 How are you doing, Natalie? Well, Eddie, could you hear me? No, now I can't. Oh, sorry. Hi, I said it's my first time eating today. I'm trying to scarf something down. Oh, you're ahead of me. I've been looking at food all day, though. Goodness. Every single time I drive by a restaurant, I bet they got food. I just want to remind counsel that you are live broadcast to the public now. You all made Stephanie mad there. With that, let's go ahead and get rolling. It's 3 o'clock. I recognize a quorum. Madam City Clerk, do you want to call the roll? Council Member Tibbetts. Council Member Schwedhelm. Here. Council Member Sawyer. Here. Council Member Fleming. Here. Council Member Alvarez. Present. Vice Mayor Rogers. Present. Mayor Rogers. Here. And Council Member Tibbetts, have you joined us? OK, let the record show that all council members are present with the exception of Council Member Tibbetts. Thank you, Stephanie. And Council Member Tibbetts is unlikely to join us this evening. But if he gets a chance, I'm sure he will pop on. Before we get into our study session, I did want to do some quick housekeeping reminders for council members. Please remember to stay muted on Zoom unless you are speaking. We have the ability to unmute ourselves if we need to. But go ahead and make sure that we do it at the appropriate times. Staff will also remain muted until they need to speak. For members of the public who've joined the meeting, they'll be participating as attendees on the Zoom. That means that the microphone and camera will also be muted until the clerk asks them to unmute and sends that request during public comment. You'll only be able to view the panelists for each of the items during the meeting. And so please wait until you are called on to speak. If you're calling in from a telephone and choose to speak during the public comment portion of today's agenda, privacy concerns from the host, we will be renaming you by the last four of your phone number. So that way, the public can't call you back and leave comments for you related to your public comment. We also want to make sure that folks remember that the city of Santa Rosa is committed to creating a safe and inclusive environment free from disruption. That means that we won't tolerate hate speech or actions towards staff and presenters or the public that are anything but respectful. Folks who violate this will be removed from the meeting. And if we need to, we will immediately end the meeting as well. Madam clerk, do you want to explain how folks can participate in today's meeting during the public comments? Yes, thank you. After each agenda item is presented, the mayor will ask for council comments and then open it up for public comment. The host and 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 public to see. Once all live public comments have been heard, the meeting hosts 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 email e-comment or voice message public comment will not be duplicated, read or play during the meeting. Additionally, there are two public comment periods on today's agenda to speak on non-agenda matters, items 13 and 17. 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. And also if you did provide an email or e-comment by the deadline of 5 p.m. on Monday, your email and e-comments have been uploaded to the website and the city council were afforded your comments. All right, thank you so much. We did not have closed session earlier today. Thankfully, Sue's team had a little bit of a time off. And so we will move on to our study session. Item 3.1, Chief Navarro, I think this is you taking this away. It is, I will do the introduction. Counts, Mayor Rogers. It is 3.1, Santa Rosa Police Department staffing, Ray Navarro, Police Chief Presenting. Good afternoon, Mayor Rogers and members of the city council, Ray Navarro, Chief of Police. This is a department staffing study that we are gonna be presenting today. The, this initial staffing study was provided to the Public Safety Subcommittee meeting back in November. And as a result of that, they requested that the presentation be presented in front of the whole city council. And that's in, that is why we are here today. I'll give you an overview of where we've been and where we're at right now and some of the issues that we're trying to address. The, again, the overview will be of the Police Department staffing. And we will, at the end, this is for your information, we are gonna be making specific decisions based on our staffing this year to address how we focus on Calls for Service and prioritizing issues that come up in the community in regards to safety. Next slide, please. So to begin with, this is a, this is a diagram of our chain of command, provides you a general overview of our Police Department. We have three main areas and then we have a, which we have in divisions and then a fourth division that we've divided up our Police Department into. Our largest is the Field Services Division that is headed by a captain. And that is basically all of our uniformed assignments. So it's our patrol officers that are out on the street, it's our special assignments that are related to uniform patrols such as school resource officers, the, our public information officer, our downtown enforcement team and our traffic bureau. The other piece that is in there is our tactical teams and other collateral assignments that are taken up by people from throughout the department. And that includes our SWAT, H&T, hostage negotiation team, mobile field force, field training officers and so on. We have in our, for our training, for our training teams, those who train our new staff coming on, we have 23 field training officers that are in patrol and they are basically solo officers and then take on a trainee when we are putting somebody through training and basically become the infill instructor to make sure that they're signing off and they're, make sure that our new officers are doing things appropriate legally and meeting the standards of the Police Department. We also have 18 SWAT members, 17 hostage negotiators, 38 mobile field force members. And then we have 10 members for the incident management team, which again are throughout the department, but they come together, and pulled for specific events for such as large scale incidents or emergencies and help plan for those, including what we've seen this year with COVID, the protests and the fires. We also have our administrative vision that has to do with overseas, our admin secretaries and our store specialists and admin analysts. Our technical services division includes all of our dispatchers and records bureau and property evidence and crime analysts. And they do a lot of the work on the, with people coming into the front counter of the Police Department, they work hand in hand with our officers to address reports, get that information over to the district attorney's office or other partners that may need that information. And then we also have our special services division that includes all of our investigative bureaus or investigative bureau and all of our teams, including our domestic violence team. We did have a gang unit, I'll go into that later, narcotics property and our violent crimes team. We have a professional standards bureau and that includes our team that does all of our recruitment testing and testing for our new staff and our training department, which logs over 20,000 hours of training for our entire team, our entire department last year. They also work very closely with our field training officers who again work with our new officers and new staff out on the street. Next slide, please. This slide or this graph provides a visual of our staffing over the last 15 years. As you can see, we've we have seen some dips and since 2006, when we had 281 budgeted positions, 190 sworn positions and 91 civilian, since then we've lost 27 of those positions, including 13 sworn and 14 civilian positions. 2009, there was a significant reduction where we had to cut 23 staff members and there was a direct impact on our services. One of the things that happened in 2009 was our record section went from a 24 hour service to basically business hours. That reduced the ability to get some of the records work done in the middle of the night. It impacted their ability, records ability to support our patrol officers over the night shift hours and take missing persons reports, that sort of thing in the middle of the night. So all of that impact that was reduced went back to our patrol officers for them to work. These cuts included again, both sworn and civilian positions, which impacts all aspects of the department. In the past two years, we've lost, again, several positions. We've cut 12 positions, including in 2019, we had to make some significant cuts in our civilian staffing where we've been trying to increase. That included three community service officers. Those are officers that are, or civilians that are in the field taking traffic accidents and what we call cold reports. So reports that, or a crime may have occurred 12 hours before instead of sending an officer, we would send a community service officer to that. We also had to reduce, take away our research and grant coordinator, a police technician in our records bureau and then one of our police personnel supervisors which handled our recruitment efforts and back in 2019. This particular year, this last year, we couldn't cut anywhere in the areas of civilian personnel. We had to reduce our staffing by four sworn officers and a communication dispatcher and our IT civilian supervisor. We have two IT or three IT technicians. We currently do not have a supervisor for those positions right now. Technology is continuing to be a significant issue for us as we have addressed a radio project, continue to work on our body or camera projects and other technology as they become vital in public safety. In addition to that, we've also frozen two measurill swarm positions that were basically frozen because of the lack of revenue from the measure of tax measure. So with that, we've had to make some difficult decisions on what our staffing is, as we always have done and to do, take care of the critical issues with the reduced staffing that we have. Next slide, please. So this slide gives you an idea of our staffing as it relates to our population over the last 15 years. And as you can see in 2005, our population was 153,000. The estimated population was in 2020 was approximately 175,000. We had 124,000 calls for service in 2005. And the 137,000 was a 137,000 was an estimate. We have, I was told that our dispatch has actually received about 240,000 calls for service in the year 2020. The response to calls this year has decreased because of some of the COVID issues and the reduction of some of the service to protect both the community and our staff from the COVID pandemic. We checked in with our cities playing an economic development team. It's estimated that our population for the city is projected to increase at a growth of about 3.6 over the next five years. We looked at how we respond to calls for service. Some of the things that we look at is how quickly do we get to priority one calls? Those are the fight calls, those emergency calls that we have to get to. In 2019, our calls for service, our ability to get to a priority one call was six minutes and 48 seconds. That's higher than the average for some of the larger agencies in the state. The averages for response times for the larger agencies in the state are anywhere from 5.4 to 5.7 minutes. And so we're definitely above that. And our goal is to get down to less than six minutes on priority one calls. It can take us because we prioritize these with other calls for service that come in that are priority two calls, lower level, they may be as much as 12 minutes. And priority three calls, which are maybe a nuisance call may take as long as 25 minutes to get to that particular call. One of the other things that we are experiencing or will experience when we return back to normal is how do we address contract overtime? In normal circumstances, we have a lot of contract overtime that comes in and we have officers sign up for that. That includes the fair, the Wednesday night market, any other special events that come in such as the Ironman or any bike races that come in. And so we are with the reduced staffing, it becomes more difficult to staff those positions when we have those special assignments or special contract services come up. And the added duties that we take on with our investigations and we'll talk more about this later is, we have more priorities and requirements in our investigations for violent crimes, domestic violence, and just to make sure that we have all the information compiled appropriately so that district attorney can have enough information to determine whether or not to file on a case. Next slide, please. Thank you. So another, so we use a national allocation model to determine our staffing. And basically what this is, is we look at our patrol officers' time, both reactive and ability to be proactive. And we want that to be pretty much a 30-30 split. So 30 minutes are gonna be proactive responding and or dealing with community projects, addressing traffic, traffic complaints, community engagement, that sort of thing. And then 30 minutes will be right reactive time, go into a emergency response call or a call for service where somebody calls 911. In 2018 was our last staffing update, we used three years, 2013, 2015 to 2018 data to create, to look at where we were. And we were right about 31 minutes or 31 and a half minutes on our reactive time. So it wasn't too bad. However, we maintained that particular split by cutting in other areas of the department. So over the last several years, we've been in order to meet that, we have reduced our staffing in several special assignments, which has hampered some of our abilities to be more proactive in several of these different areas. And it's having a direct impact on our investigations and again, proactivity in areas such as quality of life and gangs and traffic. The other thing to note based on our staffing model was that in 2018, there was the recommendation from the staffing study was that we needed to have four additional officers immediately to bring us to 185 sworn staff. And by 2022, which is next year to add an additional three positions for 188 sworn staff. Again, we're currently at 177 positions, sworn positions. In another staffing study that we did for our communication center, which was done in 2015, we used data between 2010 and 2013. It recommended a total of 28 dispatchers and four supervisors. We are not there yet. We have currently 23 dispatch positions and three supervisors allocated within our budget. And then we are looking at ways to change how we do things. We're looking at, we'll get into a little bit more, but we're looking at mental health response, how we respond to those type of calls. We're looking at how we respond to homelessness. But even if we change the way we respond, it's gonna continue. The calls will continue to come in to dispatch and continue to be an impact for them. And again, we anticipate the calls to continue to increase as our population grows and our city becomes more dense in our housing. Next slide, please. This slide here shows Santa Rosa's comparable cities. Basically we compete with these cities and several other jurisdictions within our region for qualified and professional personnel for both sworn and civilian staff. This particular information was based on 2021 data that we pulled from each of these agencies. There's another universally accepted standard to look at staffing for police departments. And that's the number of officers per 1,000. And we're, according to this slide, we are right at about one per 1,000 residents, a little bit lower than some of the other ones and a little higher than two of them. This does not account for the vacant positions that we have, although we have allocated 177 paid positions within our budget. We currently have six officer vacancies. We have two sergeant officer vacancies or two sergeant vacancies. We have four dispatcher vacancies. And we have about 11 of our current staff that are allocated. They're actually in our field training program, which means they are not solo status and they can't take a beat on their own. We also have about 13 sworn staff who are injured and not available to work. So if you take the 11 and the 13 into account plus the vacancies, we have been significantly impacted by our staffing numbers. And then again, the other thing that's not captured in this is the daily time off vacation time off, quarantine time off for the pandemic, sick leave and family leave that all employees, when they have to, all employees have and need to address when they have something come up. Next slide, please. So this slide shows kind of where we are in our, with our investigative units in our collateral assignments. The abbreviations, just so you're aware of what they are, AI are accident investigators, motors of the motorcycles, downtown enforcement team is DET, the SROs are the resource officers for the schools. DBSA is domestic violence, sexual assault, PCI is property crimes, VCI is violent crimes. And then we have gangs and narcotics. We, with the reduction of staffing in our investigations to meet the demands in patrol, it is causing a delay in how we investigate and the ability to go out and do proactive work as investigators. It reduces our ability to address certain services such as dealing with homelessness, violence reduction and community engagement. And all of our teams have been impacted. Just last year, we had, I believe, four homicides. We're seeing violent crimes starting to rise again. We had another recent homicide in this year in January. We suspended our gang crimes team and the gang crimes team and our SRO program were the primary contacts and collaborators with the violence prevention program. Our gang crimes team proactively addressed gang issues and we are now completely reactive to any type of violent crimes related to gangs. We have suspended our SRO program partly due to the COVID, another issue with the measure O and the fact that we don't currently have an MOU in place with the schools. And we've maintained some of the first areas that we have reduced our resources in was in the area of property and in trafficking. We have maintained that reduction as we've gone through the last few years. And again, from a traffic point of view, some of the things that we've had to do this last year, again, due to COVID and staffing, we've reduced our traffic enforcement, which is there's a direct correlation with traffic safety. We had eight fatalities, traffic fatalities last year. And we have an increased, we're having increasing amount of side shows on a regular basis throughout the year and we anticipate that to continue, especially as the weather gets better in the spring and summer. Next slide, please. So this slide provides some data related to how busy we are in our detective units and our clearance rates over the last five years. We've done our clearance rates for part one crimes have reduced a little bit. Our violent crimes, we're continuing to do well because we feel that is a priority. And we've kept our violent crimes team as staffed as we can. And when there's a violent crime, we pull from our other detective assignments to make sure that they're getting assistance in areas of going out and doing follow ups, surveillances, that sort of thing to make sure that we're doing what we can to clear those violent crime rates. We have been significantly impacted in the area of property crimes. And that is one of the areas which we see over and over with emails and concerns coming in as it involves stolen vehicles, package thefts, schemes that are going on through the internet, that sort of thing. And so we've had a significant decrease in the ability to clear those crimes. We have tried to maintain our domestic violence sexual assault team as much as possible. So because that is a priority for us. However, if every time we have a reduction and I believe we have one, we're down one detective right now, any reduction there impacts our ability to do proactive enforcement and investigations on crimes such as online predators. And then also help follow up with some of the domestic violence calls that we get on a regular basis. And again, it limits our abilities to be able to do more proactive work in the area of probation and parole contacts. Next slide, please. This particular slide shows where we are on, or just gives you an idea of what we deal with from a worker's comp injury and disability retirements as we've gone through the last several years. We have seen an increase in disability retirements. We have eight last year. And again, we currently have, we average, you know, we're in the 40s usually with workers comp claims on any given year. And again, right now we have 13 sworn officers that are out on injury. We have two civilian officers who are out on injury. And we have additional officers, four officers that are out on some other type of FMLA stats. And so it does impact our ability to work and do our investigations and address calls for service in patrol. The other thing that that doesn't do is doesn't, this doesn't include any of the quarantining that we're doing this last year, which is it definitely, that fluctuates. It'll, you know, we'll get certain times where it may spike where we're, you know, we come across an exposure in patrol and we'll have to quarantine a group, maybe a group of officers at given time. And those will happen from, it just depends on week to week on when, who we're contacting out on the street and what's happening. Next slide, please. So we did a internal assessment for both internal and external factors that are gonna be impacting, that are impacting our department. And as you can see our strengths, I think that, you know, we, our teams, we have always relied on experience and, you know, dedication from our teams and our individuals here to go out and do the job that they have signed up to do. We have done a really good job at holding onto people for a long time. We, you know, we see some of that changing and we'll get into that in a bit. We've done a very good job at cross training and mentoring. Again, a lot of our collateral assignments, such as the incident management team and some of the other training, we cross-designate people and have them trained so they're working multiple assignments and they can be moved from one place to another. And, you know, we have, again, a team of dedicated employees who, you know, when we have an emergency, we call them out and they put a different hat on and they switch from an investigator to somebody who is responding to an evacuation or to an emergency crisis. We do a very good job at recruiting people, qualified people. We, I think that's something that we've always taken pride in and we try not, you know, we don't wanna lower our standards. We wanna continue to hire the most qualified and diverse group of individuals as we take on these continuous challenges. With, as far as weaknesses go, our staffing, again, has been a struggle. We have lost several positions, which, again, impacts, as we've talked about, our ability to do our work, some of the proactive work that we do, our investigative work, it reduces the staffing and investigations, which has an impact on recruitment. Everybody that I've spoken with a lateral that we've been able to hire over the last year and a half, which is, we've had about four people, each one of them had told me that, you know, they're coming here because they wanna come here for the opportunities, the opportunity to move to a special assignment sometime in the future and be able to do something different. And so with reduced staffing and investigations, that becomes more difficult to do. We have a reduced, again, our reduced budget, it becomes, you know, we can't increase our staffing to meet the needs of the growing population and the growing calls for service. We are seeing more people leaving right now. I've had just two people leave in the last two months who have left that we're not of retirement age and left to go to other departments. We have to meet mandates in a timely manner. So whether that's an investigation or dealing with a public records act or dealing with our bodymore camera footage, that's a significant hit to our staff. The bodymore camera project that we have has been very important to us and very valuable, but that expands or extends the time on a call for service to be able to properly label that evidence and be able to get that downloaded before they go on to the next call or go off of their shift. And then just being able to maximize, not being able to maximize technology for the efficiency. All technology is expensive and we are, you know, when our equipment has been, our equipment budget has been reduced as have our staffing. And then all of this leads to morale. I reported out to our Public Safety Subcommittee in November that our morale has dropped. We do have, we have poor morale, a lot of that goes back to the things that we just talked about, the staffing, the inability to have opportunities, the increased mandates on our staff, and there's a perception that they are supported with the last, definitely over this last year and with budgetary issues and compensation. And so we did take a, we did do a survey and we did get that feedback from our staff and those are some of the areas that they look, they're telling us is the problem or the issue with our morale right now. Some of the opportunities that we have as we go forward, we always want to look at what can we do better and what can we continue to do? We have an opportunity to continue to work with our nonprofit partners. Again, we're looking in the area of mental health and homeless response. We will be giving an update tomorrow at the Public Safety Subcommittee meeting on that, but we are in the final stages of getting a final contract written for a consultant with Kahootz and moving forward with that to get something moving in that end and we'll be working with our nonprofit partners to see how we can get civilians to respond to some of these calls for service. It's important to have a staffing study come up. Again, it's been a few years since we've had one, but that is a, it's a very expensive item that can cost up to $15,000 to have a staff quality staffing study done. We have employee wellness programs to work on morale. We've, we have, we've worked with the Sixth Foundation. We've worked with our EAP resiliency first and we have, again, our wellness solutions that helps us in some, in the different areas, both physical and mental wellbeing to try to prepare our staff to be ready to help other people when in crisis. We have, we are looking at some consolidation of services. Those can be maybe some, it may be out of ways, but one of the things that we've looked into and have had some initial discussions about are how do we consolidate maybe dispatch and maybe other areas that we can work with other agencies to help consolidate some of those resources. We are also putting together a, or continuing to work with recruitment. I'll touch on that in just a bit. Community engagement, especially with this year, there's, we have to take the opportunity right now to move forward and work with our community and listen to the community and have those, that open dialogue. I'm excited about the SEED Collaborative and the work that we're gonna be doing as a city and we're gonna be involved in that. And then the other thing that we're doing now is we're taking the opportunity to look at our calls for service and evaluating which calls will be impacted this year based on our reduction in staff. Again, challenges that we're looking at, you know, we're looking at competing with other agencies throughout the region based on our, for recruitment. We have, you know, we're looking at the increasing mandates, the increased housing density and population as we grow, as we rebuild in the fire areas and then also build up some of these high density areas in the downtown area. And we're seeing a lot of high density housing in like off of Petaluma Hill Road and also in the Northwest section of the city. Natural disasters, COVID fires, that's always gonna continue to be a challenge. You know, we have to, it takes every single person to go out to those emergencies and if we don't have the number of staffing that we should have, it impacts our ability to evacuate people in a timely manner. One of the, that was seen this last glass fire when, you know, there were challenges with getting people out of the Oakmont during the glass fire. And then also dealing with COVID issues and then also major incidents, any other major incidents that come forward in the future. We have, there's a public perception of policing that is, you know, again, we have, we are dealing with that. We are looking at how we can continue to do better as a department. We are looking at what's going on in other departments throughout the nation and how that impacts us. And we, every opportunity we have when there's a significant incident, we look at our policies and procedures, see if we need to make any particular changes. But as that continues to be one of those topics right now, that's gonna be a continued challenge and how do we continue to meet there, meet the public and work with them, work with the public in the next year. Attrition is gonna be a huge challenge for us. Again, we have 25 sworn staff members who are eligible to retire this next year. And so, you know, the number of people that were getting off of training, it's gonna help us immediately, but then we're gonna anticipate another huge reduction as we go through the next year or two. And then it's difficult to address those impacts with recruiting, new recruits and putting them through the academy. And we'll talk about that. And again, increased population and the calls for services, they come along. Next slide, please. So again, this is information on our recruitment. We've done a tremendous amount of work in the area of recruitment. What we have found is in public safety or at least in our department, approximately one out of every three people pass our background. And so that's what we have a standard in place. And so we have, we try to get very high caliber people to come here to serve our community. And it's important to understand when we do recruit people for a brand new officer. So somebody who's never been an officer anywhere else, the entire process from the opening of a recruitment to the end of their field training program could take up to 18 months. That's going through the application, the recruitment, the initial training academy and then the field training that they have to go through. And then there's another 18 months of probationary period that employees go through to make sure that they're meeting the mission, vision and values and the standards of our department. Again, we have six officers, two sergeants and four dispatchers that currently vacant 25 staff that are going to eligible to retire. And then we also include, there's included or in addition to that, we have dispatchers who we believe will be leaving as well. So some of the things that we've done, again, we've updated our materials. We have updated our job announcements, our job descriptions for several of our positions. In the area of dispatch, we are utilizing a new testing platform called Critical which helps us become more efficient and better evaluate somebody to come in and be a dispatcher. We've tried to be innovative in our advertising. We've utilized social media including Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. We've advertised or we've used interactive stories and videos in the past year to highlight some of our new recruits and why they come here. We no longer have a marketing and outreach coordinator, but when we had one, we used that position to help us with a recruitment tool last year in 2019. We've advertised on specific job websites, both professional and also educational. We had an officer who came up with an idea of running with a recruiter about a year and a half ago where we went out with applicants, ran three miles and gave them an opportunity to talk to the officers and myself on what is being an officer like and what to expect and how to best prepare for being a police officer. We've also worked with local colleges, the Santa Rosa Junior College, Sonoma State University and with our last recruitment that just closed a week and a half ago, I believe. We, I reached out to 10,000 degrees to get their help and ask them to push out the information throughout the debate area. And so we've done a lot of work there. The other thing that we're doing is as we've closed the recruitment, we are setting up opportunities for the people going through the recruitment