 I'd like to ask the interpreter currently on the Spanish Channel to commence translation of the meeting. For those just joining the meeting live translation in Spanish is available and members of the public or staff wishing to listen in Spanish can join the Spanish Channel by clicking on the interpretation icon in the Zoom toolbar. It looks like a globe. Once you join the Spanish Channel we recommend you shut off the main audio so you can only hear the Spanish translation. Interpreter, can you please restate this in Spanish? Bienvenidos para los que recién se unen a la reunión. Interpretación en vivo, al español está disponible y los miembros o personal que deseen escuchar en español pueden unirse al canal. Para unirse haga click en el icono de interpretación que aparece en las funciones de herramientas de Zoom que parece como un globo terratio en su pantalla. Una vez según al canal de español se recomienda que también aspague el audio primario para que solo escuche la interpretación al español. Good afternoon, welcome to today's City Council meeting. Madam City Clerk, can you please call the role? Thank you Mayor. Council Member Schwedhelm. Here. Council Member Sawyer. Here. Council Member Rogers. Present. Council Member McDonald. Here. Council Member Fleming. Here. Vice Mayor Alvarez. Present. Mayor Rogers. Here. Let the record show that all council members are present. Excellent. We start the day with items 2.1 and 2.2 in closed session. Let's see if there's any public comment on those items. See nobody in the chambers. Madam Deputy City Clerk did we have any hands on Zoom or any pre-recorded voice mails? I'm seeing no hands raised on Zoom and we have no pre-recorded voice mails. Okay, we'll recess into closed session. Madam City Clerk, can you please call the role? Thank you Mayor. Council Member Schwedhelm. Here. Council Member Sawyer. Here. Council Member Rogers. Present. Council Member McDonald. Here. Council Member Fleming. Here. Vice Mayor Alvarez. Mayor Rogers. Here. Vice Mayor Alvarez. Have you joined us? I think he's trying to sign in. Or from closest. I think he might be, we might be without him for the rest of the night. Okay. So let the record show that all council members are present with the exception of Vice Mayor Alvarez who is absent. Great. Madam City Manager, can we go to our study session? Yeah. Thank you, Mayor. Good afternoon. So item 3.1, Bennett Valley Golf Course Enterprise Update. Deputy Director Santos will begin the presentation. So good evening, Mayor Rogers, Council Members. I'm Parks Deputy Director Jen Santos and joining me today for the study session. Members of the Touchstone Golf Executive Team, Steve Harker, CEO, Mark Luffman, President, Ashley Bendisle, Vice President of Sales and Marketing. And I hope we can get them promoted really soon so they can join us for slide 3. Next slide, please. Oh, we don't have our slideshow yet. I'm sorry. I didn't realize that. We're bringing that up now. Thank you. Thank you so much. So today we're going to have a study session about the golf course. And we're going to highlight Touchstone's progress since taking on the management and operations and maintenance of Bennett Valley Golf Course in July of this year. Specifically, this study session will highlight the background of the Bennett Valley Golf Course briefly and the management arrangement. The Touchstone Executive Team and the new Bennett Valley Golf Course Executive Team and Touchstone will review the business plan, marketing and outreach and golf programs. We'll look at the financial results so far compared with the expectations and the outlook forward for those financial results. We'll discuss the golf course fees and the proposed update. We'll discuss the current golf carts and the future needs. We'll also review the capital needs of the golf course. And last but not least, we'll review equipment for both the restaurant and the golf course. So this afternoon, we are seeking overall feedback and discussion about everything that's on the agenda today, but we are absolutely specifically seeking feedback on the golf course fees as well as the capital investments when we discuss those. We intend to come back to Council in January to request Council approval of updated fees based on the feedback we received today. We'll also be returning in 2023 with a request for capital needs specifically for construction of the water storage project. Next slide, please. So just as a reminder, the golf course is 150 acres 18 hole golf course. On the left, you have kind of an aerial map of the golf course with all the 18 holes. The items shown in red are facilities such as the pro shop and the restaurant and maintenance yards. And when we talk about the enterprise itself, we really mean everything that's part of it, including the golf course, the driving range, the restaurant events and pro shop maintenance yard restrooms, equipment, et cetera, everything. And before we jump to the next slide and I turn the presentation over to touchstone. I just want to take a really brief step back and remind ourselves how we got to this point today. Last year in anticipation of being without the operators of the benefit of golf course we embarked on a process to better understand where options are for a successful future enterprise. And so the city worked with the National Golf Foundation and they did a full evaluation of the golf course and recommended that city look