 Good afternoon everybody. We'll call the regular meeting of the City Council to order and start our 1 p.m. study session as we're taught. Thank you mayor. We have two study session items for you today. 3.1 is the Jennings Avenue Railroad crossing and Jason Nutt our Director of Transportation and Public Works is here to present. Good afternoon Mayor and Council members. I am happy to come and have a discussion with you today about Jennings Avenue Railroad pedestrian and bicycle railroad crossing. The intent of the study session really is to allow you as council members to have a dialogue and to discuss what what the history of the project has been and provide some direction to staff as we begin to move forward so that so we know what the end product may end up being and so the intention of this is to provide you with quite a bit of background. I'm gonna kind of relive some of the some of the activities that we've done over the last few years so that you can just remind yourself where we've come from what options we've looked at in the past and then where we think we might have opportunity to go moving forward so that'll be sort of the the direction we're gonna take here with the study session. Please feel free to ask questions throughout not that I need to give you permission but I just want you to know that it's that my flow for this is it's okay if you have questions during the course of the presentation. So just to remind you where the Jennings crossing is it is to connect both dead ends of Jennings Avenue immediately to the south of the Gernviller or Santa Rosa North smart station. It is was an original site of the station during one one portion or concept that smart had been looking at prior to initiation of the project. It was then moved north to its current position just south of Gernville Road. With that when that was being looked at they they did ultimately decide that a crossing should should go at that location and ultimately what they did is in 2012 started a study to determine what that might look like. They did do a feasibility analysis to determine that it was feasible to incorporate a crossing at that location because it conformed with the North Station area plan which they worked very closely with us on that we felt was important for the growth of the community in the north part of town. We also had this particular crossing identified as part of the 2010 bicycle and pedestrian master plan which was then also incorporated into the city's general plan at the time. So this has been a fairly important piece of our bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure and became more important as the station area plan began to grow and we found that it was a vital piece for connection to smart. And then in 2013 the council gave us direction to initiate working on an environmental impact report to really look at the details of what this crossing would need to be whether over crossing under crossing at grade crossing and how we might want to move forward. So we did begin an EIR process. We did a bunch of counts and one of the pieces of information that we provided for you back in 2018 was we did an eight hour account on a specific day in 2013 where we saw 25 bicyclists and 91 pedestrians cross. That particular piece of information solidified the fact that this is a legitimate crossing that wants to be a legitimate crossing. And so we began to continue. We proceeded with this particular study. We did look at a number of different options options that included an above grade or separated grade crossing. This was a structured crossing that would go over the tracks. There was a very short period of time and we didn't go into a lot of detail where we actually looked at trying to go under the tracks. We did look at an at grade crossing which is where we ultimately ended. But when we were doing the initial start portions of the EIR we had heard from the California Public Utilities Commission Safety Enforcement Division the SED is the way I'll end up describing it moving forward who's responsible for ensuring that crossings that are built and managed are safe. They indicated that the current policy within the Public Utilities Commission is no net new crossings. And with that council then went through a process of trying to evaluate whether if we wanted this bad enough and I don't know a better way of saying it would we be willing and interested in considering closing a crossing in the downtown. So a large portion of this EIR was dedicated towards that evaluation. And as we proceeded with that new players started to emerge in the discussion and the public conversation about what Jennings Crossing was. We had a lot of interested parties in the Railroad Square area, Western Farms, the West End area. They began to engage in this conversation. As we were in the midst of the EIR the city went forward and was ultimately successful in receiving an alternative transportation grant to construct a separated-grade crossing. And that was a eight point almost eight point two million dollar grant to move forward with that. Ultimately and I'll get to it as we move further. Ultimately the council made a decision to not accept that grant in the end or to return the grant because of the significant impacts that we saw relating to that above-grade structure. So what I want to do is as we're talking about this EIR I'm gonna walk you through and give you those images that we saw back in 2013 that diagrammed the various alternatives that we discussed at that time. So the first was the separated-grade structure. This is what the this was the primary premise of what we were doing with the environmental impact report. What you see on the image really is the general outline of the structure itself. The yellow area that's sort of highlighted provides the area of impact for the construction and what sort of improvements were going to be made in and around that. So this is the end of Jennings Avenue looking at it from the west side looking east. And then if you add the structure that was associated with this the structure needed to be almost 22 feet in height for the train to clear depending upon the type of materials the various trains were carrying. Again this track is not just utilized for smart but NCRA and freight services through Northwestern Pacific Railroad Company come through here. And so the loading on those vehicles is dramatically different. We had to meet the clearance requirements that the Federal Railroad Administration requires. In order to accomplish that it required substantial ramps both coming in both directions in order to meet ADA requirements. And so that is why the significance of this structure is. A couple of other views looking at it from the east looking west. And you can see in order to get the ADA compliance we actually had to turn down the railroad tracks in a parallel fashion and then loop back. And then again further back towards Dutton Avenue. So this is North Dutton at Jennings Avenue looking eastbound. So as that large ramp that came over the tracks did a hairpin loop back into the station in order to complete that compliant ramp. And so this was the significant structure that we were looking at. Ultimately council making a decision to say it was too significant and that we felt that the general public would probably try to find some alternative less exciting ways to cross the tracks. And in essence they were probably going to continue to do what we didn't want them to do in the first place. Jason can you remind us how long that structure is? I want to say it was over 900 feet in total length. But I'd have to double check with staff. Thank you. So that's about 900 feet. And I think the ramps were a little over 350 feet on their own. So one of the other components as I mentioned was this concept that okay maybe we'll give you an at-grade crossing but you've got to close another crossing in an effort to achieve it. And so we spent quite a bit of time evaluating three crossings in the railroad square West End area which is 6th Street, 7th Street and 8th Street with the idea that maybe there was a trade-off as that seemed acceptable and appropriate. The EIR spent quite a bit of time looking at traffic circulation. What was this going to do to the community? How were businesses going to survive through the course of these changes in traffic patterns? Ultimately council made a decision to move forward in opposition to the SED's suggested requirement to have one of these closed. That related to the at-grade crossing proposal. The general footprint of the at-grade crossing is substantially different than the above-grade obviously. But we would still be doing substantial work along Jennings Avenue in an effort to make it a place that was more pedestrian and bicycle friendly as a primary front door into this crossing location. And so again on Jennings Avenue from the west looking east and this is the significance of the crossing at that location. We did take a lot of time looking at what that crossing needed to look like to meet the general requirements that the FRA and SED were wanting us to comply with. We looked at other crossings up and down the railroad line and we tried to go a step above what those were. And so this is the nature of the design. It is a dual track crossing which there are not a lot of standalone dual track crossings for bike and peds along the line. But we did take additional actions here. As you can see that particular gate has two arms on it. One higher one lower so that it's one more visible for pedestrians. Also it makes it a little more difficult for folks to try to sneak underneath especially children. It has the exit swing gate which provides that additional level of protection for people. When the gates down they can't try to go around the gates. We took a lot of effort to make this to make this compliant and as we talk a little bit further based on direction from the PUC we actually upped it a little bit and took other things into consideration. In 2015 as we said we we ended up making the decision or council made the decision to request that staff proceed with an at-grade crossing with no closure in the downtown and resulted in us returning funds to the MTC related to the alternative transportation program. I recall this was my first month working here. I recall actually that was a very difficult decision to make. You don't usually get awards like this and and it was very difficult for council to get to that point of action but the level of commitment that you had as a body to trying to put something that was more feasible more reasonable and more consistent with the community's aesthetic I think was courageous and ultimately got us through the next portion of the process. We did initiate an application to the Public Utilities Commission. There is a process that you have to go through in an effort to have a legitimate crossing. This particular location the city and at that time the railroad I believe was actually I don't know remember if it was North Coast or Union Pacific at that time we agreed to close this crossing it was a vehicular crossing at one point in time around the turn of the century and we abandoned the site and so in order to reestablish it we had to go through this process of requesting a new at-grade crossing with the Public Utilities Commission. Jason would you clarify a turn of which century? The 19th century I apologize no 20th 1900 19 to 20 not 20 to 21 yes thank you yes thank you for helping me clarify and and so as part of that process we submit our application and the Public Utilities Commission distributes that among interested parties to determine if any of those interested parties objects at the last minute and I don't say the last minute in a in a in a mean way I mean it was they took a lot of time to come up with their with their with their their opposition letter the SED which is the Public Utility Commission Safety and Enforcement Division they did submit a letter opposing the crossing in June right before the deadline and that and that was very specific on two different primary pieces one is their belief that the that the policy direction that the Public Utilities Commission had adopted established a no net new increase in the number of crossings and they held very firmly on that the other was they were concerned about the safety of an at-grade crossing at that location and were and were pushing towards seeing an above grade now they were very clear in saying it's not this specific crossing that that causes them it is a policy decision that at grade crossings are less safe than an above grade or separated grade crossing so there was nothing in there specific to this location it was merely a generalized statement coming from that division so with that with that protest the Public Utilities Commission assigned an administrative law judge to oversee a series of mediation events and those mediation events were included all interested parties and as we got into this it wasn't just the city and the SED it also included friends of smart it included the western farm center it included the West End district and it included James Duncan as interested parties separate entities that were that were part of the process we were all brought together as part of this mediation and in an effort to try to best understand how we were going to proceed and whether there was a way of overcoming the concerns that were being placed on the table as we went through that process ultimately and it was a fascinating discussion I mean I it was fun to be at the table almost to watch the administrative law judge work their way through this ultimately SED prepared a letter and responded to all of the other parties that said that they were they they retracted their argument associated with needing to close a crossing to get a crossing as we determined through the course of the mediation there was no nexus between the two we determined that basically the administrative law judge got SED to agree that in and of itself each of those crossings independent of the of the other were a safe location that there wasn't anything specific that closing one would make a safety benefit to the other and so so they ultimately recanted their protest on that specific regard and and that helped us move forward because now we could focus specifically on the addition of a new crossing and we didn't have to worry about the impacts to businesses impacts to circulation and the other things that would come from closing something in the railroad square area as we worked our way through that the administrative law judge then arranged for a public participation hearing on February 1st of 2016 that meeting was pretty widely advertised actually thought the Public Utilities Commission did a good job of trying to get the word out we assisted and our partners assisted we had over a hundred participants at Helen Lehmann and school on that night all of which were talking in favor of the at-grade crossing all were describing the need for a clean clear methodology to get from one side to the other without the significant detour that we had to implement and that's what the administrative law judge heard not just from the public but also we had a number of officials in the room both city council members as well as representatives from the supervisors office and our state legislature that then turned into evidentiary hearings and so an evidentiary hearing is very similar to being in a court and that's exactly what we were we had the administrative law judge we had witnesses that were called to the stand each of the parties and their representatives had an opportunity to ask questions they all reviewed documentation we provided statements in advance it was it was a very complicated process as we went through the evidentiary hearings in the end the administrative law judge McKinney ultimately wrote a proposed decision and that proposed decision was issued to the the full commission that was done in July of 2016 and in September the full commission actually approved decision 16-09-002 which actually gave us full approval to move forward with the Jennings crossing that decision did stipulate a number of different conditions and I'll go through that here in a little while near the end of the presentation so you can see what they specifically stated how they stated it and what that meant for us as we were going to proceed in in as soon as that was completed and we had the approval from the public utilities commission staff with the city and smart began negotiating a process where smarts contractor would be responsible for constructing the improvements and the city would compensate the contractor smart for producing the final product we started looking at what that agreement would be and then in November we requested from council not only approvals to finalize that agreement but also approvals to secure the funds that we were negotiating were the total amount needed to complete the project for us to proceed and so council did in late November approve those two they you approved us moving forward with the negotiation you set aside 1.825 million dollars of funds to pay the contractor to complete those improvements within smarts right of way unfortunately it took it still took quite a bit of time for us to complete the negotiations on that there was a lot of back and forth there was a lot of other things going on which caused some delays on both sides in getting that information transferred and it took a meeting of myself and Bill Gamlin in May of that year to finalize the agreement we had our attorneys sign off on the agreed-upon language I will say there were concessions on both sides in an effort to bring this agreement to a final product and in June on June 9th we received a copy of the final agreement ready for the city manager's signature that was signed on the 13th and hand delivered on the 14th the timeline there as we described was in an effort to get on the June 20th smart board of directors meeting and that was why we moved so quickly from June 9th to the 14th was to make sure that we weren't the cause of not getting on that on that that meeting for the final decision it on June 20th we found out that it was not agendized and on June 21st we received an email that informed us that since we had that the board that the board was not going to be asked to authorize that agreement or execute that agreement until such time as the maintenance agreement for quiet zones was was executed by the city Jason just to be clear this the the statement that Jennings wouldn't proceed until this maintenance agreement was executed that was an agreement that covered not just Jennings but all of the quiet zones yeah so just to give a kind of a highlight on that smart has been asking jurisdictions up and down the the line that are in the process of or have already established quiet zones through their communities to enter into an agreement that that clarifies maintenance responsibilities for the improvements that were made associated with the quiet zone itself as you're aware when you establish a quiet zone in order to compensate for losing the train horn itself you have to increase the level of physical improvements at the crossing to minimize the impacts to the public so at some of the at most of the crossings in Santa Rosa you'll see we have we have quad gates we have now a gate on all four corners that comes down in an effort that you can't drive around the gate and so that was done in a way to minimize the impacts of losing the horn as required by the federal train horn rule and so that was their ask was to have the city approve an agreement that outlined the maintenance responsibilities for all of those components the challenge we have and what council has heard is there were some other conditions within that agreement that we didn't necessarily feel were appropriate and we couldn't at we couldn't buy this june meeting come to an agreement with smart as far as what the terms were going to be and so not seeing them connected or needing to be connected we proceeded with Jennings because we saw that was at the end of the line figuring we would come back at a later in the year and try to finalize the quiet zone agreement or the maintenance agreement we found out on the 21st that that was not the timeline that smart had in mind they wanted us to bring them all together and so the the discussions about maintenance agreements had been going on for some time before this June of 2017 yes they had been for about a year but they had we had had discussions with them but at no time during the course of that were we informed that they were connected in any way so we weren't we weren't following a path that the two of them had to come at the same time and we were keeping them separated and my understanding is is we still have not agreed on maintenance agreements for the quiet zones is that correct that that's correct and i don't know if there's additional information that the city attorney would like to include and our our lack of an agreement on quiet zones hasn't stopped or delayed any construction or development of the smart line any operation of the trains the only thing that it has affected is the Jennings crossing that that's correct thank you mr rogers thank you mr mayor mr nut and maybe this is getting a little bit ahead of your presentation we received a letter from smart on august 20th expressing that they had safety concerns with the Jennings crossing at any time have we ever received anything in writing from them linking the separation or linking the maintenance agreement to the Jennings agreement you know we hadn't and and we've heard from smart staff that somewhere in one of the correspondences there may have been i have not been able to find it in the various emails and letters that i've i've read through so we we weren't under the indication at any time during the course of this process that the two were linked either physically or mentally by by any of the parties it has this been linked to any other crossing along this the rail line not that i'm aware of as far as i know aside from the downtown crossing there were no other new crossings being proposed along the line okay is there do we know do we have anybody from smart here today who can answer questions if we have them i don't know actually it doesn't look like it i'm not i'm not surprised i'm just disappointed miss combs thank you just to clarify we don't have currently a maintenance agreement executed with regard to quiet zones is that correct that's correct do we have horns blowing we do not okay let me preface let me let me preface that by saying we are in full compliance with the federal railroad associations train horn rule by establishing a quiet zone smart and northwestern pacific railroad company have been asked to cease general and normal operation of the train horns during the course of the day and evening with the exception of if they believe there is a safety issue within or immediately adjacent to the tracks that would benefit from the train horn being blown thank you i i you've you've done a very good synopsis of what a quiet zone where the quiet zone rules are i'm just interested that we don't have the maintenance agreement for quiet zones and it isn't holding up the quiet zone concept it's holding up genics i find that of interest that's correct was one of the factors in the maintenance agreement because it's i mean maintenance sounds like maintenance a liability or insurance related issue is that a piece of this those are parts of the agreement and those are some of the portions of the agreement that we have concerns with and we've offered alternative suggestions we've not been able to come to a resolution with smart at this time thank you i i may want to go further down that path mr schwedhelm thank you mr jason are there other agreements that the city sanarosa is in conversations with smart uh the i'm i'm not aware of anything other than the potential agreement associated with the downtown development i don't know what that looks like i'd have to ask director guin if he has additional information on that my question is more is um are there ongoing dialogues since smart comes through our community we have two stations are there ongoing discussions that the city has and that with smart regarding operations through our city so we are constantly working with smart to both enhance their service and our own um sanarosa city bus uh works with smart on a daily basis in an effort to ensure that we're enhancing their operation and vice versa that they're doing the best that they can to keep uh to keep patrons moving between the two systems as smoothly as possible our traffic engineering team has worked with them in the past in an effort to try to ensure that all of the signage is adequately placed that we've got directional information um we're working with them to look at how the signal gates uh how the signal arms and gates work uh and how they coordinate with the traffic signals so so the answer is yes we're continuously working with them there is no physical agreement with that that's just operator to operator uh and and it's it's in all of our best interests that the two teams are are are very closely aligned that was my assumption thank you thanks so just to look think about as as um uh councilmember rogers mentioned we did receive a letter in august we also did receive a letter from smart back in 2015 as we were initiating this process and i went back and read that letter and the reason i bring it up here is because it was specifically referenced in the august 20th letter and and as i read through it i actually found a couple of differences in what was being relayed this particular letter was a letter of support being submitted to the california transportation commission associated with the alternative transportation grant and as a function of that the way it was expressed by smart is they were supporting an at-grade bicycle pedestrian crossing with specific benefit of safe routes to schools for students trying to access to and from helen layman school um it further talked about smart supporting studies to evaluate the at-grade crossing partnering with the local jurisdictions and then their agreement to make sure that that the crossing was built in such a way that it would have a good connection to the multi-use path that they were building and so when we looked at the august letter that we received of this year they they did say that they are no longer look supportive of the at-grade crossing they referenced that prior and and under the auspice that it was being being submitted purely for the separated grade component albeit the at grade was it was what was specifically mentioned it they also mentioned that they have concerns specifically relating to school-age students coming to the crossing and the safety associated with those students especially since it has a dual tracked component and and that they didn't feel it was a good safe route to school and that they were strongly supporting s ed's suggestion that the at-grade crossing was not as good of a solution as a separated grade crossing and then they end that letter by talking about Guernville Road being a superior location because of improvements that they've made there to protect the public as they're crossing the two tracks and the fact that the train speeds were slower as they're approaching the station and leaving the station and so I bring that up again it's not really in an effort to point fingers in any way but I wanted to clarify statements that were made in there and why certain things may have transpired the way they did so when we look at the decision that was issued by the cpu c this mirrors what was what was projected or what was proposed by the administrative law judge they're almost identical in every way and so that means the administrative law judge actually did a you know they did a very comprehensive job of evaluating this the situation reading the players that were involved and making a suggestion that the commission adopted this and in the commission really did so what you know and I don't want to I don't want to read these but but this is sort of an outline of the 11 points that the commission ultimately ended up stating that they determined that the s ed did not