can set up a code in the system, especially if we're offering them a special rate. And then after that weekend or whatever, we can look and see how many roommates were consumed with that discount. Yeah, exactly. And I have a meeting with the country summer and amateur next week actually, and so I want to talk to them more about ways that we could do something like that so we can get a better gauge of how successful it was for our hotel, so yeah. Yeah, thank you. All right, any further discussion? All right, well thank you, Janelle, and thank you everyone. We will now move on to the next item. On the agenda, so we have 4.2. I type a little reactivation at the Thurstreet Cinema site and we have a discussion of a proposed project to reactivate the Thurstreet Cinema site to a hybrid conference slash performing art center. We have here presenting board member, Hufu Trail, CEO of Hotel E. And our house. Thank you. Yes, thanks. Well, this is just an informational item. I wrote a brief memo about this. I think we all know that that cinema site, the cinema six site has been vacant for a fair number of years now since early in the pandemic. It's deteriorating, it's a mess. It's been owned by the same party since they bought it out of foreclosure back in 2011 from a developer who went bust. And it was operated, of course, as a cinema by the Tokini Center of Entertainment Group that owns the Roxy for a period of time. And now it's empty. So thinking about the site, it occurred to me that here we've got in the middle of Santa Rosa next to a parking garage right on Third Street, surrounded by restaurants. A building or a site that can be turned into additional conference center space, which is generally we're conscious of, we need more of that. And also in the kind of hybrid also for some performing art space. I know Dan Fenton of JLL actually, and I had discussed with him his views about that last month. And he said the state of the art is to do hybrid programs so that you maximize the amount of usage space, maximize the number of people coming in. So we have an unbinding memorandum of understanding with the owner. This isn't going to be a development project of my company. I'm really acting more pro bono on behalf of downtown and potentially other hoteliers because obviously this would not only benefit downtown if it was successful at benefit hoteliers generally. And there will be some kind of operating nonprofit, but there has to be due diligence. It's very complex. Is can the building be adapted to this purpose? We, it appears that the ceilings are high enough to serve as on a performing arts basis. That's good. We can assume that the rest of the building would have to be gutted and reconstructed to meet current energy and structural standards. Could on the other hand, the building simply be knocked down and a whole new building built there. Would that be a better way to do it? Don't know. It could be. The zoning allows you to do almost anything with that property in a very intense way. We don't know that. We don't know who would operate it, although I have had some conversations with a member of the executive committee of LBC. And there will be some additional conversations with them and it could be that they could be not a less see, but an operator as a satellite center for LBC. Don't know. And then there's the whole issue of financing viability. This is a quasi public kind of a project. These are traditionally supported through public grants, other public sources of income, including hotel, hotel tax dollars. You know, like Monterey, when they redid their center, some 40,000 square feet down there, they restructured their TOT down there, as you guys may already know. And the farther away you were from the attraction, the less you paid as the assessment basis, there being if you're right next to it, like presumably a hotel would pay more than anybody else would, for instance. But we don't know. And there is no proposal that I'm making in front of the board here today. I just wanted folks to be aware, transparently of what was going on. The city staff is generally aware, but and a couple council members kind of like the idea. The chamber board took this up yesterday as a potential action to provide the refundable deposit, which is $30,000 on the lease. And the general discussion was very positive. So if when the lease is signed and reviewed, then this non-refundable deposit would probably be used. And it's totally refundable during a six-month due diligence. In effect, we all have a six-month free look at this property for six months without having to pay the existing owner anything. The due diligence period, though. You know, I mean, it's gonna cost probably at least $100,000 worth of costs between engineers, feasibility, study, and so on. And I'm not recommending that that due diligence period be kicked in until the sources to pay it is identified and committed. At some point it could be back in front of this board to talk about that. So that's what I wanted to pass on. There are a few people in the community who are generally aware of this. I already got a call from one person who wanted