process to meet with our staff, to talk about each level of the recruitment process to help them prepare as they go through so they're not doing it on their own, to help them be more successful. And the last thing I just wanna say about recruitment, on a regular basis in the past, we had regularly received, you know, 500 applications for each job recruitment that we've done. Over the last three recruitments for officers, we have received less than 200 applications each of those three times. The last one that just closed, we received 158 applications for the police officer training position. We don't currently have anybody in the process of, for laterals coming from other agencies. That's a significant concern for us. There's a lot of issues. Number one, morale, you know, we, you know, everybody has, we all have networks. We all, you know, and everybody talks and with other agencies, there's a lot of issues with COVID. There's a lot of issues with the economic climate right now and not a lot of people wanna move. And, you know, when you do move, coming into Sedoma County can be a significant issue with the economic constraints for employees who try to make that move. So again, those are some of the things that we're trying to do within our recruitment and we are looking forward to other ideas and be working with, again, our partners in the community to try to continue in that particular area. Next slide, please. Again, I'm here for any questions. We have, this has been really the, this has been for your edification. So you're aware of the police department staffing over the years, where we are right now and to let you know that, you know, we are having significant issues in our staffing. A lot of it, again, is tied to economics, to our ability to do different assignments and then also compensation that has been impacted by the economy. And then also to let you know that we will be looking at calls for service and how that's gonna impact what's gonna be taken away, what we're not gonna be able to do. We're in the middle of that right now. And to let you know, we're working on that based on our priorities and the priorities from city council. Council Member Sawyer, see your hand up. Thank you, Chief. Two questions, they're both related. I'm curious about exit interviews and those officers that are leaving that are not of retirement age and that are leaving to go to other organizations. And I'd be curious how much of that we were tracking and what the, you may have already mentioned some of the reasons why we might be losing some of our officers. The other thing is if there is any way, especially at a job fair, where you hand out some material to a prospective employee and to find out why they didn't choose Santa Rosa or what they had heard or what, you know, some of those the unknowns that are a bit mysterious and that kind of information of course would be much more difficult to gather together than an exit interview. But I'm wondering if there's any way to ascertain why we are 300 applicants short of where we had been before. Yeah, those are very good questions, sir. I can tell you that a couple of years ago, I went to the Latino State of the Union down it. It was at Sonoma State, believe it was in 2019. And there was a lot of discussion about how the big move right now was to be your own boss, right? To be an entrepreneur. And, you know, it is difficult to hire people to, you know, come work for the police department where you get to work birthdays, holidays and, you know, you're up all night, you know, at the beginning of your career. So it's, you know, those are always things that has been a challenge to us. The exit interviews, I can tell you that the exit interviews that I, when I've spoken with people who've chosen to leave, there is people are upset with the current climate in California as a whole, you know, there are some people that they're, there are some people who are leaving for, you know, because they don't feel that this is an appropriate place for, or they can't, they don't feel that they can raise your families here and they're moving to other areas. So, and then on the other question that you had, it is difficult to reach out and ask people, why aren't you putting in applying for this job? And so, again, that's why we're trying to reach out with the nonprofits and with the educators, our education institutions. And that's something that we can work on and we can try to get that information because I don't know what that information is. Thanks, Chief. If we do get that though, I'd definitely be happy to report back out if we do learn of what that is. Well, you know, we know that housing is very expensive. There are some obvious answers, but I'm a little in some ways more interested because those are always issues in Sonoma County or have been for decades. I'm a little curious as to those reasons that may be a little bit more nuanced, which are of course very difficult to obtain. So, I appreciate that. Yeah, so the exit interviews don't tell me, you know, people aren't coming here for, you know, the economic reasons, right? But what I've heard, and again, it is anecdotal, is that people don't want to make the move. And when we've seen, you know, the some of the staff that have come from other departments over the last year, it's, there has been a, I'm going to apply, I'm going to, there's been some delay. And then we move forward because it is, it's a very difficult decision to be able to move from one area of California into Sonoma County and try to figure out, how are you going to do that? And so that is, I have heard that, that is one of the things that is constantly in people's minds when they're, when they're trying to make that decision. Okay, thanks, Chief. Vice Mayor. Thank you, Chief, for the report. I did have a couple of questions. You may not know the answer, but I was curious to know the rate of crime in the cities that were compared on slide six out of the 12 and where we stand with the crime rates. So if you have to get back to me, that's fine, but I was interested in knowing that. And with us looking at the Kahootz model, how many of the calls for service may be diverted with that model in place that the PD would not have to respond to? I'm sorry, yeah, was there anything else, ma'am? Oh, I have a list. If you can answer that one first. So those, so first of all, I don't have the crime rates for the other comparable cities. We can see what we can try to pull those up and get you those at a later date. And the other question was regarding Kahootz. We don't know yet. It's a different, you know, we can try to compare what's going on up in Oregon. And the closest we can come, it's, you know, they have told us that they can, they have given up about three to 5% of their calls for service. And again, they have, they still go to mental health crisis calls their officers do. Sometimes they go with Kahootz. Sometimes they don't go with them and then call them later, but ultimately it ends up being about three to 5% of their calls can get diverted over to Kahootz. We're hoping that we can be in that same area. You know, we're trying to look at, in addition to mental health crisis, we're also looking at, you know, can we address some of the homeless issues with Kahootz, with the Kahootz model? And the other piece of that is, are we gonna be able to do something that is, you know, 24 hours a day, seven days a week? You know, how many, you know, and the larger, the larger the scale, the more expensive it's going to be. So that's the other piece, right? So the larger, the larger it is, they may be able to take on more calls for service. And so we're trying to identify how we get it started and how do we grow it. That's it. And then also I wanted to know with, well that this kind of answers it, I guess a little bit, but with having the Kahootz or a model similar to, with that free up positions and maybe looking at not having the SROs for right now, we're not using them. So would that free up for people to go out in the officers to go out in the field? Or I mean, I still know there's a deficit. Yeah. So right now what we're doing with the SROs, we, two of those have been frozen because of measure row. So they're vacant positions. The other three have been reallocated back to patrol to meet the, to help meet the needs in patrol. So right now they're, so those staffing positions are needed to answer calls for service. And again, we are, you know, the information, based on the data that we have over the years and the calls for service that we're getting, and the recommendations from the study that we did in 2018, we are nine positions behind where we should be starting next year. And that's just from a sworn officer position. Okay. And this is my last question, everyone. Sorry. So the marketing and outreach coordinator, was that one of the positions that was eliminated? And do we feel like with our recruitment issues that that would be a position that would help assist us with recruitment or? There was a, there was some movement within the city organization and our marketing and outreach coordinator, which was a halftime position, was moved over to the city and marketing and outreach team or marketing team. And there's currently a team for the city that handles city-wide resources. And they assist with, you know, we have our own PI, Press Information Officer, Public Information Officer. We have staff who have a collateral as engagement officers, which we want to use. And they, the marketing team for the city, we speak with them on a weekly basis and let them know, you know, these are the needs that we have and, you know, if they can help us out, they will. There are times where, you know, there's so many things going on in the city, such as some of our major emergencies, they've got their hands full too. So long answer to that, but the position was moved to another city department. Thank you. Is that it, Madam Vice Mayor? All right, Council Member Fleming. But go ahead and hit the unmute button. Can anybody else hear? All right, Council Member, do you want to restart your microphone and we'll go on to Council Member Schwedhelm and then come back to you. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Chief, I have a question on slide four where you're talking about the staffing and the number of calls for service, you know, going back, obviously the big reduction in officers was in 2009 with a great recession. But I know some policing strategies have changed since 2005 that are represented here, namely, you know, two things, I know the thoroughness of the domestic violence investigations and the body-worn cameras because all calls for service are not created equal. Can you talk a little bit about the differences in what officers are required to do in 2021 that maybe they weren't required to do in 2005? Yeah, that's a good question, sir. We have, you know, with changes in laws, there's been a lot of additional requirements and I think the biggest thing is, you know, with every, you know, with every report that we do, there's some type of form that's attached or some type of either admonishment or notification that we have to provide to a victim or a witness or a suspect. And we've, you know, so there's more and more paperwork that we have to go through, you know, some of the things that have changed for the positive as far as victims' rights, we have to make sure that we're getting that information to the victims, but it does take more time to go through some of this, some of these processes, which extends the time on several of these calls. The other thing that has changed over the years is there has been a change in different laws that have, you know, impact who goes to jail, who doesn't go to jail for a particular violation, and then also for, you know, again, how we, you know, the changes in laws and what's needed for reports. And so, you know, we have to become, you know, when there's a change in law, as far as a district attorney needs something extra for a report or it needs to be more, you know, based on a specific law, then we have to provide that information in the report. And so it's not a, it's not assumed anymore. So we have to, you know, some of the changes over the years have been, you know, we don't just take a domestic violence report based on a victim and a suspect comment. We're reaching out and we're making contacts with potential witnesses and neighbors sometimes and continuing that because the level of information is needed is much more. With the area of Bidingmore cameras, we instituted Bidingmore cameras in 2015. That has been a tremendous help for us in the field to address not only evidence, but also, you know, our, you know, complaints. We saw complaints go down once we received Bidingmore cameras. But everybody more camera is not, it's not a, it's not an hour for hour. So, you know, you turn on your Bidingmore camera, everything is, we require the cameras to be on when you're out on the call for service. And it takes a significant amount of time to go through, to look at that information because that helps us write the reports. And also to make sure that we're labeling correctly, marking certain areas in the footage. So we can help the district attorney and direct them to a certain time where, okay, this was said or this particular information is critical in your, in the case when you're determining what to do with the filing. And so all of that is put on the officer's shoulder. And so it takes a significant amount of time to complete the reports and to complete each call for service. And that takes you out of service, which impacts our ability to address calls for service in patrol. So it's, you know, we had, with the protests, we had over 3,000 hours of Bidingmore camera footage. And so that's the kind of, you know, and we, again, our footage, our cameras are rolling with every call that we go to on a daily basis. A few weeks ago was a very busy week. We had over 300 calls for service, you know, over the weekend. And it was just, that's, we do, you know, we average patrol going out to calls on an annual basis, going up to 140 calls for service, 140,000 calls for service on a normal year. And then, you know, it's just, you know, each one of those compounds, the time off the street. Right. And so those activities that you just described, downloading Bidingmore cameras right in the reports, getting information, DA's office, that all goes within the 30 minutes of what you said on slide five, the 30 minutes, an hour of reactive time, not the proactive time, correct? It's on that side of the equation. That's correct. So anytime you have a call for service, so you get a call for service and you go to a domestic violence call, that all of that time is allocated into the reactive time. Okay. And then all the other things, the proactive things, meeting, what a community means, community members doing traffic enforcement. That's all on the 30 minutes of proactive allocation time, correct? That's correct. Okay. Thank you. Council Member Fleming. Can you hear me now? Thank you. You know, Chief, I was gonna thank you for your report and also ask you dovetailing on what Council Member Schwedhelm asked, how do you define the difference with those of us who don't live and breathe this stuff, reactive versus proactive? Yeah. So the reactive, again, is just in simple terms, somebody calls 911 or calls about a particular issue, right? It could be a theft, could be a fight, could be a sideshow. And that call for service goes to patrol and they're told there's a specific crime at a specific place and we respond to that call. That's a reactive call for service. Proactive call is, it's basically self-generated. It's you are out doing traffic enforcement because you're reactive because it may be a beat project or a complaint, but the dispatch did not send you to that. So you may have been directed by a supervisor to go work in a particular area to reduce the traffic issues in that area. And so that would be a proactive engagement. Community engagement is also proactive time. And again, if you're going to a meeting, that sort of thing, that's gonna be proactive. So anything that we're self-initiated, that is proactive. How do you classify processing body and orange camera footage as reactive or proactive? Well, again, I'll have to get confirmation, but if it's basically, if it's based off of your reactive or your call for service, which is a reactive call, like a domestic violence, that's going into your reactive time. Thank you. That's helpful to understand. And then I wanted to, first of all, I know during our public safety subcommittee, I asked about survey data. So thank you for following up and conducting a survey. I wanted to dig into that and see if there was any additional info or information on the specifics. Like you listed a number of areas that were contributing to challenges in recruiting both new recruits and laterals. And one of the benefits we had of this meeting over the last one is that you've conducted your provenance that we can say that we know that it is not just how things were before COVID, it's how things are now. And so I'm curious to know if you can add any more detail or color to what perhaps the most impactful factors were in the challenges of recruiting, whether the number one thing is compensation or opportunities or if the community doesn't feel supported by the council in particular, what are the things that are really operationally impacting you in building our force? So let's, so there are, there's a few things that's impacted morale significantly. Again, you've mentioned a few of them. Number one, there is the compensation aspect of it. There's been, there's, when you talk about pay and benefits, that's a significant piece for our staff. Again, the other piece of it is the lack of opportunities here because of our staffing, we have to take away some of our special assignments. And so there's a lack of opportunities and that's very difficult for us. There were a couple of other ones that I'm trying to think of, but I think the biggest one is lack of support right now. We have had a significant issue with the perception, the perception not having support from, and it was told that the information from the survey is lack of support from the community, lack of support from city leaders. And those are very, have been very specific. And that comes out as based either from lack of statements or compensation or not, I mean, just general acknowledgement. And I just want to say about that, we did sign up to be officers, but we're also human beings. And I know, I don't know what people are saying in public comment, but we do have, we have a dedicated and professional staff here at the Santa Rosa Police Department. They do their day in and day out. And it becomes very difficult when there is that, there is a feeling that there is no support on what they're doing. So, the concern is, are we supported when we're going out and arresting people when we have to, right? The concern is, why should I stay here if there's not appropriate compensation? And we get, we're again, we're dedicated, we're professional, we are from a compensation standpoint, there's, we have to look at other comparable cities. And so there's a, we have to look at those different discrepancies there. So, but in general, it's lack of opportunities, lack of support, staffing issues, and the ongoing demands or the additional demands that are growing each and every year with our staff. Chief, I just want to say a true heartfelt thank you to you for being as honest and direct with us as you have been about this. The position that you're in is not an easy one in both caring for your officers and for the needs and desires of the community and the city council. And so, I know I put you on the spot with this question, but it really helps us to inform where we go from here and balance the needs of our professional and hardworking staff with the demands of the community. And to that end, what I'm wondering is, and I think I know the answer to this, but I'm curious is how much of this is a common problem throughout the state of California since the last summer, the events of last summer and since the murder of George Floyd. And, you know, and how does our department, I can only imagine how called our department is by what happened, but, you know, what is the sense, you know, not just within Santa Rosa, but beyond the officers who are leaving or who no longer feel comfortable, compensation is sort of, you know, an important other topic, but I'm really particularly interested in the sense of not feeling supported by the community, you know, in figuring out how to move forward and we can take this up in more depth tomorrow. But, you know, where our officer is leaving to and is this problem specific to Santa Rosa or is it something that, you know, we're not seeing a lot of lateral movement throughout California? I can't speculate on other agencies. At this point, I can tell you that, you know, we as California chiefs continue to talk about how we, you know, move forward since the George Floyd incident and try to, you know, lead the way for the nation. And so we have, you know, we have put in, you know, we are working with legislation on those particular issues and we'll continue, again, we want to be the driver of that. Again, I can tell you that for us, it's, you know, we will continue to work with other agencies to get that data. But for us here, you know, those are the things that we, that is concerning our department. Okay. I believe those are most of my questions. Thank you for being so transparent. Thank you, council member, council member Alvarez. Yeah, good afternoon, chief. I want to echo council members' sentiments. You are appreciated. In regards to the comparable cities on slide number six, and again, echoing a lot of the questions in regards to compensation, is there a comparable study that we've done in order to see where we stand in how we're compensating our law enforcement? There is a, I don't have it with me right now. I can definitely get back to you, but the city does do, they do track that when we go into negotiations. And so that is something that I can work with our HR department on getting that information to you. Perfect, and in regards to slide number four, I believe it was the calls for service is an incident the same as a call or is there a difference? If you can explain that for both my clarification and those people that might be watching. Yeah, so it's basically the same thing. An incident is a call for service. And so, and then it can be a proactive call for service or a reactive call for service. In regards to the last four years, what do you see has changed since the last four years and what do you see as being in the next four years, especially with the climate in regards to social justice that we see it here locally and in our nation? Well, I think over the last four years, we've seen significant changes in how we have to address large scale emergencies. And again, we've had, it seems like we have a fire every single year. We're dealing with COVID and we've had a civil unrest that has impacted our city. And so those are the big, those are the biggies that have changed over the last four years. And with that, you see the budgetary issues that has put some constraints on the city and the police department. The other thing that I see over the last four years again is the implementation of the body warm camera project that we have that has sucked up a lot of time for our staff, both civilians, both sworn, addressing it within their call. And then also with dealing with sending reports over and dealing with or meeting certain mandates for law, transparency laws that have come up such as SB 1421 and AB 748, which address providing information to the public on significant uses of force. And so when we do that, there's a lot of redaction that goes into that. And so our staff is, it's taking numerous hours for them to address meeting those particular demands. So those are some of the issues. Again, higher calls for service, we've seen calls for service increase, especially when we're in those normal years where there isn't a significant event where we're evacuating half the city. And I see as we move forward, I think that what we're gonna deal with is again, higher density. It's a different way of policing when you're dealing with higher density areas. So as we grow the downtown area, what does that look like and how do we meet the demands for public safety down there? Are there gonna be more calls for foot patrols? And then also balancing that with spreading out over 47 miles of city and dealing with calls throughout our jurisdiction. From a social justice standpoint, I see us, we've done a lot of work. I mean, our staff, I'm proud of my staff and what they've done over the last several years. And again, we took a significant look at the President Obama's 24th century policing or task force on 21st century policing and looked at the different pillars. And one of those was accountability. One of those was working with the community. Technology was another one. And so we looked at those and see where we are and what we were doing and how we can improve. We're gonna continue to do that. And over this next year, we're gonna work with Seed Collaborative and we're gonna continue the conversations that we started. I had community listening sessions when I was first appointed. And we had maybe 60 people show up to those. But I think now there's, we have an opportunity to do larger listening sessions, get a hold of more people and then utilize that to move forward, to continue to build that trust in the relationships with our community and repair what people have seen as, repair the issues that have gone on. The things that we're dealing with nationally are impacting us locally. But as a whole, we're gonna continue to, we're gonna continue to train our officers in cultural awareness as we've done in the past. We're gonna continue our role in training our officers in implicit bias, which we've done in the past. And we're gonna continue our meetings and collaboration with nonprofits in the community as we've done in the past. And each, it doesn't matter what rank you are or what classification all of our staff have been involved in that. For years and we're gonna continue to do that. And I'm proud of my team. I think that they're doing a fabulous job. And when we have to make corrections or changes, we implement those changes and move forward and learn. Thank you. In regards to slide number four, if we look at the numbers from 2020, when we go back to when Rosalind and really district one was annexed, are any of these numbers incorporated into this report? Yeah, so this is, you know, once the switchover happened and I believe it happened in November of 2017, it was right after the Tubbs fire. And we annexed Rosalind. So those numbers are included from 2018 on. Those numbers include the Rosalind area. And lastly, but not least, now with the inclusion of Rosalind and district one into the city of Santa Rosa, I definitely want to make myself available to those efforts of being inclusive to the community. And if there's something that I can do to help the efforts of the Santa Rosa Police Department, please know that I'm at your service. And I appreciate everything that you do, Chief. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks, Chief. I had, well, actually I see Council Member Sawyer, did you have additional questions? Thank you, Mayor, just one quick question. It was, it had to do with the recruitment as well. I'm curious, Chief, if you're aware of our retirement tiers, if that has had an impact on laterals. So you're asking if our, can you repeat that please? Well, it's because of our tiered retirements, if they, when they come in, if that has had, when once they are aware of how our retirements work, whether that has had a negative impact on your ability to get laterals to come to Santa Rosa. Yeah, I don't think the, I don't know if the tiered, again, I'd have to be speculation on my part. I don't know, based on the information that I've received personally through exit interviews and entry interviews, the tiered, the tiered piece of the retirement system is not something that has come up. Again, what has come up is the fact that, you know, there's people are getting closer to retirement and deciding, you know, to leave and or to instead of staying a few more years, they're opting to leave closer to that retirement age, which is, you know, from the newer officers coming in, again, we'll have to wait and see what that looks like. But again, you know, the general feeling that we received from our survey was that, you know, people are, they're not comfortable. They, there is, you know, there's talk about, you know, are there other opportunities out there? And so we have seen that with some of the other officers who are, again, two in the last month. Okay, thanks, Chief. All right, thanks, Chief. I just have a couple of questions. One of them, we've sort of, we've talked about this 50-50 split, proactive and reactive. And you and I, one-on-one, we definitely talked about officers getting an opportunity to be more proactive and more involved, boots on the ground in the community and integrated in other things. Can you try to quantify for me where you see the split right now between proactive and reactive? Is it 75 reactive, 25 proactive? An understanding that the PRA and BodyWarnCAM helps distort that a little bit. So I don't have, I can't give you an actual split. I would hate to give you a number and then it'd be, you know, off a little bit. What I can tell you is that I have a scanner that's on it in my office and I have a radio that I wear and our officers are, our staff are going, they're going from one call to another and then when they're not going on a call, they're in here completing their reports and then they're going back into service and getting another call. They, again, we average hundreds of calls a day, which is significant. We are the busiest department in Sonoma County. We're actually in, you know, we're the largest jurisdiction north of San Francisco within California. And so we are a significant, you know, we're the county seat. And so we get a lot of calls. And so I don't know what that percentage is. We would have to do another staffing study to actually get what, to get those percentages for you. But I can tell you that, you know, they anecdotally, the officers are telling me when they're coming in that they were going, hopping from one call to another all day long. All right, I appreciate that, Chief. And one of the things that I'm particularly interested in is talking about the staffing model in a way that lends itself to talking about service delivery as well for me, I appreciate knowing how many officers there are. But the key component that I want to know is how do we develop that better relationship with our community? And if that means adding officers to free up time to do additional things in the community that are proactive, that are community engagement, or that are community oriented, I kind of want to hear what that model would also look like as we go forward. And I think that that's part of what the Kahoot's conversation is designing to do is putting officers in a position for success to build those relationships. So I'll want to hear more about that as we continue to talk through this. If I could just make one comment on that, Mayor, it's that I completely agree. I think that that is something that we're trying to look at. And as we've, again, over the last several years, we've utilized the school resource officer program in our gang unit to be part of those, you know, when our staff is too busy, they're the ones that are going out and making contact and doing the community engagement with our neighborhoods. And then we do try to do several other engagements such as coffee with a cop. We do, you know, we've done community police experiences and all of those are, you know, dependent on the ability to staff appropriately. And so we will continue to look at that. And but the engagement piece of it is highly dependent on the ability to free up our officers. So we're not doing it on overtime. Yeah, I appreciate that. And many of the community meetings that I have neighborhood meetings, I hear from residents a desire to see a police officer walking around, not just driving through their community doing enforcement but actually walking around saying hello and having that personal feel. And I understand that that takes officers beyond the amount of calls for service that we're replying to. You mentioned a couple of times that one of the challenges is the increased density that's coming in our city. And if you could just walk me through that a little bit, it did not, maybe there's a disconnect for me, but the, I'm sure the calls for service will increase as the population increases, but at the same time, the amount of density or how dense