necessarily determine that an at-grade crossing could not be safe and it wasn't appropriate if done properly that we made a convincing showing that the design that we were implementing addressed safety hazards that the local community including our emergency service providers were supportive of the at-grade crossing and then they actually specifically stated that smart supported the at-grade crossing and and so it was it's specifically highlighted in its own bullet point in this particular case and then that that the s ed who's responsible for evaluating crossing applications and reviewing the design determined that this crossing in itself designed was safe and then other important considerations really did look at the positioning of the station the speed of the train that came through the sight lines we spent an enormous amount of time during the evidentiary hearings talking about sight lines and could you see the train coming in both directions how were the gates going to be positioned so that you didn't have sight blockages how would we manage the vegetation that's on all four corners and so those were things that we spent quite a bit of time about and they've captured that that we didn't not just an adequate job but we did a good job that supports the fact that it's a safe crossing and director just for the public's benefit that stretch of this of the train line is capped at 35 miles per hour is that correct i don't believe there's a cap at that point they've made an assumed speed based on the distance away from the platform in the highest potential speed between the north station and the downtown station right so it was categorized as a part of this part of the study is that the train would be traveling somewhere between 25 and 35 miles per hour probably closer to the 35 side because one slowing down and one's pushing out and then and then they went further to say that that this last bullet the city has convincingly shown that it has eliminated all potential safety hazards and it's the word convincingly that i think we did a very good job presenting our case and showing the the level and extent of work and detail that we put into the design of the specific crossing they did then go further however and express a concern relating to school children in particular and what they requested and it was a request not a requirement they requested that we work with the school district to determine whether the placement of a crossing guard would be appropriate and we started the conversation we didn't complete the conversation with the school district our initial conversation was was we may keep we may try to put someone out there for a period of time and then reevaluate shortly thereafter to see if there's any benefit or value and then there's the last two pieces which which states that we have three years to initiate construction and that if we don't request an extension within that three year period actually specified 30 days prior to the to the expiration of that three year period then the authorization would be rescinded if i may um has smart or any other entity suggested any special track crossing measures to ensure pedestrian safety at the gernville road crossing where the traffic crossing is where students are being rerouted i've not seen anything that indicated that this kind of barrier and gate system was being discussed for the gernville road crossing so we're rerouting school children to a crossing that doesn't have the same level of safety so uh when smart constructed the north station they rebuilt the pedestrian facilities along gernville road and in in the course of doing that they actually implemented safety measures right are they to the level of what we're proposing no but they meet the conditions and requirements of the fr a in fact they actually exceed the conditions and requirements of the fr i am not suggesting that the crossing there is less than adequate i'm saying compared to what we're talking about here i think especially given the audience or the audience or the users that we anticipate here i think we've gone a step further and enhancing the level of safety thank you director at the time of the cpc hearing and the decision uh was it known that this was likely to be a quiet zone and does that factor in at all to the newly found concerns about the safety on smarts part that was very heavily discussed during the evidentiary hearings as well as the mediation it was clearly noted that the city was going to be moving forward with a quiet zone and i believe we actually implemented the quiet zone during the course of the evidentiary hearings and so this was no there was no surprise in all of that and it did not come up as a as a the maintenance agreement did not come up as a function of any of those discussions there certainly was concern relating to the lack of a horn and as practitioners in the in the traffic field obviously and you've heard this from us in the past we too have concerns that the horn is not used as a tool however we also know that there are tools that are given to us to try to compensate that and so we've taken every effort to to include those above and beyond what the federal rule requires so looking back at the analysis that we had when we started this process as i mentioned back in november of 2016 the council approved the city the city negotiating an agreement with smart for the amount of 1.825 million to construct the improvements within the smart right of way on the total project cost was a little under 2.3 million because there were improvements on jennings avenue on on the east side of our west side of jennings avenue including crossing enhancements of north dotten that we were going to include that we felt were important to the overall design those were outside of the contract we have not moved forward with any of those at this point in time because we were waiting for the crossing to be completed first we some of the key issues as we were discussing and if you recall the conversation we did have a member of smart here at that time in november of 2016 we talked about some of the increased costs that we were a little bit surprised about there was a significant amount of money toward the administrative aspect of we uh of positioning this new crossing in their within their positive train control and their traffic signal or their signaling system um we we asked a lot of questions about why such a big dollar amount and this was all in advance of actual trains on a fair service running and so um as we as i get to the next slide we'll talk about how that could differ moving forward so now that we're looking at this in the place that we're currently in we're in a very rough estimate looking at something in excess of four million dollars to construct and complete the same improvements that we had previously and some of the reasons are if smart is not a willing partner we may have to go out and hire our own contractor to do the work we then have to achieve agreements and licenses to be able to cross and perform work along the tracks we're going to be interrupting fair service and may have to work with smart on how we would compensate for that whether we're doing it one track at a time and allowing a single single track to operate or whether we're closing the whole thing down and establishing a bus bridge if you recall a typical crossing construction that smart did during the early days of rebuilding this took anywhere from from 48 to 36 hours to complete and so about two to two and a half days of of work in order to complete these crossing improvements this isn't something they can necessarily at least to best of my knowledge go in put in some work and then open to through traffic and so now that the trains are running we believe that there's going to be additional costs associated with that type of work and we'd still need to spend time with smart trying to understand what those operational impacts are going to be and then of course now that you've got an operational system how is that going to impact the cost of integrating this this crossing into their positive train control network and their signal network so so these are some questions that we're starting to ask ourselves should we be asked to proceed with this and we'll have to work with smart to better understand what range of impacts this may ultimately result in and so you know we have a recommendation but really this is a this is this is an opportunity for you to provide us with direction how you'd like to see staff proceed on this we have a design that's ready to go we just need to find a partner that's willing to help work with us to get this implemented we'll also we believe about 50 short of the funds in an effort to deliver this project and and so there's you know there's a gap that we need to figure out how to fill there may be options for us but there's a time and there's also a competitiveness of those grants so with that I'd be happy to continue the discussion and answer any additional questions. Councillor further questions Mr. Rogers thank you mr mayor so director you kind of alluded to it but smart was recently approved for an at-grade crossing at 4th street one that had not been discussed can you talk a little bit about the differences between there and Jennings particularly with a look at the safety uh the communication with the city and as well as the understanding that originally the cpuc was going to require downtown crossings to be closed in order to add at-grade crossings yeah we we learned this about a month ago that smart had actually received approval for the 4th street crossing we weren't we weren't included in any of the discussions with the public utilities commission this is something that was done by smart as they moved forward predominantly to support the development activities that they're looking for on their property there are there are differences in the two crossings and so the crossing that they're looking at 4th street would occur right at the existing partial crossing and access to the station and so the way that could be posed and the way smart probably posed it is this is just gaining access to the platform from both sides the fact that they connect to make a through route is just ancillary to the to the product and so it sounds like it went very smoothly it doesn't sound like they had any opposition the reason i can say that is because no one asked for any letters of support from us we didn't or weren't asked to testify and so i can assume that that went went fairly smoothly as the primary access to the station trains are traveling at extremely low speeds across there the access control is much tighter because the station is right there so it is slightly different than what we're talking about at Jennings which is a little over 200 200 feet from or 200 yards from the cross from the platform at the north station and so trains are traveling at a higher rate of speed it's not connected to the platform in any way shape or form it's a standalone product and so there are differences that i i think are are valuable in that discussion but but yeah they did they did receive that approval this summer without going too far down the rabbit hole on the discussion about safety since smart has previously declared this safe the cpu c is declared this safe are there any comparable crossings in california that we can point to that are up and running that are similar to Jennings that we can look at for their safety record so there are a number of crossings throughout california that that are similar i can't say that they're all identical the two tracks is slightly different there are crossings bike and ped crossings up and down the smart tracks i want to say there's four of them maybe five um some of them are fairly similar the hamilton crossing is fairly similar the ignacio crossing is fairly similar both of those i think are relevant to the discussion and the level of improvements that have been placed at both of those two crossings i know you've received letters from other individuals you'll probably hear about them during public comment that uh some other rail crossings in pasadena and san clemente there that that have similarities as well they've tried different crossing techniques different safety measures some of which were found to be beneficial some of which didn't necessarily pan out quite the way they had hoped but but we have been throughout the entire course of this process beginning with mediation looking at the other bike and ped crossings that exist in california and how they compare what when we took the best of all of them in an effort to try to incorporate that into our our crossing design okay uh miss gallagher we've forwarded you information the council received in the email from an individual uh talking about the legality of smart going against the determination of the cpu c once the public utilities commission had declared that this crossing was safe was safe does smart have the legal authority to prevent us from building this crossing vice mayor we're actually still evaluating what what leverage legal leverage we have the letter suggested that smart by now reversing its decision or at least the discussions about the crossing had violated the order from the cpu c the member of the public is correct that the cpu c has exclusive authority regarding safety of the crossing and yes there are very strict timelines for challenging a cpu c order those deadlines are our way past very much further past that but the issue is that the cpu c order is a permission to build it's not an order to build construction of the crossing is going is a complicated process it's a it's a construction that's going to require some level of cooperation between smart and the city probably also the cpu c and the federal railway authority we need to be able to connect in with the signal crossing system and the train control network that whole electromagnetic system we need to be able to link into that so we do need cooperation from smart the director director net also indicated we're going to likely need to have the train operation suspended in that area for for some period of time so what we've been looking at is you know various case law as some other statutes as to what what our legal leverage might be and we have not reached a conclusion we're also looking at our real estate documents so what what right of way powers do we still have what is the scope of our authority over that area what have we given up in the past so those are all questions that although going into it we thought would be have us we would have a simple answer on that it's actually more complicated so we are still evaluating it all right thank you director to the best of your knowledge was there ever any conversation or stipulation when smart gave their approval of this crossing and worked with us with the cpu c around the maintenance agreements being a necessary agreement before they would move forward so throughout this entire process quite frankly smart and their staff have been excellent partners in trying to get this project to the finish line and so we actually had an extremely good working relationship we felt it was very open communication as i mentioned none of the staff that have worked on this ever recall having seen any type of connection between the two both did we did receive emails relating to both of these and both of these products but they were never directly or specifically linked in any in any of those discussions and so we were like i said we we had a really good working relationship and we met with smart on a regular basis as we went through the design smart was at every one of the evidentiary hearings as well as the as well as the the prior process i mean we we really we really were working we're walking arm and arm through this entire place and as miss gallagher mentioned it was the time when when entities were asked in june of 2015 to protest the process that was the time that an entity such as smart would have filed the protest that they didn't feel that this was going to be a safe a safe location and so and that's and that's pretty much what you ended up seeing specifically written into the decision was smart agreed that we were there now now in smarts in in reading smart's letter and having discussed this with them they know more today than they did them i mean let's let's be clear they're now a year into operation they've they've been they've seen what the trains can and can't do they've seen what our public can and can't do and and so they feel like they've got more information today than they did in 2015 or 2016 as we were pro going through the process and i think that now has shifted to be their primary stance in issuing the letter in august so see your say i apologize i just want to push back on that a little bit so smart prior to the construction of the train didn't anticipate issues with pedestrians particularly potential safety issues they they they did um i do seem to yes they did study session where they explicitly called out that there would be essentially would be fatalities that the start of all train stations have those bumps and and you're absolutely right and i think they would they would agree with you i i merely bring it up from the standpoint of their the letter has shifted the letters now primary purposes we now know more than we did before whereas in 2017 it was you didn't bring forward the document the other document that we asked you to bring forward there wasn't no mention at that time of safety safety was not the issue that was causing us to not bring that item to the board of directors for execution and so a year later this is the i'm only providing you the the discussion and rhetoric that we're we've been having with smart and so that you understand the position that they're presenting at this point since they're not here to to present it no i i understand and i'm trying to figure out how we move forward from here uh miss gallagher uh what did the maintenance agreement entail why did we not want to move forward with it and why did novato and san rafael choose to move forward with it excuse me the maintenance agreement includes a number of different elements um it outlines has exhibits that outline who is responsible for maintaining which uh improvements um drawing that all out that's nice to have that specificity so that everyone is clear and in the event of dispute it's everything's clear there's also federal regulations that also govern that so even in the absence of a maintenance agreement we do have some legal direction on that point the primary issues stumbling blocks there were some refinements of that of that allocation of maintenance responsibility but that those are all workable and as director nut has indicated staff of the two agencies have worked very well together in developing that the sticking points had to do primarily with uh insurance certain insurance requirements and requirements that we maintain insurance that city maintain insurance uh primary insurance for smart on certain elements and then the indemnification over their cost on their insurance i don't i don't know um i did not look into what the cost of their insurance would be or how that would be allocated but it would certainly put burden on our insurer were we to accept the way it's drafted the other element is the indemnification they were looking for a one-way indemnification whereby the city would in agree to indemnify smart for any not only smart but any uh entity that uses the railway so any other you know freight operator or anyone else using the the rail line we would indemnify and defend provided defense for them in the event of any potential claim that the injury arose out of any of the improvements that the city had constructed we have had extensive discussions with smart and have suggested that a mutual indemnification would be most either mutual indemnification or silence would be most appropriate in other words under either those scenarios each agency would be responsible for any injuries and damages that arose out of the improvements that we either designed constructed installed maintained but was our fault we would indemnify smart if it were smart the fault of um smarts equipment uh or maintenance that would then they would indemnify the city that was not accepted um and they are very insistent on having simply the one way indemnification you are right that the city of san rafael and city of novato have agreed to that um but uh we have significant concerns about the potential implications of that provision and particularly the burden that would be placed on the city to provide a defense uh for smart and in likely a wide variety of situations all right my last question director nut has smart ever articulated what we could do different in our design to make it safer if they have safety concerns uh they have not thank you miss geller um i know that you have met with smart on the um on the indemnification question since they articulated at least verbally to us that um they no longer supported the construction of this crossing are you able to um characterize that discussion and and where that stands at this point sure i had a fairly lengthy meeting with tom lions who is the general counsel for smart um we had a productive discussion conceptually uh and talked at some length about each agency being responsible for its own actions and own equipment um but at the end of the day um there was no movement off of the one way indemnification mr lions did indicate that he would um he would give some thought and provide a perhaps provide an alternative um but i have not received anything and uh we have not had any additional communications in the recent um month or so and has there ever been any indication from from smart that um if we were able to come to an agreement on the maintenance agreement uh that their position on the crossing would change no there's been no indication that way our in my discussions with mr lions there was no no discussion of any connection with the Jennings crossing and as director nut pointed out that was different from what we were hearing from smart and what i was hearing from mr lions prior to the august letter which previously the signature on the maintenance agreement from smart's perspective was being tied to the Jennings crossing but now the Jennings crossing from the my discussion with mr lions was really in the context that they were not going to move forward on the Jennings crossings regardless thank you miss combs thank you i i'd like to clarify the indemnification piece again would you i'll bring my mic up did i hear you correctly that the indemnification we would be required to provide defense for any rail user not just smart uh yes any rail user not just smart but again um the way it is written is it's limited to providing indemnification and defense in the event that damages arise out of out of any equipment designed installed or maintained by the city but the issue is you um most often don't know what the at the outset of litigation you do not know where the ultimate liability may lie and we would envision and expect anticipate is maybe the right word that smart would be tendering defense to us in a variety of cases if there was any hint of involvement of any city safety measures is this only around the Jennings crossing are are we talking from city boundary to city boundary the full scope the full length of this the the train line the rail line within the city limits and if i understood the last question of the mayor and your response i had thought we were excuse this expression that we were being held over a barrel to not have the Jennings you know to get the indemnification agreement in order to get Jennings what i'm hearing you say now is that that's not so clear a connection that uh even if we sign the indemnification agreement we don't necessarily get Jennings as a as a quid pro quo that is my understanding and you are um correct that um up until august like over a barrel we were the the Jennings crossing agreement was being held up specifically awaiting city signature on the general maintenance agreement and that is no longer the case the messages that i've gotten and i don't know if other staff members have gotten a different message but the message that i've gotten is that Jennings is off the table and regardless of whether we sign the maintenance agreement or not um that's not changing in the event that we don't sign the maintenance agreement some other regulations federal or state applies yes our preference um would be to have a maintenance agreement it just adds clarity um for for both sides it adds clarity it makes it far easier should there be um should there be an accident should there be questions about liability that that then provides the basic foundations clear if we end up in court clear for everyone involved um that being said um silence um works we have federal regulations which give some at least some definition to whose liable whose maintenance liability where the where the maintenance liability lies there's also uh court cases and uh common law um and and statutes that also regulate and will govern liabilities questions itself forgive the interaction let me let me ask sort of a clarifying question to that answer i'm i'm guessing that the federal and the case law doesn't always assign all the responsibility to the municipal jurisdiction a train goes through that that it that it doesn't do what the current maintenance agreement they're asking for does that's that's true that that the um again state and federal statute and case law all divide up okay responsibilities um if we sign this we're losing access to that case law we are not entirely losing um uh access to that case law that case law will still provide some um designation of where the liability lies and will certainly um help shape an ultimate decision but it's the defense costs that are particular concern to our office um in that if there is any piece of city liability even if it's a minor piece we could be held to um provide a defense to smart even if it's a uh a small percent not even if it's small percent you know each case is going to be different we have to go in you know it it's not going to be a blanket same thing for every case but that is our where our concern is do we have i thought i was hearing that we may have the option of building the crossing ourselves but that the question has to do with how we provide the connections properly to the smart equipment that would give alerts and signals and move the barriers and right we um are still evaluating what the possibilities are for us to move forward just for the city to move forward just on its own can they refuse to allow access to hooking up the safety equipment for the electronic controllers et cetera do you think is that can they say no if we have a crossing that needs their safety equipment if if we're given the authority by smart to actually begin proceeding with the construction of the crossing they would not they would not restrict our access or our ability to connect to their equipment i think the question is and what miss gallagher is trying to state is work we don't know whether they have some overriding authority that would that would keep us from keep us from beginning the project at all and so once we get into it there there will be an agreement whether it's an encroachment or a license agreement that allows us to access the the property with the project um they're going to want all safety measures incorporated and and so they won't keep us from finishing anything the bigger it's just a question of whether they'll agree to issue an an encroachment or a license okay thank you if there are no further questions from the council of mr soyer thank you mayor mr net if we were to be able to satisfy the league all the legal requirements which sounds like quite a challenge in itself i don't have my ipad in front of me so i couldn't go back to the other slide um having it issues which slide would you like uh well i'm not sure which one it was it has to do with the with the costs involved and i'm so i'm curious um i can can i assume that the increase in the cost has not been budgeted uh correct there's been no increasing cost in fact um this last year as we made you aware we actually had to return