for a single operator to operate, manage and maintain the golf course as an enterprise. We did see a seat one operator and council approved touchstones management agreement on June 7th of this year. And at that time we did anticipate returning to council with an update of progress and to address the golf fees and the capital infrastructure items. So I will say in working with touchstone of the last five or six months they have shown they're really easy to work with they are a true extension of what we're doing here and our staff. They're always available and knowing how many other golf courses that they manage it really is amazing the personal attention they've been able to provide to the city for Bennett Valley golf course. They've been working very hard very tirelessly using their expertise to really understand and dig into the inner workings of the golf course enterprise and make those positive change that we really need it by golf course so. With that we'll go to the next slide please and I will turn the presentation over to our touchstone team so we can hear all the good work they've been doing and the plans they have for the golf course enterprise. Terrific Jen. Thank you very much and thank you for the kind words as we get started. Good afternoon. Council it's a pleasure to be here with all of you today. My name is Mark Luthman. I'm touched on golf's president. I'll introduce the rest of our team here in a moment. I wanted to take everybody through and build on a little bit what Jen mentioned which is our engagement and a little bit about the relationship and arrangement that we have with the city of Santa Rosa. So we were retained after a request for proposal process and we started our management tenure at Bennett Valley on July 1st. This is after a number of months of fairly intensive planning and meeting with staff and stakeholders in the city and in the community. And so we initiated our tenure on July 1st and went to work operating the golf course on that date. A little bit about of our arrangement so different than the past arrangement that had been in place with less sees at Bennett Valley or concessionaires. The city receives all of the revenue that the golf course and the restaurant generates. And then that revenue in turn is used to fund the operations of the golf course to pay the staff payroll all the expenses that are associated with the golf course as well as capital improvements and equipment to operate the golf course. So our projections were that in year one of our 10 years. So the fiscal year 2022 2023 top line revenue would be $3.5 million. And then by the time we get into year three and the restaurant is really fully open and cranking and turning into the wonderful event center that we expected all will. Top line revenue would approach $4.6 million. And how we got to those projections was really through a detailed analysis of the information that we had about the past performance of the golf course and then our analysis of the marketplace as well as our experience operating golf courses around California and around the country. So the first year annual expenditures we have forecasted at $2.9 million. Now it's important to note that does not include the $250,000 worth of or 300 excuse me $320,000 of startup costs that we had planned for the golf course. And in year three that expenditures would be at a $3.8 million level. So those expenditures are offset by revenue. It is our expectation that Bennett Valley will be a profitable golf course. Well into the future. It's such a strong facility, both the golf course and the restaurant will operate profitable and in the black. Our budget and our projection in year one projects a $250,000 lost after paying the startup costs of $320,000 as well as paying the 300 and it's a little typo there. It's a $359,000 a year debt service amount and that is the city's debt service as it relates to operating the clubhouse. We assume that catering and event sales will be 300,000 in year one and this amount will grow to 600,000 in year two and up to 900,000 in year three. Now these are the event sales that are associated with our operating the restaurant and that being and becoming a thriving banquet and event facility for the community. Okay, next slide please. So I am joined here today, virtually by Steve Harker, Touchstone Golfs CEO and founder. Ashley Van Dissel, our Vice President of Sales and Marketing. James Birchall, who is Touchstone Golfs, Northern California Vice President of Operations, and then in person. In the front row today are General Manager Greg Anderson, Food and Beverage Director Chris Hill, Jessica Schroeder, the Director of Sales at Bennett Valley, Doug Wiggers, who is our superintendent, and Matt Carvalho, our chef. Other members of the team include CJ Snyder, our head golf professional and Rita Comstock, our accounting support person. Next slide please. Okay. At the outset of our engagement, we set forth a few key points of our business and operating plan. And an important aspect of this is rebuilding the Bennett Valley brand. A golf course has suffered over the past couple of years due to lack of reinvestment in the golf course, very limited community engagement on what is going on at the golf courses it relates to programming. The restaurant has been closed since the outset of the pandemic, and therefore there was no or very limited non-golfer use of the facility. So our thesis is with