certain areas of the city are, is that going to significantly change your staffing model or are you still going to have the same amount of officers in that beat able to respond from call to call? Again, a lot of it has to do with our calls for service, right? So the calls for service will, you know, the more people that you have in one particular area, the higher calls for service that you have. So if you have higher density areas and then it also goes back to the community engagement that you're talking about, you know, people want to see you out and about that higher density area. If you have apartments inside or enclosed areas, you know, how do you get in, you know, how do you approach the approachable and how you engage people in those particular areas? So, you know, when I talk about, you know, the need for additional staff for those things, it's not only responding to calls for service, but also the engagement piece of it and also the perception of safety, which goes back to, you know, seeing an officer. I've been to many calls, many meetings where people have asked, we want to see more officers at a particular park, you know, and, you know, if there's, and that goes along the same line. So higher density will, I believe result in, you know, additional calls for service and the need for, you know, it could be the beat may be smaller, right? So if you look right now, we have nine beats in our city. The smallest beat is our, what we call beat nine and that's the downtown core, the downtown area. We have beat officers assigned to that. And then we also have our downtown enforcement team, which addresses a bunch of quality of life issues and also, you know, other calls for service in that downtown corridor. So the more people that you have in a particular area, there's a high likelihood that, you know, the beats might get smaller and we'll need more officers for those particular areas. Okay, thank you. And then you brought up specifically the contract over time for officers being, being something that this year in particular was gone with Ironman and Wednesday night markets and the fair all being canceled. Typically that contract over time is paid for by those events, correct? Yeah, that is correct. The biggest issue for us is having the staff to do it. So they pay for our staff. However, you know, what happens is usually at the end of summer, we tend to have burnout because people are working continued assignments. And, you know, if you're at an adequate staffing level, you'll have people who will sign up for overtime. But if we don't have people sign up, we end up mandating people for that overtime because it's contracted out. And then you have basically staff that may be doubling back or they may not have a day off. They may be, you know, not just not able to take that time off, right, because they're mandated to work it. And so they're without forcing of working overtime. It becomes, that's one of the things that can impact morale. And so the issues that we started to see in 2019, specifically, especially with all the fires and continuing to try to do some of these other special assignments or special events was that, you know, people weren't signing up for these events. And then we would have to force them to work those events. And it's a heavy load. Not only do we have people working the actual event, but, you know, with, you know, it seems like forever ago, but, you know, I think we can all remember the issue at in Gilroy, you know, with the active shooter there and other major events that have occurred in other parts of the country. And so there is a significant amount of planning that goes into each one of these events as we get prepared for it. And so that's where we pull the 10 people for the incident management team. We may have additional staff members that are working an operation center. And those positions are not being funded through the contract overtime. The event organizers are paying for the officers on patrol for that event, not all the extra efforts that we're putting into that to make it safe. All right, I appreciate you saying that. That might be an area that the council wants to look at further when we have these event contracts come before us to see whether or not we want to sign on is making sure that we are being adequately compensated for our staff time, not just at the event, but in preparation as well. Have you with the being down roughly 30 officers in terms of injuries and other that you mentioned, have you seen a significant influx in overtime to fill some of those positions? And if so, is it cheaper for us to hire somebody if we can retain that can attract them and retain them and by how much? So I don't have the numbers to be able to tell you how much we would save, but I can't tell you that we do use overtime to address our staffing issues because you don't have somebody for that beat, then we're gonna have to fill it. And so we'll have to fill it with the overtime. And we are running, we pretty much, we need officers every single day in some, you know, usually every single day in some form of fashion on a particular beat or a particular shift to fill in. We try to use our investigators and our traffic unit when it's like a last minute fill that we have to do. But then again, that takes away from that special assignment. So we do use overtime to backfill and that's been a significant piece of our overtime that we've used. And I can definitely have that information as we go into the budget cycles and mid-year budget discussions, have that for you and we can get actual information on where we're gonna save money and where we're not. And I think, was there a second piece to your question, sir? No, I think you touched on it. I think that that's exactly it is that when we go into budget, if you show us that if we can hire two additional officers, we actually reduce the overall cost to the city because those slots are being filled currently at time and a half for overtime. I think that that's a pretty easy discussion for the council to have. If we get better coverage, less burnout from our officers and a reduced cost to do it. And so I'm just wondering where that nexus is between providing overtime because it's easier than retaining or attracting a new officer versus having that extra position that's put in there. Madam Vice Mayor. Sorry, just to piggyback on the overtime from a mental health standpoint, I think when we mandate a lot of overtime and we don't have the officers, it increases a lack of good judgment, increases the likelihood of mistakes, ability to have the empathetic and compassion, compassionate to the people that they're working with and also how they engage with the community. And that's my standpoint when I work a lot and how I have to engage with my children. So firsthand, I know what I'm talking about. Yeah. And our overtime hasn't, as we continue to address that, our overtime budget has not been increased. I mean, everything's been, to help the city address some of the shortfalls, we've had to decrease in numerous areas. And again, we're limited in our, we've been reduced in our staffing, in our equipment, in the training and then also in our overtime. So it's impacting us in all areas. All right, thanks, Chief. My last question for you, you mentioned for a field trainee for a recruit, it's 18 months typically start to finish for them to get out of that trainee status and then it's 18 months of probation. How often do people fall out during that 18 month probation period or how often at the end of it are they not retained by the department? Well, we've had, we usually have pretty good success with our probationary period. Again, we set them up, but we try to set our training up so we can make them successful. And so a lot of times because it can take up to 18 months, we have a, it's generally a four to five month field training program, right? And so we have, it's four months in the car plus about three weeks of kind of onboarding training with some of the implicit bias training, some of the training that the city does. And then if we have to extend people, then we will extend people another month or maybe even two months. And then, and we have a pretty good success with keeping people on probation. We have had a couple of people who have not successfully completed the training program or the academy. We had one last year who decided after a week of being in the academy that that person decided that police work wasn't for him. And so we lost a person in the academy. Sometimes we have lost a few in the academy due to injury from time to time. That does happen. And then we, there's been a couple of trainees over the last year that we have lost that weren't able to successfully complete the field training program. So it does happen, it's a, we try to keep it at a low percentage. And that goes back to the recruitment and the hiring procedures that we have to make sure that they are successful. Great, thanks Stephen. And then actually I do have one more just on the morale question. And in particular as it pertains to the conversation about moving towards this Kahoot style model. My first couple of years on council that is the thing that I heard the most in terms of morale from officers was the challenges around addressing homeless services calls when that's not what they had signed up for and that's not what their training was. I'm not on the public safety subcommittee. We don't get to have those conversations typically at the council. And so I don't wanna make Sue nervous and go too far into them. But just in general from the survey that you did or from conversations that you have with officers would that type of a program help increase morale as well within the department? So I can tell you that we're all anticipating and excited about having a response model that will help us alleviate any type of calls for service. And so that is definitely something that my entire staff would be, they wanna have here. Again, we don't know what that means for us yet. Again, we have to look at how to actually make it work for Santa Rosa. And then the other piece that we have to worry about and be concerned about is how do we get our partners to agree to doing that type of work? One of the things that we've worked on in the past is the county has a local support team that works with us. But very early on when that team was created and it's a very valuable team, one of the things that came up was that they would not respond to a call without the police department. And so that if an outside entity makes that decision there's little we can do about that. I think part of the concept here is let's find out how we can all work together, get everybody on the same boat and agree to what this looks like. And so we're working on that through the next few months. Okay, I appreciate that. And the independent auditor is housed in the city manager's office, not in the police department, correct? That is correct. It answers to the city manager. Okay, great. Any other questions from council? All right, Madam City Clerk, we'll go to public comment. And I see Michael followed by Kimmy, but I'll go ahead and let you pull up the window first. Okay, looks like Michael's hand went down. Oh, there it goes. Michael, we'll go ahead and go with you first and then we'll come back for Kimmy second. Hi everybody. I'm not at all saddened to hear that quality of life and outreach efforts by SRPD have been impacted by their budget. Enforcing city ordinances that target our homeless population due to quality of life concerns are inherently violent, even more violent than this pandemic. Yesterday morning, the homeless encampment by Olive Park was swept. And you can all see the weather outside right now. It's pouring rain and you're well aware of the freezing temperatures. This is not the first time any of us have seen the encampments being swept just before the rains come in. And if you ask me, there ought to be an investigation into the possibility of intentional use of weather as a weapon against the homeless during these sweeps. Speaking of investigations, this city should prioritize investigating the Human Rights Commission report on policing the Black Lives Matter protesters. Outreach efforts such as ethnic studies with a cop are performative. And the photo ops with thin blue line flag are just downright damaged. These efforts are not addressing the root of the problem. And for many reasons, they're backfiring and reducing trust even more to the extent that outreach efforts are hampered by the budget. And those outreach efforts are a distraction from the real issues. I really don't see the loss. And if people don't wanna join the police department because they don't wanna be part of an institution that is held accountable by the public, I think that's a shame. I think that's the real problem with public perception of the police is that police are entitled to do what they wanna do and not be held accountable to the public. That needs to change. And that's not easy, but that needs to change. We need to defund the police and refund the people. We need money for services and not sweeps. I yield my time. All right, thank you, Michael. We'll go to Kimmy followed by Rex. Kimmy, go ahead. Hi, can you hear me? Yep, there you go. Hi, so there's a few things. First year response to homelessness has been raiding encampments and further displacing our residents who are struggling, just like Michael said. It's really frustrating for community mutual aid efforts who work so hard to keep these people warm and dry for you only to come and raid them and throw away the tiny protection they have, especially during something like these very severe weather warnings. Chief Navarro and his staff love to talk about protecting private property when it comes to business owners, but forget that it's property destruction when they throw away the tiny bit of personal property that our shelterless folks have. These sweeps are harmful and they just affect our most vulnerable, especially spreading the coronavirus. So with that, and people die from exposure every year in this county from being shelterless and being exposed to this weather. So we need to look at reallocating our funding from law enforcement to a model similar to CAHOOTS, which actually Chief Navarro in 2019, it was reported that CAHOOTS took 24,091 calls that would have otherwise went to stream in Springfield, Oregon, which is about 20% diversion from those two areas. So you received 137 calls, 1000 calls last year and I'm curious to see this breakdown and see how many are related to mental health and homelessness. And we've asked for this before, we asked for this last year, the breakdown of these calls and no one has taken the initiative to really break that down and look for it. And so to everyone here, when talking about pay and benefits and compensation, I want to make very clear, so my field of study was social work and many case managers and direct service providers get paid around $15 to $18 an hour. So let me say this again, case managers, not law enforcement, but the folks you contract money out to like Catholic Charities, for example, case managers for families seeking assistant for domestic violence, sexual assault and homelessness get $15 to $18 an hour for a position that provides direct services and requires a degree. That means college education, right? So living wage needed for this county is calculated about $25 an hour. So we know we social workers and case managers are also dedicated and professional people who lack support. And if we're looking at making a robust approach to this community, we need to look at that as well. And as a professional, I never had to shoot a canister of tear gas into the face of teenagers. Lastly, Chief Norrell, you said that the things that are happening nationally are affecting you locally, but do not forget that locally you did tear gas into projectiles at teens and young adults here in Santa Rosa, leading to severe injuries such as needing facial reconstructive surgery and someone getting their testicle removed because of your actions. So do not discount your own actions in the distress that this community has towards you. Thank you. And I yield my 15 seconds. All right. Thank you, Kimmy. And we'll ask the question about the breakdown of calls when we come back from public comment. Libs followed by Allegra. Hi. Can you hear me? Yep. Thank you. So my name is Libby and hearing Police Chief Norrell talk about really everything is incredibly aggravating. I'm really appalled that y'all are asking for any sympathy after what you're doing to houseless folks. You made a raid happen the other day and it's raining outside. There are people that are now going to be suffering under unfair weather conditions that a lot of us have the privilege of staying away from with yourself included. So to say that you need more support to terrorize houseless folks, honestly, that's a disgrace and you should be absolutely ashamed of yourself. I won't swear at you because frankly, you're not worth my rage. But what I will say is that if you want to do something good for your community, stop asking for more funds to do messed up things to people. It's so disappointing. And another thing that people keep not talking about in these meetings is that police officers and law enforcement were born out of white supremacist values and they still enforce those values to this day. The police start off as slave catchers that has not changed. They still enforce methods. They still enforce the prison industrial complex. They still put people in prisons without good conditions to live in, keep them away from their families, away from contact from their families. And also I'm pretty sure prisoners were going on a hunger strike not too long ago and there hasn't really been a lot of talk about that. You need to bring up the Human Rights Commission report in these meetings. This has to be talked about. We've been waiting since the summer over six months now. This has to be talked about now. Stop pushing it off. Be held accountable. I yield my time. Thank you, Libs. Allegra followed by Kelsey. Hi, good afternoon. I just, I want to question the assertion that we need more police or more policing, period. I heard Chief Navarro bringing up the difficulty in dealing with homelessness, but it seems that he does have plenty of officers to continually raid encampments that people set up so that they can have a semblance of stability in their lives. It seems there's enough officers to use chemical weapons and other weapons against the community, including children during the protest this summer. There were enough officers to harass members of the public in Roseland where I live and I witness this regularly. And during all these actions, by the way, the officers are frequently unmasked and otherwise not following the protocol. The staff perception is correct. The community does not support police who commit violence against us. So I'm glad it's hard to recruit people to do a job like that. And I ask that the city council consider the benefit of fewer officers on the streets and to deny any future requests for more officers. Thank you. Thank you, Allegra. Kelsey followed by Catrine. I can hear me. Yep, go ahead. Hi, my name is Kelsey Barrow and I was born and raised here in Santa Rosa. So what underpins the question of staffing of police is the question of what police do and what we want them to do. And I think there's been a lot of discussion around that. Things like measure P passing, discussion nationally have spoken to this a lot and it's not, the answer that has been coming out is not more police or more policing. They are not social workers. They are not mental health specialists. They are not trauma informed. They're not advocates for sexual and domestic abuse survivors and they are not culturally competent to say the least. Forced incarceration and violence, they don't solve social problems like poverty, homelessness, mental health crises and racial injustice. We use violence, including incarceration to punish and abuse the most vulnerable in our society and our community instead of helping them, which means we use the money we have to hurt them and then say we don't have enough money to help them. About the issue of community engagement, what we would call PR basically. Again, I want to echo what others have said about the fact that we don't need a better perception. We need different actions. The criticism and the scrutiny on policing is completely warranted. And instead of changing, doing puff pieces to change the perception, we need to address the actual issues that people are calling for. And about the question of more police on the streets, I would just like to say you need to be looking at who is talking about that and what populations are being surveyed there because we know that some people are safer or at least feel safer with cops around and other populations are less safe with cops around. They do not need more contact with police. They need to be listened to the people, the groups of people who are actually being harmed, especially communities of color and unsheltered. For years, people have been asking for reforms and the opportunity for minor reforms is far over. Now it is time for real structural changes. And that's what we're looking for and not hearing it at all here. I yield my time. All right, thank you, Kelsey. Catrine followed by Gregory. Hi, can you hear me? This is Catrine. Yep, go ahead, Catrine. Hi, thank you so much. I'm a longtime Santa Rosa resident and I'd like to comment that Chief Navarro talked about the lack of support from our local community and the need to build trust and relationships and how the national issues are impacting us locally. I would respectfully like to add that what police do locally is impacting us locally. Chief Navarro, his department and the Santa Rosa city council still have a lot of work to do when it comes to addressing community concerns about the actions of local law enforcement. It has taken well over six months of continuous postponement to finally get the Sonoma County Human Rights Commission report about the excessive use of force by SRPD and other law enforcement during last summer's protests on the agenda for the city council to discuss in March. We need more than listening sessions. We need more than marketing campaigns and symbolic gestures. We need real change. We need to ban the use of tear gas and rubber bullets. We need to hold SRPD accountable for their actions against Black Lives Matter protesters last summer. And they're in action and false statements regarding those who use their vehicles to attack and plow into those same protesters. My daughter and their friends were part of these protests. We have teens in Santa Rosa that were politically active that were tear gas during last summer's protests. This needs to be addressed publicly. So if the city of Santa Rosa and SRPD truly want to build trust in relationships with this community, we need accountability and true change. Thank you, and I yield my time. Thank you, Katrina. Gregory, followed by Elizabeth. Thanks. My name is Gregory Farron. Here's some thoughts in there. Basically three Fs, fear formulas and facilitation. There's a lot of fear here. The folks on the left who are demanding to defund the police are frightened as heck and you're hearing it. The folks on the right or over on the other side who want you to refund the police are equally frightened that you're not going to maintain police levels. And that's coupled with or added to by the fear of the police department and the sheriff or the chief that the community is going to abandon them and we're not going to keep good officers. Then there's the rest of the community who's frightened that you're not gonna find solutions in this. So I want you, I'm advocating that you try not to, try not to let fear destroy this conversation. The second is a formulas. With all respect to the chief, a lot of the data that you're getting, a lot of the historical data is based on formulas that don't really work when you're changing the nature of what police do. I was reminded by a friend who said that, in the 1800s in Santa Rosa, we had about 40 horses and they were, the police department used it. Horses were very popular and we had about 40,000 people. So we had about a horse per thousand people. And there was a, almost a formula that said, we need more horses when we get more population. We're doing the same thing now. We're sort of linking population to police officers and that's really too simplistic. You can't use formulas that don't take into account today. And the changing nature of what police do makes a lot of the formulas kind of useless. The last is facilitation. I want you to think about what the chief said and others about if you're going to go to a new kind of response and you're going to use the county staff, you really have to facilitate a conversation that makes everybody accountable. Your facilitation is far beyond what you have ability to control directly. And you need to make sure that you give yourself enough time for that because this isn't gonna work if we just dream that we're gonna have an integrated community and county and city response to homeless or to any other issue that the police get drawn into. Thank you. Thank you, Gregory. Elizabeth, followed by Rex. Good evening, Santa Rosa City Council. I'm Elizabeth Escalante, a commissioner on the Sonoma County Commission of Human Rights. I wanted to echo the same request. Most of your community members are calling out for for that review of the human rights report related to the protests that happened last summer. Maybe you've read it once, maybe you've read it twice. I implore you to review it the fourth, the fifth, or even the 10th time. Also, just that reminder too, and an ask, please, you know, please don't put your vulnerable communities through another listening session. There has been lots of time to open that. Your community has been talking to you. Your community has been providing you input and input with that being suggestions and the next action steps, you know, towards building trust again for the SRPD. Homeless sweeps in Olive Park, I'm greatly disturbed by the images I see and the stories that I hear. This is not exactly that first step towards building the trust with Santa Rosa and the rest of your community. I implore you to review on this. I also ask that, along with the report from the commission of human rights, that an independent review of the actions of the SRPD be taken. Officer Navarro, you have also spoken about working with other agencies to, you know, for improvement, at least from what I hear. The Sonoma County Commission of Human Rights still stands. I invite you to open the dialogue with us and continue to build trust once again. Thank you and I yield the rest of my time. Thanks, Elizabeth. We have Rex followed by Lee. Hi, can y'all hear me? Yep, go ahead. Okay, I just want to take this moment to say to anyone who wants to become a police officer that there's so many other things you could do that it could help out your community. You could work at the library. There's a lot of schooling you can do for that. You could go into schools and help children grow up to be fully functioning adults. And to any police officers who are worried about losing their jobs, pick a different one. Pick one where the community will eventually trust you because I can guarantee you that my side of the community will never trust you. We have never trusted you and you've never given us one single reason to trust you. And as far as the houseless people getting swept all over the place, do you really think that they feel like they're a part of a community that a police officer is in? Those are two different worlds, ridiculous. That's all I have to say. All right, thank you, Rex. We have Lee followed by Maritza. Hi, can you hear me? Yep, go ahead. Thank you. I want to speak as a member of the disability community. I have a hidden disability. I have extreme concerns over of the lack of education regarding disabilities that the law enforcement has. They're not educated to help with anything that has to do with mental illness. And in fact, some commands are would be confusing and unknown. We've seen the murder of one autistic young man in Colorado this past year and we have an incarcerated autistic youth. Both of them, those two young men are black. One was and is black. I have a huge concern about the lack of understanding about hidden disabilities and how they express themselves and how confusing that would be to somebody who is not educated. It's a life and death situation for community members who are not white, who do not have privilege and who also have disabilities to interact in emergency situations. We've seen time and time again when emergency calls have been made and law enforcement has arrived and the person who is needing the care has been injured or killed. So it is time, it's past time. The reform would have reformed. We're done with talking about reform. We're talking about spending money to prove that we care for each other in this community. And those are actions that we take, provable actions. And yes, it's fear. You should be afraid. Fear does need to inform you. We do need to be afraid that we have community members that are in danger of getting killed. That is important. So I want us to use our fear and go, oh my God, we need to do something. We need to have people who are educated. We need to have people who understand mental health and we need to have, I basically, I'm just echoing also what everybody else is, very, a lot of people in the community have also said for the last six months, again. And most importantly, please publicly discuss and respond to the human rights violations report. Thank you and I yield the rest of my time. Thank you, Lee, Maritza, followed by Craig. Maritza, are you able to unmute? Okay, Maritza, we'll come back to you. We'll go to Craig and then see if your hand comes back up. Thank you. Can you hear me? Yep, go ahead, Craig. Oh, okay. I wanted to start by saying thank you to Chief Navarro and the Santa Rosa Police Department for all that you do. Your school resource officers have been a really positive and supportive influence on our children. And this is an important point of contact between officers and students. These are often the first interactions that students will have with police officers. And they often set the stage for students to feel respect for and eliminate possible fear of law enforcement. So I just wanted to thank you for that. Secondly, the police bashing that I'm hearing in these comments is shameful and pathetic. I sure hope those complaining never need the aid of a law enforcement officer. Ultimately, unfortunately, they will come to your aid because please do their job. Regardless, regarding the homeless in Santa Rosa, Santa Rosa has the fifth highest homeless population per capita in the United States. There's a reason for this. We have multiple shelters, Catholic Charities, homeless advocacy groups, our very own and very limiting injunction, in addition to the Ninth Circuit Court Injunction and an environment that encourages lifestyle homeless to flock to Sonoma County. Santa Rosa has spent about $150 million in the last five years on homeless services and our homeless population has increased significantly in that time. Point-in-time counts do not accurately reflect not just the number of homeless, but the fact that a majority of homeless here now are not from Sonoma County. Santa Rosa cannot solve California's homeless problem. And that's what is happening here. We're trying to solve the problem of the state because we are taking care of homeless people that are not from here. And we have a growing population with no real solutions. We need to allow our law enforcement to protect citizen taxpayers and families because that's what we have. We need to be protected. The vast majority of Santa Rosa's homeless are not fire victims or recent job loss victims or temporarily down on their luck. The majority choose the lifestyle and reject opportunities for shelter and services. We can't afford to permanently support individuals to contribute to disproportionate number of crimes, calls for service, environmental destruction with human waste and damage to public parks and waterways. I live here with my family and I cannot in good conscience allow my 13 year old daughter to walk to the park with her friends due to the dangers of mentally ill homeless living there. The homeless are not all innocent victims here. We need to support law enforcement and allow them to protect everyone. We simply want accountability for all members of society, not just the house. It's a double standard that must be changed. I yield my time. Thank you, Craig. Maritza, followed by Bailey. Hi there, can you hear me now? Yeah, there you go. Okay, perfect. So what I have to say is nothing that is recited or written down, this is speaking for my heart. It's very amazing