some funds some grant funds because they were set to expire and so we returned about three hundred and twenty five thousand dollars back to back to their source i do remember that that section um if we were to await some kind of um assistance from the state some kind of grant do you have a sense of timeline how long it would take to put together four million dollars in grants i i don't necessarily have a timeline um there are grants out there such as the alternative transportation grant which we received previously uh that we could apply for there are other grants of similar caliber that could potentially provide enough funding to complete the project um they're you know that's but they're all competitive not only regionally but in some cases statewide and and we would be at the mercy of the selection committee um for alternative transportation not that they wouldn't take this one purely this application purely on its own individual merit but they may recall that we did turn back money previously on it and so i don't know how that would factor into their decision-making process um with that said that would certainly be a course of action that council could ask us to pursue is to look at other grant funds to see how we could compile enough money to where we feel confident that we could engage in a contract to complete this during the course of that time we could work with smart assuming smart is willing to work with us to try to better understand the cost associated with it with completing this project even if it's not with their contractor they're still negotiated activity that we would have to do with them um and so that's that's a direction we could certainly go to try to to try to find more information about what we believe the end cost would be have we done any advance analysis of what we would not be able to fund in one of these next fiscal years if we were to move forward with the expense of doing the project ourselves so i i will say um not specifically for this project however as we'll be talking about moving forward with with our public assistance funding for the disaster recovery we're beginning to do that exact thing trying to determine what projects can can and should be deferred in an effort to free funds to pay for our local share as well as our ability to get into contracts so we are actively in that process and we can certainly try to figure out how this fits into that game and it's sad because as much as as positive as positive as this project appears um we do have the issue of ability to pay and that does give me pause thank you mr. Schwedhelm thank you mr. I just want to listen that night the same concerns that council member sorry did the other one is the expiration date rather puc decision how does funding and timelines fit together can this realistically funding and timeline won't fit together uh not without asking for an extension and so um if council during the course of uh either this this this afternoon or into a future discussion requests that that we proceed with with researching funding and uh and buildability of this um then we would be looking at that what we need to do to prepare to submit our request for an extension in august of of of 19 and are there guidelines for the extension you get one six-month extension what can you tell us about that so i haven't actually dug into that in detail and that's what we would bring back to you to let you know i i don't believe it's that tight of a timeline i've heard from other individuals that there have been extensions up to five six years so i think this is not going to be an issue as long as we're trying to proceed with collecting the funds in an effort to deliver the project i think that's what the puc is going to be looking for great thank you all right we have members of the public who want to address the council on this issue we'll start with johanna james followed by janet baraco we'll start with janet then and uh johanna after her right up on the in the top tier can you hear me okay yes so thank you to the first two jason nut for that excellent synopsis and also to the members of of you the council for your interest in this important issue and for your thoughtful questions and your attempts to unveil the layers of the onion of this mysteriously this mysterious issue of the jennings crossing seem to be many layers um i live in on the i'm a resident of jennings avenue for 18 years and um i have been privileged to help out with others on this issue um as you've heard neighbors are are very very interested and want and need this crossing um i may be underlining things that you already have read about for instance in the letter from surely zane have have you all seen this letter that surely sent the supervisor zane sent um anyway she she wrote an excellent letter after several of us walked the crossing the detour and i would invite any of you by the way if that would help you understand this better i would love to invite you to come walk the crossing with some of us the detour the entire detour um when the judge walked it when we had that hearing way back when when over a hundred of us uh attended and spoke at that meeting um at helen layman um she was it was really interesting to see kind of the light bulb go on when she actually saw the extra 15 to 20 minutes it takes for people just to get where they need to go but um to be brief here i just want to say that um i have a couple of points um i i'm just thinking of a neighbor john we met when um supervisor zane was there and i had met him previously when i was petitioning uh taking uh uh getting signatures for this issue um john lives on the east side he can no longer walk his disabled daughter um to the dentist which is on north dot and used to be a five to ten minute walk across the crossing now it takes him so long he um he needs to have someone drive her he doesn't own a car so um there are many neighbors on the east side like this that used to walk to school used to um go to services on the west side um i believe this is a social uh justice issue as uh in addition to everything else uh a climate change issue because more people are driving now um than ever before i can tell you jennings traffic has increased a lot and i i know for fact because i've talked to some people on the east side that they now drive their kids um okay i guess my time's up um i just want to also ask a quick question though this indemnity that smart's so excited about about the accidents on the on the crossing what about the accidents that will occur on busy north dot and for people having to walk that detour that extra thank you miss brock so thank you so much thank you johanna james followed by thomas ells johanna james i live at 1138 lance drive which is around the corner from jennings and not far from the jennings crossing um smart's current concerns about safety are disingenuous at best leading one to wonder what the real issues might be uh their current concerns are also a reversal of three previous positions which i'll discuss in a moment following council member uh rogers lead i don't want to go too far down the rabbit hole of safety but i would like to point out that the pedestrian crossing eastbound sidewalk on the north side of college which is this next nearest crossing to the south from jennings um is a double track pedestrian crossing at that sidewalk with no safeguards for pedestrians there's no gate there there is nothing and that's a double track pedestrian crossing so you know like why are we then talking about safety at jennings um smart's original position was supporting safety at jennings then reportedly they had concerns about an indemnification agreement which was completely unrelated to the jennings agreement um at their board meeting a year ago september september 20th 2017 a number of neighbors uh went to express their concerns about the crossing not being built council member rogers came to um complain that they seemed to be holding the agreement holding it hostage to the indemnification agreement board member shirley zane expressed a lot of concerns about safety at the crossing later in that same meeting their general manager farhad monsoorian stated and it's in the minutes and it's in the video that none of what we had heard about the jennings delay was true that now that they had just approved an amendment for the larkspur extension that contract would now allow them to build jennings within a week of that once again we were reading in the newspaper that the issue was the indemnification agreement so what went what happened there with what i call the the september 2017 reversal now we're back to talking about safety which has long since been decided by the cpuc so um i don't know what action is available to you to uh rein smart in on this but they are usurping an authority over the crossing which is not theirs to approve or disapprove that's already been done by the cpuc thank you thank you thomas ells followed by james tonkin thank you for having this hearing and we look forward to uh having a discussion with smart smart refuses to do that um not to contradict anything director nut said i thought that was a very good history um maybe take you back just a little bit more regarding that station is the transportation land use committee of which many of the people are right here established almost 30 years ago uh funded peter calthorbs two county study nine which was completed in 1997 they paid 400 000 for that study in order to get uh smart approved the trend uh the leadership santa rosa number 15 with which i was a member in 1999 did a very extensive of which um uh Sharon right was actually both the chamber and the mayor uh head of the chamber and the mayor and she was head of the of lsr 15 and uh study evaluation of the north santa rosa station and locate plan and location and i mentioned at that time that that station at jennings was too close and they were not it was never going to be but they they just had it in their head that they could just establish it anyway uh so jennings was kind of connected to that at the time i mean the station was there and that crossing was but smart rejected that station position and they moved it to gernville and in a way in their head they kept the jennings crossing and the jennings station together and now it's moved it's good to be at gernville no there was always that a right established by the puc that where those people could cross there says they they rejected and it's because uh the reason they rejected is because of the overlap of the of the um the areas that influence the two stations they were too close and it would always interfere with the draw to eat to the station because it was too close it had to be further away so smart coming forward many years now to when they begin they begin to drag their feet on the jennings crossing while proceeding with the signal integration design without jennings why did they do that there were five incidents i may be able to come back to that uh there's really only one where the person had earbuds and he and he walked across there was no crossing uh two um were very unfortunate and i don't really want to get into that because it's very unfortunate but there's very little in the regard to the actual incidents um and nothing that they almost nothing they could do uh according to cpu c and the um federal uh rail guidelines the site distances are it was 900 feet and 1200 feet those are good for 60 to 75 miles an hour and they're and they're it's different because there's different lengths right so somewhere between 60 and 75 miles an hour depends on which direction you're coming um not 30 i mean 35 it's very adequate even without any any crossing elements um so it's much improved with the design uh many more crossings are anticipated i just take one more second uh many more crosses are anticipated uh in marine uh particularly interesting trials with significant design integration and everything regardless james duncan please thank you mr duncan yes be followed by steve brutal bow yes thank you mr mayor i can't hear myself so if i'm too loud or not loud enough please signal that to me you're just fine thank you um in response to some of the unknowns listed in the staff report i'd like to start with the question of can work be completed without interrupting smarts revenue service and i'd like to draw your attention to a march 16th uh 2017 letter from stacey and whitbeck incorporated to bill gamlin um which is in the attachment to the reimbursement agreement that was provided to me by the city quote the main line and citing this is regarding jennings will be inaccessible for at least two weekend shutdown saturday 10 p.m through monday 4 a.m the smart trains are double ended it would mean that their north station service and their airport service would be closed during those hours but because the smart trains are double ended they can continue the rest of their service i'd also like to bring to your attention the fact that the city was originally going to be the contractor for the jennings crossing not smart and i will provide the city clerk and the city council with all the documentation that i have that will show that the other thing that's important to keep in mind is that the um discussion of the funding for construction that's focused on completing the entire project but that wasn't the original plan and it shouldn't be the plan now what's critical is that you complete the improvements within the smart right of way for the civil improvements because the civil improvements and the signal improvements are two separate areas finish the civil improvements it's comparable to gaining invested right to complete construction of a building once you have a permit approval you don't want to go to the cpuc for an extension if you've done no work they're going to say there isn't a public need for it because you haven't done it and that would be hard to argue against you have some money you can spend some money do those improvements the question is regarding um smart denying access to its right of way they have no legal right to do that and no judge in sonoma county is going to say that they do at some point a position is going to have to be taken to bring smart's administrative management in line the board has never met it never provided direction this is farhad mansoorian and his employees speaking until the board speaks it doesn't mean much so thank you very much thank you steve burdlebow followed by jack squaringen thank you mayor corsie and members steve burdlebow with the seara club this has been a long road we really appreciate the decisions that the city has made thus far we expect that this matter will be before the smart board in the near future we understand that supervisor zane has requested that the board look at it i think this is the time for the city to show the same perseverance that the city of san clemete showed over a period of years in order to get the five crossings that they got in connection with their beach trail for the city to hold its ground and show that you're unanimously actively going to pursue this at this point is likely to get the best result from the smart board on the cross tissue i would suggest that we take a look at the agnesio crossing it's where the smart trail crosses the track down at highway 37 uh it's a three track crossing ours is a two track crossing and interestingly they did not remove the uh concrete ties in order to do that which meant that they didn't need to close down the the track for an extended period of time in order to put the asphalt in there without necessarily putting in a a concrete median that would reduce the cost considerably i think one can also look at the question of whether you need to rely on track circuitry in order to operate the gates denver has a different system which basically relies on gps to set the gates down uh so there are issues of cost that can't be negotiated since smart wants to talk further about this before actually building it and we hope we will get the smart board to set the staff straight on this thank you thank you jack swarington followed by terry shore hello mr mayor and members of council i'm jack swarington i live in zenerosa and i'm chair of friends of smart i've been involved with the project as a citizens advocate for since measure r i think and i've been involved in the jenny's crossing brouhaha since it first emerged and for an old guy i have a reasonably good memory so i invite you to go and check the things i'm going to tell you for my memory uh the first one is that smart objected to jenny's before any pedestrian incidents or any vehicle as is at any crossings so to say they learn they know more now than they did then is fallacious in fact there had no been no incidents when they said we object because we know norm out no more now secondly smart has never put this item on their agenda it's never been a smart board position it's only been from the general manager and the people work directly for him so therefore i don't see how it is a legal smart position it needs to be agendized by them if it's going to be pursued as a public issue like it has been and finally i think what they've done is establish what i would call an arbitrary absolute that's to say one person has said this is not safe period end of data uh no more data is supplied that takes the whole problem out of a system context in a big picture view and puts it into one little issue uh this crossing at this time with this kind of people it does not look at the context does not look at the travel times the alternative does not look at the safety at the crossing of the crossing urnville it's totally out of context you can't solve a big picture problem by looking at one simple piece of the puzzle i thank you thank you terry shore uh yes good afternoon um mayor corsie vice mayor roger city council members members of the public by name is terry shore i'm the north bay regional director for green belt alliance um number one i just uh want to thank the city council for holding the study session and moving forward um please take the appropriate steps to move toward the construction of the crossing uh the jennings crossing um i've been with green belt alliance for uh three and a half almost four years and one of the first issues that i engaged in to support friends of smart and the neighbors and jennings is a jennings crossing issue but green belt alliance has been in support of this and supporting it long before that so it has been going for a very long time i'm very impressed with friends of smart including specifically jack swearington steve brutal bow and the neighbors including jim duncan and jihanna james uh janet baracco they have done incredible legal organizing and other work all along so i'm very impressed that they've continued to push this forward and i'm extremely disappointed with smart and smart's actions it's pretty shocking that they would take the position that they're taking in my view and so thank you very much for moving this forward it's very important to the city of sanarosa and to the people in the community and to green belt alliance so thank you very much thank you i'm disappointed and smart to taking the position on this and disappointed is probably too too mild a word i think it's ridiculous that we're having a conversation about the safety of this crossing at this point but i'll get to get to that in a minute willard richards many of course the council members my name is willard richards and i live in sanarosa it was earlier mentioned that smart has obtained permission to establish a pedestrian crossing at fourth street um it's worth noting that there are cement ties where they plan to build that crossing so the question is are they going to take out those cement ties and put in the usual wood ties so that they can bolt the cement slabs to them the way they've done on all other crossings and if so what will that do to a smart service when smart is making that change thank you mr richards that's all the cards i have going back to my comment that it's ridiculous we're talking about safety here i think we we know very well very clearly um why smart opposed to this crossing beginning in june of 2017 and as mr squaringen pointed out revenue service had not started there hadn't been anyone injured safety was not a concern at the time you know smart has has recreated a railroad that's uh that's 100 years old or more a railroad that uses at-grade crossings and that goes through a number of communities in marina and sonoma counties uh it's a railroad that needs to be integrated with these communities it's not it's not grade separated or fenced off or through tunnels like bart or the bullet train crossings are part of the design and this crossing needs to be part of the design and i hate to say this but if this crossing as designed isn't safe then there isn't a safe crossing on smart's line so we're being asked for direction uh to the council here today and and i'd just like to start by saying i think we need to seek an extension from the the cpu c we need to research our ability to build this on our own whether smart wants it or not and we need to pursue grant funding to pay for it and happy to hear other ideas from the council i'm going to go down to mr tibbetz first thank you mr mayor you know this this issue is relatively new for me having been on the council for two years and the lion's share of the work having happened before that but what is really apparent to me is that um in order to make smarter reality it required mutual support between agencies certainly support from the city of santa rosa and so it would seem clear to me that we should have mutual support now and the fact that the city put forward mutual indemnification to me seems like a no-brainer and a good step forward um to that end uh i i would like to see in addition to the things that the mayor stated i'd like to see the extension i'd like to see us press ahead with or without smart if it came to it um but also to as vice mayor rogers put it show us what works okay we've we've shown you that we're willing to mutually indemnify but if you are going to claim that this crossing is not safe and you need to clearly stipulate to us and to the public that we represent what is um so i think that would be a good starting point the other point that really resonated with me was that for mr swaring jinn and if this has not been publicly agendized on smarts uh by smarts board it needs to be because the elected officials were accountable to this public need to hear from them uh and the other thing i just want to finish up by saying and getting this on the record is it to me you know you can you can find fault with an at-grade crossing you can find it to be relatively unsafe but the one thing that's going to be the biggest detriment to that community particularly in the jennings neighborhood into the kids and the schools around there is doing nothing at all because as somebody who's closest to the youth um on on this council just by virtue of age i will say that if i were 12 years old and you asked me to go two three blocks down the tracks to cross at the legal crossing i'd have my spot right there that's convenient and that's what we can't have you know you have to regulate the environment to make it safe for people and kids in particular so i'd just like to you know get that out there in the public and hope that somebody from the smart board is watching this video so we've we've got to work together to that end. Mr. Schweitho. Thank you Mr. Mayor. First I have a question Mr. Ney you talked about um when you're making references smart we heard some of the speakers talk about it when you when you you're making references smart now saying they don't think it's safe are you talking staff or the electives? So uh the the first meeting where this came up with us actually had the executive director the president of the board their attorney and chief engineer in the room and so that was the first time where we actually began to hear smart formulate this concept uh that safety was now their number one priority and that they didn't feel that this particular location was meeting it for them and so it's since then it's been it's been predominantly that group of individuals that have continued to um express concerns relating to safety now with that said those happen to be the four individuals that I interact with most on the smart board so uh you know I I haven't had interactions with the others other than uh other than director McKinsey um and I have not heard that from director McKinsey at any point in time. So again and again councilmember Tibbitt's mentioning because that's where I I'm all about you know defining the process so we don't have to defend the decision I thought I understood the process and I thought the decision's been made and now apparently not so I'm trying to figure out who is making these decisions representing smart you mentioned some individuals who are on the board but are they representing themselves as an individual who happens to be on the board or at the direction of the board this is what I want you to tell the city of Santa Rosa. Well so I'll give you my two cents and then I'll let I'll let Sue finish um with probably what's right uh the um I mean realistically uh the letter we received was on behalf of smart and so it's I I took that as not necessarily a letter from professional to professional but the professional representing the board that that he's responsible to and so that that was the way I took that that specific letter that came our way this this august um and and in the past the question of who was talking and what they were talking was clarified during a meeting recently this spring where the executive director said I have not discussed this with our board and the request specifically from the mayor was then please go discuss it with your board and send us a letter confirming that this is in fact the direction and therefore the letter was received in august so based on the request that was made by the mayor and the feedback we received I'm taking that as direction from the board of directors did you have anything you wanted to add I'll just um reiterate part of that um that yes in the meeting that we had um with the general manager and the chair of their board that was made clear that they had not brought this issue to their board I'm not aware and I don't know if director nut is of any agenda item being on their uh on on the board's agenda that would have been either in closed session or open session regarding this issue but I also agree with mr nut that the letter that came to us in august represented that it was a um a district communication and not an not a staff just determination but again I'm not aware myself of it ever being agendized for the board I'm not either and I try to pay attention to that and I appreciate you paying attention uh mayor and and I agree with what your earlier suggestions were um having been involved in the process being on the council when we did all this study and we went to the PUC hearings talked to the neighbors very familiar with what that roundabout means um my bottom line is how do we get this done again I thought I understood the process and we made the decisions now all of a sudden there's another reason for it so yes I think we need the discussion or we need the extension we need to find the additional funding we need to find a way to get this done in spite of some folks that may be throwing up some barriers for us let's just get it done the most efficient way possible of what you're suggesting and I think it is the most efficient way of doing it let's start that ball rolling miss combs thank you mayor uh one of the letters that we received was from the safe routes to school program that indicated that um they had had a significant drop in participation in their safe routes to school biking and pedestrian program and that they attributed it directly to concerns about the crossings the having to take the long route for the crossings um it seems to me far less safe to take either of the alternate routes gardenville road or college to get school um puts the children more in direct contact with traffic uh this crossing is clearly the the safer crossing as as one of my colleagues said if this crossing