improving all of these aspects of the operation, the Bennett Valley brand will be restored to a place in the community that the golfers and the non-golfers utilize and see Bennett Valley as a strong community asset. So how we would go about doing this is first providing strong value for the guests that come to visit the golf course. That would be high quality golf course conditions, an excellent restaurant experience, and prices that remain very affordable when compared to similar facilities in the Sonoma County area. Second would be implementing a robust calendar of golf and non-golf events that will take place at the golf course. And so all members of the community will be able to utilize Bennett Valley, not just the golfers, but also non-golfers that will be coming to participate in our social events and the restaurant on site. And then finally providing for a strong service environment for all of the guests that visit the facility. Next slide please. So the key business drivers in our business plan are first creating the inviting facility and restaurant. So I touched on this a little bit. This is improving the curb appeal of the facility when one arrives. It is providing for strong course conditions for the golfers when they come, as well as a restaurant that has tasty food served at appropriate prices. Improving the golf course playing conditions is no small feat, and fortunately we have Doug Wiggers, our strong superintendent who has started working at the golf course, and will entail some level of reinvestment in the facility. We've considered a number of projects at the first year of operations to improve the golf course, but continuously improving the golf course playing conditions will be a high priority for us in the first few years of our tenure. Next is creating a destination dining and event venue. The team has been hard at work first getting the restaurant reopened so the public can enjoy it, and we've started our catering and sales booking efforts led by Jessica Schroeder, working on Christmas parties now and then as we get into next year, weddings and other private events that would take place. Next would be enhancing the practice facility and the golf instruction program. One way that the golf course will serve as a community amenity is for people that are interested in playing golf, but have not had the opportunity to learn how to play that they see Bennett Valley as the place to come learn how to play golf. Improving the guest service levels at the facility throughout the facilities. The team that we have in place that you see in front of you today is the A team. And if there is one aspect that drives all of their day to day goals, it is leading and providing a strong customer service experience. And then finally clearly defining who our market segments are, who in the population will be our customers and reaching out to the folks that might never have visited Bennett Valley in the past. Next slide please. I'm going to turn it over to Ashley Van Düsselt, Touchstone Golfs Vice President of Marketing and Sales, and she is going to take the next few slides as it relates to our marketing and sales efforts. Thanks Mark. So as Mark just mentioned, when it comes to building the Bennett Valley brand, it really starts with marketing and outreach. And so what we did is we first created a new website and we really focused on excellent visual design, quality content and really intuitive navigation when someone gets to the site. We've also focused on the email and social media marketing. And on this slide, you'll see a few of our posts and email snapshots that have gone out over the last month. And in just the short six months we've been there, we've increased our email subscribers by over a thousand and the email open rate to 45%, which is huge if you think of a national average is only 21% open rate. So we're really proud of that 45% open rate. And then we've also increased customer engagement on social media by 22%. And actually I looked up today as of today we're up to 27.2% increase. And with the largest post of 67% higher than the previous operator. So we've really been focusing on engagement by both social media and email. And we've had tremendous feedback on this. They can be, I know the community has been really thankful. We've had a lot of responses to Jessica's emails, and they're excited about what communications coming from the club. So now that we've been running these events and started the promotion. The next slide if you can move to next slide please is a snapshot of our success so far. So we've sold out our first community open house and actually our first two community golf tournaments, the Halloween tournament and the Thanksgiving tournament. And a little insight in the Halloween tournament and portrayed in the photos here to the right. Jessica and the team promoted as a dress up day and the golfing community really embraced it and the theme and everyone almost everyone showed up in costume. And again, the feedback and our from our follow up email was really tremendous. We had multiple people sign up right away for the Thanksgiving shotgun, which again sold out as well. And we're really excited. I'm sure some of you might have seen we are already promoting a breakfast with Santa for the community and a holiday dinner. Both again open to the community and the holiday dinner is almost sold out as of today. And so these are just the first of a full