to hear how many people bash police officers. When we are in danger, who do we call? When we need something, who is there for us? Who risks their life for us? And I am someone of color who is speaking. I'm not sure the other people who are speaking what they are, but I am a minority and I stand with police. They protect us without them. What are we going to be doing? Do they really know what they're speaking on? And I would like for them to live in the police officer shoes for one day and see how they feel all of the emotional and physical things that they have to go through. And about the homelessness, none of my family members feel safe going out and walking. When I was pregnant, I couldn't go out and walk. Why? Because I was scared that something would happen to me. It is something where it is an issue. And for people to say that police officers are disrupting their homes, it's, it's disrupting our homes. We want to live peacefully. I just do not understand how people can bash those who are protecting us and defending us. Where are things going? And like I said, I am a minority. I don't know what the rest were, but I stand with the chief and to protect our community. If we don't have the protection, what will our future be? That's it. Thank you. Thank you, Maritza, Bailey. Let's go. Hello, can you hear me? Yep, there you go. Cool. Yeah, I would like to echo what most people have said just as far as I'm not sure that we necessarily need more staffing and police, but I am sure that we need money to go to the people who are more educated to help as far as mental health crisis is, such as like the Cahood's model. I know that that was mentioned earlier that they're gonna look into that and I'm just putting forward that. And I'm also, I would also encourage you to pay attention to the human rights violation that has still not been talked about this past year. That's all I have to say, but I yield my time. Thank you. All right, thank you, Bailey. Madam City Clerk, how many phone messages do we have? Mayor, we have 55 voice message public comments to playback. Okay. I think what we will do if it works for the council is we'll take a 10 minute break and then we'll come back for the voicemail public comments before we conclude this item. So let's go ahead and come back at 525. All right, Madam City Clerk, I see a quorum of the council. Could you please call the roll? Yes. Council member Tibbetts. Here. Council member Schwedhelm. Here. Council member Sawyer. Here. Council member Fleming. Here. Council member Alvarez. Present. Vice Mayor Rogers. Present. Mayor Rogers. Here. Let the record show that all council members are present. Great, thank you, Stephanie. So where we left off was starting our voicemail public comments on our study session. If you'd like to facilitate, that would be great. So after that, you watch people listen. Yes, hi, my name is Elizabeth Merrick and I am calling about agenda item 3.1. I am calling to support the Santa Rosa Police Department. And I have friends and family, friends of family who are policemen and I have concerns about needing, I need to give them more support and I'm specifically asking for better staffing that we need to increase the number of policemen to the recommended 188 so that they'll be able to do their work. And I just want to give my support to the Santa Rosa Police Department. Thank you, bye. Yes, hi, my name is Matt and I am calling regards to the public safety agenda items, calling in support of the Santa Rosa Police Department. I've been a resident of this community for 45 years and I want to pledge my unwavering support for our law enforcement officers and staff. I feel that it's critical that the department has the support from city leaders and that the city leaders understand the community needs and expectations, not just those expectations of a smaller faction of vocal people within the community that maybe don't see the big picture. I'm upset with the recent removal of the posts supporting the officers that had to do with the banner. Apparently they had the blue line associated with it or a small group to have co-opted that symbol is not representative of what that symbol means and what it represents to, I think the majority of Americans and especially people here within our community and I think it's critical you understand that the overwhelming support is for the police department, the work they do, every interaction that I've ever had with any member of that organization. Santa Rosa Police Department has been nothing but professional. Thank you for listening to my comments. Hello, my name is Josh Carrillo and I have been a citizen in Santa Rosa for 40 years born and raised here and I'm calling about the police staffing study session and I wanted just to express my love and care for our city. I care about the city very much and I'm really concerned and confused and disappointed in how our city council and our city manager and the leadership doesn't seem to be supporting our officers. I believe that our chief is doing a great job and I think that he is trying to care for our city well, he's trying to care for his department well and I know that there's a lot of things that have been happening around in our world and in our country that we want to continue to grow on and I think that our police department is committed to those things. And I think, I believe instead of taking things away from them like staff and funding, I think it's actually better to equip them and encourage them and empower them so they continue to grow and be better police officers to help us and protect us things like with traffic accidents, with crime in our city, with the fires that happens. I know that our police department is not perfect and I know that they are not people that we are to worship but I respect them very much and I care for them very much and I think that they are endeavoring to do the best job as possible. And so I think instead of removing them, I think it's actually better to help and equip and encourage and empower them. And so I would encourage you as the city council, you as the city manager to really consider how you can equip and encourage and help your police to continue to have them have the appropriate staffing, have the appropriate funding to care for our city better. And then let's work out ways that we as a community can come together and talk to each other and encourage each other and see the ways that we all need to grow together to be a better community. I love the city, I'm committed to the city and I really appreciate you being willing to listen to this message and to take your time out. I hope you have a good day. Bye. Hi there, my name is Chloe Merrick and I've worked in San Rosa for the past 15, 16 years and I'm happy to ask for what's the meeting I'm talking about. I'm talking about the day January 26th meeting. Chief Navarro is gonna provide facts and things like that. Anyway, that's the meeting that I wanted to comment on and to be heard about. I really would love the city council would go on or more support for the police department. I want public support for our officers who have done so much and haven't received a ton of support it seems like over the past, especially the summertime when things were so awful. I would love for the $1 million to be refunded so that we can have the restoration of the six police officers whose positions were lost just this last year alone. I would like increased staffing at the police department so that the officers can properly respond to things like fire evacuations, vehicle side shows, growing homeless encampments and all the crime that comes with that traffic enforcement and just general community policing, policing, excuse me. I know that since 2006 the city of San Rosa has grown a lot and we have cut 15 police officer positions. So it seems like our officers are overwhelmed and that's why we need support and we need more officers. I also know that some officers are weaving to other states or retiring early and we need to show our support to them and get the support our community needs. Thank you for listening, my telephone number, if you need that, 707-327-6601. Again, my name is Kelly Merrick. Thank you, bye bye. Hi, my name is Greg and I'm calling regarding the thin blue line flag issue that you guys are discussing. As a constituent of yours, I'm deeply disappointed now that city council is handling this issue given that it was a gift given to the department. It shows the complete lack of compassion that the city has for its employees, especially those men and women who put their lives on the line every day. And it's also a slap in the face to those who work at the police department because not less than one year ago did we lose very little armor to COVID-19. The department has been nothing but heroic over the last few years, especially with their responses to the fires that we've had and the pandemics this past year. My brother also was a police officer but he was shot and killed in the line of duty and he died when he was 24 years old. Before his death, I had no knowledge of what the thin blue line was. After his death, I was given a flag and a symbol and it creates a press for us survivors who have lost our family members in the line of duty. To me, it speaks for my family. It shows support, love, compassion, respect that represents what the officers are willing to do to protect their communities during their day-to-day job. This flag is not associated with any racism or racist behavior. It represents the men and women on a daily basis who fight the thin blue line, which is the thin line between good and evil. These men and women of all races and backgrounds put their lives on the line. There's no ethnicity behind the badge. It's just one heart with one solid mission to keep the citizens that they work for safe. I'm disappointed with the rhetoric that city council is putting out there and with our city that are caving to an outspoken minority of people to remove signs of the thin blue line flag. It is an insult to my family, my brother and all other police officer, survivors who've lost somebody in the line of duty. The flag represents everything that our family and our loved ones sacrifice. And we should strive to represent those people and show how brave, honorable and good they are. Thank you. My name is Jill Moreno. I would like this to be played during the discussion about the blue line flag being taken down from the police department's page. I wanna take this opportunity to call in and let the city council, especially the mayor, know that as a citizen of Santa Rosa for over 20 years, it is extremely disappointing to see the lack of support for the Santa Rosa police department. We need to see more officers on the street and it's up to the council to give us a position. I personally have come in contact with SRPD two times in the last five years. Each time I was pleased with the way things were handled. Police don't just show up on our good days. They show up on our worst days. The officers that I encountered treated me with respect. They didn't rush me along. They didn't judge me because of the way that I look. And they simply helped me. They are the best of the best. I would think the trend of officers leaving the city would be very alarming to you. Yet, what we need are more officers and you don't seem to be giving them to us. As a citizen, I can't help but wonder what is going on behind the scenes. After last week's debacle with the social media posts and then reading the Santa Rosa police department association message to the public, it is clear that you the city council, the mayor and the city manager, don't back the police. As a resident, this is extremely frustrating. What do you gain by not supporting the men and women that protect our community? I had the pleasure of meeting Chief Navarro at a public event in late 2019. I was extremely impressed with him. He speaks so highly of the men and women in his department. From what I understand, he has been with the department for many years. So when you force him to do things that disrespect the men and women of his department, you need to understand there are consequences. It's not like you have some chief who knows nothing about the city or the history of the department and you're simply using him or her to do your dirty work. What you have as a chief is an ethical, honest, straightforward, humbled, respected, decent and trusted leader with Navarro. Yet you use him to be a scapegoat of some sorts. For the life of me, I can't figure out why the mayor, the city council, are bowing down to those in the community who do not respect the law and order. What happened to our city? I challenge you as city council members and mayor and the city manager to think about the qualities I just listed above for Navarro. Look in the mirror and ask yourself, can you say that you have those as well? If not, you should probably find a way to become those things. You were elected and we depend on you to keep our city in order. What you have done is create a complete chaos. I want to publicly thank Chief Navarro and the men and the women of the Santa Rosa Police Department. You are all good, decent human beings and you deserve to be respected. May God keep you all safe, healthy and get you home to your family's home at the end of your shift. Thank you. My name is Jose. I am calling to show my support for the police and they're finding a tough battle right now with everyone against them. I'm here to support them. They need all our support, all our staffing. They need more staffing. They do a lot of stuff behind the scenes. It's never, they go something. So I just want the police to know that I'm here to support them and they need more funding, more staffing and they need to get a win. They need more support, emotional support and that's as far as I got to say right now. Thank you. Hello, my name is Olga. I'm Breeze. I live in Santa Rosa and I'm just calling to express my support for the police department. We need more support, not less. We need more staffing of the communities and I think that anything that is against the police is not helpful for our community. We need to be able to have peace and order and this is the only way. So I fully support the police department and any kind of support that they can get as well. Thank you so much for putting this on the agenda for today or tomorrow, whenever you meet. Thanks again. Bye. My name is Jonathan Flores and I'm calling for concerning the police staff support. I feel like they are understaffed and underappreciated. We need more support from our police to make sure that we feel safe and secure in this community with these crazy times that we are going through with our support for them and help them out because without them, we are nothing. Thank you. Hi, my name is Kimberly and I would like to comment from the police staffing study session. I have been a resident of Santa Rosa since 1984. I live in Rankin Valley and I love my community. I have never called or written into a meeting but I was shocked and saddened at the main comments with Ray Navarro, our police chief, regarding his Facebook post. And I felt that now is a good time to call and show my support. The fact that he was put in that position to choose between supporting his officers or listening to the social media critics and likely was forced to take the image down is maddening. The police were just thanking a community member for a gift but the hot debate and hurtful comments were so sad. Our police sacrifice so much for us each day, week, month and year. They faithfully serve and protect our community. The city of Santa Rosa and the leadership team needs to back them and support them financially and verbally. I could not believe that the city of Santa Rosa stood silent when there were protests, riots and threats made to our officers over the summer as they protected and served us to keep peace. We need to be united as a city. We do not have corrupt officers here in Santa Rosa and we need to support the brave men and women that have agreed to serve our community. They need even more funding now that our city has grown, not less. I have only had positive interactions with police officers and a positive image is what needs to be shared with our community, not a divisive one. I was walking with a friend and was surrounded by a loose pack of pit bulls. Yes, pit bulls. And a police officer had been called by a neighbor and I did not even hesitate to get in his car as he helped my friend and I. He was there to serve. I also met many officers in our community as they willingly coach our kids in youth sports. We want our officers to feel loved and respected so that they can continue to want to be here. There are plenty of cities out there where the cost of living is lower. Crime and homelessness are not issues but we want these amazing, yes stellar officers to want to stay here and serve and protect us. Who do we call when there's an emergency? Who is there to direct traffic when there's an accident? Who is there to evacuate us during the fires? Who is enforcing traffic laws and other laws? Our amazing officers. City of Santa Rosa, please show us that you support them with our tax dollars and work with them to create a place that people want to stay living in. Instead of moving out of state like so many are right now, our police officers need your support now more than ever. Thank you. Hello, this is Kim Graves and I'm calling in support of radio borough and the posting of the blue line flag. I do not think you should have had to apologize for something representing police support. It's absolutely absurd. Members of our community would be offended by that and even more absurd and disappointing that the council would take their side by asking the post to go in need. As Biden would say, come on to the council of Santa Rosa. I just am very, very offended that he had to apologize. It takes something that supports our police department who works so hard to keep our community safe down. So hopefully you'll listen to this and take some motions to... Well, thank you, bye-bye. Hello, this comment is regarding just the SRPD police in general and just a staffing issue. My name is David, I was born and raised in Santa Rosa, Sonoma County and now raising my children here. Just two things quickly want to say that it has been sad to see some just kind of sort of a general low morale of police officers to sort of lacking support in the community and the larger political conflicts, whatever it is, so hopefully see the leadership in that way sort of backing better the police officers and keeping our streets safe and really just hopefully turning back around Santa Rosa, Sonoma County. On that note, just getting in line with more appropriate staffing with comparable cities. I believe the number that would be more appropriate for police officers would be about hiring new folks, getting up to speed on about the 188 staffing total that is more in line with reality. And I don't think it's at that point now. So hopefully that can be addressed quickly and the ball is moving in that department. Thanks a lot and happy 2021 and happy to call again or provide more information if needed. Thanks so much, take care, bye-bye. Hello, my name is Marisa Mendoza. I am calling about the January 26th Santa Rosa City Council meeting in health in regards to police staffing. I am calling to support police staffing. It is very essential for Santa Rosa and its surroundings to have a strong team and for them to be fully staffed and supported. It is ridiculous if it is something that is looking to downsize or not to have their support. They protect the citizens when we are in danger or they are here for us. They need to be fully supported by the city because we need them in all moments. Thank you. Hi, I'm calling to give my input for the police staffing study session agenda item 3.1. My name is Mike Robert and I've lived in Santa Rosa my entire life. That's 55 years of being a citizen of this great city. And I just want you guys to know that I am disgusted in the lack of support for the Santa Rosa police officers from our city council and the city manager. As long as a longtime resident and concerned citizen of Santa Rosa, I'm asking that you refund the $1 million to the police department budget and hire more officers to keep our community safe. There is just simply way too much lawlessness in the neighborhoods of Santa Rosa. And this is not the city that I grew up in or that I want my adult children and my grandchildren to grow up in. I love Sonoma County and specifically Santa Rosa. But even I have contemplated moving because of what I see happening around me. The city council and the city manager have been extremely weak and have caved into the vocal minority. The vast majority of the citizens of Santa Rosa support our police. And unfortunately, most of the people that support the police are less likely to make their voices known for fear of retaliation. The vocal minority are often angry and sometimes even violent. The safety of our community depends upon the city council and the city manager supporting our local police. I wanna see our city council and city manager start to support public safety. And if this does not happen, we are gonna experience more loss of good officers. And I think you need to ask yourselves why would anybody want to work in public safety for a city that does not support them? Thank you. Hi, my name is Sharon Bailey and I'm calling for the police staffing study session. And I just want you to know that I have lived in Rinka Valley for 16 years and Santa Rosa for 43 years. I love our city and I'm grateful for all of you who served. But I'm very disappointed in the lack of support for the Santa Rosa police officers from our city council and the city manager. I'm asking you that you refund the $1 million to the police department budget, hire more officers to keep our community safe and pay our officers appropriately. The safety of our community depends upon it. I ask you, I urge you that our city council and city managers start to support our public safety. Please remember you represent us. I ask you to hear our plead. Why would an officer wanna work for a city that fails them? Why? Please get back. Please get some backbone and let's do the right thing and support the man or woman who laid down their life for us. Your work is not laying down your life nor is mine. So let's appreciate those who do. I get the next door app and every time I read a police report, if the officer leaves his email, I emailed him back with a subject line saying, thank you. And then with a short note, I just say, please disregard the hate of the mainstream media and know that the majority of our town needs you and we want you. I thank you for the service and for making our city a safe place. And you know what? The majority of them send me back a quick note saying, thank you for your kind words. So please take care of our pleas so they could take care of us and do their job. You all reap the benefits. We the people pay our taxes and we appreciate if you would just listen to the people and do the right thing and take care of the people who make our city a safe place. Again, thank you for serving us and thank you for making Santa Rosa a great place to live. And again, my name's Sharon Bailey and again, I've lived in Santa Rosa 43 years and I appreciate your listening to this. Thanks and have a good day, bye-bye. Hi, this is for agenda items 3.1. My name is Evelyn and I moved to Santa Rosa in the early 80s and raised my family here. I reviewed the PowerPoint presentation and it is clear that we need more officers. Our city has grown in the number of officers we have not matched that growth. This is a safety issue for community. Without the proper number of officers, our police department is not going to be able to respond in time when people need them. We need to fund our police department appropriately which means they need a larger budget to hire more officers. The Santa Rosa community supports our police officers who have proven time and time again that they are professional, they are a professional department that cares about this community. Hi, I'm a homeowner in Rickham Valley and I'm calling in regards to the police staffing study session. During the recent fires Santa Rosa police responded to my neighborhood, took action with garden hoses and worked to save my neighborhood. This is a testament to their character and servanthood to their community. This past year I watched as members of the Santa Rosa police department mourned after they lost one of their own. Mary Lou Armour who died from COVID-19. I observed as protesters treated Santa Rosa police officers with disgust and disdain. I marveled at the resolve and compassion displayed by the officers toward the community they serve and love. I saw the graffiti that said, kill the police when I went downtown for outdoor dining. I imagined the children of police officers reading this graffiti which demanded that their parents should die. Finally, I hung my head in shame as the city council of my own great city voted to defund the police by $1 million. At a time when police of our great city need support more than ever for all that they have clearly done for our community, we have failed them. They left their own homes to burn during recent fires to save the lives and homes of community members. But when it comes to giving them support so they can better support our community and keep us safe, the Santa Rosa city council has failed. I am calling for the city council to recognize that this community needs the police department who has supported in their efforts to keep our city safe. I am calling for the city council to refund the police because I want my children to be able to raise their children in a city that is safe and has enough police officers to protect our growing population. I am also calling for the mayor and the city council to increase funding to the Santa Rosa police department and make Santa Rosa a place where police officers want to live and serve their community so we as residents can feel and be safe. Hi, my name is Jennifer Roland and this comment is for the police staffing study session. I would like to be on record as being very thankful for the men and women in law enforcement who serve Santa Rosa. Like many, I have been dismayed and heart sick over images across the country of tragic death that seem unwarranted at the hands of law enforcement. In my opinion, there have been some real miscarriages of justice and they should be addressed. However, nuance seems to be totally absent in our present climate. We have lost the ability to hold two things true at once. Bad cops should be held accountable. Good cops should be supported. How can we support good cops by continually making an incredibly difficult job, even more difficult? How can we implement health and reform by slashing resources? City leaders need to be able to understand nuance. You cannot expect it from the loudest voices you hear. It is your job as leaders to be able to sift past mob mentality and discern how to help the city move forward. Discouraging, shaming and defunding our police will just exacerbate the problems we face. We need good police officers and they need our support. We have a police chief that serves with integrity and wisdom. He is not inflammatory, but rather a voice of serving his community. We need to celebrate that kind of leadership and provide the resources such leaders need in order to serve well. Thank you. My name is Laurie and I'm calling in regards to the police staffing study session. I grew up in Santa Rosa and my husband and I have lived here for 31 years. I have been disappointed in the lack of support shown to our SRPD officers and Chief Navarro by the city council. I'm urging you to return the funds removed from the department budget so that our community is kept safe. I fail to see how decreasing our police presence will have a positive effect on the safety and security of our city. I support Chief Navarro and the officers of SRPD and I urge you to do the same. Thank you. Hi, my name is Leonardo and I am calling up about police staffing study session. I have been a resident of Santa Rosa since 2002. I am originally from Sao Paulo, Brazil and have seen firsthand what happens when you have understaffed and underpaid police. In contrast to that, Santa Rosa is a safe city with a professional and friendly police force. We should be supporting them back in the blue, not shaming them and giving them to the world culture that is infesting this country. We're starting to see the consequences of these policies in the bigger cities as crime rates and response times increase. For example, Seattle, Portland, New York and Austin. I am asking that the city council and city manager announce these riots in protest that only serve to further the wider city and behind the police officers and restore the police budget. We need to hire more officers and provide the existing ones with more resources to continue to keep our city safe. We need to be fun. The $1 million that was spent on the budget, we need to make sure that our current officers feel appreciated for the work they're doing and supported by our city. Thank you. Hi, I'm calling about the police staffing study session at the meeting. I wanted to let you know, my name is John L. Roberts and I have been a born and raised here in Santa Rosa. I'm the third generation born and raised in Santa Rosa and I'm so disappointed in the way that you are handling our police officers and how you are not in full support of police. And that I really want to see you refund the police officers back that $1 million into their budget. For me, as a lifelong citizen of Rankin Valley, a volunteer of people in Rankin Valley, I'm pretty disappointed and it's pretty frustrating for me. I was so disappointed when I heard the remarks from Chief Navarro on Facebook about taking down that post about the flag really hurts that you don't support me and that you support the minority voice. And I think it's time for you guys to stand up and start taking the position of supporting police officers. My tax dollars pay for it and this is what I want. Thank you for your help. Hi, my name is Judy Scott and this comment is for the police staffing study session. I'm the grandmother of seven wonderful grandchildren who live in Santa Rosa. I'm always at one of their homes and up until recently have felt safe in your city. There have been several budget cuts and understaffing in the police department which prevents Santa Rosa from being the safe place that it was. I have seen increased crime, unchecked homelessness along with filth in your streets all the while preventing the police from being able to do their jobs due to these cuts. I am sending this email in support of returning the budget that was taken away from the Santa Rosa police department. Please return Santa Rosa to the once desirable, safe and clean place it used to be. Thank you so much. Bye. Hi, my name is May Nelson and my comment is regarding agenda item three, the police staffing study session. I feel extremely blessed to have been born and raised in beautiful Santa Rosa and have personally known many incredible people who have served us in law enforcement over the years. Living in a community which values and fully supports the men and women who daily put their lives on the line to protect us is imperative to a thriving community and is something I value wholeheartedly. I am grieved by the lack of support that our city council members have shown our officers and for the safety of our community and for all those who call this place home, I implore you to stand up for what's right and refund the $1 million to the police department budget and value our officers by compensating them appropriately. Our community depends on your support of the Santa Rosa police department. Thank you so much and I am praying for our community. My name is Elizabeth Warren. I'm speaking to agenda item number 3.1 for the city council meeting of January 26th, 2021 regarding the Santa Rosa police department staffing and the upcoming police staffing study session. I'm calling to give input for the police staffing study session and to convey my support for our Santa Rosa police department. First, I must register my outrage at the lack of support our elected city council and appointed city manager have given the Santa Rosa police officers. The minute you vowed to the pressure from special interest group and withdrew your support from local law enforcement, you stopped acting in the best interests of our community and you violated the trust of your constituents. This is not a course of action I support or voted for. Second, I'm asking for you to fully restore the police department's budget so that they are able to perform their duties of public safety. We are the public and we want to be kept safe. Staffing has been reduced while at the same time the population has increased and the calls for