isn't safe there aren't any safe crossings um I don't appreciate having school children's routes to school held over a barrel by anybody this has been a priority for us as a council within our own budgeting for our own capital improvement projects to make sure that kids routes to school are safe um so I would support uh seeking the extension I would support pursuing additional funding and I hope that we can proceed as much as we possibly can I would like us to stick with our view that we should have mutual indemnification that seems only fair I am delighted that Supervisor Zane has changed her mind and has issued a letter to that effect and I am hoping that she and the smart board can direct their staff to work in a more congenial manner with us and to stop holding school children hostage stop holding school children over a barrel for a crossing that they're using in order to manipulate us into taking a deal that is not good for us in terms of maintenance not good for not fair in terms of maintenance so thank you Mr. Sawyer thank you Mayor I'll be brief last I repeat the recommendations from previous recommendations from my colleagues I just will say that I agree with them wholeheartedly and I share their disappointment and frustration thank you thank you Vice Mayor thank you Mr. Mayor it'll come as no shock to folks that I'm extremely frustrated that this hasn't been built yet um reading through the staff report was actually pretty depressing for me as I'm going item by item the hoops that the public has had to jump through to get this crossing up and moving and yet here we are still having to discuss at stage one how we're going to break ground to provide this historic crossing in Santa Rosa when I when I worked for Senator McGuire the excuse was we'd have to close another crossing and then when I went to the smart board meeting last year the excuse was the city hasn't done the indemnity agreement and then when I went to the smart board meeting the next time it was that this the crossing wasn't safe and when I went last Wednesday and asked the board to do a public agenda item on the crossing and that if you weren't going to keep keep your commitment and your promise to our neighbors that you at least have a public discussion about it the response that I got from the chair is Santa Rosa hasn't been clear that it still wants this and that was both in public and in the parking lot so I don't know I don't know how we can be any more clear we want this crossing as councilmember combs said we received a letter from the safe routes to schools the participation for the school has dropped from 20 percent to 11 percent since that fence went up kids are being impacted families are being impacted it is both a social justice and an environmental equity issue I don't really don't even know what else to say Mr. Mayor we want the crossing and any representation that we have been unclear on that is complete fiction I would support moving forward with the extension I am weary of asking smart repeatedly what would make this safer we know what's going to make this safer and you're just driving up the cost on our on our neighbors at this point let's get this done thank you mr. Rogers mr. Dot are your directions clear they are thank you very much thank you moving on we'll go to item 3.2 mr. Toto item 3.2 please yes our second study session item is 3.2 climate action planning update and I believe Jessica Jones our supervising planner will present and introduce partners along the way all right good afternoon Mayor Corsi members of the council my name is Jessica Jones I'm supervising planner with the planning and economic development department as you will recall in May of 2015 the council requested an update of the city's climate action plan activities and information on all electric building codes the study session that is before you today will respond to that request by providing a report on the citywide 2015 greenhouse gas inventory and regional efforts which will be presented by alec a civil from the regional climate protection agency or authority or our cpa we will also be going over the city's climate action plan implementation which I will be presenting then we will go on to all electric building codes which will be presented by Jesse Oswald the city's chief building official sonoma clean power we'll be talking about the advanced energy rebuild program it'll be presented by Rachel gucandol from sonoma clean power and then we'll close it up with a discussion on the local energy efficiency retrofit programs which will be presented by alec a from our cpa I also wanted to recognize numerous city staff that are here in the room with us we have all been working very closely together in implementation implementation of the city's climate action plan we have staff from the transportation and public works department water recreation and parks parking and planning and economic planning and economic development so with that I'm going to now hand it over to alec a who will start us off good afternoon um thank you for having me I uh know that we have quite a bit of information to get through today so I'm going to try and be relatively brief but happy to take any questions and revisit any uh any uh of the topics that we cover today so again my name is alec a civil and I'm the director of climate programs for the regional climate protection authority um we today are talking about our 2015 greenhouse gas inventory update the rcpa coordinated a countywide climate climate action plan climate action 2020 that has community profiles and measures outlined for each of our cities santa rosa included in that and uh we included a an inventory of greenhouse gas emissions from 2010 in that plan and we just recently released an inventory update for 2015 and that's what I'm going to be focused on today so um I'm going to talk a little bit about what's involved in the inventory and again happy to answer more questions on that I'm sure many of you are quite aware of uh how inventories work but generally the purpose of a greenhouse gas emissions inventory is to you know focus actions and monitor progress um in terms of in relation to the climate action plan so these are the sectors that our inventory covers we followed ickley's community protocol when we uh when we develop the inventory and it's an activity-based protocol and that means that basically it involves measuring or modeling the primary emission generating activities and then translating those based translating those into ghda emissions based on standard or local uh locally specific emission factors and that's really what's involved here so building energy transportation and land use solid waste water and wastewater livestock and fertilizer um and basically uh we we use this to evaluate our progress and to to make sure that we're focusing on the right areas so um the main takeaway is that we are not moving at the speed and scale required to meet our green house gas reduction goals so as you all know in Sonoma County we we like to to be ambitious and we adopted a 2020 ghda reduction goal of 25 below 1990 levels uh the state of california has a goal of just 1990 levels by 2020 which they've already reached so ours is more ambitious right now we remain at about nine percent below 1990 levels um so we have a ways to go there's a lot of great work to to uh to talk about but we do have quite a bit of a way to go i think there's one more animation thank you um as you i'm sure all know one of the main uh reasons for this is that transportation is a really big challenge for us and that's you know common with trends in terms of our region in the bay area as well as statewide so transportation remains our our biggest challenge uh the good news is is that we have uh great resources and leadership in terms of Sonoma clean power and you'll see that our transportation emissions look even worse because Sonoma power has made our our building uh energy emissions look much much better and i know rachel's going to talk a little bit more about about that later on um i can go to the next slide so we wanted to provide a little bit more detail on jurisdiction level details and so rcpa conducted a county wide inventory but then we've also done inventories for each of the cities and that's one of the the services that rcpa provides um so i think there's a couple more if you go four there we go um so this is not to single things out but this is really to provide context um so of all of our nine member cities we had four who uh went are are doing slightly worse than they were in 2010 and then santa rosa along with the others are doing just slightly better but again the overall message here is that not enough is being done and we're not moving at the speed and scale required to actually meet those goals overall um i did want to note though that providing this context so for example in cloverdale we can assess that the the per capita daily vmt so vehicle miles traveled and there was a spike between 2010 and 2015 so daily miles per person in cloverdale went from about 25 to 31 and so that's one of the reasons for this um in healdsburg uh one of the factors here is that uh they don't uh actually utilize synom clean power they have their own utility as you know and it was a 2015 was a drought year and so they had less hydropower to actually draw from there and that's why that emissions spike went up so there's key reasons for that um also in petaluma there were uh actual improvements in inefficiencies and reporting um in terms of waste and so that's one of the reasons that those went up so we have looked into that a little bit more and it's part of our work going forward to figure out where we can move the levers to really make things go in the right direction so just a little bit more uh detail on santa rosa so right now based on the 2015 inventory santa rosa's emissions are 11 percent below 1990 levels um if you want to move forward and so again transportation remains the biggest uh biggest source of emissions for santa rosa cleaner electricity from both pgne and synom clean power um is is making helping us to make progress um i do want to note as well in terms of building energy i'll talk a little bit later on about the bay run program and that's where we're really focused in terms of improving efficiency in building use so actually reducing the amount of the energy we use as well um so we'll talk a little bit more about that later on um but uh ultimately if you want to go one more or actually i'm sorry go back so ultimately we have a lot of challenges ahead of us we know from our recent reports from ipcc that even if we allow emissions to get to to increase by 1.5 degrees globally um that can lead to it's going to be catastrophic impacts from that so ultimately i think the policy signal from those reports and and from where we are is that we have to be bold and we have to focus and we have to really consider what we can do at the local level to have the most impact possible in the least amount of time and on that note we wanted to give a little more detail on travel modes to work because again this is our one of rcpa's main focuses going forward and one of the ways that we're really looking forward to working with santa rosa to really understand where those barriers and challenges are in shifting to cleaner transportation modes going forward so thank you i'm happy to take questions now or hand okay so we're gonna um unless council has any questions we'll go ahead and move on to the next section this is so i do have a question for you it's you've stated that everybody's a little bit behind on the pace that we need to keep up in order to reach our 2020 action goals um what does rcpa recommend for steps for local jurisdictions to take to speed that up um so within the climate action 2020 plan each as i mentioned each city has a community profile and there are specific measures that are outlined within the plan the idea behind the plan was that um we were considering what local actions could have the most impact in the context of both state and regional actions as well and i do think that that's key and one of the things that rcpa is here to do is to support our member cities and really focusing on what they can do at the local level that's going to work in conjunction with all of the action that's happening at the state level so the plan does provide more detail on that obviously santa rosa is a bit uh unique in that you guys have already done incredible amount of work in terms of your own climate action plan and that's something that we're really excited to continue to support thanks and actually i'm glad you brought that up because it's it's interesting to look at the change that's happened since 2010 for the city of santa rosa amidst a booming population and when i used to be on the board of public utilities that was always a real testament to the agency's ability to to reduce because you have to not only bring it back to where your populations were x but they've grown substantially to why two things i'll ask you and your expert opinion are we have there've been a couple of discussions one thing that has come up it's all electric homes requiring that is as a building code city of santa rosa the other that i'm pretty passionate about personally is getting the city to do a cost analysis study about purchasing evergreen power from sonoma clean power because we're a huge energy consumer and what in your opinion what impacts would those have i mean i i'm sure it's hard to quantify and you haven't done it and i'm not going to ask you to on this spot but are those steps in the right direction or are there other things in the community plan that you would recommend we prioritize yeah and those are great questions um and i'll i'll do my best to speak to them now but again happy to go into more detail later on um in terms of the all electric ordinance i think that the fact that we can focus especially in this context in the face of a housing crisis and rebuild on making sure that any new building stock is as efficient and all electric ready and you know moving towards all electric as possible i think that's incredibly smart you'll hear more later on today in the presentation about the 2019 energy code and the fact that even if we just build to code we're going to see substantial increases in inefficiency based on the housing stock that we lost and then the housing stock that we'll have there so i do think that that these discussions and these discussions are happening in other cities and counties in the bay area and beyond it is the direction i think that it's probably very smart to go in the near term i i also think that i want to make sure that we're not losing uh losing sight of the fact that this is we're talking about new construction so there is still quite a bit of work to do in terms of the existing building stock and i'll talk a little bit more later on about rcp's work with the bay area regional energy network um because i do think that there's a lot of we've had a lot of impact so far but there's a lot of potential there um to really think about the the savings that we can achieve with our existing stock as well so i agree um on uh the second part of your question just remind me again having the city of santa rosa do a cost analysis to determine the feasibility of becoming an evergreen customer of sonoma clean power correct um i think that would be a fantastic idea personally i've spoken a little bit with sonoma clean power about this i think um you know the irony or the reality of the situation is that what you have right now is quite clean i believe about 86 percent clean um energy that you're receiving at the moment but i do think that if we could do that at the local level um that that would uh definitely have an impact and we're happy to help in supporting uh folks both at the city and sonoma clean power to determine what that impact would look like in terms of the cost okay thanks so much sir i'd just like to to point out that the uh the big elephant in the room here is is the transportation sector and particularly on-road transportation it's gone up quite a bit in the past or in the 2010 to 2015 a lot of that has to do with the economy but a lot of it has to do with people where people live versus where they work and if if we continue with our priorities to build housing downtown to build transit oriented development to build housing that is energy efficient we will have that's the biggest effect we can have on these numbers mr rogers thank you mr mayor and uh mr tato i i don't actually know the answer to this question do we have a uh employee smart program where we will help subsidize the cost of smart for our city employees no we don't okay thank you okay please proceed okay so this next set of slides will be going over the city's two climate action plans and what we are doing to implement those so in 2009 the city began the development of the two climate action plans which are the municipal climate action plan also known as m cap and the community climate action plan known as c cap the m cap focuses on the greenhouse gas or ghg emissions associated with municipal facilities and operations the c cap or community climate action plan was developed to to guide the city's ghg reduction policies and activities at the community level the council adopted the community climate action plan in june of 2012 and the municipal climate action plan in august of 2013 both plans identify measures that the city and the community can pursue to contribute to ghg reduction uh goals the uh the next uh following slides that i'll be going through we're going to be walking you through the both of those plans and the implementation of of each so first up is the community climate action plan so as i mentioned the c cap provides a guide to the city's ghg reduction policies and activities at the community level in order to establish the city's baseline emissions a sector-based emissions inventory for the year 2007 was prepared the community climate action plan contains emission reduction measures organized over nine categories which are listed here on this slide and i'm going to be walking through each of those so first up is energy efficiency so the goal of the energy efficiency policy is to conduct the same operations using less energy uh to that end the city implements the california building code known as title 24 within title 24 is cal green which is the first state mandated green building standards code it contains mandatory requirements and more rigorous optional standards known as tier one standards the tier one optional standards include five subparts energy efficiency water conservation planning and design material conservation and environmental quality in november of 2016 the city adopted the 2016 building code and all of the tier one subparts except for the energy efficiency standards which must be shown to be cost effective and approved by the california energy commission based on preliminary analysis by city staff at that time the cost effectiveness of the tier one energy efficiency standards could not be demonstrated the 2016 building code and adopted tier one standards currently include green constructions such as water efficient fixtures recycled content and requirements electrical infrastructure readiness for electric vehicle charging in new single-family residential as well as others conservation efforts that increase shade and reduce the need for building cooling are also part of the permitting process for new development as a quick question yeah when we look at the cal green building standards if we were to adopt those would that be sufficient in reaching our overall 2020 goals and i ask because there's been conversation with some of the organizations out there that our codes and our goals are not actually aligned here i'm rachel kai can all know my claim i'm gonna be talking a little bit but i think one of the things we'll sort of talk about which is an issue currently with the codes and one big issue is a lot of our emission sources and buildings are coming from natural gas about 80 percent of folks heat or use water heating that uses that and so one of the things that the state is really going to have to look at as we start to align with carbon goals is potentially phasing out or thinking about alternate ways to do that so cal green currently does not have an all-electric requirement it's just an efficiency requirement so generally if you want to get to climate goals it's looking at energy efficiency paired with decarbonization or fuel switching so you'd probably want to look at both of those together thank you okay so this next slide is renewable energy so there are policies within the community climate action plan that aim to implement renewable energy in buildings and vehicles the c cap policies are supported in part by the building code for example the code currently requires that new single-family residential dwellings be solar ready and electric vehicle charging capable solar panels will become mandatory in the 2019 code cycle for residential in advance of that requirement for solar the city has created a streamlined process to approve certain solar permit applications over the counter and has provided an online process for scheduling and responding to inspection requests as part of the renewable energy program the city receives electricity from Sonoma clean power which you're aware of Sonoma clean power procures a mix of electricity that is a minimum of 42% renewable carbon-free sources and provides 100% renewable energy or renewable electricity to subscribers out of premium service Sonoma clean power also is administering the advanced energy rebuild program which I think will be talked about later on in the presentation and that provides rebates for residents rebuilding homes in the fire impacted areas to higher efficiency standards if I may before you move forward are all of our meters Sonoma clean power or only some of our meters I can help you guys look into that I don't have the answer now but it's I can say for cities it's generally sometimes a mix and we can certainly help you look at the information on that and on why some of them might not be and are any of our meters evergreen or are they all straight Sonoma clean power I don't believe they are currently but we can certainly help look at a cost impact of switching some of the meters would appreciate knowing which meters are and aren't maybe not exactly which meter but how many meters are and aren't what the reason why is and what the opportunity is if we wanted to go either all Sonoma clean power or in some meters go to evergreen I'm Claire Myers with Santa Rosa water and just wanted to clarify the vast majority of our meters in the city are with Sonoma clean power there is a very small handful that are still with PG&E for reasons that I'm not entirely sure of but I'm happy to get the rest of that information but I would say probably 99% are with Sonoma clean power thank you into my understanding none of those are evergreen at this point those are all the normal okay so we'd like to know the impact of both thank you we moved past the residential section my recollection was that there was a fairly heavy dependence in the climate action plan that in order to get there we couldn't just do new construction up to improve standards but that some significant work had to be done in terms of retrofitting existing buildings will you be speaking to that I don't didn't see it in my packet it is not something that's in the presentation but certainly something we can look into and get back to you on I would like that thank you because if we're pretty dependent upon that I need to know what we're doing to help that happen and near the end of the presentation like we'll be talking about it with with the Bayron program as well thank you okay so this next section is the next two slides actually are related to parking and land use the transportation and the use of gas powered vehicles remains the largest as was shown earlier in the slides the largest percentage of community GHG emissions the city's land use policies do support reducing traffic and increasing residential densities downtown and near transit centers the city is downtown and north center is a stationary specific plans focused new mixed use residential development near the smart rail stations as well as transit centers commercial uses and services and then through the land use entitlement process this city staff also encourages implementation of project features and operational procedures that could potentially indirectly reduce vehicle travel some of those include encouraging large employers to have commercial services on site such as dining and retail the city's public parking we have a demand-based parking pricing system that was implemented in january of this year the pricing structure increases the price of street parking and high parking demand areas like the core of our downtown the goal is to improve access to short-term parking thereby increasing convenience to business patrons reducing circling and related traffic hazards residential parking permits are also offered in six of our residential neighborhoods to improve access to street parking for residents in these areas during certain times of the day these restrictions place a limit on the number of vehicle permits available per household and prevent spillover parking from the employment centers encouraging alternative transportation forms up next is alternative transportation and as we'll cover the next few slides the city supports the development of multimodal transportation system by encouraging transit bicycling walking and other forms of alternative transportation new bike lane and pedestrian improvements are routinely installed as part of a large-scale new development through the permitting process and through development of our city's capital improvement program the pedestrian and bicycle enhancements that were completed in 2017 were located at over 100 locations throughout the city and we have a few that are highlighted here on this slide they include green painted bike lane transitions the stony point road class 2 bike lane and signal walk improvements monoceto boulevard class 2 bike lanes bicycle and pedestrian signal design at herne avenue the smart multi-use path improvements and implementation of a bike share program with regional partners improvements to the city's transit system is also an essential priority to reducing vehicle miles traveled as council is aware in may of 2017 the city implemented phase one of the redesign known as reimagining city bus as part of that phase one the city has collaborated with sienna as a junior college to provide unlimited access to students on city bus which has resulted in about 3500 rides per week in the spring of 2018 the city also continues to manage the free ride project which provides participants who walk bike or carpool to work a guaranteed ride home in the event of an emergency in 2017 there were approximately 1500 participants in about 290 organizations phase one also included development of new routes and schedules new bus stops pedestrian facility improvements the city's first 15 minute service on mendicino avenue and sabastopol avenue as well as a shuttle service from the smart stations so this slide shows the santa rosa junior college student participation in the unlimited ride program this is between november of 2017 and august of this year and so as i mentioned you can see on this slide the peak was in uh the spring semester of 2018 do we have any data on how that compares to prior to this program and as you just indicated there are ebbs and flows to the school year and when students would be using this so it's not surprising that june when they're they graduate and they're no longer going to class that it'd be lower and then there'd be a build-up time as new students come in i'd be curious to see sort of an end over end comparison between 2016 and then ultimately 2017 sure hello racially deputy director transit we can certainly provide some more depth of data on this program one difficulty we have is that the student ridership kind of washes into the route one ridership and other ridership the one thing we can do is provide you with data at boardings at the