calendar of events programming events that we plan to implement at Bennett Valley. Next slide please. So as I mentioned, these are just the first of many and we'll continue to create more excitement with as you can see here golf private events and community outreach. On this slide, you'll see some of those plans for the next in each of these categories, but I'll touch base on golf and actually on the next slide. But when it comes to private events, as Mark mentioned, we're really fortunate to have Jessica as our director of sales who is present there today. But we have full confidence in Jessica and she's already doing so really filling our calendar with all of these milestone celebrations that community members can come to Bennett Valley to celebrate. And then Jessica and the team are also aware that the community would like to see the concerts on the green and specialty branches again and we look forward to bringing these back with new events but with a new energy and a buzz around the new restaurant and event center. Next slide please. So kind of continuing on community building. As I mentioned before, I wanted to tell you a little bit about our golf programs. Our focus has been we'll continue to be making golf accessible to everyone in the community. And so what we started with is youth programs, but just like all of our other properties we plan to create programs for seniors and women. And I know a stat that Steven I talked about was that only 20% of golfers are women right now. So we have a huge population of golfers that as an industry we hope to be the leader of introducing and including into the game of golf. And also not in the slide but I wanted to mention because we just found out that the I got this foundation which promotes instruction and playing ability or playing opportunities. I'm sorry for people with intellectual disabilities has actually chosen Bennett Valley as one of their 2023 clinic locations which is really exciting. And so that'll be another opportunity for us to bring golf to the community. And so kind of going through this slide here. One thing I want to mention before I jump into each one of these programs is that we have a foundation through touchstone that we will actually at Bennett Valley fundraise to make all of these on this slide and the ones I talked about these programs at a minimal to no cost for anyone that wants to join. So that's a key factor to making that accessible to the community. So first when I kind of jump into Santa Rosa golf access what we've titled SRGA programming. We've started with the neighborhood services youth program. And basically we've introduced or we've added golf to their youth programming. And then we've also established a relationship with Elysee Allen High School and to reinstate their golf program which unfortunately was shut down during covid but we're working with them to bring that program back. We're also building a partnership with voices youths which are youth ages 16 to 24 in the Napa Solano and Sonoma communities. And that you those youth are transitioning from foster care to adulthood. And what we're doing is working with them on opportunities to provide transportation for these youth to Bennett Valley for the purposes of playing golf but also golf programs and job opportunities and career development opportunities for those youth that are transitioning into adulthood. We've also launched our junior linksters program which is year round junior golf program and individual and golf and group golf lessons. And we've made diversity in our workplace a priority. As I mentioned we're working with voices youth to build those career development opportunities but we've also implemented staff education and specific training as you can see on here regarding creating a culture of belonging. So as you can see the team is completely focused on creating golf excitement within the community and making it accessible to everyone but it's important that that's not the only focus and really making Bennett Valley golf course a community asset like Mark mentioned the restaurant and event center are important focuses as well. So next slide please. So we've temporarily named Bennett Valley Grill Bennett Valley Grill and we had a soft opening on October 1 which I previously mentioned was a huge success and sold out. Jessica and the team have been really diligent in the promotions and communications. So you can see on here one of the communication pieces was to introduce our new chef Matt and creating pop up specials on our website and social media. Really just to get the word out there that we're open and what's going on at the club. I'm fortunate to have an aunt in the area. So she lives in the overhead and she tells me everything and she's mentioned multiple times at the community. There's already a community buzz and excitement for the restaurant. And then I'm going on to the next section there. We're also in the final stages of rebranding the restaurant and event center. So our chef Matt and food and beverage director Chris also their present have come up with really an amazing menu that will appeal to all customers and it will elevate the dining experience with it. So we've compiled three brand concepts and our plan is to present all three to the city and then move forward with the top concept and then moving into 2023 we'll have a grand opening in a full marketing plan promoting that new brand concept for the