service have increased. This simply doesn't make any sense. Every citizen wants the safe and secure home and community. We need to hire more officers to keep our community safe. We also need to give our officers a raise so that their salary is just compensation for their sacrifice and service. We need to show our officers we value their service and sacrifice. Lacking this, we will continue to see record retirement, overworked and demoralized officers and the community that descends into lawlessness. Why would anyone want to work for a city that doesn't support them? Why would anyone want to live in a lawless community? The safety of our community depends upon your swift reversal of this recent trend of budget cuts and the evaluation of our Santa Rosa police officers. As a taxpayer and 50 year resident of Santa Rosa, I must speak out and demand that our city council and city manager show the respect and support that our public safety officers deserve by restoring the budget and personnel and materials needed to run the department as the chief sees fit. Running the department is his job. Giving him the tools to run it, the money is yours. So do your job so he can do his. And finally, a question. Have you gone mad? Unless you alter your course, you are heading down a path that will turn our city into a wasteland of lawlessness where parks and streets and stores and homes are not safe. Is this your vision for our beloved city? It's not mine. Peter, Mary, I'm calling about the police number of police. I'm not in favor of limiting or decreasing police protection. And I don't know what item that is, but that's a reason for my call. Thank you. My name is Terry, and this is regarding agenda item 6.5. I'm deeply disappointed, frustrated, and angered by the city council's stance on the situation. As a citizen of Santa Rosa, I have attended city council meetings and there have been an SRPD officer too at the meetings, standing in the backgrounds. When asked why they were at the meetings, they said they were there in the event something happened and they needed to protect the process of city government. Looking back, they described being the blue line, the line between society and those that don't respect or accept our government. Those officers were there to protect you and that you don't respect them. I hope the chief has the integrity to say he will not send his officers to these meetings when they become in person again. And each of you will have the opportunity to be your own line between government and chaos. The people that stood up and attempted to stop the capital insurrection with the men and women of law enforcement. Again, being the line between society and chaos. They're being celebrated for their actions while you are condemning them. In researching this topic, the flag represents so many things to law enforcement. It represents the strength and courage to run towards gunfire and tragedy while others run from it. It represents the strength to run into building burnings in areas that saved people's lives. Have you forgotten the Tubbs fire in the recent glass fires? It represents the sacrifices made in a profession. It represents a lives lost in line of duty. A sheriff's deputy was just killed in Sacramento. That blue line represents him. That blue line represents General the PD Detective Armour who lost her life. It represents her. It doesn't just represent the sacrifices that the men and women of law enforcement make. It also represents the sacrifices that their families make. These people miss holidays, birthdays, graduations and other memorable events because someone has to be out there protecting society from those that would harm it. I am angered that you have cowed to the very loud minority on social media. Did you vet these people to see if they even lived in Santa Rosa? The quiet majority spoke up and there were so many more positive posts and posts demanding the return of the banner. Why have you not listened to them? If you are governing based on the number of posts, likes and comments that the banner should have been returned. During the Capitol insurrection, writers also waived the American flag. With your logic, we should remove the American flag because it was also there and offensive. Lastly, as a citizen and constituent of Santa Rosa, I believe we are entitled to know unequivocally how each member stands regarding support for Santa Rosa PD. This is a simple yes or no answer. Mayor Rogers, do you support the Santa Rosa Police Department? Yes or no. Vice Mayor Rogers, do you support the Santa Rosa Police Department? Yes or no? Councilman Sawyer, do you represent or support the Santa Rosa Police Department? Yes or no? Councilman Tivitz, do you support the Santa Rosa Police Department? Yes or no? Councilwoman Fleming, do you support the Santa Rosa Police Department? Yes or no? Councilman Schwedholm, do you support the Santa Rosa Police Department? Yes or no? Councilman Albrecht, I'll ask the same question, but I think your social media posts referring to Santa Rosa Police Department is trash, is already answered it, but... Hi, my name is Victor Andrade, I'm a resident of Santa Rosa, and this is for the agenda subject, police staffing. I'm calling in regards to Santa Rosa looking into, into lowering the police staffing numbers in our streets and in total disagreement with that. I think we actually need more policemen, more force responders, but in general policemen in Santa Rosa, Santa Rosa used to be a very safe city as it's not anymore. I grew up and live in the Roseland area, and there was crime on a daily basis, and it's the only people that just get a, just get a benefit, it's the wealthy people up there on Fallon Grove and Rick and Valley where the crime is low and there are no need of police, but the general public in Santa Rosa, the majority of us, live in the areas of like Roseland and other cities where the crime is really high, and that's who the lowering of staffing is gonna take effect on and gonna damage our community and the crime rates are gonna go up, people are gonna start arming themselves, defending themselves when there's no police and we need police and that's the worst thing I've ever heard of is the funding the police and lowering staffing of police members. We need police and we need more in this case. What's going on globally is sad, but the Santa Rosa does not need to, to lower the police staffing because of what's happening globally. We actually need more policemen, we've never had any issues with police here in Santa Rosa. I know a lot of policemen that work for Santa Rosa and they're all great and yes, I'm a, again, my name is Victor and I'm a resident here in Santa Rosa and I disagree with lowering police numbers in Santa Rosa. We actually need more police and then instead of lowering the numbers, we actually need to train police so we need, actually need more money for police. So any questions? My number is 707-529-7088. Thank you, have a good day. Hi, everyone. My name is Jonathan and I wanna give my thoughts about the police staffing study session. I'm a father of two kids and an SRJC student here in Santa Rosa. I've been trying to make sense of things that I've been reading in the press Democrat and on Twitter the last few weeks. And my impression is that our police department is running dangerously low on morale and support. Our city also seems to be competing for last place amongst similar cities in the Bay Area when it comes to sworn officers per capita. My concern is best illustrated by comparison to my time in the military. My unit was asked to perform a task with far less personnel than were needed. It was a political decision since people, equipment and money were available. This situation happened over and over as politicians sought to accomplish one thing but present a different picture to the voters of what was happening. The end result was negative for the people being asked to serve as they became leaned on for far more than the human spirit can handle. The best people began exiting for greener pastures and the morale of those who stayed suffered. The most awful result was the mistakes that were inevitably made and the population we were there to serve suffered those mistakes. The tragedy in all of this is how avoidable the situation was. As I said, the military comparison is not the best one to make but I see strong parallels to the decisions that are being made by the city today. You have a city charter that requires enforcement of the law but you're taking the department's legs out when it comes to money or even something as basic as vocally supporting the department during city council meetings. I'm in John Sawyer's district and I vote for him when he's on the ballot. I appreciate that he and all of you walk a tightrope every day having to answer to multiple constituencies but I need to make my voice clear as well. Law enforcement is fundamental to the roles that you fill. Our department is excellent and recent city decisions and policies are running dangerously close to creating big problems that are completely avoidable. Thanks again for stepping into your roles as city council members and being willing to take heat from people like me. Please show our police department a similar level of support as I take the heat from the decisions that you make. Thank you. Hi, my name is Josh McGarver. I am calling about agenda item 3.1 for the Santa Rosa police department staffing. I'm a business owner in Santa Rosa and I've been a business owner for many years. I've raised my family in Santa Rosa and I've lived here since I was 11. I believe that the Santa Rosa police department is very important to the safety and harmony of our neighbors and neighborhoods and I think that it's very important that we fund them and staff them adequately. I think they're doing a great job and I just wanna put my support behind adding additional officers to make our officers per capita in Santa Rosa equal to if not greater than similar areas in California. Again, my name is Josh McGarver and I'm a local business owner and family member and I really think that we need to add additional staffing. Thank you. Hi, my name is Renee Scott and I am calling to provide input for the police staffing study session. As a proud resident of Santa Rosa and mother of two children growing up in this city, I am upset at the lack of support and finances our police department is enduring at the hands of our elected officials. How is our city expected to thrive and be a safe haven if budget cuts, understaffing and morale issues threaten the very people who have been there for all of us as first responders during the recent disasters that we have continued to face. I urge city council to reconsider replacing the $1 million that was taken from our police department's budget. At a minimum restore the six positions lost this year alone and please think about how you can better support our men and women in uniforms who are trying to uphold the law and serve our city throughout and despite the political unrest. I'm imploring you to be careful in making choices that may have a detrimental effect to the safety of our city as a whole only to appease the few. Thank you for listening. Yes, my name is Ann Barthelot and this is regarding the police staffing study session for the council, not sure the agenda item. But since 1969, my husband and I have grown up attending local schools, worked as civil engineers and raised five children in Santa Rosa. It has been a wonderful city in which to live. I'm writing today as I'm deeply concerned for this city and specifically over the lack of respect and lack of appreciation, I have seen exhibited towards our police force. Every encounter I have ever had with the police in our community, whether it was the warnings of fires, respond to the theft of my home or the many other times we needed them, they were kind and respectful and efficient. It scares me to think of a city where the police resources are cut so thin that they are unable to respond to the people they serve. I'm writing to you today because I really fear this is what is currently at stake in our community. As our council, you have the power to make these decisions. We will be a sorry city indeed if we lose the hardworking, self-sacrificing public servants that do the daily difficult work to keep our city safe for all to enjoy. I can't even imagine the pressure our police officers are under in this current cultural climate. What honest, hardworking, competent police officer would even want to continue to work for this city under these conditions. They risk their life, their family to protect an accusatory community where the few loudest voices seem intent to search out faults and completely overlook the overwhelming accomplishments. As a resident here for more than 50 years, I believe we currently enjoy one of the finest police forces the city has ever had. If anything, it's time to increase staffing, raise pay and actively appreciate and value the men and women who daily serve us. We must give our police chief the tools he needs to serve our city well. Nothing else will much matter if our city is not safe. I would ask you to ponder that fact. I am respectfully asking that as leaders and decision makers you prioritize increased funding and staffing of our city police force and that any defunding that has occurred be reinstated. I also ask that you consider personally how to actively set the example for our community of respect and appreciation of these men and women. And I want to publicly thank all those who currently serve in our police force. Our family appreciates the difficult work you daily do on our behalf. Thank you. Hi, my name is Travis Schimmer. I'm calling from San Rosa, I live in San Rosa, California and I'm commenting on agenda item number 3.1 on possibly increasing or decreasing the amount of police officers and staff that we have in Santa Rosa. I just wanted to call on support of increasing the amount of officers we have in the city. Our popular, I read the report that recommends that we go up to 188 sworn positions and I totally agree with that. In fact, I think with the amount of homeless people that we have in our city and the problem that obviously presents to tax paying citizens like myself and land owning citizens like myself and my wife, we need peace officers to enforce laws and by decreasing or staying at the same level of officers on the streets, all we're doing and inviting more crime and I hate to say the homelessness into the county. And so I 100% support bringing on more officers. I know personally have grown up with a few different officers on the force and I can say, you know, Santa Rosa has a really great culture of policing. And so yes, please, if you want further comment, my number is 707-483-3586. And thank you very much. My name is Ken Kreischer. I'm a resident of Santa Rosa. I'm a resident of Sonoma County for nearly 50 years now. I'm calling on agenda 3.1 at the upcoming city council meeting to voice my support for SRPD. The city needs to take a hard look at increasing staffing beyond the needs of the last couple of years and also showing support for the thin blue line flag. It's not the statement of racism. It's not a Confederate flag. It's not a right wing flag. It's a flag to show support for the men and women that wear the blue uniform. And I support them. And I think our elected officials should. And I believe there's money in the general budget. Quit wasting it in other areas and support the officers. Thanks. Yeah. Hi. My name is Jose Torales. And I'm calling on behalf of the police wages. I believe they need to make more money to always put in their life in jeopardy for us. And I don't think it's fair for them to just have a minimum wages or whatever. I'm an agent. I think they should have a lot of more benefits and more better pay by phone number 707-484-5972. I appreciate it. You want to hold me back? Thank you. Bye-bye. Hi. My name is Ruth Cake at 338-7755. I'm calling in regards with the defunding of the police. I am totally against that. We have enough problems in our county with the homeless and everything else that that brings that hasn't been addressed by you, the council. So why would you want to defend the police when we need their help on these matters, which are only going to get worse. So I'm completely against the funding the police. And there are so many more like me that aren't sitting in the phone number to call you. Don't know about it, but talk about it in groups and discussions. We are also in support of our police and the thin blue line flag should be allowed to fly anywhere. This is America. There should be freedom of speech and there is nothing wrong with that. And we need to support and stand up for our police because they do protect and they do serve and they give of their time. And we should be appreciating that, not punishing that. And they need all the equipment and supplies to keep them safe, which in turn keeps us the community safe. And the respect needs to come back to this position because I'm sure any of you on the council, the first person you would call if there was someone breaking into your house would be the 911. And if you defend these guys as much as you want the million dollars, your callback time, your time to get to your house may just be lengthened like enough to where harm could come to you. And I'm sure you don't want that for any of the other citizens in our county. So please do not defund the police and stop this craziness over the thin blue line flag. This has just got to stop. We've got to start working on our communities and not fighting over things that can help protect our communities. Thank you. Yes, my name is Marcia St. Clair and my comment is I think it's absolutely crazy to defund the police department. With all the crime and homeless and drugs that are going on, it's just crazy. It's totally crazy there. I'm calling up the police staffing study session. My name is Brett Deverees and I've lived in Santa Rosa and worked in Santa Rosa for about nine years now. And just wanted to say the disappointment that I have with the support of the police officers in Santa Rosa by our city council and the city manager. I'm hoping that you guys will refund the million dollars so that they can hire more officers to help keep our community safe. I feel like they're understaffed now and things are getting worse around the area. And I'll just hope that, I also hope that the city council and city managers will support them more in the things that they're doing to provide the safety for our community. Thank you very much. Hi, my name is Laura and I'm calling regarding agenda 6.5, support of law enforcement. I'd like to state that I am the current wife of the Santa Rosa police officer, SRPD police officer, as well as a daughter of a retired Santa Rosa police officer and a niece of a retired Santa Rosa police officer. I find it disheartening that our public has lost all sight of all the good things that many of our law enforcement members do for their community. These are men and women that were held on the highest of regard when we have fire season and they willingly leave their families and their homes. Some of them lost their homes the night of the Tubbsfire of 2017 and were out serving their public, saving their lives and helping them get to a safe location. In addition to that, many of the Santa Rosa police officers that I know, including sheriff's deputies as my husband was a longtime sheriff deputy as well for this county are good, honest, community supporting and loving people. They want to support their community in the non political way and they want to be able to uphold the laws of the government of state and the federal government and our city government. In addition, I would like the public to be educated on the different first responder flags that are out in the public view. It is not only an LEO flag that is flown meaning the blue line flag. There is a red line flag for firefighters. There's a camouflage line flag for our military. There's a flag for nurses, EMT dispatchers, correctional officers, the list is long. And by no means does this flag represent white supremacy. It represents support of these many men and women who constantly day in and day out give up family events, life events to be with their community and serve their community. It is simply a symbol of solidarity with these strong men and women. I thank you for your time. And I ask that public be educated and that we continue to build bigger and stronger community ties through law with the law enforcement and all first responders. Thank you. Mayor, this is City Clerk Williams. We did get the Spanish comments translated by staff. So I will read the translation that was just submitted by Maria Elena. She says, hello, my name is Maria Elena. I live in Santa Rosa. I support the police. We need to not defund the police. Please do not cut or take away the police. Please do not make any cuts to the police. We need to support the police. The police is indispensable. We need the cops for everything. We are with the cops and God bless. We are supporting the police. Please don't take away the police and please don't make cuts to the police. And then I have the translation from the earlier comments submitted by Erica and she said is saying, I would ask that we help support and provide economic support to the police. The city is becoming more dangerous. All of Santa Rosa needs them. Please support them so that they can receive the training that they need. Great, thank you so much, Stephanie. Let's go ahead and keep going through the public comments. Buenas tardes, mi nombre es Andrés Roblero y estoy, quiero apoyar a la policía. No quiero que haga recortes. Se necesitan muchos policías aquí en el condado de Sonoma. Gracias, adiós. And her comment is I want to support the police. I don't want there to be any cuts. We need more cops in Sonoma County. Thank you. Yeah, my name is Fred and I've lived in Santa Rosa in the Santa Rosa area for many, many years. I'm 75 years old. And I don't know exactly what the meeting's about tomorrow, but I know one of the officers of the police department, Jose Alex Andrade. He's a young man and I'm 75 years old. He's my nephew. And I love all the police officers, whether it's sheriffs, the city of police, the high patrolmen. And this is ridiculous. I think they're trying to do is get you to defend benefits or defend or cut their pay or something. It's just ridiculous. You know, I fought for this country and I'll fight for this country until the day I die. America has been invaded by these wacky people like what happened in Portland and what happened yesterday in Tacoma, Washington and what happened in Minnesota, what happened in all these cities. It's ridiculous. And we're going to see, I think we're going to see unfortunately more of this with this democratic regime that took over these people are bad, bad people. So I support this. I was a police support, but 100%, 100%. And my number is 707-888-5724. And I guess if you need my number, call me for anything I can do to help. Feel free to do that. Thank you. Hi, this is Steve. I am calling in response to agenda item 3.1. I've been a Santa Rosa resident since the late 1970s and I find it appalling that our police department has to come begging with hat in hand for additional funds when it is clear that for the size of our community, we sorely need more police officers. I can't believe that three years has passed since the fires of 2017 and we've forgotten how heroically our police department and fire department responded driving into burning neighborhoods to save our citizens. I sincerely hope the city council will provide the funds necessary for the police department to hire more officers. Thank you. My call concerns the police staffing study session. My name is Chris and I've lived in Santa Rosa for 31 years. I have appreciated the professionalism of our police department all those years. I'm so grateful for the sacrifice and service of each member as they protect and serve our community. These are challenging times for all our public servants but I believe it's time for you as our city council to show tangible support for Chief Ray Navarro and the men and women of our police force. Santa Rosa has grown to a city of 179,000 people approximately and along with this growth comes greater challenges requiring more competent officers, not fewer. Chief Navarro and our public police department need your support and encouragement to lift their morale. As leaders in our city, please lead with an ear that is equally attentive to your fellow public servants as it is to some vocal citizens. May God grant you the wisdom of Solomon to navigate these challenging waters. Thank you very much. My name is Matt Bogue. This message is in regards to the city council study session on police staffing during your January 26th meeting. I live in Rinkin Valley. I have raised my family here in Santa Rosa and have been a Sonoma County resident for the majority of my life. My neighborhood has seen an uptick in property crime during the last few months. I've been a victim of this twice recently and 100% support the police that have come and helped me. We need to have law and order and security in our city. If people don't feel safe, they will leave. Please do not take any more financial support away from our vital police services and restore any funding that you have previously taken away. Our police officers need more funding, not less. Security must be a top priority of our city council. We, the people of Santa Rosa, will be watching your actions and we will remember when it comes time for reelection. Thank you. Hi, my name is Kelly Salas and I am calling to provide input for the police staffing study session as a proud resident of Santa Rosa and mother of two children growing up. I am upset at the lack of support and finances our police department is enduring at the hands of our elected officials. How are we expected to thrive and be safe if budget cuts, understaffing and moral issues threaten the very people who have been there for us as first responders during the recent disasters that we have continued to face. I am asking city council to reconsider replacing the $1 million that was taken from our police department's budget. At a minimum, please restore the six positions lost this year alone. And please think about how you can better support our men and women in uniform who are trying to uphold the law and keep us safe throughout our city despite all this political unrest which is more reason why we need more law enforcement. I am asking you to be careful and thoughtful in making these choices because a lot of these choices that are being made are detrimental to the safety of our city and as a whole of our community. Thank you for listening, bye-bye. Hi, my name's Karina Hernandez. I'm calling because I support the police and I believe and I think they need more help and money and I support the police, the cops, sheriffs. Thank you, bye. Hi, I'm Mary Hernandez and I wanted to say that I support the panels of PD and I believe that you guys should raise their income and they need more help because of the support that they give the community. Thank you. Local police. Hi, good evening. My name is Erika Tamirano and Marta Ojeda and Kionia Andrade and we'll leave here in Santa Rosa and we're calling to let you know that we support the police here in Santa Rosa that to please not cut their financial hours or remove officers from helping the community. We feel safe if you keep them where they at or given more help to keep our community safe. Thank you. My name is Erika Tamirano. My telephone number is 70. My comment is regarding the city council study session on police staffing at the January 26th city council meeting. Hello, my name is Emberley Bogue. I grew up in Hillsburg and then have lived most of my adult life in Santa Rosa for the last 20 years. My husband and I have raised our children here and our youngest is now in her senior year in high school. I am calling in regards to the police staffing study session. I am so saddened and concerned for the lack of support for the Santa Rosa police officers from our city council and the city manager. I am asking that the $1 million be refunded to the police department budget. Taking money away from the police budget is the opposite of what should happen. More officers need to be hired to keep up with the demands of our city and they should all be paid appropriately. The safety of our community depends on it. I was horrified to see our officers being mistreated this last summer. I saw video of them being verbally threatened and having bottles and rocks thrown at them. If our police are not supported, officers will start to leave Santa Rosa and move to work somewhere that they are supported that will leave our city with less experienced officers that know our community well. To Chief Navarro and the rest of the department that may hear this, I hope that the city council and city manager will listen to the needs of our police department and will support you in every way. My family appreciates everything that you do to keep us and our community safe. Thank you for your sacrifice and taking care of our city. My family appreciates it and is so sorry for the lack of support that you have been shown. I demand that our city council and city manager start to support public safety. Thank you. Hi, this is Osana Mendoza. My voice now is going to be Spanish. Hola, mi nombre es Osana Mendoza y yo estoy llamando acerca de la meeting o de la reunión que va a ver mañana. Creo que el número es el 3-1-8-6. Y yo estoy llamando porque sé que va a ver una junta mañana acerca de los policías, los recortes que quieren hacer. En mi opinión, yo vivo aquí en la comunidad de Santa Rosa y deseo una comunidad segura que últimamente no estoy mirando eso. Estoy mirando una comunidad muy insegura. Deseo que mi comunidad sea una comunidad segura y creo que la mejor forma para eso es que haga más policías que los policías estén entrenados, que haga más apoyo para ellos, más personal, que se les brinde más ayuda para que ellos estén preparados para ayudarnos cuando lo necesitemos. En mi opinión, personal, siempre he tenido el apoyo de la policía cuando lo he necesitado y siempre me ha tocado buenas experiencias con ellos, se han portado muy bien y no creo que sea justo que les quiten los recursos que les vayan a cortar personal. Eso sería muy injusto. Por favor, pido que haga más apoyo para ellos, más dinero, más recursos para que ellos estén mejor preparados. Esa es mi opinión. Espero que mi voz sea escuchada. Mi nombre es Susana Mendoza. Vivo aquí en la ciudad de Santa Rosa. Muchas gracias. And Mayor, so then the translation to that message is, I am calling about the meeting or gathering that is going to be happening tomorrow. I believe that the number is 3186. I'm calling because I know there is going to be a meeting tomorrow about cops and the cuts that want to be made. In my opinion, I live in Santa Rosa and my wish is for a safe community that I have not seen lately. I'm seeing a community that is very unsafe. My wish is to have a safe community and the best way for that is to have more police with training, more support for them, more help for them, give them, give more to them so they can be prepared when we need them. In my personal opinion, they have always been available when we need them. I have had good experiences with them. They have behaved very well. I don't believe it is just to make their funding and personnel that would be very unjust. Please, I ask of you to give them more funding and resources so they can be better prepared. That is my opinion. I hope that my voice is heard. My name is Suzanne Mendoza and I live in Santa Rosa. Thank you very much. Thank you, Stephanie. Good evening. My name is Eric Prieto. I am a resident in Santa Rosa, California. And I wish to speak a little bit and say that I don't want the officers in Santa Rosa to get their hours cut down or laid off. I support our community and I support all the police officers that are here doing their jobs, keeping the streets safe, making sure they attend all of Santa Rosa. And this is my last thing I have to say is my godson, his father, very hardworking man, police officer. And I thank him, which I could be part of the team, but I couldn't. So I want you to have a beautiful rest of your evening. And hopefully you guys hear this message. Thank you, bye-bye. I'm calling to provide input for the police staffing study session. My name is Louise Clark and I've lived in Santa Rosa for 11 years. I've lived in a number of different countries and cities and Santa Rosa is one of my favorites. As I'm sure you know, one of the things that makes a city a great place to live is safety. It doesn't matter what a city can offer if safety is not one of them. The appeal to live there is lost. I'm calling in today because I'm terribly disappointed at the way our city council members have been treating the police department. A