srjc bus stops and we have seen and i don't have that data with me but we have seen kind of a rebound in the level of boardings at those bus stops with the institution of this program as you would expect and so i could provide that comparative data but i don't have that with me at this time but happy to provide it yeah and i also understand we we launched the reimagined bus service so the the numbers might not be comparable anyway but i would like to see the next time we have this conversation sort of some form of a side-by-side comparison so that we can see if we're actually increasing ridership or if we're just looking at it as a snapshot of when students are in versus when they're not in school right yeah and i would say overall from what we have seen i i think we we have seen an increase of participation i think we are growing ridership on this but i will again you know follow up with the the actual data great thank you and rachel are you still there um do you have any information about the veterans because i know council also funded a similar program with veterans yeah that program has been very successful um we we are well on course to exceed uh you know well exceed what we estimated in terms of participation probably by the halfway point in the year um will be uh at where we thought we would be for the full year um i'm going to look at urie to see if he has any data on weekly or monthly ridership for that program but um if you could just include at the same time yeah sure because i know okay those of us on council are interested in that absolutely yeah for sure and just one more quick note if i could miss jones um going back a slide to where we talk about the the shuttle service around smart and obviously we have the free downtown shuttle that's been running uh when we have the conversation about extending that or whether or not we should continue to do that given the limited ridership i'd be interested in seeing whether the addition of the the the bus driving around has increased our greenhouse gas emissions relative to the limited amount of people who have been taken off of the roads by taking the shuttle instead does that make sense yes thank you okay i just wanted to get that note down okay um our next slide so this is uh just illustrating the free ride project and um the types of trips that were logged by the participants of this program so again it was about 1500 participants in a little over 260 organizations okay so the this next slide is on optimized vehicle travel so the electric vehicle infrastructure has been installed in public parking facilities at numerous city offices specifically 11 public electric vehicle chargers are located throughout the city with seven more planned for installation the city also participates in the electric vehicle program called drive ev which is which is administered by sonoma clean power and provides substantial reductions in the total cost for purchasers and leasers of electric passenger vehicles the program has incentivized the purchase of about 445 electric vehicles in the city and has provided residential ev chargers to approximately 700 uh santa rosa residents over the last two years in addition the scta is implementing a regional car sharing program in partnership with sonoma county jurisdictions and scta and the city have established a car share pilot program um with a location for two vehicles in santa rosa through august of uh 2019 excuse me do you know and i forgive forgive me for not having asked this in advance um do you know if we allow private property owners to install charging stations for profit or for for at at their properties and if we do allow it do we allow it on the at the curb yes that's a good question we have had multiple requests for having private installation of ev chargers at the curb privately owned and operated um we're working through that what that means there'd be a license agreement obviously it's an encroachment into the city uh city property um so part of what we need to do is develop a license agreement identify what that looks like and then also understand what that does the parking in the area or in the neighborhood or where where that's located um that others might be using as well um so we're we're looking at that right now um we're also looking at other curb services such as parklets and um other things that go along in the right of way and what we're planning on doing is taking a deep dive on that as we do the update of our downtown stationary specific plan um that's a good forum to have that conversation as we're talking about what the especially the downtown core and surrounding areas look like with regards to ev stations parklets and other things in the right away okay this next slide is regarding solid waste a solid waste disposal so um as the council is aware in 2017 uh recology was selected as a new holler for solid waste and recycling collection uh in processing services the uh recology mission it represents a fundamental shift from the traditional waste management to resource recovery under the agreement with the city recology is required to progressively increase waste diversion from our local landfill over the next 10 years with a diversion rate of 60 by 2029 uh in contrast the previous waste haulers diversion rate uh hovered around 37 percent a major component of the diversion plan is the introduction of organic green waste cans for all residents recology has also introduced new 2017 2018 model year collection vehicles to service the city in compliance with clean air requirements and these vehicles also uh include fueled uh they're fueled by renewable diesel in addition uh recology's zero waste zero team is devoted to providing public education outreach programs um to further support the city's diversion and waste reduction goals on a regional level in 2014 the city and other regional partners implemented a countywide ban on single use plastic bags at retail and grocery stores and established a surcharge for uh paper bags so in the uh community climate action plan it calls out specifically the reduction in plastic bags but it also has styrofoam packaging as well where are we at in moving that forward or what would the process be in including that component yeah it's something that we can look into it's it's not something that we've uh to my knowledge uh looked at yet um but certainly something we can look into and get back to the council on what uh what would need to be done to make that happen great thank you can can you clarify what renewable diesel is it's an excellent question so oh good i'm not the only one who's not sure we think it might be referring to bio diesel but we can we can verify it might be something like that okay and and also the the current supplier uses separate trucks as opposed to combine load trucks so for example if i have three cans three different trucks come as opposed to previously when two trucks came for three cans um have we calculated any greenhouse gas effects on that difference um maybe it's the same maybe it's different but it seemed to me three trucks might be different than two trucks it is three trucks uh councilwoman um and um we've asked them to give us some calculations but the the difference was because they were collecting two recyclable and your solid waste one side would fill up faster and so the truck would be filled up more on one side and have to go all the way and dump their load this way they're able to fill up the single stream and dump the load when it's full as opposed to trucks having to make trips when they weren't full on both sides so um from their business model and the efficiency they they um project that it is more efficient but we'll get the numbers from them for you thank you okay so moving on to water and wastewater efficiency the um as the council is well aware the city continues to be a leader in implementing innovative water efficiency programs uh water efficiency and demand management are an integral part of the city's water management strategy a uh and reduced GHG emissions by reducing or eliminating the energy required to move and treat water used by residents and businesses the city offers technical support education information and incentives to single and multifamily residential commercial industrial and institutional centers uh or customers the water department also manages long-standing water conservation rebate programs overall the city's sustained annual water savings for water use efficiency programs is about 1.6 uh billion gallons water efficient landscape requirements have existed in the city since 1992 and were most recently updated in 2015 in compliance with state law as part of the permitting process for new development city staff implements the water efficiency landscape ordinance requiring all new and modified landscape work associated with the building permit to maintain a calculated water allowance the water department is also in the early stages of deploying smart water meters that track water usage in real time and this rollout is phased so that all conventional water meters are expected to be replaced by 2021 uh moving on to local food systems um the city has made efforts to support local food systems as opportunities arise as you're aware we have several farmers markets that operate in the city both seasonally with the wednesday night market and you're around at the veterans memorial building gardens are also featured in new parks including the finale and bear parks and opportunities for future community gardens in existing parks are evaluated through the park master plan update process in addition as some of you may recall the zoning code was updated in 2012 to allow hens in single family residential neighborhoods so the last section um for the community climate action plan is off-road equipment and emissions um ongoing from city programs reduce emissions from off-road equipment and vehicles associated with landscape maintenance the residential building code requirements for outside electric outlets also facilitate the use of electric uh gardening equipment ongoing rebates for turf replacement with uh water efficient landscaping also reduce the use of gas uh gas powered gardening equipment the parks department vehicles and equipment are inspected and maintained irregularly to ensure optimal performance and staff annually um reviews the policy limiting idling uh for equipment and vehicles additionally standard conditions of approval for new development includes restrictions on the operation of construction equipment okay so we're going to move on to the municipal climate action plan so as i mentioned earlier um this document was adopted in 2013 following the adoption of the community climate action plan the m cap identifies activities and programs that contribute to a reduction in ghg emissions for the city's municipal facilities and operations uh with uh with some overlap with the community climate action plan so there are five categories within the m cap which are listed here on the slide and again um as we just did we will go through each of these with implementation so the first up is water and wastewater the city's wastewater treatment facilities serves as the uh serves the entire city as well as um surrounding nearby communities the treated water produced at the laguna treatment plant is transported through a 40 mile pipeline to the geysers geothermal plant where it is used to generate electricity the plant has been upgraded to achieve reductions from its processes including installing high efficiency uh cogeneration system that used methane produced by the treatment process to fuel facility equipment this generates approximately 7.8 million kilowatt hours of electricity annually the facility has also upgraded to high efficiency lighting and automatic shutoffs where practical and water pump engines are being replaced um as with higher efficiency engines as needed and then finally a uh energy optimum optimization plan is currently being prepared by the water department to serve as a roadmap for strategically and systematically optimizing energy use in santa rosa waters sub regional system the next couple slides are on the city's building and facilities energy so several energy efficiency upgrades to city buildings were identified in the municipal climate action plan um that have been completed these include the installation of a small cogeneration system at the finley swim center and a high efficiency boiler at the ridgeway pool center these upgrades help to reduce the energy and cost associated with heating these facilities the city generates renewable energy at 10 existing solar panel arrays on various water department facilities uh totaling about 486 kilowatts of solar electricity generation capacity in 2018 the parking division staff completed installation of rooftop solar arrays at four public parking facilities totaling about 319 kilowatts increasing the renewable generation capacity of the city uh the city's facilities by approximately 60 percent the city is also exploring opportunities to add floating solar panels at the laguna the laguna treatment plant facility uh this next slide is related to vehicle fleet and transportation so the city's vehicle fleet is upgraded through the regular replacement of vehicles as funding is available and vehicles reach replacement age the city currently operates 66 hybrid vehicles and four electric vehicles with ev charging stations at the city offices the city also operates 10 diesel buses and is in the process of purchasing uh two all electric buses and chargers through funding from the federal transit administration according to the department of transportation each diesel bus that is replaced by an electric bus eliminates about 1690 tons of co2 over a its 12-year lifespan which is equivalent to taking about 27 cars off the road for public lighting the city continues to replace high wattage sodium street lights with led lights the first phase was completed with approximately 10 000 cober cober lights replaced the second phase will retrofit the decorative street lights within the city with led lights and is scheduled to be completed in 2019 so the final slide for this section is the employee commute and waste system so the city administers an employee trip reduction program a telecommute and alternative work schedules such as 980 work schedule to help reduce city employees trips the city also continues to support curbside recycling green waste disposal and improved waste diversion through progressive services agreements with recology related to solid waste reduction goals the city also continues to implement a minimum recycled content purchasing policy so now i'd like to briefly go over the climate action plant implementation team so as part of the municipal climate action plan the city organized a climate action plant implementation team also known as cap it which consists of city staff from various city departments the cap it is responsible for ensuring that the ghg reduction emission reduction measures and programs that are identified in the climate action plan are implemented monitored and tracked the team will be meeting twice annually to report on progress of implementation activities by each city department and those meetings will be publicly noticed notices will be provided on the city's climate action plan website as well as at city hall and at the transportation and public works offices which is generally where the meetings take place and will be emailed to interested parties so the last slide that i have is recognition so did want to recognize some of the wars that the city has received from the institute for local government for ghg reduction and energy savings so what's listed on this slide are some of the awards that we have received over the years the first is the silver agency eight percent ghg reduction award and the silver best practices award in 2013 the gold best practices award in 2014 the silver agency eight percent energy savings award in 2015 and then most recently in this year we received the platinum level beacon award for 20 community ghg reductions 15 agency ghg reductions and five percent energy savings so now i'm going to hand it over to jessie oswald our chief building official good afternoon so the next part of our presentation has to do with the the building codes and what they've done and what they continue to do for the to affect our climate action plan and energy use and climate measures in general so here are is a list of essentially what we call the california building codes the bolded highlighted ones are the ones that generally focus on what we're talking about here with the energy efficiency and green what's known as the the green code cal green code these these two codes play the primary role in all the energy efficiency environmental interior environment factors water use efficiency these these are the driving codes especially the green code which is relatively the the infant of all the building codes it's only been in effect so somewhere around 10 10 plus years so it's it's the baby with all these codes so here we see over a period of time through shorter history of the codes the effectiveness on energy savings through just the implementation of measures in the codes and the projections through the next code cycle show the energy use decreasing which is our hope through the continued use of just the the the base code implementations so cal green building codes the the california green building standards code cal green is a set of mandatory building standards to promote sustainable construction the basically was implemented to get us going in the right right direction the mandatory measurements are base code back when we first adopted here in Santa Rosa 2013 I believe was the first year that the tier one adoption which would normally be not mandatory but optional were adopted at that time giving us this additional 15 percent reduction in energy use the the standards we adopted which was mentioned earlier from early on were not in were not inclusive of the energy efficiency portion which the reason being that there had to be proven cost-effectiveness analysis to show that it was could be implemented and that can be different through different climate zones throughout california some climate zones it's easy to show the cost effectiveness others it's not and we're we're looking at that that studying we've actually got on board with a regional entity to have the cost effectiveness study done so again the tier one standards part of the cal green energy efficiency design water efficiency conservation uh for material during construction and reuse and the interior environment and exterior environment as well some new things that do come out in environmental uh the both interior and interior that benefit both some folks are exploring and we've seen it here locally are the rooftop gardens uh your roof is also shrubbery it's pretty impressive uh tier one energy efficiency standard can only be adopted if the city demonstrates the cost effectiveness and we have enrolled with a group to to get that done for us so again we didn't adopt the energy efficiency part of the cal green but we're looking looking at the the effectiveness of doing so other efficiency standards the all-electric building standard eliminated the the use of natural gas in a building which is primarily used for space and water heating and we've seen all of the data that shows that most of our gas natural gas uses is for those two two parts of our our homes all electric ready standard all pre-wiring needed to be to it would be in in the home to not ever have to use natural gas again other energy efficiency standards include the cool roofs which helps with the reflecting of the the the solar heat gain and space and water heating can can be part of the other other elements so our voluntary uh code adoption procedure voluntary standards are based on the mandatory requirements of each code cycle the through the different code bodies there are several that end up becoming the california building codes uh cal green is one of those group of codes uh in 2019 uh they they have the 2000 what are called the 2019 codes and they're going through the process now and it's currently in what's called the public comment period 45 day period and in november uh that period ends and then they move to the next stage uh for the adoption process before the ultimate goal is to have the current codes under review be effective january 1st 2020 before you go on um you mentioned looking at the cost effectiveness of tier one it looks as if there's a change in tier one and in tier two it will be coming into effect january um 2019 and then implemented 2020 if i've read that right correct okay so if we do a cost effectiveness does it make sense to only do it for tier one or should we also do that for tier two it would make sense to do both especially if we're interested in the the the recent uh publications that we've seen is are that most jurisdictions are interested in exploring all their options okay i'm i would share that interest i will leave my colleagues to comment on that but i would think that we would want to know whether we should go ahead with tier two right and just really fast i'm i guess i'm just a little bit unclear um so the tier one can only be implemented by a city if we prove cost effectiveness to the state so doesn't that preclude i mean i would think that driving investment in the direction of tier one standards would bring down the overall cost as it's implemented and as it becomes a more regular thing so isn't this the chicken following the egg in some in some sense you're correct the in the the cost effectiveness was only on the one portion of that tier one we implemented all of the tier one measures for california green there's just the one section which is energy efficiency which is has an overbearing entity the california energy commission says that we have to prove that that portion is cost effective so it's not the whole the whole tier one i'm probably arguing with state law but why isn't there a value that the public has in investments in renewable energy that might extend beyond just the dollar amount i would i would agree with you uh but i can't answer as to the to the why okay thank you uh okay so through the voluntary adoption to adopt a non-mandatory energy efficiency cost the code cost effectiveness study uh must demonstrate over the life of new buildings which we're currently discussing the voluntary code measures are reviewed through the public hearing process and approved by the council so you will see this numerous times especially in your desires to move forward with these types of additional measures and how we adopt them and what they actually say in our our adoption the california energy commission reviews that to show that we have proven cost effectiveness and then the we have the opportunity to coordinate with our cpa and member jurisdictions on cost effectiveness this is what i was referring to that we have enrolled to have our area studied as well for this cost cost effectiveness and its regional if we had an interest in adopting the all electric ready ordinance i think that's item 2.1.3 on our list how would we move forward with that do we do we need to make a motion or do you bring that forward to us as staff the uh to be clear the um proposed codes are not all electric none of them are electric ready right so all electric ready very different um that appears to not even require the cost effectiveness study right um we could by direction make that inclusive of our adoption process and by all accounts from what i have read is that it wouldn't require any extensive measures measures other than to include those specific things in our adoption if we had an interest in that do you bring it when you bring back the rest of the codes or do we move do you need direction from us uh we can take direction on including that in our adoption and make it part of the process which is we're we're right at that point now which is perfect timing this is a study session so i'm having some difficulty understanding how exactly we move forward so i think i think what we've heard and what we've heard multiple times is the all electric ready looking at tier one tier two um so what we'll be doing is looking at that as as this building code moves through the cycle and gets closer to the adoption um we'll want to look at what that means for the city um do the analysis and bring forward to the council of options uh would that adoption be in january it would be in it would go into effect january first 2020 um it's going the night so it goes into effect then but we would we'd be then waiting until january 2020 to implement all electric ready correct we would we essentially start our adoption process in january time frame of of 2019 and work through the process uh simultaneously with with the state we have a lot of construction going on right now and i understand that it's not when the job is finished but when the permit is applied for um if we had any interest in moving forward all electric ready sooner than 2020 would we be able to implement uh within a reasonable period of time i'm just trying to see how many permits we catch earlier so i think if that's a if that's an item that the council wants us to bring back we can take a look at that and see what that would entail um i think maybe if if just to give an update on what the current building codes are for electric readiness um and then essentially we'd be looking at what that delta is between what's in the current code what your what the in game is and then what that delta would be and then how do we implement that i'm just i guess i'm asking a city manager question with regard to timing um because you know if it if i mention it and even if we say if we make a motion and we start our process of agendizing it um do we get back to do we get back here in time to catch permits that are since we're stimulating construction right now um what's our what's our turnaround time on that again i i need to look at the what what that would entail and i can get back to the um city manager and give a sense of what that would what that would be if that's what the council would like us to do mr. Tillett's first thank you mayor um yeah uh assistant city manager guin i'd also like to see this brought back actually separate from the building code because to me what we're looking at here is is our impact on that on our 2020 ghg goals and and we've got to meet those goals um and so obviously we want to be looking for the delta we want to be talking about additional cost especially in the wake of you know making so many advancements on our shared efforts to create housing in this city but at the same time i think it's also a unique opportunity because of those strides and those efforts you've made the council's made this council putting forward a housing bond that we probably do want to have our best foot forward as far as making sure that we're doing the best building practices mr. Schwedhelm thank you it just is for part of the conversation because the concern um that i was for fire survivors as they're rebuilding of insurance settlements and what impact it may or may not have on those trying to rebuild in those fire impacted areas so i know you have data as to how many permits you know how many are let's say for at a thousand well we still have quite a ways to go and um so however you would include that information for us to factor into whatever decision or direction we go i think we'd be very important also and following up sorry i got people lined up here okay uh in that within that in that same subject um i understand my understanding that the costs are fairly minimal to be ready to be all electric ready that may or may not be the case that would be part of the conversation i'm sure we would have would be the costs involved um are you aware of people doing it voluntarily um during this this time in this in the interim and if not do we do are we providing the community um those that are rebuilding with information regarding electric all electric ready yeah so i think what you're going to hear next is um the summer clean powers program that's supporting the rebuild effort specifically the rebuild um to bring homes to that level and