the ability to put their entity into the performing arts part. And it's way premature to be making those commitments. And I'm also a little concerned because honestly, if it's a performing arts center, it needs to have enough half that it can at least attract second-tier headliners who would be coming to town from outside the town. Otherwise it's not gonna have any bed nights for us, basically. It'll be a nice attraction, but it won't have bed nights. So we'll see. So it's open for questions or conversation, whatever. Do we know how much seating or space would be available like if it was turned into a performing arts center? Yeah, we don't really know. I think there's some standard ratios of square feet and seating when you take the common areas. The ground floor is 20,000 feet. The rest of it is a mezzanine. And so, I mean, in theory, you might hit as much as 1,200 could be seated. But it has to be adaptable to break down into smaller spaces too. And then there's the problem of, although you have a hybrid space, how do you make both conferences and performances physically compatible within the space? Because conferences can't just be a bunch of chairs. Sometimes they can't be for lectures, but you need more flexibility in that. People, designers have created these adaptable spaces in which literally the whole seating configuration mechanically can change, but that's very expensive. Now, and also then the question is, even if you have 1,200, is that enough? I mean, this is outside my bailout, I don't know. Are there any other questions for a member of the trial on the board? Just questions, okay. There'll be room for a little further discussions, but I'm gonna go to the public. I will now ask for public comments on this item, then move on to the board for the discussion. Recording secretary, can you please provide instructions for public comment? If you're attending in person and wish to make a comment, please raise your hand. So, would the entire cinema site be changed? Is there isn't a proposal yet? Well, it's vacant right now. Completed? Nothing is going on inside it. The building isn't operating, it's just a building that's empty. The Roxy statement? No, it's not the Roxy. It's the old Cinema Six property, which is off of Third Street, between what used to be the Ale Works restaurant and La Fondita. It's kind of tucked back in there as a building. Yeah, you wouldn't notice it unless you knew it was there. Do you think it'll most likely be used for something involving tourism or just be changed into a building that will be used by the people in San Jose? Well, a conference center and performing arts center would be designed to benefit the people who live here and also the hotels that attract people to stay here, which has an economic effect for the whole city. So it's a community benefit project as well as an economic one. Any other questions? You also state your name and last name for the record. Oh, Marta, alright. I'm not sure if she reached our three minutes, but... Okay, any further discussion? Thanks for that. Thanks for the update, you. It's very exciting. I can see how it comes on. Yeah, and if I may, I did... There was a fellow or there's a party that was interested in looking at the B of A building with the notion of perhaps turning that into some sort of entertainment center slash nightclub. But then they figure the numbers didn't match in the end, but I think they're still looking around for other areas that would be happy to give you their contact information in the event that they would be willing to support something like this. Probably doesn't fit in this building, but if they're a good user that can be fitted in downtown somewhere, that would be a good thing. Right. Yeah, so if you want to send that way or send it, I can send it around and see. Yeah. Todd, do you have your hand up? I was just wondering if is it Santa Rosa has had any inquiries like for events or for our area that that space we could actually use to draw people into the area for conferences and stuff. I mean, is it something that we don't currently have? I can't think of anything. I will say that, yeah, I mean, we definitely turn away RFPs for larger meetings because really we just have the Hyatt and Flamingo that can handle that size. Right. Or Flamingo, I don't know that many people, but yeah, so they would go to hotels outside of Santa Rosa. So Sonoma County Tourism usually will take over. Take over. Yeah. So specifically, I can't think of any of it off the top of my head, but definitely, you know, large conferences like that. Event-wise, you know, like more performing arts, music, sports, that sort of thing that we would get, we would use, we generally are going out to get, you know, to jump in business with them, you know, on the various platforms that we use, like this wouldn't be sports obviously, but you know, we have different platforms like Play Easy, event that we're, you know, we're just going out and just kind of like looking for events that are looking for venues. Right. So then it would open that up for us to be able to start looking at, for more events. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. So instead of them coming to us, we'd be able to go down. Right. Thank you. At the chamber discussion on this, that did came up. I mean, and Peter has mentioned to me before that there are organizations that come his way, that we simply can't deal with. They're not, they're even too big for the Hyatt deal with them. And Hyatt does have some capacity, of course, and the Flamingo, but not, you know, not a, you know, a Dennis convention from Evansville, a research convention. And Alicia Benson from Keysight was saying yesterday at the meeting, which is very excited about this because she said, Keysight typically has annual meetings of, of about a thousand people, the great majority of them engineers. And they struggle sometimes to know where to put it. Sometimes they put it down in the fairgrounds of all places. And then the people kind of, many of them don't even stay down here. They just drive. Her view is that a place like that, they would sell out and take that whole thing. They would probably double their participation because demographically, you know, the 32 year old engineers don't necessarily want to go to these things anyway, to be in an area where you can go right out and have a drink, coffee, get some entertainment and so on. Suddenly it's attractive. And the leisure part of it to bring the family. Yeah, precisely. So I think there could be a big impact, but we would have to feasibility study to really see. So a lot of information right across the street of the chamber of people who've made inquiries of the last 10 years, I'm sure could get extracted to be able to help see. I could look at the database. And so fortunately, the city's this size doesn't really have a large facility, you know, conference center, the Hyatt Flamingo are the usual ones that a lot of people attend or pick, but in terms of capacity, there is a challenge there. And the, yeah, the fairgrounds, although it offers a lot of space, you know, that site is somewhat outdated and it's unfortunate when, yeah. And then we have the city of Stockton, for example, which is comparable somewhat, you know, city. They do have a nice conference center, entertainment center, public cars. And it's far more achievable than a full blown. Yeah. The convention center, obviously, you know, which we know that some of the kind of tourism has a feasibility study to look into that. Very hard to see how that's going to work in my opinion, but this might. The other thing I should mention too, that I'm really conscious of at this site, which after all is just, you know, like 600 feet from us that direction is also essentially adjacent to the square. And the square was originally designed by, you know, by former city managers very strong on this to lay it out in such a way that it could act as an outdoor performance space also. So you begin to see if you've got this indoor facility right there, you might be able to do festivals that include indoor and outdoor functions. And suddenly you might have the chance to have a cultural stamp on Santa Rosa's, you know, similar to Ashland or something like that. And suddenly you're going to get a lot more people coming our way. So on that topic, not to open up a can of worms here, but I have had event promoters come to us and want to host large festival type events on the square. But there it come with the square is that we can't, we can't close it off, right? So they can't do ticketed sales. So they wouldn't, it would be difficult for them to generate income. So just to throw it out there. But that's a policy decision. There might be a way to actually do that. I just thought I'd throw it out of this group because I know there's, you know, yeah, just, there's been a couple. It's important policy question when the time comes. Yeah, absolutely. And the fact is, if it's a performance, even if you're ticketed, I mean, what do you do? I mean, if you're sitting in a bench, you know, just on the other side of the fence, you know, I think it's more about the experience too. They can, you know, they've talked about different sort of, you know, like a bottle rock type of thing, right? Precisely. Precisely. Yeah. Yeah. Well, there are big events and, you know, public spaces that were all around the state and are ticketed. So, yeah, there's a way to solve the problem. I believe it. It was, they kind of came, you know, late in the game, they wanted to do it this year, but, you know, but just for future thought, if they come back. Sure. Thank you. Member for trial for that great information. We'd like to hear an update perhaps this meeting. When our future meeting. Yeah, I'll keep it updated in the next meeting too. And if anything comes up before that else, I know that that can be distributed to board members. Excellent. All right. Well, thank you everyone. We will now move on to the next item. The next item is department reports. And we actually ever have department reports. So that leads me to item number six, which is the adjournment of the meeting. So being adjourned. Thank you all very much for attending. Look forward to seeing you in the entire next meeting. Thank you very much.