police department that does a sterling job in keeping the city safe. As our council members, you should be supporting our officers during the times we've had. It is wrong to use a broad brush and sweep it across every police force in the United States because of the terrible things that have happened at a few. Each police force should be commended or disciplined independently and ours is doing a great job and deserve your support. You should show that by refunding the $1 million to them. The second issue I have with our city leaders is the way you gain public input. You do realize that most people are dealing with unprecedented pressures on their lives right now and expecting them to look out this type of meeting that is terribly publicized is ridiculous. You're just listening to the loud minority on issues as important as law enforcement and that's not acceptable. As our representatives, I expect you to do a better job in ensuring you're looking to the majority of the city. And I guarantee you these proposals are not what the majority wants to see. So please support our police. You know they do a great job and make an effort to get and hear real input from the majority of the city. Let's keep Santa Rosa safe and a great place to live. Thank you. Hi, my name is Scott Sallison. I was calling regarding the police session that is coming up. And I wanted to just say as a resident of Santa Rosa, I support our police department and I support the actions that they take. And I just wanted to say that I believe that they should have the freedom to express their concerns when one of their fallen brothers or sisters has died in the line of duty. And I don't believe that that should be, they should be censured or anything should happen to them because of that. And I strongly support them. I think they do wonderful work here. And I believe that they are great for our community. Thanks so much. Hi, my name is Ruby Mendoza. I was calling in regards to the police staffing study session you guys are having tomorrow. I wish that my city of Santa Rosa has a little bit more help with training, training sessions for police and more staffing as well as more help to the community and more funding as well for our police with Santa Rosa. Thank you. No, that concludes my presentation. Great, thank you so much. So council, I think we will take a, let's call it a 15 minute dinner break and come back at just after seven o'clock if folks can hold it to 15 minutes and we'll conclude this item at that point. We'll bring it back for council discussions at that point. Thank you. All right, Madam City Clerk, I'm seeing a quorum. Let's go ahead and take the roll and get the show back on the road. Okay. Get the show back on the road. Council Member Tibbets. Present. Council Member Schwedhelm. Here. Council Member Sawyer. Here. Council Member Fleming. Present. Council Member Alvarez. Vice Mayor Rogers. Present. Mayor Rogers. Here. Council Member Alvarez, have you joined us? Okay, let the record show that all council members are present with the exception of Council Member Alvarez. All right, thank you, Stephanie. And I will also note joining us now is Assistant City Manager Jason Nutt, who will be filling in for the remainder of the meeting. Shawn McGlynn has gone to the Emergency Operations Center as was planned at 6.30 to be able to monitor some of the storm events that are happening or anticipated for tonight. So we'll have Jason with us for the rest of the meeting. Do we have the Chief back? Yes, sir, I'm back. Hey, Chief, thank you so much. Before I bring it back for Council Member Comments, there was in particular one question that was raised in public comment that I was hoping you could get to. And that was the question about the breakdown of the different types of calls for service. If you have any of that data or when the public should expect to see some of that data discussed in the Public Safety Subcommittee or in our budget meetings. Mayor, was the question about our calls for service or was the question about the difference between the calls for service on what we do and what the report out of what WIPER Clinic reports for their contract up in Oregon? As I understood the question, it was a breakdown of looking at our types of calls for service so that as we potentially move in this direction of creating a Kahootz model that can take some of them, we have a better understanding for what percentage or what total number of calls for service could be diverted into this additional process. Okay, we did provide some information that a prior Public Safety Subcommittee will clarify that and get some more concrete information for you for the future. Yeah, that'd be great, Chief. And I believe it was Kimmy from my notes that asked that question. And so if I'm incorrect in interpreting after 60 plus comments, what it was, Kimmy, feel free to get back in touch with us and we'll make sure you get what you're looking for there as well. All right, thanks, Chief. Are there any other questions for the Chief before we go on to comments? Council Member Tibbets. Thank you. I've got a question actually for the Chief and thank you all. I apologize for not being here for the first half of the meeting. I had an unexpected visit to the hospital relating to my wife's pregnancy, everything's good, but I was listening as a spectator. Chief, my question for you is I heard a lot through the comment section that we have taken away a million dollars from your budget. And my understanding, I could be mistaken, I'm not on the Public Safety Subcommittee, but my understanding was when we were having this conversation back in the summertime after the protests around defund and all those things, we elected to take money out and basically set it aside because we wanted to have funds to explore the CAHOOTS model and some of these changes we wanted to implement in the department to have better service. And my misunderstanding how that went down. So we experienced a $1.1 million reduction. A portion of that was frozen and the other portion of that came through actual reductions in staffing. So we did experience reduction staffing of officers and civilian staff, but it was a combination. I believe it was about 960,000 in CAHOOTS and then the rest were, I believe, frozen. So I could have the other way around, but it was a combination. Okay, thank you. And if any of my council colleagues remember more specifically, if you don't mind elaborating, that'd be great. Thank you. Yeah, and within context, that was a component of the $18 million that we had across the entire city. So chief, I'd have to go back and I'd have to look at my notes as well on how much was frozen versus how much was cuts. But we did maintain the measure O baseline is what I remember was where we put it was the measure O baseline funding for both police and fire. Madam Vice Mayor, do you have a question or are you ready for comments? I have a question, well, two questions actually that were brought up during public comment. So the first one would be clarification. Chief, when we go out to the encampments, we're offering services for people to go into shelters or we have an alternative for them, correct? That is correct. All operations are done in conjunction with the homeless outreach services team, also with our homeless team here in the city of Santa Rosa. And so we work collaboratively with the other city departments and hosts to make sure that when we're addressing one of those, we're meeting the injunction requirements. And then also part of that is to provide the services to the people who are in the encampments. Okay, and then my second question, and maybe I needed to read a little bit more of the press Democrat over the summer, but what did happen to the vehicle that plowed into the protesters during the summer? There were a couple of incidents that we had. One, we did arrest one juvenile who went through the crowd. We, on another one, we identified the person who was driving. We sent that information over to the district attorney's office and I don't believe that there was a filing on that. Okay, and last question. Are there current trainings for our police force looking at the hidden disabilities or things that they may not be able to see, but that are present? And if so, what is that? And how often is it conducted? So our department just went through another series of crisis intervention training. I actually went through it last year where we work, it's a county grant that is used to train officers throughout the county in all the jurisdictions. Part of that training includes crisis intervention for mental health. It also includes a component of addressing needs as far as potential disabilities and also addressing or meeting with people who are from just the different demographics in communities. The other thing that we did recently was that we presented training to all of our staff in person and also through online regarding disabilities and regarding epilepsy. And so we just did that this year as a, throughout all the departments. So that was both sworn in civilian who received that training. Council member Fleming. Yeah. Thank you so much, Chief, again, and thank you to the public for reaching out and expressing yourselves. One of the things that I think makes us a strong city and a strong police department is our willingness to look at our role in the larger picture and how we fit into that. And so to that end, I'm curious to know because I do think so highly of our police department, how and when and where the conversations around racism, not just implicit bias, but white supremacy and how those forces, which we do know exist in law enforcement, they may not exist within our police department, but our police department is certainly egged on by the POA that's not just in Santa Rosa, but statewide and nationally. And so I'm curious to know how these conversations are facilitated and brought forth so that we can hold ourselves to a higher standard and be worthy of the respect that the police department is asking for from the community. That's a very good question, ma'am. So one of the things that we've done over the past several months is that we've worked directly with our office community engagement. We've really relied on them because with the difficult issue of actually meeting people, where they are and the trust, we've been able to work with our office community engagement to build some of those meetings. And I know the former mayor had been part of those meetings. I've been part of those meetings. I have had some ongoing dialogue with the president of the NAACP. We, some of these community meetings that we've gone to have been attended virtually. And I've had a lieutenant as part of that. The other thing that I'm really excited about what we're gonna be doing in the future because we can't stop with the meetings that we're doing right now is again working with the SEED Collaborative as we start implementing that as a city. And so that's gonna be, I think there's a heavy lift there for our HR department and we're working with them and we're gonna be having specific dialogue with community internally with the SEED Collaborative on equity, police engagement, community policing and cultural awareness. So we're gonna, and we'll, I'm not sure what their report out is, but we're gonna continue that and it's a long-term project. Thank you, Chief. And to that end, it is a long-term project. And I think one of the ways that our police officers and the good work that they do can be best recognized is by dealing with these things directly and in an ongoing manner. And so, and in doing so, acknowledge them and allow us to move forward rather than being paralyzed by the accusations and where there are instances of things that are not going right. And then we can empower officers to identify and eradicate it so that they can indeed be worthy of the respect that we confer upon them. Thank you. Council Member Tibbets. Thanks, Mayor. Chief, one more question. I was reviewing the slides at some point in the presentation when I was listening. I heard that we had six positions go vacant in the last year. Did I hear that correctly? That is correct. That does include the, believe it includes two frozen positions. So in the chart in the presentation, it showed a number of sworn officers is 177 in 2020. So are we at 177 now or are we at 171? No, we are. Try to figure out where that's six. So the actual, so we have 177 allocated positions. So, and then two of those are frozen. And then there's a, and then we have I think 13 that are injured that are not working right now and 11 more that are in training. So we did. Okay, that's too much math for me to do on the fly but thank you. I noticed on the slides that also said 184 is the standard for the national study. So I guess what I'm trying to figure out is how many officers do you have to hire up to get to that national standard? Which slide are you referring to, sir? I apologize. Let me go take a look here. Looks like it's slide five. I think it is. The patrol staffing study for 2018 recommended adding an additional four officer positions immediately to bring the total to 185. Yes. So that was, again, that was back in, that was back in 2018 when we had 181 positions at the time. And then over again, we've lost positions over the years and the 180, yeah, the 185 comes from the staffing study that we took. I'm not sure. So to follow up on that study, I think it says 188 were required by 2022. Yes. So I'm guessing we're in like the 186, 187 range by 2020. What I'm trying to do here, chief, is figure out how many officers that you need since this is a study session, because I assume we're gonna all give our opinions on what we should, you know, let staff know is what we need. I mean, I'm of the opinion that we should be close to the national study, closer than where it seems like we currently are. Speaking for myself, I'd really like to see, you know, and I understand we have to do more work on this, but I'd like to see the necessary number of people who are in plain clothes, who, you know, are fulfilling the same or similar role as cahoots be included as part of that, because I also heard earlier when you guys were speaking that about three to 5% of calls for service in Eugene, Oregon were reduced as a result of having cahoots participate in some of those homelessness and mental health calls for service. So, you know, I said this, I think when we were talking a lot in the summertime about this issue, I don't believe that we're gonna have a better department by taking money away. Now, I wanted to set money aside so that we could do the research necessary to improve the service in our department, particularly as it pertains to the homeless and people who struggle with mental health. So, you know, whatever you feel is necessary to get us there, to have that department that's able to provide that service, I'm very interested in that. Okay, thank you. And I think what, I can understand what you're asking. So it was basically between 2018 and 2022 it was about an almost like an officer a year to get to that point. So we, you know, so we would be at around 180, 186, 187. Okay, well, between years. Yeah. Adding my opinion, I think that we should get there. I'd still like to maybe stop at 182 so we can leave room for that research to happen about how many plainclothes mental health responders do we need. I understand we might be talking with the county about using, I don't know if it's the heart team or whomever, but, you know, I just wanna make sure that we have room in our budget, in our department to provide that service. But I do wanna make sure that we have, because here's the other thing I'm hearing from our community that there may be certain situations where they don't feel safe or, you know, maybe an officer is stressed because he or she is running around to multiple calls. I think overworking an officer probably leads to that situation. It contributes that low morale and what can potentially result in maybe a poor attitude. I'm not saying that about our department, but I think I'm sharing this with the community because I think it's important that the department be staffed up adequately to have all the calls for services get responded to in a timely way and that morale in the department is maintained because without it, I just don't think you can have a good department that is keeping everybody in the community safe. The other thing I just wanna say and then I'll listen to my colleagues is, it's so apparent to me when I look at the national stage, all the way down to even the local stage that we so often engage in these us versus them conversations and I'm getting so tired of it. It seems as if that, you know, these worlds where you can back the blue, but also, you know, support communities of color and some of the insecurities they might feel around government institutions, particularly police departments, that somehow that those are mutually exclusive and that you have to pick a side. That's not the world we can afford to live in. We have to live in a world where we can support both because if we don't support both, we're not gonna get the results that we want. So I just wanna say to the community, you know, as one council member out of seven, I'm gonna continue to push for positive reforms in our department, but I also wanna make a statement to you, chief, that I hope you'll pass along to your department that I do greatly appreciate the work that the men and women of the San Rosa Police Department do. No department is perfect. No government agency is perfect. No politician is perfect. We're imperfect beings, but by and large, I think we have a very good department. San Rosa's blessed to have a good department. And to me, the difference between good and bad is who's willing to change or who wants to just uphold the status quo. And so far, I've seen a department that is willing to change. And I assume that we're gonna continue to be willing to change to be a better department. So my thanks to you. Thank you, council member, council member Alvarez. Yes, thank you, mayor. Chief, did I understand you correctly that when you stated that one out of three applicants to make it through the background checks? That is correct. It's, you know, I spoke with my recruitment team and they said on average, it's about one in every three people will get through the entire process for a conditional job offer. For the other two, what's usually the factors that remove them from the process? Well, once you're through the written and the interview process, you go into a background and it becomes what a lot of it has to do with life choices and time and distance. And so again, people are not perfect. We don't expect people to be perfect, but there does have to be some time and distance between, you know, maybe a mistake that was made. You know, we've, or, you know, could be, you know, whatever the issues are, right? So, but whatever that is, there should be some time and distance. There are things that we do look at and, you know, we do address, you know, if things come up that look like somebody's gonna be, is gonna be biased, those things will disqualify people. And so we have trained background investigators when we become to the point where we're overwhelmed, we do have the ability to get some, to help from outside entity and the expectations are clear on what we're looking for. But again, we're not perfect. And, you know, that's what makes us all human and probably better at addressing calls for service. Yeah, cool, mighty judge, right? In regards to moving forward with a force that's representative of the community that they serve, do you have any recommendations for us at the city council on approaches that we may put forth to one day, hopefully, have a force that is representative of the community that is being served? Well, I think, so, I mean, it helps with, you know, as you speak with your constituents and, you know, and to really show that we're, I believe we're a legitimate professional department and it's an honorable profession to be in. And so, you know, we're looking for people who wanna serve. You know, it is a, it's, again, there's definitely some benefits that you get out of it. It's a challenging and rewarding career, but it can be trying at times. And so we're looking for somebody who does have critical thinking skills who is willing to, you know, put others in front of before themselves. And those are the things that, you know, I ask as you look, speak with your constituents to talk to them and help them prepare. And if there's anybody who's ever interested in being a member of the police department, you know, we are more than happy to take their emails or phone calls and talk to them about how to increase their chances to become one. And so we're working with our, we try to work with our schools, we try to work with our junior college and to try to make that available. But I think the best thing to do is really help us, just like any other city department, you know, help us recruit by spreading the word. And if there's things that you hear that people have questions about, we're more than happy to have those conversations. Thank you. And my last question, it's more of a question of how to be more efficient, but I don't understand the end to not. You spoke of the downtime that an officer must take in order to take their video and really present it in a way that it can be used by detectives or those looking at the evidence. What's the limitations that we would be able to pass this information on to staff and have them prepare the information for the higher ups? Yeah, so when you're talking about a court presentation, you have to, as the officer, you're going to be the one testifying in court. And so the officer is going through and number one, making sure that, I mean, it's a great tool to use as you're writing your report, but you're also, you're not changing anything. You're just marking certain areas and nobody else can really do that, right? The officer has to do that. So the district attorney's office knows, this is the area, this is maybe one area where there's a particular piece of evidence. For other issues such as redactions, we have civilian staff that do that. And it's become more and more cumbersome for them and more time consuming because it takes a lot of time. There are certain things that may be on video. The inside of a person's house may be a minor that there's privacy considerations that we have to address. And so we have civilian staff here within the department that handle that. Thank you, sir. Thank you, Council Member. Are there any other questions for the Chief? Should we go on to discussion and comments? All right, I'm not saying any other questions. So Chief, I just wanted to lead it off. I want to piggyback a little bit on what Council Member Tibbets was talking about. And I think that we are all particularly feeling it this week more than most, though we get used to it. And it's this attempt to push us all into this false dichotomy between supporting police officers and not supporting police officers between supporting our BIPOC community and not supporting our BIPOC community. It is, and I wanted to address specifically the thin blue line flag, I think to say that it's a divisive conversation and a challenging and problematic symbol doesn't do justice to what we've seen in Santa Rosa over the last week, nor what we've seen across the country over the last year to a year and a half, right? And I think that I've seen Chief Navarro receive a outpouring of support tonight. That was very nice to see. I've also seen you being run through the ringer on social media by folks who quite frankly, do not live here. And I don't understand why they care so much about how Santa Rosa chooses to navigate this complex conversation about safety within our community, about rebuilding trust within our community. The post went up on a Saturday. Myself as well as other council members and other community leaders brought the concerns forward to both the chief, the city manager and other leadership at the city. And I want to make it really clear. There was not one person who chose to remove the post. It was a decision by the leadership of the city in one voice saying that that post should not have been posted to social media, not from the official site from the SRPD, that that symbol, we needed to be more cognizant of the impact that it would have on our communities that we are trying to rebuild our trust with. And just because those folks are in the minority does not mean that they are a small percentage of our community. We are in government. We need to be inclusive and cognizant of how we address everyone within our community. And I just wanted to say publicly chief, for me personally, removing the post is not a sign of disrespect to your officers. It is not to show that we don't value folks who are in our community. It shows that we are listening to our BIPOC community and our marginalized communities and actually hearing from them what their concerns are and taking proactive steps as a department and as a city to address those concerns. And chief, you have my complete confidence and my complete support in all of these conversations and I appreciate how you're able to bring both of those perspectives and try to bridge that divide. We as a community are gonna be having a very difficult conversation going forward. I'm proud that we brought in SEED Collaborative to be able to do that for us. But I wanna make it very clear to the community that I stand by that decision. This is the direction that our city is going is to be more inclusive to honor everybody's perspectives and make sure that there's a place at the table in Santa Rosa for everyone. Now as it pertains to the police staffing, I keep wanting to hear from you and I appreciate the information that I'm getting from the public safety subcommittee about what staffing level we need and what funding level we need to build the safest community that we can. And that doesn't just mean safest for one side of town but also building those partnerships and building those relationships throughout our entire community to look at a different staffing model that might not be your traditional way of viewing how many officers versus how many people to council member Sweathelms point looking at these other models that could remove some of those calls for service make our community safer, make our officers safer and more effective at their job and truly do a positive thing for our community. It's going to be a tough conversation and I know it is. And I hope people will stick with us as we work our way through it. Again, the message that I want to put out there and just make sure to reiterate over and over again we do support and value and appreciate our good officers. We do have to make changes within our department as everybody does. We need to hear from our BIPOC community as well as our other communities that have been marginalized for far too long in our community and only together are we going to move forward not us versus them, but as one Santa Rosa. And with that, I'll get off my soapbox and I'll turn it over to other council members to see if you have comments. Madam Vice Mayor. Thank you, Mayor. So I think my comments are all over a little bit so if you guys can bear with me. First, I wanted to thank the chief for being here and enduring the comments that were brought forth if they were half as bad as some of the ones that we received. I know that they were not great comments to read and are here but I do want to acknowledge that heroes work for the city of Santa Rosa. They possess honor, courage, integrity, honesty and compassion and I can say this for most but not all that cops should be supported and bad cops should be taken off the course. I am definitely a firm believer of that. I do want to thank the department for the sacrifices that they make daily and also their families because I know that it is definitely a big sacrifice. I also want to thank the community for the emails that came from both sides of the flag debate. And thanking you for allowing your voices to be heard. And chief, you said something earlier when you were talking and you said, we did sign up to be officers but we're also human. I acknowledge that and I also want to say that I did not sign up to be BIPOC and I am also human and I think that listening to some of the comments that were made were very disheartening. I'm calling people wacky and frowning upon people's ability to have a voice of wanting to be equal and want social justice within our community. We can be a standard nationally of how we want people to see us but we do need to make changes within our department. We are not perfect and we really do need to acknowledge, everyone needs to acknowledge that we need to make changes and probably many different departments of the city but this is the one that we're looking at tonight. I've had both personal and professional run-ins with SRPD and the personal interactions were awesome. The detectives and officers were great but working with them on a professional level with a master's degree and having eight years of experience under my belt working with the mental health I believe that I was spoken down to. My knowledge of my field was questioned by someone that does not have a master's degree in my field. So I can only imagine how in certain situations our community members are spoken to. Lastly, I do think that we need to work on our staffing. I think the best way to work on some of these things is to have adequate staffing. I agree with Jack when he spoke about saving some of the allocations to see how the CAHOOTS model and things that we want to implement will work into that. But I think also by having adequate staffing the things that we want to see as a community such as training and education and restoring, taking away the fear and restoring our community with our officers, we need to do that by having adequate officers. We can't run them down into the ground and still expect them to smile all the time and to have the things that we want our officers to possess. And lastly again, we got to stop with us versus them. I'm not sure who came up with, we don't support our PD. We're trying to be inclusive and support everyone. And I'm sorry if it came at a sacrifice to the PD and they believe that we don't support them, but I can speak for myself. I wholeheartedly support everyone on our force and whatever we can do or whatever I can do to continue to support them, to continue to support the growth of the PD, but also acknowledging that there are some changes that need to be made on our force. So thank you. Thank you, Madam Vice Mayor, Council Member Sweatham. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. So I'm gonna start first with the staffing and thank you Chief for providing all this information. And one thing that struck me even after we had it at the Public Safety Subcommittee meeting, it's kind of like expectations whether it be council expectation or community expectations. And the Chief provided some numbers about the calls for service. And the reality is all those calls are related to a resident who is either in the city of Santa Rosa or lives in our city or is visiting our city, right? The police department's not making those numbers up. And so for us, what type of customer service and community service do we want to provide this community with our law enforcement officers? Having been in Chief Navarro's position back when we had the great recession, those are very difficult times where we lost staffing. Had to make some very difficult decisions. But then as I expect right now, Chief Navarro is the most information to make those decisions. Because unless you actually understand the workings and the responses of the department, specifically in those special services that Chief Navarro talked about, just to say motors or violent crimes or domestic violence, but knowing the nature of the calls for service there. And it was even some community members who were asking about the passage of our last tax measure. But what'll be the impact if we don't continue this funding which may result in additional cuts to the police department? Well, if you're a victim of violent crime or sexual assault, you're not gonna see anything. But trust me, those people in the services that the Santa Rosa Police Department provides on those sensitive investigations, they are phenomenal. They are incredible human beings because these are the most challenging types of cases and we need to give them that support. So as we continue these budget discussions because it'd be great, I'm with you, Jack saying, yeah, I wish we were at 185, 188 officers. There's a price tag attached to that. And we have to apply that towards, in my opinion, okay, what's it looking at the whole city? So how much can we afford to pay for police services? And then I believe it's Chief Navarro's job once we come up with that figure, okay, what's the most accurate deployment strategy? Because there are some agencies, Chief Navarro talked about the 30 minutes obligated, 30 minutes unobligated or his terms were reactive or proactive. Heck, there are some cities in the state of California, they just go call to call to call to call. There is no interaction with the public because they're off to the next one. That's not the type of police department I want in our community. And I wanna do what we can to maintain that reactive and proactive time there. And that does take commitment. But again, there's challenges. So it's somewhat we're having this conversation in somewhat of a vacuum because if we do take funds from somewhere else or we increase the budget or whatever we wanna do there's gotta be consequences. I think we need to have that. So Chief, I would ask you as we do have either the mid-year budget discussions, I don't know what the city manager is planning for us or our goal setting or our next year's budget process please share with us if this is the level of funding that we want. Here are the consequences. Here's how I would deploy these resources because you are a subject matter expert in the deployment of policing resources. And so please frame it for that so we can get our arms right. We can do that, but that means either we're only gonna have 10 minutes proactive time, whatever that is. There are consequences for decisions that this body makes but trying to stay in my own lane which then leads me into the recent weeks of conversation. You're a chief, you have all the information 100% supports you in the department. I had a complete trust that given the information regarding that posting you're gonna make the right decision. You don't need me to tell you how to act. And so I just wanna clarify and I appreciate Mayor Rogers your conversation. But the number of comments that we heard from the public saying all of us, we guided this. I didn't have a conversation with Chief Navarro and tell earlier this morning about our presentation tomorrow for this public safety subcommittee meeting. I didn't have a conversation on this with the city manager until Friday, right? And was very disappointing to me what we've all acknowledged is some of the quite frankly, nasty language that is going on both sides, you know? And it was interesting to me coming in the week after our inauguration what really struck me as impressive was when we had our three former presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama they're right outside the two in the unknown soldier, right? And President Obama said, you know we've got to not just listen to folks we agree with but listen to folks we don't, right? We are so much better than this than pointing the fingers. And, you know, Mr. Alvarez you were asking earlier about, you know what can we do to help recruit? We gotta own that, right? I can personally tell you, I have tried to recruit people. You know, when I was mayor we had the council ride along to try to get people to understand what it's like to run for public office. We all have to take ownership and not point the finger at the police department. Yeah, you're staffing and what are you doing about morale? It's all of our successes or failures. We all have to accept responsibility for that. So chief, I was supported by you when the city manager pointed to your position I'm still a supporter for you. I believe you're the right person for this job and you're gonna make the right decisions. And it's a tough job but I just hope that you recognize the department recognizes we're with you. And yes, you're not perfect. We're all human, quite frankly not just you and we're all human we're all gonna make mistakes and I have confidence that when you do identify a mistake or something that didn't go as smoothly you'll take that corrective action as I've seen you throughout your career. So thank you for this presentation and hopefully the study session has provided this community additional dialogue. One last thing I do wanna share with just about against Mr. Alvarez because I think you were there at South Park before you were sworn in. And myself and chief Navarro along with community engagement did a listening session in South Park. And after that listening session I saw a posting where a mother whose son had a conversation with chief Navarro. And I think he was an eight or nine year old boy had told his pediatrician when the pediatrician said what do you wanna do when you grow up? Mother was expecting a soccer player because that's what he'd already said. What did the young man say? I wanna be a police officer. Well, do you know any? Yes, I know chief Navarro. That was one interaction out in the community and that's the impact that chief Navarro can have on this community. And I would argue there's probably 177 other people that can have that same impact but we gotta do it together. We're much better than this. So thank you for providing that information. Chief Navarro, I look forward to our subcommittee meeting tomorrow when we do talk about the Kahootz program because I think that will be help address some of these staffing issues. Thanks. Thank you, council member. Council member Sawyer. Thank you, mayor. I really wanna appreciate Mr. Schwerthelm's comments because he touched on something that we lose sight of at times. I was gonna save my comments for the item a little bit lower in our agenda could have to do with the public safety subcommittee but given how many comments there were about the council's reaction and lack of support for our police department, I feel it and this is probably the time to respond to that. But he was taught, Mr. Schwerthelm was talking about the sacrifices that we have to make when we're dealing with budgets. I was part of the decision-making body that did some cuts to the police department during the Great Recession. And it's something that it was very painful to do. It's not something that I would like to do on a regular basis. And I think that we will have some good information that will come out of the public safety subcommittee and allow us to make some of those decisions that will make us more efficient and more responsive to our community. I don't, I have not in the past or will I now and know will I in the future engage in conversations on Facebook about policies of this city because I find it, I just don't think it's the right forum for it. This is the forum for comments that I believe would come from me about whether it be criticism or praise of our city. And it is my opinion that our officers have chosen the most demanding, the most dangerous, the most and the most scrutinized of the positions in our city organization. I highly respect and appreciate the challenging jobs. They have risked their lives to undertake. It is my hope that the new public safety subcommittee will identify certain policies and procedures which are functioning well and identify those that are not functioning as well and be making changes than those. And I think that our police officers will be, it will embrace those conversations and recommendations as time goes on. So this was a difficult few days for our city and I believe that we will come out of this stronger and better. It was painful to watch and it kind of indicates, can show what can happen on the negative side of Facebook interaction and I'll leave it at that. And again, you have my utmost support, Chief DeVarro and as do every man and woman on our police department. And I look forward to increasing their ranks in the future, although even if it means making tough decisions on what we consider core services in our city and making and having to make some uncomfortable cuts at times that will be painful. But that is what the seven of us have to tackle and they will be painful discussions and if it happens during the mid-year budget discussions then so be it. We need to respond to our studies and then let us know we want our officers safe and we want our citizenry safe. And if we have to make certain sacrifices and other parts of our budgets to guarantee that then I'm willing to do that. Thank you. Thank you, Council Member Fleming. Thank you, Mayor. And I largely agree with the comments that have been made by the council members preceding me. What one of the things that I look at when it comes to I'm going to dive directly into staffing here is what are the services that we want to get out of our police department. And I think that that actually relates to the bigger question about equity, fairness and just policing. And that we had a lot of pressure, have a lot of pressure on defunding the police. And the fact of the matter is that police officers provide services that as my social worker I could not hope to provide dealing with sexual assault and domestic violence, child pornography and types of fraud. And what I hope for is that we really look closely at what it is that police officers are required to do. And then we look at what areas there's been mission creed. And I do believe there's mission creed. That is my opinion that police officers likely don't have a place beyond responding to active shooter situations in schools that police officers are not educators. And that besides coming in and visiting and doing something here or there that police officers really ought to be doing the core services of dealing with the most violent offenders and the most criminal minded people. And that there's a lot of other enforcement positions. I mean, we have code enforcement. We have people who enforce rules all over our society and do so without weapons. I know that in my position, working with psychiatric patients, I have the awesome responsibility and honor to take away people's freedom and their civil rights when they're a threat to society. And I do so without a gun and the security officers that I work with do so without a weapon. And we do so with far less pay than police officers get. And we don't go around asking for the kind of recognition that officers do. And it's okay, it's a job and it's a calling. And I know that policing and police culture is a little bit different, but we need to take a surgical look at where we need police officers and give them the respect that they deserve for doing that work, which frankly, I would never want to do. And most people would never want to do. And then we need to say what the rest is mental health and what the rest is code enforcement. And so I'm not in favor of us upstaffing. I'm in favor of us staffing appropriately and looking to move away from militarism and policing toward very targeted and thoughtful policing and policing that's respectful of the community. And then, so I'm going to move from there into some other things here, which is, I wanted to touch on why I think that there's this false dichotomy. I think that there are people in our community who feel genuinely more protected when there are more police. And by listening to that show, which I believe was largely a gone by the police officers association of that two-hour show that we all listened to, what you hear is people saying, I'm a landowner. I'm a taxpayer. I live in Bennett Valley. I live in Rincon Valley. Those are dog whistles. That's a way of saying, I'm white, I have privilege and I want police to protect me from the other elements. And we know what they mean when they say other elements. And that's to me not cool. That's racism. And I'm going to get a flurry of emails and I'm going to stand by it. And I also stand by the pressure that I put on the police and the city manager in conjunction with others that I proudly put to take down the thin blue line post. And let me tell you why I did that. The thin blue line is a symbol and symbols mean different things to different people. I'm the granddaughter of a family that was wiped out in the Holocaust. And when I go to India and see a swastika, I am not offended. And it's because in India, a swastika does not mean the same thing that it means to me here in the United States or in Western Europe. And the thin blue line to many officers means love and support. And to many people of color and people who have been disrespected by police, it means fear and terror. And it's our job as council members to remember that we have to protect the least amongst us. And people who do not have the wherewithal to speak out and who don't have powerful unions backing them who need us to say that, you know what? You have a gun, you have a badge. Of course you're human, but you have the right to do a whole lot of things. And rarely if ever is a police officer ever held to account for taking the life of a person of color. And so when we talk about this, we need to not have false equivalencies. We need to be real with the fact that there's a huge power dynamic. And if that makes people who are uncomfortable, so be it. We need to get good at being uncomfortable in order to move forward. And I'm gonna leave it at that. I have a lot more to say, but I'll leave it with one last thought, which is I love Santa Rosa. I love the hardworking people of our police department. I'm disheartened at the loss of Mary Lou Armour. It makes me sad and I think about her every day. I also realized that there's only ever been one person in the Santa Rosa police department who's ever died violently, one in our entire history. We can't say that of the precious people of color of this community. Thank you. Thank you, council member, council member Alvarez. After after those words, I really don't, I don't understand speak, but I gotta tell you, I've been thinking about how, how can we separate the concerns from my community? It's not, it's not that police are hated. There's a separation, there's actually three separate issues here. One is police, one is staffing, and one is the banner. When it comes to police, when it comes to staffing, it's absolutely imperative that when a person needs our police officers, that someone shows up and it helps them when they're in need. When it comes to the banner, I think it was very, very eloquently explained of what things mean to different people. And I didn't realize it, but the answer has been on the tip of my nose the entire time. This thing here means that I wanna think about somebody else's well-being in a fashion that I wanna actually put that paramount to my own well-being. This is the ability to sometimes think about other people and what it means to their well-being. And for me, I absolutely understand that the black line or the blue line, I'm sorry, the blue line means very, something that's very close to the heart to many, many people. But when I hear people talk about, it's the minority speaking. It's absolutely the minority speaking. It's the black and the brown speaking. When we think about compassion, empathy, sometimes it's not about our interpretation. It's about having the consideration of how other people might feel about something. And it's absolutely true, we're not perfect. And we have a lot of learning to do, but I hope that we can learn together and understand that we have to take each other into consideration no matter what it is that we're bringing forth. And as a new city council member, I'm learning this every day. I'm learning how important things are to community members that might not be important to me. But I hope that we as Santa Rosas really take into account each other's concerns and fears. Is that the only day, I mean, we're not going anywhere. We're all here together, calling a spaghetti bowl, calling a tall salad, but the reality of it is, I'm thinking about you, think about me. Thank you, council member. So with that, we're going to finish the item. I do want to leave us on this note that tomorrow the public safety subcommittee meeting will be discussing many of these items that we talked about. There will be a discussion about the response over the flag. And my hope is that we can do that respectfully of one another and move on to the discussions that are more important or the reforms that I think many people in our community have been crying for, for discussion. With that, I leave that to you, Madam Chair for the committee tomorrow, and we'll move on to our next item. And Madam City Clerk, I believe that because this is the start of the official meeting after the study session, I will, Sue, if you'll permit me, do a quick straw poll from council. Thumbs up if people need a five minute break or if we should keep going. All right, I'm seeing some folks who'd like a five minute breaks. We'll take a five minute break and we'll come back at 8.05. All right, Madam City Clerk, I see a quorum. Let's go ahead and come on back and take a roll call, though. Thank you. Council Member Tibbets. Here. Council Member Schwaitham. Here. Council Member Sawyer. Here. Council Member Fleming. Present day. Council Member Alvarez. Present. Vice Mayor Rogers. Present. Mayor Rogers. Here. Let the record show that all council members are present. All right, we have no closed sessions to report out on. I'm hoping, Madam City Attorney, that you don't have anything to add from our study session that started at three o'clock. And Mr. Nutt, but if either of you do speak now. Nothing from me. The City Manager does have a report. Well, we'll get to the City Manager's reports in just a couple of minutes. No proclamations. Let's start with the staff briefings. All right, so the COVID 7.1 is COVID response updates. And yesterday at the California Department of Public Health lifted the regional stay at home or to statewide. Sonoma County, including Santa Rosa, will remain in the most restrictive purple tier. Under the purple tier, outdoor gatherings are permitted with up to three households and personal care businesses can open with modifications. The following are permitted to operate only outdoors with modifications. Restaurants, wineries, gyms, places of worship, movie theaters, family entertainment centers, museums, zoos and aquariums. With the pandemic far from over, residents are urged to continue wearing masks, limiting mixing and getting vaccinated when eligible. All phase one A groups are being offered vaccines in Sonoma County, including healthcare personnel at risk of exposure, residents of skilled nursing facilities and those age 75 and over. The state announced today that it will adopt an age-based system to vaccinate residents, shifting away from the state's initial strategy of weighing job-based risk. Those 65 and over are part of phase one B tier one, but future groups will become eligible based on age. The state is officially launching My Turn Today, a new system for Californians to learn when they are eligible to be vaccinated. A place to make an appointment when eligible and a mechanism to easily track vaccination data. Californians can go to myturn.ca.gov to sign up, although Sonoma County residents will not be able to use the appointment system until sometime in February. Information and updates about the vaccine change frequently. So please go to sonomasocoemergency.org forward slash vaccine. We say that again. Socoemergency.org forward slash vaccine for the latest information on the county's website. And that concludes that briefing. Thank you, Mr. Assistant City Manager. I will say that restaurants being able to operate outdoors on the biggest rain deluge of the year is so on brand for this pandemic that I don't even know what else to say. I see Magalia coming on. You want to take us away? Do you have a report as well? Yes. Good evening, Mayor Rogers and members of the council. I have a very brief community empowerment plan update. On the Center of the Police Department low-rider patrol car, there's currently a fleet project happening that will affect our timelines. So we're looking at another three to four weeks until the car can be released. There was a community question regarding the funding for the SRPD low-rider patrol car. And the funding will be coming from the community engagement budget since this falls under our designated funding to support the community empowerment plan. And the vehicle will be used as a long-term community engagement tool. In addition, since we've announced the project, we've had a very positive response from individuals, businesses, and organizations who have reached out and are also interested in funding the project or donating work. In terms of the community empowerment plan report, because the community empowerment plan reports information is led by the community that participated, we are currently looking at the best way to present the report itself. So that is in the most accessible version, and that the community at all levels from youth onward will be able to have a clear understanding of the outcomes and information presented, and we'll have more to come on this process. And that is the end of my report. Thank you. Thank you so much, Director. And Mayor, item 7.3, the glass fire recovery update. Both Paul and Kempelin are on duty with the impending weather event, and we have no update for this evening. Great, thank you so much. Council, are there any questions about the two updates that we received? Madam Vice Mayor. So I'm sorry, what's the amount disclosed for the lowrider or what the actual budget is? I know where it's coming from, but what is the actual budget? I think is what the community wanted to know. Sure, that amount, including the part, not the parts, I'm sorry, the labor cost, which is the bulk of the cost is around $17,000. However, again, that's estimating labor costs and the Sonoma County Lowrider Council has offered that labor in kind. So technically that won't necessarily be an expense. However, we do want to note it as an expense overall. Thank you. Council, any other questions? Great, we will go ahead and go to public comment on this item. Again, this is for the two staff briefings that we just received. We still have our non-agenda items, public comment coming up, and I see one hand, and that's Evan. Evan, your hand disappeared and it came back up. So we'll go ahead and unmute you if you're interested in speaking on either of our updates. Yes, can you hear me? Yep, go for it. Yeah, I would just like to point out that, and then thank you Vice Mayor Rogers for your question. There's a lot of uncertainty for the community regarding the empowerment plan use of funds and for the first substantive use of funds to go towards a police department project as really poor optics, regardless of the intent. I'm not speaking necessarily in favor or in opposition. I would just encourage you to consider that. And then just regarding staffing, actually, I'll reserve comment for you to get through your items and we'll get to open public comment. That's all I have for now. All right, I appreciate that. Evan and I hope you'll stick with us for item 13. There will be that opportunity as well. Adam City Clerk, were there any voicemail comments? There were no voice message public comment. Great, we'll go on to the city manager and city attorney's reports. Do either of you have a report for us tonight and who wants to start? I do have a report. Don't know if the city manager does. I think so. All right, so we'll have you jump in first. Okay, my report is simply we have an issue that has come up regarding the sequencing of council member appointments to city boards, commissions and committees. This comes out of our transition to district-based elections. So with that transition, there's uncertainty as to the order in which existing board and council members will be replaced. So for example, we have two new district-based council members, Vice Mayor Rogers and council member Alvarez. Together they take the places of the former at-large council members, Oliveris and Dowd, but individually they're not tied to any, you know, those two groups are not tied in any particular way. So when one of the new council member makes an appointment, the question comes up, well, does that new appointee take the seat of the appointee placed by former council member Alvarez or by former council member Dowd? So we've researched the issue. We haven't found any applicable state law. We've not found any applicable city policy or code provision, nor have we found a guidance from other cities on best practices. So in order to ensure a fairness and consistency, we've determined to simply have worked with a city clerk and we've determined to simply have a random selection. So through which each of the new council members will be linked to the former council members, but only for the purpose of determining board and committee replacements. So I will hand it over to the city clerk and I understand that she and the assistant city clerk or deputy city clerk will make a random selection. Yeah, so I have both vice mayor Rogers and council member Alvarez's names on pieces of paper that are fold equally the same way. I'm going to drop them into this and shake them up. So the first name will be the council member who will make the appointments to council member Dowd. Appointees and conversely, the remaining council member will be making appointments to replace former council member Alvarez's appointments. Vice mayor Rogers will be making appointments. Her appointments will be replacing former council member Dowd's appointments and council member Alvarez will be making, his appointments will be to replace former council member Alvarez's appointments. And I will. And thank you, Stephanie and Dina. And to explain, this has come up because of timing differences in appointments. So it was like who's going to be placed first and second. So that was the issue. And that's it. I have nothing else to report on. May I ask a question? Go for a council member. Can I get a recount? No, just kidding. So Madam city attorney, I did have a question for you. Something that was brought to my attention earlier today. So Santa Rosa was ahead of the game and giving me direction for the mayors and council members appointments at our last council meeting. Subsequent to our meeting, a correction was sent out that there is not in fact two different seats on the association of Bay Area government's executive board. There is one with an alternate seat. So the direction that I received from council was to support two people for the two seats. And then as I said, there was a correction after the fact by the mayors and council members association on what that looked like. So I'm wondering is, would it be appropriate or how should I navigate asking the council between the two that they gave me direction on? Council member Susan Adams from Runner Park and council member Arielle Kelly from Healdsburg, which one they would prefer as the primary and which one they would prefer as the alternate. We should set that on the agenda for next week. If there's a timing concern, we can still get that onto the final agenda for public. Yeah, I'm not sure if we can for next week. We can still get that onto the final agenda. We haven't started under the new ordinance yet. So that would be my recommendation unless there's an urgency to have it done sooner but that would be my recommendation as we get it onto the final agenda for the meeting of the second. All right, thank you. And we do have the failsafe of the council giving me the authority to do what's in the best interest of the city if we need to. But I did want to make sure that I daylighted for the public and for the council that there is this additional question if they wanted to weigh in on it. Yes. Thank you. All right, with that, we'll go to the assistant city manager. Thank you, mayor. I have an update on tonight's forecast for heavy rains and strong gusty winds. Beginning tonight, a strong winter storm is anticipated to generate rainfall rates and intensities that could trigger thresholds for potential debris flows within the 2020 burn scar area, including some areas of the glass fire burn scar. Additionally, potential localized flooding power outages and downed trees and power lines are possible throughout other areas of our community as both high winds and heavy rainfall are forecasted for all areas of the city. The city is coordinated closely with the county of Sonoma and other local agencies to be ready to address potential impacts. This evening to ensure residents within or immediately adjacent to or downstream of the fire scar areas are aware of the increased threat due to the forecasted storm, the county of Sonoma issued an emergency alert using SoCo Alert. In addition to the SoCo Alert, the National Weather Service indicated that they may activate the wireless emergency alert system to issue a flash flood warning based on observed rainfall rates as the storm passes through. Due to anticipated bleed over of these weas, residents outside the area of concern for debris flow may also receive the alert. The city of Santa Rosa wants residents to be aware that within the Santa Rosa city limits, the areas of concern for debris flow, including this weather event are located within the following evacuation areas, Calistoga North, Calistoga South, Skyhawk, Pythian and Melida. Currently, there is no immediate need to evacuate. However, if located in one of these areas, residents may consider temporarily relocating before the storm hits as traveling after the storm's onset may be hazardous. Residents within these areas of the city limits are asked to remain vigilant for signs of possible danger due to erosion, debris flow, rockfalls and land movement. These residents can review additional rain after wildfire preparedness information at srcity.org forward slash be rain ready. Residents and businesses in all other areas of Santa Rosa should also be prepared for potential localized flooding and downed trees and power lines. And Mayor that can, ah, no, sorry. Community members should also act now to secure property by clearing dead tree limbs and assessing and addressing patio furniture and other items that may be blown around by the wind. Businesses participating in outdoor dining should be prepared to secure loose items and temporary structures. City staff are also preparing for potential impacts of the storm, including activation of our emergency operation center, which began this evening at 7pm and which will remain open overnight. So the staff are best positioned to quickly respond to any emergencies related to the weather event. Staff from several city departments will be represented in the EOC and department DOCs are on standby in the event that activation is also required. Throughout the duration of the weather event, city public works crews will be monitoring conditions in the field and particularly in the glass fire impacted areas for signs of ground movement or debris flows. Crews will also be checking and clearing storm drains and creeks as well as responding to localized flooding and tree related issues throughout the city. Our storm water team will also be monitoring creek gauges and watersheds downstream of the burn scar. Residents can access information about the weather event, preparedness information, including how to access free city sandbag and water stations at srcity.org forward slash emergency. And that concludes my report. All right, thank you, sir. Councilor, are there any questions for the city attorney or the assistant city manager on their reports? See if there are any comments from the public. All right, seeing none, were there any recorded voicemail public comments? No, there were no recorded voicemail public comments. Thank you. Perfect. We'll move on to item nine council. Are there any statements of abstention today? All right, seeing none, we'll go into council member reports who wants to start council member Fleming. Thank you very much. So since we haven't had enough public safety fun, I thought I would let everybody know about the public safety subcommittee meeting tomorrow. That's myself, council member Schwedhelm and vice mayor Rogers. And I want to invite the public to weigh in. Our topics include the cahoots, the Santa Rosa Department model for response to mental illness and homelessness, the school resource officer update, the police auditor physician update, and the community empowerment plan update, and wherein we will also be setting priorities for the scope of work that the public safety subcommittee will be addressing. And your input is especially important on that topic. And finally, our last item that we will be taking will be a place for people to weigh in if they have feelings or thoughts about the thin blue line social media posts. So this is a great opportunity to engage and have your thoughts and feelings heard and shape the way that we move forward as a community in regard to public safety. Thank you so much. Thank you, council member. Can we answer that? Council member Sawyer. Thank you, mayor. I noticed that the economic, well, the economic recovery task force has now joined the economic development subcommittee. And we did have a meeting last week. We held a special meeting on the 19th in which we followed up on temporary paid sick leave on the temporary paid sick leave study session and the subcommittees recommendation on this matter will be heard as an urgency ordinance at the next week's council meeting. We also set the ongoing subcommittee meeting schedule which will be on the second Tuesday of every month at 10 a.m. Starting with our first regular meeting on February 9th. So that's every second Tuesday at 10 a.m. And it will, the first one will be on February 9th and that's the end of my report. I do want to mention one more thing. There was a bit of time has passed since the council received an email from the Merit Awards Committee. And clearly we can't conduct the Merit Awards the way we have in the past. It's a very hardworking committee. They do just great work. And so things will be a little bit different this year but we're really hoping that the full council have an opportunity to participate in what is one of the most positive events usually held in the council chamber. But this time, no, unfortunately, but it will be special nonetheless. And those that will be receiving Merit Awards will appreciate the council's participation. So keep watching and look forward to seeing your faces on this screen on that evening. Thank you. I thank you so much for that council member and we're looking forward to that event as well. Even not in person, I think we'll be able to find a way to make it memorable. Madam Vice Mayor. I just wanted to take a moment to appoint Glenn right to the Board of Public Utilities. He has served for the past year and I'm happy that he agreed to stay on. Great, thank you so much. Council Member Tibbets. Sorry, Mayor, no comment. All right, and staff has informed me that I also have to make a number of reappointments for folks on boards and commissions. So I will be reappointing Lisa Baden-Fort to the Board of Public Utilities, Jeff Nathanson to the Arts and Public Places Committee, Leslie Graves and Cherie Barnett to the Community Advisory Board, Drew Waggle to the Design Review Board, Mark Stapp to the Measure O Committee and Julian Peterson to the Planning Commission and finally Kim Baden-Fort to the Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Board. And with that, we'll move on to our next item. Council, we have minute from the June 30th, 2020 meeting from last year. Are there any changes that folks have to the minutes? Seeing none, we can go ahead and show those as adopted and Mr. Assistant City Manager, let's go on to the Consent Calendar. Thank you, Mayor. Item 12.1, Motion Contract Award, Montgomery Drive and Sodiomi Street Signal Modification. Item 12.2, Resolution, Authorizing Filing of Application for Federal Transit Administration, Formula Program and Surface Transportation Program Funding. Item 12.3, Resolution, Approval of Fifth Amendment to the General Services Agreement, number F-001343 with Mission Linen Supply. Item 12.4, Resolution, Approval of Second Amendment to General Services Agreement, F-001847, Weinstein Security Incorporated for Unarmed Security Guard Services. All right, thank you. Madam Vice Mayor. I apologize. Council Member Tibbets, you have a question. Yep, sorry to do this to everybody, but I had a question about 12.4 Weinstein Security. I noticed that it was just a contract extension and we didn't take it out to bid and I was curious what the rates are. The only reason why I ask is I've been up to my eyeballs in security contracts lately and I've been seeing what the going rate is. I'm just curious what we're paying. Kim Nadeau, our parking manager is online and should be able to respond. Good evening. Can you hear me? Yep. Great. So this contract is about $6,000 a month for them to provide a service from 1 a.m. to 6 a.m., seven days a week. So you don't have an hourly rate on that, Kim? They've quoted it by month, so I could do the math for you if you, and wait a minute. That would actually be great. I apologize. So let's go ahead and, while Kim finds that information, perhaps we can deal with the other items on consent. And first, Kim, if it works too, I'll do public comment and then see whether you're able to get that number. Does that work for you? Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate it. All right. With that, I'll open it up for public comment on the whole consent calendar. Does anybody have a comment they'd like to make? Madam City Clerk, are there any voicemail public comments? No. You were muffled there, but I think you said no. Right. That's okay. Great, then I will go ahead and bring it back to the council. And Madam Vice Mayor, can we take all except for the fourth on the agenda? Yes, Mayor. I move items 12.1 through 12.3 and wait for the reading of the text. Second. So motion by the Vice Mayor, second by Council Member Schwedhelm. Let's go ahead and call the roll. Thank you. Council Member Tibbetts. Aye. Council Member Schwedhelm. Aye. Council Member Sawyer. Aye. Council Member Fleming. Aye. Council Member Alvarez. Aye. Vice Mayor Rogers. Aye. Mayor Rogers. Aye. And that motion passes with seven ayes. And Kim, do you need another minute? No. So it comes out to $41.81 an hour. And that does escalate in the outline months there. I mean, excuse me. So the first year that would be the rate. And then the following two years there is a built-in escalation. And I know you're asking me what that is and I didn't do that, Mathias. Don't worry. What I'm gonna tell you is just all I wanted to tell you. I'm aware of three security companies right now that are providing services for the County of Sonoma in St. Vincent de Paul. We just took our security contract out to bid and we're getting rates in the range of $26, $35, and $38, and $40. And so I really think that we should take it out to bid since it's such a significant difference per hour. That's gonna add up over the multi-year spans. So I'll be voting against this. It has nothing to do with you, Kim. I just think it should be, that cost saving should be pursued. And I'll ask a couple of additional questions then hearing Council Member Tibbetts' comments. Kim, how difficult or how time-consuming would it be for us to take this out for our bid? So my understanding, this is a city-wide contract that's already in place. And so this is merely an amendment to a contract that I believe was bid. I don't know if there's anybody from the purchasing team on this meeting, but this is not an agreement just for parking. This is an agreement that was already in place for security services that are provided for City Hall and other parking, excuse me, other city facilities. So I believe it was bid, but I would have to defer to purchasing on the process. Parking is merely adding an amendment to add services to an existing contract that expires in January of 2024. So I don't know that it could be bid prior to the expiration of the existing contract. And I did see Allen Alton came on. So I assume that Allen has some more information for us. Other than not a lot of extra information other than it was initially bid out as all of our contracts like this are. So, and as Kim said, this is just an amendment onto an existing contract. So in order to, the only way we would be able to bid the parking part out would be to do it as a completely separate contract. And I don't know that that really works out with the economy of scale that we normally get on our contracts. So without, I'm not sure of the dollar ones that Council Member Tibbets has. I mean, that's interesting to note, but there could be a lot of reasons why those were bid the way for those areas and not for us. And is there any urgency on this, Kim or Allen? For parking, this is an existing service that we've had with Weinstein since May. We eliminated 1.5 vacant parking operations aid positions when we took on the contract with Weinstein. So we would no longer have staff to provide these patrol services for those hours. So we do need, it's imperative for us to have a contract in place for security services now so that we can continue to patrol the facilities. I guess my question is under our open government sunshine ordinance, we have the ability to add this to the agenda if it's held over from the previous meeting. Does this need to be done tonight or perhaps would there be the ability to hold it for one week until next week's meeting to get some of these questions answered for council member Tibbets? This actually was the last meeting that we could bring this forward before our existing contract would expire. So if this was not approved tonight, we wouldn't be able to deliver services starting in February. And as I said, we don't have staff to backfill that. Okay, thank you so much. Council, are there any other questions on the item? All right, I'll entertain a motion on it. Yeah, any other questions for folks? Okay, I'll entertain a motion on this from the vice mayor. Move item 12.4 and wait for the reading of the text. Second. Motion and a second, let's call the roll. Council member Tibbets. Was that a no? Yes, sorry, that was a no, nay. Thank you. 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 six ayes and one no from council member Tibbets. Go ahead, council member Tibbets. I'll take a quick comment. Thank you, mayor. You know, in the future, it would be really helpful if when we got these contracts, I know it doesn't always add up this way because people are busy and there's a lot of pressing issues that staff has, but it seems to me in the future, this would have been an easy contract to possibly investigate further and save a lot of money for the city. And the idea that it would come to us basically at the last possible minute where we can't really have the opportunity to make changes without creating a lapse in services is really not acceptable. So I hope in the future that we can make sure we have at least a week, hopefully again, I recognize it's not always gonna be the case, but really try to make that effort so we can make changes because if we're voting on and reviewing them, that's what we're supposed to be doing. All right, thank you, council member. With that, we'll move on to item 13, public comment for non-agenda items. I will also note for the public that late correspondence has been added to the agenda that you can click on and see emails that have come in at the last minute. With that, we'll start with Evan. Can you hear me, Evan? Yep, there you go. Yes, I'm here. Okay, yeah, I just got the prompt on mute. Yeah, I wanted to again express sentiments and support of council members, Alvarez and Fleming's comments after Chief Navarro's report around staffing. And there's a lot of commentary I know that I have and a lot of community members have. There'll probably be more appropriate for the public safety meeting taking place later. That said, I just want to just put into the kind of general thought process that while there's a lot of repair that needs to be done or trust building between the community and the civilian public, that broken trust is not of the responsibility of the civilian public to repair. It's of law enforcement, whether they feel personally responsible for their own actions contributing to that is irrelevant. That's just not the nature of the dynamic. And I would encourage the city to review social media protocols because I understand the need for wanting to have a very humanized presence, but it's not always exactly appropriate. And then also the kind of padding on the back that the police department feels necessary to make public seems like something that should be kept in-house from morale. And I'd also like to point out that there are countless ways to show your support for the police department that don't use symbols that other people find dehumanizing and degrading, which we'll touch on that more tomorrow. But regarding the actual staffing part on that, which I miscomment earlier, it seems that the order of operation seems to be completely flawed when we're talking about staffing to respond to the necessary police issues, which everyone agrees we need the appropriate level of staffing rather than focusing on how do we prevent the need for police calls to begin with. And that just seems like a glaring omission as a philosophical component that maybe I missed it, but it seemed to go totally ignored. So when you have such a low spend on violence prevention relative to the overall policing budget, that's something that really does not sit well with the public at all. And then the other part about staffing is I think there needs to be some sort of quota regarding local residency. And I can understand why police would maybe not want to live in the city where they work, but if we're spending so much of our money and then they have high paying jobs to be quite frank, they're then increasing the tax base out of our community. So we're paying a lot of money which is already controversial to these people to then leave our city and spend their money elsewhere, which it's like a total double-edged sword there. So regarding staffing for the police department, it shouldn't be what the focus on what the appropriate response is. What comes first in that order of operations is how do you reduce and diminish the need for response, right? And the funds that go with that. And then secondly, who we're hiring, of course, the issues around training, competency, cultural nuance are great, but you've got to also try and have local people so they spend their money here in Santa Rosa. We need to keep our money here, so thank you. All right, thank you so much, Evan. I appreciate that. Is there anybody else who wants to raise their hand for public comment for non-agenda items? All right, seeing none, do we have any recorded voicemail comments? Madam city clerk, it looks like- Yes, yes, we do have voicemail public comment and she's bringing up the slides now. Excellent, thank you. Hi, agenda number 13 and my name is Dr. Roberta Godby-Tipp. I am very concerned about the small-cell policy that's coming up for your review with the city council or with your city council members. And there's really important elements to consider and to have a very strong ordinance, 500 to 1500 foot setbacks maintain requirements for the least intrusive methods, proof of significant gap in coverage that's really important, that has to be proven in a specific way, that the property owners within 500 feet of a proposed installation be notified about what is happening with a certified letter, not by the telecom industry, that there is insurance coverage without a pollution exclusion and include aesthetic requirements and no multi-year agreements beyond five years. I'd appreciate your consideration of this for the welfare of all residents of Santa Rosa and all of us in the community today that use Santa Rosa as a place to visit. And frequent, especially when stores are open. Thank you so much for your consideration, bye. Hello, my name is Dorana Meakin. I'm calling for agenda item 13. Dear council members, our long-awaited Santa Rosa small cell policy may be coming before the city council soon for your review and vote. We're anticipating that the policy will provide the city with the most controlled possible for placement of small cells. We're really, really hoping that the city is keeping in mind its constituents and what we've been asking for for this long-awaited policy. We want the ordinance that will give the most protection for all of the citizens of Santa Rosa from the onslaught of the 4G and 5G build out. Please consider the ordinances and other California cities that contain important control elements like we've seen in our neighbors in Calabasas, Los Altos, to the Los Angeles County. We're really, really hoping that the city council looks out for its citizens and picks a small cell policy that protects us all. Thank you. Hi, Paul Roberts at 1753 Burgundy Place regarding agenda 13. I'm concerned about the lack of research on 5G cell phone exposure on our health. Totally not adequately studied. I would encourage rather that we promote fiber optics which are safer, faster, more efficient. However, I realize that you're not gonna wait for that. So please consider ordinances. Other cities have instituted controls on these types of towers placement such as Calabasas, Los Altos County, Sonoma, Mill Valley, San Ramon, Fairfax, Petaluma. These cities can be more cautious with this rollout. Certainly Santa Rosa can. All right, thank you. Bye. Hi, my name is Carolyn Scott of Santa Rosa. My degree is in environmental science. I'm an award-winning documentary filmmaker and environmental educator. And I wanna make a comment for tomorrow's meeting. The World Health Organization after reviewing the best available scientific evidence now concludes its health zone and wireless radiation as a probable carcinogen. They did exhaustive studies proving the biological effects of wireless radiation on the brain, heart, and sperm, noting the importance of experimental studies and decreased exposure particularly for children. So we wanna request 1,500 foot setbacks from residential properties in schools. Released intrusive methods of closing gaps in coverage, proof of significant gap in coverage proven by specific drive-by testing. The ordinance should include macro towers as well as small cells. A macro tower was just approved for canine companions at 2965 Dutton Avenue in September, 2020. During the planning commission hearing, public comments were not even included, although roughly two dozens were submitted. Please stop approving these permits until your ordinance is passed. Thank you very much. My name is Amanda Maris and I live in Santa Rosa in the Roseland area. And my number is 707-508-5335. I am calling on agenda number 13. I believe, which is the small cell tower ordinance and policies regarding small cell wireless transmission facilities. And I wanted to share with you that I found broadband cyber optic cables to be not only the fastest and most reliable source of internet, but also a big business draw for business headquarters. And I think that Santa Rosa is the largest North Bay, North Bay City of the Bay area would be, it would be enticing to attract more businesses and retirees to come to Santa Rosa with cyber optic cables. I lived in Knoxville, Tennessee between the years 2011 and 2014 during which the neighboring city of Chattanooga had placed up. And everybody within their city limits were under these cyber optic cable broadband internet. They had done a lot of work and did spend a lot of upfront costs to dig lines and also require it in every new digging facility or any new construction of sidewalks and buildings in the area had to also require broadband or cyber optic cables. And after the city had really finished it people in Knoxville, businesses in Knoxville like jewelry, television, HGTV were considering moving to Chattanooga because they had more businesses to expand their products, their services this way. And I just found it as a big draw. A lot of the city was very pleased with it and Volkswagen had just moved a major building plant in the area and we're really pleased with the results of being able to utilize cyber optic cables. But if cyber optic cables are not what you're considering I strongly recommend looking at small cell towers with a heavy amount of regulation especially because we don't know all of the health impacts that 5G and even 4G radiation can give off in the area. There's just not quite enough research done to confirm anything and our children can't take that risk. So at least requiring 500 foot setbacks. I also think that limiting any sort of policy. Hello, Santa Rosa City Council. My name is Sydney Cox and my comments are for agenda 13. Thank you for your time. I realized these meetings can be long and there was always so much that needs to be considered. My purpose for leaving a message today is to ask you to pass the most comprehensive small cell ordinances possible for Santa Rosa. There have been four study sessions over the past three years and in that time many small cell and wireless transmission facilities have been installed in neighborhoods some right next to people's homes. I'd like to call your attention to our website and Facebook pages, Safe Tech for Santa Rosa which describes some of these installations. I know you and your staff have been working on the small cell policy and I thank you for your efforts. I hope you've been able to include some of the important requirements that have been discussed in the study sessions. Here are just a few. One, a minimum 500 foot setback from residential homes and schools. Two, at least a 14 day notification to all residents and property owners preferably by certified mail within 500 feet of the proposed facility. Three, regular independent monitoring of RF levels to ensure compliance. Four, proof of significant gap in coverage. Five, insurance coverage without a pollution exclusion to protect the city from liability. And six, no multi-year agreements beyond five years. I'd like to bring your attention to the city of Petaluma which passed a small cell ordinance in 2018. I quote, compared to both neighboring and distant jurisdictions throughout the state, the regulatory approach recommended by the city of Petaluma staff is robust. Santa Rosa, for example, does not prohibit small self-facilities in residential neighborhoods and only requires that such facilities in the right of way meet standard setbacks. End of quote. This is why passing a Santa Rosa small cell ordinance is so important. It is also expected that Santa Rosa's municipal code will govern telecom infrastructure on PG&E polls as does Petaluma's code. Petaluma also states that it has the absolute right as owner of city property to decline to add or permit small cell telecommunications facilities on existing city infrastructure. With regard to health issues that have been brought up by numerous times by residents, Petaluma stated, this proposed ordinance is intended to strike a balance regarding limiting any potential health risk while not addressing them directly, end of quote. Therefore, I ask you, Santa Rosa council, to consider all comments and not categorically dismiss those that deal with concerns for adverse health or biological effects. It is alarming that citizens cannot deny the placement of small cells in our community on the basis of health concerns. However, there are other ways to limit telecom expansion of small cells and cell towers. In conclusion, I would like to add that the environmental health trust and children's health defense is currently suing the FCC to revise their admission standards to consider. Agenda item 13. Hi, my name is Jennifer LaPorta of Santa Rosa. My degree is in environmental health from Rutgers U. Please consider the following requirements when you vote to adopt the small cell ordinance to control the placement of wireless transmission facilities or WTS in Santa Rosa. One, 1500 foot setbacks from residential properties in school. Two, proof of significant gap in coverage proven by drive by testing. Three, the least intrusive methods of closing gaps in coverage. Four, notification of property owners and residents within 1500 feet of a proposed installation. Notification must be done with certified letters sent by the city of Santa Rosa, not by the telecom industry as in the past. Of the 100 plus doors I've knocked on, less than 10% of residents had received notices. Five, insurance coverage in order to protect the city from liability without a pollution exclusion. Six, regular radio frequency testing and monitoring by independent experts. Seven, include aesthetic requirements, aesthetic. Eight, no multi-year agreements. Technology is progressing quickly and regulations may change at the federal level so flexibility is needed. The FCC is in federal court this week being challenged by the EHT and Children's Health Defense. Nine, public notification signage like the city does for other projects. Ten, the ordinance should include macro towers as well as small cells. A macro tower was just approved for canine companions at 2965 Dutton Avenue in September, 2020. During the planning commission hearing, public comments were not even included although roughly two dozen were submitted. How about that? 11, PG and E polls as well as city-owned polls should be regulated. Please stop approving WTF permits until your ordinance is passed. The city has had four study sessions since 2017 and we should have had the ordinance in place by now. At least an urgent ordinance. Look, we do not consent to be guinea pigs in this massive science experiment. This radiation affects us as we leave our homes to go on walks or hang out in our yards and play in our garden. We do not wanna be prisoners inside our own four walls. Many walking trails are now bathed in toxic radiation. I've tested many trails with my EMS meter and my outdoor recreation options are getting more and more limited. Hey, what do COVID-19 and radio frequency have in common? Both are highly dangerous yet invisible threats to our health. Thank you. Perfect. Origin to item 13. My name is Tom LaGorda, I live in Santa Rosa and it's alarming that citizens can't deny the placement of small cell towers in our community on the basis of health concerns. However, there are other ways to limit the expansion of small cells and cell towers keeping the city council in power. Please support our city in creating local control of these dangerous radio frequency radiation transmitters that emit RF pollution 24-7. Please consider supporting fiber to the premises. Fiber broadband is the fastest method of delivering high-speed internet to residents and businesses and it's the safest form of connection to. Other cities in the U.S. are already doing this like San Leandro, Chattanooga, Tennessee, Longville, Colorado and they're making money off of this. A note on Chattanooga. They spent $220 million to develop it and as of 2017 it's translated into $865 million in economic growth for the city. Longmont, Colorado's system provides $49 a month broadband which is a great price and is proving to be a magnet for business too. Now please note that today the 25th oral arguments are underway for the landmark case Environmental Health Trust and Children's Health Defense versus the FCC. This appeal seeks to have the court order the FCC to update its 25 year old exposure guidelines for radio frequency radiation from cell phones, cell towers, Wi-Fi, 5G, and other wireless communication devices. These exposure guidelines are based on the thermal effects, not biological effects currently. There are thousands of peer reviewed independent scientific studies proving biological arm from radio frequency radiation. It's not benign. Okay, thank you. Hello, this is Mary O'Malley on agenda number 13. As a registered Sonoma voter, I appreciate you listening to this and I understand that you'll be voting on an adoption of the small cell policy, placement of wireless transmission facilities in Santa Rosa. And I ask that you keep requirements in mind as they are listed in the cell tower and city ordinances, which I'm sure you're well aware of. Thank you for my kind consideration. Goodbye. That's Eris Weaver, Executive Director of the Sonoma County Bicycle Coalition. And this is for item number 13 on the agenda. And I just want to express my happiness for two recent city accomplishments of items that were laid out in the most recent Bicycle and Pedestrian Master Plan. The first of those being the hiring of Bjorn Creepenburg as the city's first ever active transportation planner. Actually, I believe it's not only the first of this sort of position in Sonoma County. I think it might be the first in the entire North Bay and I am going to be certainly using this as ammunition to lobby some of our other local jurisdictions to do the same. The second is the study on the Stony Point Corridor. I'm happy to see progress being made on that and very much hoping that implementation will not be too long to follow. My third comment is about a question. There's some issues going on about a access between Anadale Park and Oakmont with a newly locked gate just appearing on that path that connects the two and having a hard time figuring out who was responsible for it because that public easement is really important for bicycle safety if cyclists can't use that route connecting from Stonebridge Road to Channel Drive. Then they are forced onto Highway 12 which is treacherous for folks on bikes. So I would like to see some attention put to figuring out how to ameliorate that issue. Thanks so much and happy 2021. Hi, this is Kim Schroeder. This public comment is for agenda item number 13. Good afternoon, council. Thank you for all that you do. I am inquiring as to the status of the small cell council policy. Unless I heard it was under review and not yet voted on by the council. I am one of the now hundreds of citizens who have participated in multiple study sessions and reached out during regular city council meetings over the past three years on this issue. And as time goes by, the evidence continues to mount regarding the impact due to the non-existent oversight of the wireless industry or telecom. As described during the study sessions and otherwise local governments are not being given the full story on the small cell or macro powers for that matter. Last month, the Washington spectator published a major expo day by an investigative journalist on industry influence onto the science and policy of 5G and wireless radiation. The investigation follows the money. It details industry ties between the FDA, the CDC, the international commission on non-ionizing radiation protection, the New York Times, American Cancer Society and scientists professing that it's safe. Not to mention declining property values and so forth that have been discussed in the study session. The 7,000 word report features numerous US and international scientists and experts discussing the corporate powers influence on scientific discourse and reveals stunning ties between global telecom companies and federal agencies. She also cites the investigation by the environmental health trust into the CDC's website pages on wearables and non-ionizing radiation, which found that several pages were drafted in consultation with an industry-tied consultant. They have deep pockets and will push hard for their own interest and that is money. I hope this is moving through the channel to pass very thin as the telecoms will only put more pressure early on in 2021. Thank you for your consideration. Hi, my name is Sharjah Zeski and I'm calling you to leave a public comment for item number 13. I'm upset Santa Rosa PD put up a sin blue hand flag. This is a symbol of hate that's been taken down, which is the absolute bare minimum the department could have done. In an interview, Navarro said he knew this flag was present at far-right rallies and didn't see an issue. Let's just say that again just to make that clear. The head of the department knew about this flag use in far-right rallies and still couldn't tell if this is a hate symbol. When we talk about racism within the SRPD, this is what we're talking about. How much training has the SRPD undergone this year? Honestly, I don't know. I would hope it is some. And this is what we mean when we say training is not sufficient. Navarro denied responsibility, saying community members donated the flag and it was to boost morale. Maybe it is a morale problem because deep down cops know that there are racist issues here that are scary to face. Navarro's share of his responsibility is the head of the department. It's his responsibility for what happened in his department. What actions has he taken to show that he's taken responsibility? Half-assed apology, that's it. This is a failure of leadership. And this is why we need funding to go to other departments for public service. I just read the social media post from Mr. Council Member Alvarez. I'm not quite sure how any city elected official could sit there and call people that work for him trash. This is completely unacceptable and shows the true underlying feeling that Mr. Alvarez has. He cannot be trusted to be a member of our city council and he definitely does not represent my district. Hi, my name is Tara and I'm a concerned constituent. I wanted to leave a comment for item 1317. And I wanted to say first and foremost that I opposed the thin blue line flag as a symbol of hate. And I'm really upset that the Santa Rosa Police Department put up a thin blue line flag. And I know it's been taken down but that's honestly the bare minimum that the department could have done. And I just wanna know what kind of training that the SRPD is doing around these kinds of symbols. And I think it's super important that we reallocate funds from the police department to other public services within the county and that we hold the SRPD accountable for waving the flag of hatred the furthers. Yeah, so thank you and have a great day. Okay, council. I think that's the end of public comment here. We have no report items, no public hearings, no written communications. That was our public comment period. We have no additional closed sessions. So with that, we will adjourn the meeting. Have a good night, everybody.