even beyond um so again the current codes are quite a bit different than what was there before as you heard earlier um there are there are provisions in the code right now to um do certain things so i think what we need to do is bring back what the current code states in terms of what's required now for um electric readiness and then determine what that difference is between where we want to go um and that's the analysis that we we would have to go through to determine do we want to put that into place now or wait for the building the building cycle thank you mr rogers thank you mr marron i did want to just lend my my support to that as well trying to get this moving my understanding is that the overall cost is less than $250 per home seems like pretty low hanging fruit when we talk about advancements in one of the larger chunks of greenhouse gas emissions this comes and my understanding was that and i suspect we will be hearing more about this that synomically power has some incentives to assist those rebuilding in the fire areas with differing some of these costs so and as a as a person who just switched to an induction cook stove i have to tell you how wonderful it is um i from from gas and it i was surprised at how wonderful that was um so i if you need us to make a motion to move conversation forward for all electric ready i will make it but i'm thinking that you're telling me it will come back naturally my concern is that i don't want it to wait until 2020 i'd like to do it much sooner so i'm i guess i'm making the motion for us to agendize it and then if you bring it back sooner we don't write it at this point we're in a study session so there are no motions i'm doing the two step agendize thing right and and the time to do that would be later in the meeting dev report in the report out and again but you are of course um you've asked whether that will be coming forward anyway and i would um also suggest that we'll have to look at a number of different options and what the constraints are uh under the state law as well so thank you thank you okay up next is uh rachel kikendall from sonoma clean power good afternoon my name is rachel kikendall i am our program manager with sonoma clean power and if you haven't seen it this is our new branding here uh it's the first time um and what i want to talk about today is just our role in climate action planning as well as connect that to our rebuild program and really where we can have impact on this in the future hopefully you don't need this slide but just to point out a couple things about what makes sonoma clean power unique is because we partner with PG&E on distribution of electricity sonoma clean power customers are also eligible for PG&E programs so those come with a very strict set of regulations on what PG&E can and can't do with those funds and what really makes sonoma clean power unique is because uh our funds are not um do not have the same level of oversight that the cpc has on PG&Es we're able to do some really unique things with them like our drive ev program or advanced energy rebuild um and do things like decarbonization uh we can probably go to the next slide okay so focusing on transportation and everyone knows this is sort of the the biggie in terms of um emissions in the county in santa rosa and what we've been able to do thus far are a couple things um so we talked a little bit about drive ev uh that program is going on now ending november 15th this will be our last year of that particular program um because really it's been a little too successful for our dealers so they're they're running out of stock which is a great program um but really i think where we want to shift this is getting away from those early adopters to be more inclusive of who those electric vehicles go to um and reaching some of our hard to reach communities uh we'll also be looking at ways to stimulate workplace charging for us that's really important because um we talked a little bit about our emission sources and how clean they are uh but really our pain point is we have so much solar on the grid right now that california is having to curtail or turn off that solar midday so workplace charging is a natural fit to be able to use that electricity you know when it's really clean um we're also looking at options for more public charging um which realistically um is a lot about just getting people to see it um and not necessarily a huge need in a lot of places especially in santa rosa it's just having the comfort and being able to see those things as we're looking at additional level two charging which is um what you guys have in like the parking lots as well as level three which would fully charge a car in about a half hour uh and really being able to extend the range of these vehicles uh and above you can see sort of some of the stats on drive ep as well as our residential charging program um the impact of electric vehicles is is pretty amazing so this is a strategy i think we'll continue to look at in terms of how to educate folks and um drive people towards incentives uh and that's just sort of a a sense of what those emissions look like obviously that goes down to zero uh if you are on evergreen so another um way that potentially you could even get even lower than that 478 number um and then impact so this is a great sort of figure to see but just in terms of the adoption rate of santa rosa compared to some of our bay area cities um you know where we don't have as many in terms of quantity of electric vehicles as some of these other jurisdictions but the just the growth and percent increase from 2016 to 2017 is first in santa rosa so you know i think there's a lot of strides made to actually do a lot of education around these things and i think that's something we'll continue from our neck of the woods and i think um looking at the bigger picture this is something we'll continue to collaborate with other agencies on in terms of how to reduce emissions here and then building energy um like others sort of said i think we took a big chunk out of this pie already by switching to synomically in power and that handles a lot of the um electric end uses in our buildings but there's a couple of things that we're going to look at in the next several years to sort of help tackle these things uh so what we've done we talked a little bit about our emission source uh where we're going with that i think is twofold so we'll continue to have our power grow cleaner and cleaner over the years through additional procurement but also looking at strategies for when to use that power uh so we have a program called grid savvy which is um currently deployed for electric vehicle stations where we can sort of turn those up or down depending on grid needs but we'll continue to think of strategies like that that we can use with residents as well as on our end to really think about when that energy is used to make sure it's as greenhouse gas free as possible we also partner with oh that's okay we also partner with the libraries on getting free um low flow devices to water saving and energy saving devices that you can actually check out from the library um it's been a very successful program over the last few years uh and we actually recently when we expanded to menesino county launched it there as well just because it's a a really um great program that's that's pretty easy to implement uh we're also doing a lot right now around induction cook tops um so we actually lend these out from our office so customers can try them out and and cook on them and we find just one of the barriers is um having used them so they're they're phenomenal and I'm a big klutz when I cook so just um knowing that it's not going to burn me is is pretty huge and then advanced energy rebuild which we'll we'll get into a bit so where we're going here is um a couple areas so we'll actually be tackling the existing buildings question we recently got a 10 million dollar grant from the california energy commission to actually establish a physical store where customers can come in and directly see energy efficiency and fuel switching technologies things like induction cook tops and heat pump water heaters and get discounted or free equipment from that store uh I'm happy to say it will be in downtown santa rosa and we should hopefully have a lease uh in the next couple days on that uh store but that's a big thing that we'll be planning over the next two years there we're also looking at strategies for on-bill repayment which is basically free equipment that then you would pay back over time on your utility bill that's something that we're very interested in looking at particularly for our low-income communities and then finally we're going to look at grid savvy as a way to um control when electric devices are having the biggest impact on the grid advanced energy rebuild this is one of our programs that was established in um late april uh and officially went live in may and this is our program specifically for the rebuild that I wanted to spend a little bit of time talking about because it dovetails I think really nicely with some of the questions about um energy efficiency code and uh where we ideally need to be going as a state to to reach greenhouse gas goals uh so this is a partnership between us and PG&E and the bay area air quality management district how the program is structured is uh there's two main incentives so we have an incentive for homes that use both electricity and natural gas or propane uh which is sort of that and that graphic the one on the left the dual fuel home um and that home has some really unique requirements that go beyond sort of traditional code or energy efficiency including the requirement for pre-wiring so that's something we're actively testing now with this program um what we found you know there were some questions about how much does this cost uh when we bring that up with our contractors as we sort of go through the requirements that's generally when they just sort of shrug off and go oh you know no big deal um so this is I think something that is really feasible it's something that has very little overall cost to um the buildings up front and so for that particular package we offer $7,500 uh for folks that do that and that's a contingent on being about 20% better than code as well as having an electric vehicle charging station which we give folks for free uh and having uh being pre-wired for both electrification of appliances and solar um our other option is this all-electric home pathway uh and this is really the first time the state has really had a program like this where we're directly incentivizing the carbon reductions associated with those all-electric homes and this is uh generally looking at sort of water heating space heating cooking laundry um and electrifying those equipment they're about three times more efficient than natural gas pieces of equipment which brings them on cost parity finally um with gas equipment so it's it's great to sort of see that be not just the the right thing to do from an emissions standpoint but also from a cost standpoint as well um and we're actually offering $12,500 for that option so there is um a little bit still of a learning curve to that equipment some of it's relatively new like the water heaters uh so there is some contractor markup to it that we're sort of overcoming with this higher incentive um and generally that should fully pay for the cost of doing these things is really how we structured the incentive um borrowing you know there is some contractor shortage right now which is is also driving up price but but really is our goal is to make this as easy as possible for folks um currently so our we're tracking at about now 125 homes enrolled in the program um and about half of our applications are choosing the all-electric pathway so this is something I think when we start to really engage with folks on why we're doing it is um something that they are interested in which is great um and then you can see sort of down on the the bottom line of how efficiently these homes are um they're about 26 percent better than current energy code uh which and project to this save about $650 annually on their utility bill so um pretty great considering this is also making a jump from existing homes which are are much less efficient than than code homes um and yeah I guess next slide so um this is why we do this this is sort of looking at the the carbon emissions of these particular homes and their impact in terms of um what what they're doing and and you can see sort of on the going from the left that's a code compliant home um and then getting at you know just sort of the efficiency package building standards so this would be looking at something essentially what we're asking folks to do is sort of meeting tier one cal green so we ask for a 20 percent better than code cal green tier one's currently asking for 15 percent better than code so you can sort of see what that that delta looks like if that home is still using natural gas um are those those first two and then you can just sort of see what that phenomenal change looks like in terms of electrifying those pieces of equipment and then adding on the the solar components to that um not to mention from a yield utility standpoint an electric appliance can be controlled so we can send that a remote signal and sort of make sure it it's talking friendly with the grid whereas obviously a gas appliance doesn't have that ability um yeah and I think that might be the last slide that program is specific to rebuilding in the fire area it is not uh rebuilding or renovations throughout the city at this time that that's correct so the PG&E portion uh that goes into that program is actually an existing program that any um home could take advantage of any new home um but there there are some issues with the current code that actually make it really hard for an all-electric home to pass code um so there's a lot of hand holding and the additional dollars certainly help there could you clarify for me when you say that there's code issues that make that more difficult do you mean city of santa rosa code or do you mean city of california code state code great thank you okay now we're going to bring back uh alec a civil from rcpa to finish up the presentation hello again um so i'm going to speak just briefly about rcpa's work on bay rent which is the bay area regional energy network um this is a fantastic program that we represent sonoma county in along with the other eight bay area counties and uh it's actually funded through uh the public goods charge on your utility bill and so that money comes through the cpc through a bag the association of bay association of bay area governments uh to all of the respective counties to do this work on the ground uh so that's what we'll talk to you and just to briefly touch on uh you know uh i think statewide action on all electric not all electric ready but all electric uh there are plans right now through uh the codes and standards program for bay rent to actually do a cost effectiveness study for all electric ordinance a reach code that would actually go into effect in 2020 so just to let you know that there there's a lot of action on that right now um i think you know to your point about acting earlier on all electric ready that's uh definitely i think a separate issue but on all electric um there are a lot of efforts happening right now throughout the state to put that type of reach code in place so um going back to our home upgrade incentive program so this is basically uh there are incentive and several incentive and rebate programs available to santa rosa residents for energy efficiency retrofits um and they reduce energy use in existing buildings save money um and also obviously provide a more comfortable and healthier home um so uh the bay area uh we offer these incentives for single family homeowners um this slide we talk a little bit about uh the incentives that are available now this program is currently in the process of being revamped and um and improved and one of the improvements for example will be that the program currently is not available to renters it's going to now be available to renters in 2019 which i think is a really great um great improvement um and we're also going to make sure that uh we can offer an online energy uh self-evaluation and a do-it-yourself energy efficiency toolkit which i think is also going to be helpful as well um and then we're going to allow participants to choose single measures instead of having to bundle multiple upgrades and so those improvements are based on specific feedback that we've gotten through various research reaching out to customers and getting input on the program so that's pretty exciting um and that's something that we're uh we're excited to continue working with the city uh to do outreach on the ground and make sure people are aware of these tools and these programs and go to the next slide and then on the multifamily side so we also have um a lot of different grade incentives available to multifamily building owners um so we offer those incentives at about 750 per unit for water energy and water improvements um and we also offer free energy consulting to building owners and we have a case study up here on the Avalon apartments in Santa Rosa and I believe uh that this was put into place around 2015 and as you can see uh a lot of various obviously energy savings and benefits through that but also some non-energy benefits as well in terms of those water savings um and just also the fact that these are new appliances um and have a longer lifespan and more offer more efficiency so that's a quick snapshot of some of the work that we do with Bayrun and happy to take any questions that you have on that work thank you okay so that concludes our presentation and we are all available if there are further questions or take comments from the council any questions council at this point miss combs thank you very much and thank you for bringing this to us this is fabulous to get this information um very much appreciate uh that you brought it forward I have a couple of questions as this is mostly status related questions um I noticed as I was reading the materials that there was a required checklist in appendix e called e1 and I wondered if we had implemented that are we in fact requiring what appears to be a required checklist in e1 yeah so this is a new development checklist that we provide to all um applicants that come in with proposals for new development um and this helps us make sure that they are complying with the climate action plan um and with our goals and policies um that support this in the general plan so we do uh provide the checklist do we evaluate the results of the checklist uh do we is it it it didn't look like a voluntary checklist it looked like a checklist of things we were expecting yeah there there are um certain things that are required of all development and they have to show uh proof that they are are meeting each one of those uh and then there are other voluntary things that they can do as well um and again that it's something that they need to provide the information to us to show that they are uh meeting each of those requirements and we evaluate it through the review process okay so if if a project were coming through and I wanted to see that checklist it would be it would be available correct okay thank you I'm glad to hear that and with regard to the adoption of our community plan um my understanding was that we had adopted the plan but that we hadn't adopted every element in the plan so I'm I'm trying to sort of sort out is there an easy list somewhere of what elements the Council still needs to adopt after adopting the plan for example there was a recommendation that we adopt uh solid waste uh that we that we pursue um styrofoam there was a recommendation that we adopt tier one but we hadn't done it um there were some so it's not clear to me whether there's do you have now a list of the things that we while we adopted the plan didn't adopt the specific action within the plan yeah so um so the the entire plan has been adopted and uh the elements within it are implementation measures that we are continuing to you know get through as you know as we can and and that is what the climate action plant implementation team does we get together to talk about what each of the departments are doing to meet those measures that are identified in the plan um there are definitely measures in there that we have not yet gotten to um but it is something that is being tracked and worked on continuously so there's a document that says may 2018 is that the latest implementation document I think it's it's excuse me I'm being told it's called attachment three thank you attachment three to the staff report the staff report if that's up to date that's what I'll work with but I just wanted to confirm that that would be my guideline for what council still needs to move forward thank you thank you I have Eric Hates the planner attachment three to the staff report is in fact a summary of implementation to each of the measures in the climate action plan both the municipal and the community wide there have been a number of measures that were identified that were rejected on the basis though that they were infeasible or for other reasons those documented in the attachment as well okay so if I wanted to go through and just confirm what our next set of goals was for implementing the plan would it be clear to me in this document it's a brief summary and you may want to obtain additional detail from the implementing department staff okay so I guess what I would like to know is which of these items are we would expect to see in the next year which of the items are being delayed because it makes sense to wait until 2021 the code changes which of the items we have abandoned because you know I would like it sort of summarized in terms of a timetable yeah so so I think what the status the exercise first was just give a status update on where all these elements were in the process which ones are moving forward which ones aren't and what the status of those are I think when we start getting into priority we're going to start getting into resource needs and also priority so that's a conversation I think what we can do is pull that information together and potentially have that conversation as part of the goal setting in February in terms of how do we want to move some of these forward if it's going to take more resources and is that a priority of where we spend staff time but what we as they meet every twice a year as the cath it meets twice a year would that be something they would be talking about is what's the what's the implementation plan through the document as it goes forward yeah I think that would be a good effort for that meeting is because you will have all the departments in the room plus the public and everybody else to have that conversation about here's what's left here's what needs to get done what could what would priorities be and then what resources are needed to achieve those priorities fantastic thank you and again thank you very much I want to appreciate the full cap it for the work that that they've been doing on this I'm really grateful that we are moving this forward thank you other questions council got a number of cards here we'll start with thomas else followed by christine hoax thank you thank you for having the study session and really worrying about climate change it's a big deal only half of the climate forcing function is really being addressed by greenhouse gases the greatest climate forcing function is a ozone depletion and a ozone hole which are functions two separate things so zone depletion all around the entire globe and it causes what's what's called diurnal variation but in the Antarctic and the Arctic that can last for months and so it can be really really powerful forcing function on the ocean winds everything it's huge that's why it doesn't measure up when they measure global greenhouse gas emissions to what we're seeing as the function causes that are hydrochlorofluorocarbons the new substitute for chlorofluorocarbons methyl bromide used all around so what I'm talking about is maybe it's possible you could have advisory measures or things to talk about these foam foam is a huge greenhouse forcing function with regard to ozone depletion way more powerful in regard to ozone depletion than in and with respect to greenhouse gases um forgive me inline water heating very important uh if you have inline water heaters you can reduce your plumbing most of the sinks don't need to have hot water if they have inline so you could cut down on your plumbing just pecs and and really reduce the overall cost so cost savings will be really significant ground source heat this is totally it's a different way ground source allows you to use the ground as a reservoir for heat and cooling led lighting great except most of them are way too bright using way too much energy in led lighting because they don't need to be that bright either down or using whether their signalization or anything they're just way too they're almost blinding how much energy is being wasted in those compared to what they could be they're less than they were but still could be a lot lower um could you encourage uh synomically power to develop pump storage hydro from the lake synoma so that they could take the the peaking uh um green power green energy from renewable sources during the day and pump up water and then have that energy available so we could recycle that with with pump storage at lake suno with a lot of water and really opportunity there and I wanted to see if I have anything else I think that was it thanks thank you christine hoax followed by kevin conway good afternoon um i'm christine hoax and i'm speaking here today um i'm as a member of a 350 synoma climate action group and also as a friend of the friends of the climate protection plan um so what I've been okay so I've been listening to all this this is impressive and um I think we all understand how dire and immediate the situation is with climate and at least I hope we all do and I'm one of these is too important role that cities have to play in this in this change um and what they can do and what they are doing all over the state and the nation um and I'm very excited about what what we can do here in santa rosa as leaders and the role that cities that I'm getting this idea of what cities can have is not just as a city government's not just as as making these chains but also as as this connection they have with the communities with the people who live here this is where people live in the cities and they can make personal changes themselves but they need the support of infrastructure and they need the support of of of seeing that there have their leaders in their city government also taking this very dire and immediate they need that feedback so at the two-way street so it's so important the roles that you have here and um and I just want to stress that um it's just it's inspiring to me and I and I and I hope that you really take it up as I as I've seen the information and the ideas here cities are so important in this in this action that we need to take today um two things that I'd like to stress um we that we'd like to see happen right away um we'd like to have you pass the electric ready um all electric ready ordinance that I heard being talked about um is is is will be great and if we can retro you know do it retro get the incentive out there for people to do it on their own that's that's great because it needs to happen now um also um create a council subcommittee on climate that needs to happen so that action can happen and take place efficiently effectively and have a structure for that so I'm surely hear more about both of these things but I'm leaving you with those two things and just your role is so important thank you so much thank you Kevin Conway and followed by Laura niche good evening mayor and council members Kevin Conway from Santa Rosa and I'm a member of the friends of the climate action plan first of all I too want to say thank you to the cap it team for today's presentation I've heard the mayor say that dealing with the fallout from the wildfires