restaurant event center. When it comes to the event center. I'm excited to say that we already have $159,000 in tentative and booked events for the next 12 months and it's continuing to grow daily. We've also added Bennett Valley event center to our touchstone lead generation sites and these two sites are designed to funnel leads into our properties and then we manage the SEO and keyword search to specific basically focus on specific customers that are looking to for weddings and tournaments. So it's just another lead site to funnel leads to Jessica and the team at Bennett Valley. And then lastly, once our final branding concept is determined, we'll launch a second website that's really cohesive with Bennett Valley golf course yet will attract people in the area that are searching for restaurants and event venues and appeal to people that don't really know that the restaurant event center is at the golf course. So as I said, at this point there's been an immense amount of work that went into opening the doors of the restaurant event center so next slide please. I don't see the next slide to you. I'll just keep going. Oh, there we go. So here are a few photos of the space. And to give you a brief update, there were some major improvements to the landscaping around the clubhouse as you come in on the patio and extensive amount of kitchen upgrades to help us meet health standards. So I'm going to go ahead and give the team the ability to execute this elevated menu that we've created. And all around deep clean and updated signage to make the space inviting and welcoming for guests. So in all our teams done an incredible job to get to the point that we're at and I see truly I see momentum truly building and we're all excited for the year ahead so I'll pass it off to mark to review our financial results as far in our financial outlook. Perfect. Thanks Ashley. Next slide please. We have events to the next slide. It's just there's a delay in the way that the presentation was formatted with images. I just want to let you know that it's been a few seconds for it to render. Great. Thank you. So the financial results to date as I mentioned in the outset our budget target is for the golf course to lose $250,000 in the first year of operations after paying for the $359,000 of debt service. And $320,000 of startup expenses. So I'm happy to report that we are at budget target of bringing in $1 million of revenue to date. This is through October and November was another strong month of revenue performance. The earnings to date are $90,000 so we have made $90,000 to date. However, that is $88,000 short of our budget target due to additional expenses that were required to reopen the restaurant and a few unanticipated startup expenses. Some of the revenue highlights the driving range revenue is $39,000 ahead of target. Our restaurant revenue is $48,000 ahead of target. And our golf revenue is $97,000 below target due to limited golf tournament and golf league events. We just walked into a situation that the tournaments and leagues that typically took place at Bennett Valley were not reserved by the previous operator. So our team is working diligently on getting these groups on the books at Bennett Valley for 2023. And so we can achieve these targets. The outlook year to date our average green fee car fee, which is an important metric that we evaluate to understand the financial health of the business is $30 and 17 cents. So what that is, is that's the average price when you take all of the green fee rates, be it weekday weekend, senior rates, junior rates, twilight rates, super twilight rates when you put all of that together. The average green fee car fee is $30 and 17 cents. This amount is well below the competitive set of local golf courses and also limits the income potential of the facility. We're happy to see that the restaurant is exceeding revenue projections to date. And we expect that that will continue well into 2023 and beyond. And then assuming normal weather and our ability to rebook these tournaments and book events at the facility, we are anticipating that rounds and revenue will recover and continue to achieve targets. One of the items in our recommendation through the city is that we make some increases in the green fee rates. Currently, there haven't been increases to the green fee rates since 2017. And we recommend that we make some adjustments to the rates beginning in 2023 to get closer to the market rates that are seen throughout Sonoma County. Next slide, please. So the golf fees, as I mentioned, have not changed since 2017. When we arrived at the facility, we found that there was as many as 180 different fees that were being charged. And what we think was happening is when new programs and new ideas with rate structure were put into place, a new fee was made that made things very confusing. What we have done is streamline those fees to the posted rates that the City of Santa Rosa has approved and had in place. What we are proposing is an update in the fees to the market rates and still providing a value when compared to other courses in the region. Reducing the variety of fees and then including the capital improvement fee, which was previously separate from the green fees, include that and roll that in with the green fee rates. And then return to City Council next month with a fee update. Next slide, please. I'm going to turn it over to my colleague Steve Harker who is going to talk about the golf carts and other capital improvements at the golf course. Thank you, Mark. When we arrived, we found that there was 56 existing Yamaha golf carts very well maintained. The challenge being is that the lease expired in October and right now golf carts are a rare commodity. They're very difficult to find and secure. So we quickly secured that lease of 56 carts. Those carts will need to be replaced within the next 12 months and we're proposing to replace them with 72 carts because we have more demand. We have demand that exceeds the 56 that we currently have. Those would be on a five year operating lease. So basically a rental, maybe returned after the five years and replaced with another fleet of cars. And we go through the city's purchasing process, an RFP process to select the appropriate or the best bid. The most common companies that bid are Yamaha, EasyGo and Clubcar and they'll be providing us with a rental fee per month per car and we'll evaluate that along with the purchasing department to determine the best value for the city. Next slide please. We go. So as Mark shared, the facility is self sufficient and will grow in terms of revenue and profitability over time. However, there are some investments that are required and none more important right now than installing an irrigation lake with a pump system. It's by far and away the highest priority for the golf course. It's a little north of about a million dollars. We need a place to collect the water from the wells to be able to irrigate the golf course efficiently. We also need to start to think about the irrigation system itself, which is now over 50 years old. That system is inefficient. And once we have the storage, then we need to disperse the water onto the golf course efficiently. Currently we're watering areas that frankly don't need water. The consistency of the watering, the spacing of the irrigation heads does not provide the level of quality that we need in order to enhance the value of the property on a go forward basis. And it's beyond its useful life. So eventually the irrigation system will have to be replaced. There's also a number of opportunities to improve the drainage. If you see the photo on the bottom left of the slide. This is a project we did for the East Bay Regional Park District down in Castro Valley, whereby we created some low retention areas and some drainage into those areas. And a similar solution might make sense for for Bennett Valley Golf Course. We do as a part of our startup expenses, we have an architect on board to look at potential placement of the irrigation lake, and also an irrigation engineer to help us with the design of the pump station that would be required to deliver the golf, deliver the water to the golf course. There are always other projects. Golf courses can be capital intensive. There are a few other things that need to be done. The tea leveling is an item that is required when a golfer steps up to start a golf hole. If the tea is on level, it makes the golf course less appealing and more difficult. So we're asking for funding for tea leveling. That would be a select number of teas. In addition, the bridges need some attention. They haven't had much maintenance done for that on them for quite some time. And then an ongoing issue is many of the Monterey Pines are dying and need to be removed. And last and very important, the restaurant carpeting is is well beyond its useful life and is in need of replacement. And so we've budgeted or we were requesting a budget for that amount in the amount of $90,000. Next slide please. So in a moment here, we're going to see the equipment. And we've been as a part of the startup expense and one of the reasons that the startup expenses are higher than expected is we're finding that on the cook line kitchen equipment, we're finding a number of items that need to be replaced. We've tried to repair everything, but we're finding that in many cases, it's not practical to repair that particular piece of equipment. And so we're looking at replacement. This here under the restaurant kitchen equipment, 38,000 is a placeholder we're not sure yet exactly which piece of equipment this be applied to but we know that we have a need in this area and so that's a placeholder to ensure we have some funding for kitchen equipment. We are in need of banquet chairs we were able as a part of the startup to get the chairs necessary for weddings and special events, but for business meetings and those type of events that requires a different type of chair and the chair there now just doesn't make sense for that facility. So on the golf course, we're requesting three utility vehicles, a beverage cart there's currently no beverage cart this is an amenity that the golfers really enjoy having beverages and food available on the golf course. We also are in need of a driving range utility vehicle with a picker to pick the range balls that vehicles well over 20 years old. The first does not have a fairway airifier. We loaned them one from another golf course, but eventually they will need a fairway airifier, and also a greens airifier to pull plugs out of the soil, which allows us to do some top dressing and get more air into the grass to make sure that the grass is nice and healthy for golf play. And then last we need a blower to to blow off clippings and and leaves and those type of things off the areas of play. Working