has been like taking a second job for our city staff so we know how crazy it's been and yet it's clear we are making progress with both of our caps so it's important I think to take that moment acknowledge it let it soak in that was a great discussion back and forth about all electric ready and what sounds like I hope maybe a pending motion I I'm so proud to be part of such a progressive city in in this matter the friends of the climate action plan plan to support and work in a collaborative way with cap it as we did in helping to research the new codes we'll be attending the meetings and providing feedback although I have to say speaking personally for myself I am very disappointed that there are only two meetings a year I just find that inadequate the crisis is unfolding more rapidly than anyone ever predicted this is spelled out clearly in the recent report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to avoid catastrophic consequences we need to limit warming to 1.5 degrees there's no room for new fossil fuels and there's no time to lose those are three good takeaways from that report so I don't know what it would take to get us to respond to this crisis appropriately I don't know what the words are and I don't know where to go to find the words if I did I would go there immediately and often and I do know that I'm preaching to the choir when I get up here and say these things I'm sure that everyone in the chamber today is members of the choir we get it but at the same time we have to acknowledge that the paradigm shift that needs to happen culturally and in our community is not happening two meetings a year is not going to get it done and I'd like to see that change we should all be burning the midnight oil or sit under the led to find an implement in solutions that will make a real impact there are a lot of parts of our cap that our group are going to focus on today we do want to focus on what was mentioned 2.1.3 we're here to ask the council to begin that process of passing an ordinance requiring all electric ready construction going forward as as you'll see from other speakers this is doable from every perspective and it can have a powerful impact thank you thank you Laura niche followed by Mike turgeon hello there i'm laura niche executive director of 350 bay area and on the steering committee of 350 sonoma one of its local groups and been working with the friends of cap on looking for ways to implement actual action to reduce emissions thank you so much for your hard work on behalf of all of us that live in santa rosa and especially at the heavy lift after the fires we we appreciate the fact that you guys are working harder than ever and thank you for this robust conversation about things you can actually do to reduce emissions right here in santa rosa after the fires a group of concerned residents and organizations came together to explore ways to rebuild stronger and more sustainably two of those groups represented here today along with other concerned citizens can everybody that's here for the the electric ready ordinance just raise your hands quickly friends of cap and 350 sonoma are enthusiastic supporters of an all of an electric ready ordinance which will make it easy to replace gas appliances with electric ones in the future and of ensuring the caps new development checklist is implemented and maybe even making those checklists available for the public to review finally we call for a council subcommittee on climate to manage progress on the cap santa rosa's climate action plan recognizes the dire threat that climate breakdown will pose to our planet and our community and our plan supports strong emissions on a strong action on emissions reductions california the bay area and santa rosa in particular really value our role in leading the way on climate action california recently as you know past sb 100 for 100 clean energy by 2045 it's a big day for all of the climate activists in the world supplemented by the executive order to be carbon neutral by then we are not going to meet those goals or even california's long-standing emission reduction goals without phasing out natural gas a boat driver of global warming that is problematic across its entire supply chain it won't be long before the natural gas technology of the 20th century is replaced by the clean and efficient technologies of the 21st renewable energy is beating fossil fuels economically as well and the public safety implications are not trivial either we've seen examples of how brittle the natural gas distribution systems are both old and new especially in an earthquake zone we're called to take action there aren't very many moments in the arc of human history where we have a chance to make world changing action we're there and it's time to stop making plans and resolutions it's time to take swift and bold action to reduce climate and health harming emissions thank you thank you mike turgeon followed by diane wheeler mike turgeon part of the faux cap friends of the climate action plan i also add my thanks to the cappit team for the great work they've been doing regarding the all-electric ordinance all-electric ready ordinance just some bullet points we've found from our research is that it it's not a lot of red tape it would only require that the ordinance be filed with the california building standards commission it would not require approval from the california energy commission and it doesn't require a cost effectiveness study and it dovetails quite well with the synomically empowers plans but today i'd just like to read a letter from shawn armstrong who made it into our newspaper during the tragedy of the fire because of his mother law who passed away he was invited to come and speak today but he was unable honorable council members thank you for accepting my in absentia in absentia testimony my mother-in-law nancy pack was a senator was environmental activists who died from smoke inhalation in last year's fires her family hopes are passing can be a call to action to prevent further climate change i respectfully ask that you take a simple action required that stove and closed dryers be provided with enough power to choose electric options rather than being forced to burn methane this only requires a 10 gauge wire rather than a 12 gauge on a dedicated circuit rather than shared circuit the company i lead uh read with energy of arcada california has helped design more than 200 2500 all-electric zero net energy households perhaps more than any other firm in north america and what we have learned is that americans want clean indoor air and they want access to so to solar energy health advocates want to remove gas ranges because of the formaldehyde flames that can cause cancer miscarriages birth deformities and asthma in children and concerned citizens want all electric homes paired with clean energy on new homes so there's not to worsen climate change to support these public safety and public safety and public health goals requires nearly no cost dedicated 10 gauge wire in the stove and the clothes dryer it's a tiny measure with large savings for any family that wishes help for their children and for their ability to breathe better by using electric range or leaving behind a cooling planet sincerely shan armstrong thank you thank you diane wheeler followed by andrew fergusson hi i'm diane wheeler and uh as always i'd like to say thank you for all the work you all do i really appreciate it on behalf of the city i'm a member of friends of the climate action plan and i want to state uh in carrying with the presentation that we've been uh doing slide by slide for the all-electric ready ordinance um we stand in support of it and a piece of information i'm tasked to give is that we've done a lot of research and the cost per home is less than $250 it's an important piece of information because um it readies a home for the future and it avoids incredible renovation costs down the line when we are moving all-electric in addition um it'll create if people go all-electric now or whenever they do reduced operating costs as new heat pump water heaters are three times more efficient than gas on a btu basis which is a use basis with solar pv the operating costs we virtually zero heat pump technologies are super efficient and equipment prices are expected to fall in the same way solar has and stoves and fireplaces designs and functions are beginning to be state-of-the-art and surpassing all gas equipment um so we hope that the all-electric ready ordinance can be passed quickly in the wake of our building um boom right now on the path to going all-electric and in addition i personally and faux cap supports the uh formation of a council subcommittee on on climate to help manage and move our climate work forward thank you Andrew Ferguson followed by tom conlon good afternoon i'm andy Ferguson and i'm also a member of the friends of the climate action plan i'd like to rather than resummarize the points that have been made so well by other speakers i'd like to bring up two points that came out of the public discussion today for special focus one of them is that cinema clean power is planning an energy store in santa rosa in which they're going to introduce new technologies for consumers that could be incorporated into the rebuild process for homes here i consider that extremely important and i'd like to point out that the new technologies that they will have a chance to introduce uh are very exciting very revolutionary and what they need is a market because the reason we don't see them more already is because the the public the consuming public and the contractors simply aren't familiar with them these developments by cinema clean power are very promising a second thing i'd like to mention is that concerning building codes and how quickly we should institute a electric ready ordinance as someone who's spoken with both the cec and the building standards commission concerning code development uh i was heartened to hear today heartened to hear today from a leccasaville that of the rcpa that there's a lot of movement trying to move forward all electric home codes my own understanding of that situation is that there is no chance that that will happen in the 2019 code cycle and there it's so what we're talking about is a potential for that development all electric homes in the 2022 code cycle so we're looking at four years out before the earliest date which when i think that that could come about so if we try to defer an electric ready code saying well we're going to go all electric anyway at some point that is not a given at this stage in my estimation i think the council should consider that an electric ready code now is the most effective way to utilize these new technologies in the rebuilt situation we're facing and putting it off to wait for the state to do something is very uncertain thank you tom conlon followed by debbie yamagishi hi there tom conlon seara clubs and all the group co-chair of the climate and energy committee i appreciate again the opportunity here today this is a very deep conversation on this topic uh uncharacteristic of most city councils around the country to be in this level of detail and i appreciate that from you from you all i want to stand today in support of the local efforts of friends of the climate action plan they've done a great job of bringing this matter to your attention and of staff for bringing you uh the detailed information we've been through today um i also especially am impressed by the level of questioning from this council members yourselves uh this is this is the kind of conversation we should be having i i do think it's a great idea to have a subcommittee formed to meet and discuss these matters regularly and to build on this detail that you've managed to pull together today and i do think it's a great idea to draft an ordinance in favour of an all electric ready addition to your current code it was in your climate action plan that was approved and was made part of the general plan and had a supplemental environmental impact report file and yet um it was included as a recommended measure it was not included as a mandatory measure but you were you were pointed in the right direction many years ago you're falling behind on your on your progress as you as you saw today and it is frankly a missed opportunity for those people who are building their houses right and rebuilding their houses right now building new houses that weren't burned over in other parts of the city anyone who doesn't put in the $250 worth of extra investment is at risk of having to spend $2,100 to do that it is a as an existing homeowner uh after the house is completed and we all know that that's where we're being pointed right now the state in may just issue a report uh energy and environmental economics did a report on deep decarbonization in a high renewables future and in there they point out that there are basically three technologies that are cost effective way below uh cost of what it takes to implement them energy efficiency and smart growth light duty vehicles becoming zero emissions vehicles and heat pumps those are the cheapest things we can be doing to meet our 2030 and 2050 goals so you're in a position in santa rosa right now to push through that ordinance and i encourage you to do so i would also encourage you to consider tying staff compensation to achievement of your goals because unless you have your incentives pointed in the right way it's it's hard to get those things clarified and so we see that in major corporations now are doing that we encourage you to do that here thank you very much debbie amigishi followed by alima silverman hello i'm debbie amigishi and i just want to thank you all you're an inspiration your forward thinking um but i also wanted to just share the urgency of this and the um electric ready building in new construction now seems to make perfect sense and it will help reach um our goals which we are lagging behind so thank you very much thank you alima silverman followed by seni galbra hi i'm alima silverman i'm an architect here in santa rosa a member of the rebuild green coalition which a group of architects engineers and others that are helping people that are rebuilding from the fires to build in a greener way i'm also recently a member of the friends of the climate action plan and i would like to thank everyone who has worked did this work for the presentation here tonight it was certainly very inspiring to see this level of work being done by the city we need to really accelerate our efforts that are underway to reduce this human generated greenhouse gases that come from the cars we drive and the buildings we have as an architect and helping people rebuild from the fires i think it's very important that uh the council pass this ordinance for um requiring all electric ready because it's something that's that can be done now when so many people are rebuilding uh and it's not in the codes yet so the sooner we can get that in effect the better so i support that ordinance i also support the subcommittee for people on the council working together to discuss these issues certainly meeting twice a year isn't really going to give much discussion bold climate action demands that all of us be fully engaged in this the professionals the homeowners but also the policy makers and that the city of santa rosa can really take a strong leadership role in doing this and i encourage you to do it the benefits of limiting global warming should inspire us all to continue our fight to provide a safe planet for our all of us here and for future generations thank you thank you sonny galbraith followed by terry sure good evening mayor and council members my name is sonny galbraith and i'm with 350 sonoma on the steering committee thank you very much for having this study session climate change is an increasingly urgent problem that is having a dire effect on both our local community and communities around the world and i'm very appreciative and heartened that the council is looking at these very detailed and specific ways that we can reduce greenhouse gas emissions coming from our households businesses and government operations i would like to see the council use the climate action plan at past to guide decision making and to create a council subcommittee on climate to manage and integrate climate action plan implementation i would also like to ask that the council pass the electric ready ordinance that we've been talking about this evening and implement the new development checklist from the climate action plan thank you very much for your leadership in addressing climate change thank you terry sure followed by barbara moulton uh yes good evening mayor corsie council members staff members of the public my name is terry sure i'm the regional director for the north bay for green belt alliance first i want to thank the city council for scheduling this study session and i want to commend the staff from the city of santa rosa from rcpa and sonoma clean power very excellent and in fact encouraging and inspiring reports so thank you very much for that i'm here in support of the request by the friends of the climate action plan and 350.org to move forward on an electric ready ordinance as soon as possible seems like a really doable thing that we can move into motion immediately also support the request for a council subcommittee to to keep this going and allow more public input a couple more items i thought you'd like to consider i don't know if it's on the list somewhere but um taking the entire city of santa rosa to ever green could provide some strong emissions reductions um and one thing that the city of novato has done that you might consider in the future not immediately is having a sustainability manager um who would be in charge of implementing and following um the climate action plan um uh i guess the only other comment i would like to make is that in an ideal world in addition to all the climate change activists and community leaders are here that we would see some other uh a broader coalition pushing for this such as our business community the sonoma county alliance um the north bay association of realtors um the builders exchange who are out there on the ground doing the work meeting with people and contractors we need them on board as well to make sure that they know how important and doable it is um to convert to a cleaner energy future so thank you very much appreciate your time thank you barbara molton followed by duane duit barbers left duane duit followed by otis wheeler hello my name is duane duit i've asked them to put up the first slide of alternative transportation which has a picture of stony point road at roseland creek the reason why is i want to ask you for trees please please don't miss the forest for the trees urban forest trees for carbon sequestration these lower the effects of greenhouse gas emissions in any climate action plan you should be having this type of approach you've got energy efficiency auditing and retrofitting and environmental planning and it's helpful but first we need you to save your trees please there's trees along that newly rebuilt stony point road and some new trees have been planted you need to water your trees please there's been some uh appliances put around the trees to have water but they haven't been refilled plant more new trees please more trees please let's let's just keep that motto trees please to help with carbon sequestration so as santa rosa tree plan to avoid loss of trees with the city urban forester is needed i actually believe that these trees that reduce airborne pollutants in particulate matter pollution with their leaves and their shade that also decrease the temperatures in the urban heat island have been overlooked and we've just gotten so into this technological fix you're not seeing that nature could help in so many ways so please offer incentives to replace trees cut down by business sites also those people who've been cutting their trees down and not replacing them when they were required to as mitigations they need to be planting the trees so we need you folks to go after the trees please so i'll just leave you with this idea as you ride your alternative transportation i see more bike no i actually i don't i see more car parking spaces going in here at city hall i see more places for cars everywhere and it's the same old bike racks with just one or two bikes there so if you're going to get any buy-in from the public on a lot of this technological fix and this expensive kind of approach how about we practice what we preach we ride our bikes to the meetings and we make sure that we water those trees please and we make sure and keep our urban forest as our number one climate greenhouse gas reduction carbon sequestration method thank you thank you lotus wheeler hi yeah my name is lotus wheeler i want to thank you guys for having this meeting i think it's cool um i don't need to say that you know the climate crisis is a big deal i think that's why we're all here we all know it is um but i just think it's important for you guys to hear from someone who's a little younger than probably the average crowd around here that it really is a crisis and that all the decisions that you guys make today and tomorrow and next week and the week after are really really important and that the more aggressive you are and the more forward thinking you are the more positive of an impact that you guys are going to have thank you thank you that's all the cards i have we'll bring it back to the council um any further questions comments start down at the end mr tibbitz thank you mr mayor you know i'm really really glad that this was brought forward and i think it started with council member rogers during our goal setting of top bringing up the climate action plan so thanks for pushing on that you know we've got so many issues particularly around housing security which is a social issue but this is clearly the environmental issue that this city has to be focused on and it's easy to get myopic in your pursuit i know i have on housing and but climate is is equally important because this community just got rocked by a major climate event and uh florida texas gulf all over the world is continuing to get rocked by climactic events and so i you know i definitely i'm just going to say it i wholeheartedly support all electric ready and i'd like to see it come into being by january first i think the costs are de minimis compared to the social and environmental impact and in the case of this particular issue the cost of inaction is going to be far greater down the road than um you know a little bit of upfront costs on this uh i also if we could go to slide 51 is that 51 i have a different one i'm looking for the chart graph there it is thank you you know and this is obviously where it's at the far right advanced energy rebuild home all electric plus solar photovoltaic that's obviously where we got to get um now i will be really curious to know what the delta is what the cost implications are with that before going in that direction but you know if we do identify that there is a cost then we've got to identify a funding solution and you know i think there's a lot of opportunities out there to fund that subsidized change um but again i just it is an imperative that we take action on this and so i'd support anything coming back um pretty soon as far as evergreen is concerned that's another thing that i'd ask if you could bring back with this if it's not too much trouble and i'd wait to hear from my colleagues but what's the cost differential between um our current 86 percent and just going entirely evergreen which also has the added benefit of supporting sonoma clean powers power purchasing options because my understanding right now is we're having trouble shedding megawatts from the calpine geysers so i'd like to be able to help that agency in their pursuit reducing ghgs so yeah those are the the three things i'm interested in all electric ready by january 1st doing a real cost analysis of what it would require all electric construction going forward in the city of santa rosa and as council member schwedhelm mentioned also i think we need to be sensitive to people rebuilding their homes in that particular instance but new development to me is worth looking at worth looking at um and then of course uh the evergreen auction so thanks david i know that you and your team are constantly getting all kinds of tasks hurled at you frequently and so i appreciate any work you could put into it mr slayer thank you mayor well if i want to thank staff for being this forward i know it was no small amount of work to put this together in such a comprehensive way so thank you very very much and thanks for the push from the council as well in getting this together my i look forward to the to the next steps i'm i hope that the um the price or the the costs as you know uh council member tibbetz mentioned that it's the cost is much greater in the future and that is true but we also have um to be mindful of the costs in certainly in some of these implementations and i'm hoping that keeping my fingers crossed that the cost will not be outside of our realm but it is it's something that that with a little bit of analysis we can try to bring some of those costs down i was surprised to hear that the um that it was only $250 per home to be electric ready i thought it was more like a thousand so that's you know and when you're building a new home you got all those stresses on you you know keeping those costs down is really really important not only to the builder or the home the future home occupant but to the insurance companies as well so um i look forward to the next steps and thank you again for this the great report and for the participation of the community thank you right home thank you mr. mayor i also want to applaud everyone who was involved in this presentation because there's a lot of great information that we've actually i think been yearning for um so i will start off with saying i i do think that the council would be and it's probably i don't want to say much to the sugar into staff because i know when you involved council with staff projects it changes some dynamics but i think this is something that we need to elevate the importance and i think we do need to have some of the electeds as part of the cap implementation team so whether we have to do that during the next goal setting i really think that's the direction that we need to go and i would just offer specifically with um exhibit three the implementation it would be helpful for me if it was broken down into like four different categories the high impact easy to implement group high impact difficult to implement low impact easy to implement low impact difficult to implement because there's so much information there and it all sounds great but as you were saying director goon is that priorities it's tough and i think those are four common areas saying obviously let's start at the high impact easy to implement because some things may sound great but if it doesn't have that big of impact and it's going to take you know city resources away from doing something that has greater value let's focus on that so that'd be very helpful for me for that information come back in that format thank you this comes i want to repeat my thanks to the staff and uh synomically in power and the bay ren staff who have come from the a bag programs especially our city staff because i know that you all haven't had a lot of like there isn't free time this is this is essentially a very difficult thing to move forward along with everything else that your task to do so i want to thank you also want to thank the folks from the community 350.org and the friends of the climate action plan i think there was another group also i apologize if i missed you thanks very much for coming out and speaking up i agree that there are a number of things we need to move forward i think my colleagues have mentioned them i like my my colleagues comments about prioritizing and i like to see a scheduled plan sort of laid out how we're going to move forward i agree with the with council member tibets with regard to the all-electric ready and we should go with that as quickly as possible i'm very interested in the existence or the creation of council level involvement in the climate action plan however that works with the tack sounds like a good idea um and thank you again for bringing this all forward to us thanks very much mr rogers thank you mr mayor i also want to extend my thanks for walking through particularly attachment three that does itemize each of the individual things spelled out in the climate action plan it really gives a ranking for where staff thinks that we are on it as i was preparing for the study session i was walking through it and making stars on the ones that i think were important and it did highlight for me the need for some form of a committee for us to be able to project manage this document um because things that i identify as priorities staff might not and in particular there are a number that are really about removing barriers to allow the public to be a part of the solution when it comes to climate change i think we've done a lot as a city i think it's a well-deserved pat on the back for what we have been able to accomplish but if we did things such as item 2.1.1 removing barriers to small scale renewable energy systems we could allow businesses and individuals to really be a part of the solution as well so i want to make sure we're moving that forward i also didn't want us to get away from this conversation today without any mention about environmental justice or social justice as well and that hasn't really been a part of our conversation and isn't a part of our climate action plan but when we look at the two biggest areas of greenhouse gas emissions we have homes and we have transportation and when it comes to homes we know that two-thirds of all of the homes in california were built prior to any type of environmental standard and if you have the funds in your bank account to put solar panels on your home or to drive an electric vehicle you have an opportunity to reduce your climate impact but if you don't and you're struggling to live in this community you don't have those same tools and you're focused on putting food on the table for your kids we talked about smart and it's called out a lot in our climate action plan and a lot of the successes come from its implementation i mentioned earlier uh not only was i there on wednesday for the jennings conversation but i also was listening to their one-year recap and they had 722,961 train trips that's fantastic but their average rider is a 46-year-old white male who makes $97,000 a year 77 percent of their riders are white 15 percent are latino that in no way reflects the demographics of our community and if we're going to include folks in public transportation if we're going to include them in energy retrofits we need to make sure that the demographics of people who are utilizing our programs accurately reflect our community as well so i would like to see in the future a component of environmental justice within our document as well to make sure that we are getting into the communities who also need to be able to benefit from these programs thank you um i'm not sure i have a lot to add to any of this um i think that uh you've heard uh the desires of the council going forward um all electric readiness seems to be um something that we all pretty much agree on is something that we want to see coming forward sooner rather than later i just wanted to explain to you the the public who are here that between the brown act and council policy we it's a it's a two or three step process before we get to that we can't uh adopt a an ordinance to that effect tonight we can't do it at our next meeting what we will do soon is i'm assuming that the motion will be made tonight to have a vote at the next chance we get to put it on a future agenda so that's the way it works a couple of steps um when we have that vote it's not uh another opportunity to come in and try and convince us i think that that um we'll just have that vote uh the next chance we get to put it on a future agenda and at that point uh we hope to see you again so with that i also want to thank staff um thank alika and and rachel for for being here tonight and if that's everything you need we'll call this a wrap we've been sitting here for uh four hours as a council and we're going to take a 15 minute break i'll bring us back mayor corsie has left the building for the remainder of the meeting all right miss gomez if you'd please call the roll let the record show that um all council members are present with the exception of mayor corsie and council member tidbits and mr tidbits will be joining us in just a minute we had two study sessions we have no proclamations we have no staff briefing today city manager and city attorney reports the city manager does not have any report tonight thank you and i have no um nothing to report this evening either all right we're nice and efficient are there any statements of abstention by council members seeing none i'll move on to mayors and council members reports who wants to start council members wet helm thank you vice mayor just two things one i wanted to acknowledge uh david guin and his department uh last week the get this one right the american council of engineering companies awarded uh david and his team along with tennis wick and his sonoma permit permit sonoma the 2018 infrastructure public owner champion of the year so it's very well deserved it was nice seeing both the city and the county so congratulations and also i attended last week along with a couple of the council members and the mayor the benton benton veterans village opening i really want to thank the housing authority city staff obviously we uh did some of the our NOFA funding for that uh but city staff also helped really make that a reality there's so many different organizations with an affordable housing project that come together to make it a reality but it's a beautiful day uh local 1401 helps apply some of the furniture for the seven different rooms where veterans will now have housing and santa rosa i think is a great addition to the neighborhood thanks thank you council member comes yes thank you i think i'll make the motion now for the um asking that staff bring back actually asking that we have the conversation to ask that staff bring back the all electric ready ordinance uh and i'm just making the motion to have the conversation i'll second but can i ask for a friendly amendment that you include evergreen in that evergreen cost analysis the information regarding evergreen cost analysis um i'm happy to make that as a friendly amendment that the information be brought forward great thanks specifically looking at item 2.1.3 in our climate action plan great that has a motion and a second and that will be brought back at a future sorry council member soyer thank you vice mayor well last Wednesday i did attend a meeting a special meeting of the snowman county waste management agency and at that meeting we made the decision to hire former county uh transportation and public works director susan clausen as our interim executive director so we will be in very good hands until we hire a permanent executive director of the agency can i ask you if you if you don't mind is that entity talking at all about the styrofoam ban in addition yes came up earlier today it did um it is on our future a future agenda for um that i believe the staff is is working on a styrofoam ordinance thank you it's complex um it's as you can imagine many different facets to an ordinance like that but it is it is being looked at thank you thank you so much we'll move on to approval of the minutes council were there any amendments to the august 7th or august 14th minutes seeing none we will show those as adopted i will excuse me mr vice mayor i'm needing back to august 7th um i was absent on august 7th and and yet there was and the second one as well i thought there were point one point where it's gone for two weeks in a row and that was it so i will abstain from those two thank you very much i miss her tato consent thank you mayor uh consent item 12.1 resolution second amendment to professional service agreement trinity adjusters ink doing business as risk management services at california corporation item 12.2 resolution reject all bids fullton road reconstruction occidental road to west third street item 12.3 resolution agreement with avail technologies ink for continued maintenance and support for city bus passenger information systems item 12.4 resolution professional services agreement with american tree medics ink to provide an arborist report of fire damage street trees item 12.5 resolution 2018 to 2020 california violence intervention and prevention grant funding agreements authorization item 12.6 first amendment to professional services agreement with lpc consulting associates ink thank you miss her tato council are there any questions council members what um yes i have questions on 12.2 and 12.4 regarding 12.2 with the rejection of all the bids um will the delay of the re-bid impact any of the funding that's been secured for this project i have staff coming down from public court good evening member the members of the council um no the the rejection of all bids does not affect the funding for this project um it's comprised of utility fees storm drain enterprise funds sp1 funding which is secured um regardless of how the propositions come out um and yeah to answer your question no i won't okay and while you're here since there was a significant gap between uh what the estimate was what is the expectation do we believe the estimates will come down or we're going to find additional funding to um meet the increased cost it's a good question um we feel that when we're going to re-bid this project in the winter during a more favorable time of the year where contractors are looking for work um the time that we bid it they're they already have their guides assigned they're trying to wrap up all their projects for the year um this way they can hire and plan ahead uh to staff their workloads so we feel that that will help um the we're also going to re re-bid this project as a roller compacted concrete project only and not with the hot mix asphalt alternative due to the extensive cost savings we did see during the bid process so we'll we'll we'll focus on that we have representatives from the california nevadas cement association are going to be working with our local plants to see if they can in fact make the product uh to their uh standards which would greatly reduce the cost because right now they have to bring a mobile batch plan in from arizona and several semi-track loads it's you know $250,000 to mobilize it and we're seeing that cost spread amongst a relatively small project because a big project for here at the city but uh for this sort of technology it is a smaller size project so there's there's fixed costs that are not getting spread quite as far if we can get that material closer um and it will greatly reduce the cost and having this extra time for them to work with them will will help um great thank you you got a question about 12.4 yes so 12.4 regarding the arborist report we've got our park staff coming down jim santos thank you for coming in so my question on this so the arborist report will be done by june of 19 and so there'll be identifying trees um that may need to be removed what would be the expectation for the community about one of those trees that have been identified by the arborist actually be removed so we'll go through a separate process to after we get the arborist report we'll see what trees are actually FEMA qualifying for hazards and go through the process of deciding which tree should be removed so it should be another two to three month process minimum for the trees to come out as well as stumps two to three months from june of 19 we anticipate to be done long before june we anticipate to be done in february the contract runs just in case there's extra unexpected items that we're not aware of because this is uncharted territory for the department as with fire damaged trees so we're giving ourselves a little bit extra time but we do anticipate to be done sooner than june and then how will this in me not be related to 12.4 but now we have some trees that burn out the same coffee park area well now is it's being starting to be repopulated more homes are being built that now these what some you know untrained arborists would say well that's a danger that this tree coming down on my house that i'm now building how are we dealing with that and will this item help that or inform that yes so a lot of the trees immediately after the fire that were that are seriously hazard have already been removed so these are trees that we anticipate that could fail in the next couple years with the anticipation of homes not being rebuilt for a couple years so they would sit there without irrigation there may be some unknown part to it that we don't under yet understand without the arborist services so someone now calls with that very complain just because i have heard some i'm sure you guys have heard some too that this tree i'm just building my house and it looks dangerous how does the city deal with those so if it really does look like an imminent threat we will staff will respond right away but if it's something where it's a standing tree and we need it to be evaluated we're letting folks know what our timeline is on our schedule and most most folks i've spoken with over the phone have been satisfied with the schedule and would rather wait for the city to make the analysis of the tree than do anything i haven't heard anybody call yet with an imminent threat but if somebody did call we have the parks line 543 770 we respond to all imminent threats in the city for trees i'm just anticipating especially given as the inclement weather starts coming there are some concerns again but there's not that many trained arborists out in the community but it doesn't look that great so it's great that we're working on this when we do have some resources to deal with those concerns thanks thank you any other questions from council if you have any cards on this go ahead mr. DeWitt hello my name is dwayne deWitt i'm from roseland and i'm hopeful that you'll make sure that this report will have replacement cost estimates also and talk about putting trees back in for when we take trees out also if there are any extra funds perhaps have an inventory of the trees lost because the city allows trees being cutting down so much i get a report almost weekly from the city telling me who's getting to cut down one of their large trees typically it's because they say it's disrupting their sidewalk or it may deal with their foundation so all throughout the city now you can see numerous spots where trees are gone and yet they don't replace the sidewalk it stays messed up and we don't get the value of that tree that we had for shade for articulate excuse me particulate matter pollution reduction or any of the other things that are good in helping to end the heat island effect so much so they may say well that would require more money but i bet you could put the ask in there and say hey can you do a little bit more and then your staff at recreation and parks they were the tree people in the past as i had heard they could perhaps put together this inventory and tell us because i know since three years ago when a nice redwood tree was cut down at sonoma avenue and church street down my Montgomery village it was supposed to be replaced and it wasn't and so what are we doing how are we going to be helping on these types of things this is something that could really help you in the future on costs regarding pollution thank you for your time thank you mr. dewitt mr. hillbar i want to speak on uh 12.2 the full road uh project um you're underperforming the county when it comes to road maintenance i would say you should start doing some chip sealing like the county does as it stands you spend more and you get less this project here looked to be uh bid at five million plus and depending on options and that just seems crazy for watches such a small uh section of roadway uh yes i do drive this frequently and i know there's a lot of complaints about it it's broken up and patched unevenly but also i drive frequently ledwig and what's interesting about ledwig avenue and you should all go out and drive that road is that half of it's in the city limits and half is in the county and the county chip sealed their half and if you drive on that you find it's very nice and smooth and it's sealed and the chip sealing um prevents the water infiltration from the cracks and it's uh very nice to drive on and they're using smaller gravel for the chip seal so it's not as rough as when they initially started doing that process so it's an improved type of chip sealing that they're doing in my opinion it works very well on the city side there was a thin asphalt overlay which cracked and popped off because it did not adhere to the underlying existing asphalt and then when it started to crack and pop off there was patching that was very you know done on the evenly and you know you're you're back at it again doing some more work on ledwig i see but i think that's a very fine example of how you can spend more and get less because just go out there and drive that road you find that the the county chip sealed section is much better than the city section and i'm thinking maybe even on this part of folton you could grind that surface flat and chip seal it and maybe save money doing that way rather than i don't know i'm not even sure what you're doing but it is understood that full depth reclamation is tremendously more expensive and we should try to do something other than that if possible thank you sir i'm gonna bring it back to the council council member tidbits thank you vice mayor i move items 12.1 12.2 12.3 and 12.4 and 12.5 and 12.6 of the consent calendar and wave further reading in the text second your votes and that passes with six i's move on to public comment on non-agenda items Gina Hunt singer followed by Dwayne DeWitt thank you hello vice mayor rogers and the um council members it's great to be here my name's Gina Hunt singer and i'm the general manager of snoopy's home ice that ice rina down the road and brad colkins is with me he's the executive director of visit santa rosa and we are just here to do a wrap-up of the senior hockey tournament that was here this july and most of you have gotten a packet that gives you some information about what we found out um we want to thank you for supporting it um i want to tell you that your investment was uh well worth it because the 7500 dollars that you gave to the event we found out that we put in 5.8 million dollars into santa rosa and the and the surrounding areas so we have people from um hockey players we had 106 um games 10 day period um 1035 hockey players and 69 teams and they only they're here for five days but we only request them to be there for three hours and 45 minutes so the rest of the time they're out they're very social they're eating in restaurants they're in our hotels and uh they're playing a lot of golf and having a lot of fun here and they love it and they come back year after year so i just want to thank you very much for everything um that you've done uh we found out also when we surveyed the players that only 8 percent are from sonoma county so um that's a lot of people coming to town to help uh reinvest in this community and we're super proud of that another subject is that i just want to tell you that it's our 50th anniversary in 2019 for snoopy's home eyes charles schultz built it in 1969 and you're all invited we're gonna have a um i'll send you an email but april 27th we're gonna have an opening ceremony and a dedication and we'd love for you to come um the schultz family will be there and we just um are celebrating that it's been here a recreational facility in san rosa uh for 50 years which is sort of hard to believe thank you very much thank you miss unsinger and before you run away i know it's not customary to ask questions but could you remind me what the oldest participant in the tournament was this year yes he was 97 years old his name is mark surditch and he is full of vitality you cannot believe it yes and i believe he broke the guiness book of world records uh for that appearance isn't that correct he's the oldest hockey player in the world thank you so much every year thank you very much mr duwit and he'll be followed by denise kuey thank you my name is duway and i'm from roseland and on the way here today i wrote down the newly paved boyd street and there there's a sign that says where luxury meets downtown and there are new homes for sale there at 400 000 it's called village station so just down the street on doton is the peseo vista project and new homes are for sale there for under 400 000 so we're getting a lot of new housing over in roseland and i wanted to bring that up because we basically also just heard uh councilmember schwedhelm point out the good thing that happened on friday with the seven veterans getting into seven units a nice thing in one way but in another it was said that it cost 3.8 million dollars by kreg melzner the man that did the numbers so seven into 3.8 million is close to 540 000 a unit for a one bedroom efficiency kind of situation and you can buy three bedroom homes for less than that in our community and many more are being built now so i'm really concerned about how some of the funding is going i was at yesterday's housing authority meeting and i'm really glad that miss uh the city attorney was there she tried to keep things in a good order but i believe there was a violation of the brown act yesterday there was a memo a document that was given out by the chair to that authority but wasn't shared with the public and that's part of the brown act that i'm supposed to be able to see it so i believe in not only violating the brown act yesterday they should not allow that final decision on funding to be allowed i say this because they voted to give money to our local gongo the government organized non-government organization burbank housing now the burbank housing development corporation is a major funder on the yes on measure and campaign and that sure seems like a conflict of interest to me that the people that are supporting what the council wants are going to be getting money from the council so you may not see that as a big deal but to me and others that i've talked without in the community especially veterans they're a real concerned that the name veteran it gets used to market things and then those things are not necessarily as helpful to taxpayers who might like them to be so i know that you're probably a bit upset i don't support measure in but that's because it didn't make guarantees for what veterans would get if it fails you should set up a committee that has veterans who are not just real estate agents thank you sir involved thank you mr. DeWitt i hope you'll put that sign back where you found it miss kuey it was on the ground because it got knocked down in the rush to buy those houses great miss kuey followed by katie price vice mayor and council members good evening i'm a city resident and i own a single family dwelling over the last six months i've written several emails with regard to our waste disposal company recology specifically i've had issues with the bulky item pickup however i'm not prepared to speak on those details without first reading the full and current contract with recology in closing i would like to request one related action by the city that action is a new link on an appropriate city of santa rosa web page for the full and current contract with recology additionally i would also like to request that the online recology contract be text searchable in other words when the contract is scanned optical character recognition or ocr is enabled thank you thank you miss kuey and we'll see what we can do about that miss price good evening council members my name is katie price i'm a teacher here in santa rosa i'm sorry that i missed the earlier conversation about the all-electric ready ordinance i wanted to be a part of that but i wasn't able to be here and i would like to thank you for your motion to consider that ordinance because as a mother of two young children i am awake often at night worrying about the effects of climate change and i am here to encourage and support and thank you for all of the work that you will do to help mitigate the effects of the crisis i have just purchased a home with my husband in santa rosa and we are remodeling the entire thing and in that process we are creating an all-electric ready home and we have found it to be a very seamless process and we're excited about that growing and continuing to be something that other members of the community can do so again thank you so much and i encourage and support any future actions thank you thank you so much miss price it's the last card so we will move on to item 14.1 miss hertado thank you mayor item 14.1 report russell avenue public service easement vacation and amy nickelson our city planner and bill rose will be presenting thank you vice mayor rogers and members of the council the item before you is a public service easement summary vacation the applicant is the county of sonoma and they are seeking council approval of two summary vacations one of a 15 foot wide sanitary sewer easement and one of a 25 foot wide public utility easement both of these vacations will facilitate the construction of a behavioral health unit which would support the existing main adult detention facility the project site is shown on this graphic in blue it is in northeast santa rosa abutting highway 101 and as you can see it is surrounded by development the abutting properties to the northeast and south are county-owned properties this is a photograph of the site as you can see the portion to the north is undeveloped and that is where the expanded facility is proposed to be located this exhibit shows one of the easements the 25 foot wide public utility easement proposed for vacation across the vacant parcel and this shows the 15 foot wide public sewer easement which is across the parcel developed with the detention facility upon review by the city's right-of-way division it was determined that the city did not have an easement required for an existing sewer trunk line which is shown on this exhibit running parallel to the freeway as such this was an added condition of approval to this resolution staff has determined that the proposed vacations are consistent with the california street and highway code section 8333 which outlines when a summary vacation is appropriate in this case the easements requested to be vacated are no longer necessary for public purposes so they've been determined to be accessed and there are no other public facilities located within the said easements the project has been reviewed in concert with the california environmental quality act and has been found exempt pursuant to guideline section 15305 which is minor alterations in land use limitations and staff has no outstanding issues with the proposal without the planning and economic development department and the water department recommend that the council by resolution approve a summary vacation of a 15 foot wide sanitary sewer easement and a 25 foot wide public utility easement located on the properties of 562 and 648 russell avenue and i'm happy to answer any questions the city's right-of-way agent jill scott is also available as our representatives from the county of sonoma thank you miss nickleson council are there any questions are there any cards on this great mr tibbetz move a resolution of the council of the city of san rosa for a summary vacation of a 15 foot wide sanitary sewer easement located at 562 russell avenue apn 180-010-011 and a 25 foot wide public utility easement located at 562 russell avenue and 648 russell avenue apn 180-010-011 and 180-010-013 file number the ac 18-003 and wait for the read reading of the text second that will pass with five eyes with council members combs and mayor corsie absent we have no public hearings no written communication no additional public comment so with that we are adjourned