with Jen Santos in the city the plan is to come up with a comprehensive replacement plan, long term plan that we can use what utilize on a go forward basis. And that concludes our presentation. We appreciate the opportunity to present today and I'll turn it back to Jim. Thanks Steve. Really, I just wanted to say thank you to touchdown they've really done a great job of getting in there and working and when they say they've been trying to repair things. I mean, it's amazing the amount of stuff they've been trying to repair things rather than trying to they've been really good stewards of the funding they do have and trying to weigh those odds and balance what is absolutely necessary and what could wait until next budget season. So I'm really pleased with the work you've been they've been doing and obviously it's a big presentation a lot of information. It takes a lot to operate this golf course and make sure it's the best we can provide to our citizens so we're here for questions and just a little reminder that we are looking for some feedback specifically on the fees today. And the capital projects, especially the water storage system, so that we can retain storage in a much better way that's in a significantly urgent need to have that rolling forward and thanks to touchdown they're already rolling forward with design, what we'd be looking for construction in the future so we'll return to that next year. And we're open for questions or any discussion you have. Thank you so much director I'll look to my colleagues to see who wants to start with questions. That's member Fleming. Thank you Jen and Steve for this presentation as well as your staff members well done. Actually it sounds like you're killing it with your open rate on those emails I wish I could get 45% of folks to open my emails. I have a couple of questions. One is about the last slide on your large equipment. I'm not familiar enough with turf maintenance which is to say not at all familiar with turf maintenance to know if it's necessary to have one of those on site all the time or if it's like you know folks who mow their lawns where you really only need one once a week or once every couple of weeks and a model of sharing them across golf courses might be more appropriate than purchasing one to sit idle most of the time. Yes that's council member that's a good question. There is quite a bit of sharing that goes on but these particular units are used on a continual basis so it's something that most every golf course has an air fire for the fairways and an air fire for the greens. And although some options there we've presented the best case scenario in terms of the quality of the equipment and there are some options for pre-owned equipment their options for different types of equipment that can also be very useful and helpful in creating the right turf conditions. Great and are there also options for electric electric vehicles or electric operated blowers and so forth. Absolutely for sure. Is that something that you might consider pursuing. Yeah so we certainly will take a look at that the greens aerator is not available in electric but I believe the fairway or fire as a is or is not it it's not engine driven so that takes care of that one. I think we recently approved last year approved two greens mowers which will be electric and those will be the first two electric vehicles on property and we should have those sometime in the spring. That's pretty exciting. Excellent. And then the last is I got a letter constituent concern letter around the continuity of your membership program given that there's not currently an opportunity to renew how might you address that concern. Yes I think it's just a misunderstanding we will allow people to continue their membership in January by just paying a monthly fee. And then we're hopeful that the presentation that we make the council in January for new fees increase fees will be approved. And then we would go ahead and charge the remaining 11 months for the balance of the membership for the calendar year 2023. Just going forward from there would there be then an annual option beginning in 2024. Correct. Great. Thank you very much. That's all my questions. Thank you. Council members. Thank you Mr. Mayor. Thank you for the presentation. And I guess a being a recipient of many of those emails. It's very much appreciative a total different look. I think it's moving in the right direction. Also, when I visited both the restaurant and the course, I really liked the direction we're going and specifically the work that's been done around the restaurant, because it was in pretty poor shape. Testone came in, it's very much appreciated. So thank you for that. The couple of questions I had were regarding slide 17 and capital improvements. In the attachment A, it talked about water sources in the lake, which I get, but there was a line there that kind of concerned me. It said, assuming there's enough groundwater, have we done any research as to the viability of actually drilling another well there? Are we working with Santa Rosa water at all? I'm not sure who would be the most appropriate person to respond to that. Yeah, I can kind of jump in there. We, and then I'll turn it over to Steve for the details. We were originally looking to team up with Santa Rosa water to combine an emergency water well system. So it's likely a remnant of that initial expectation. However, Santa Rosa water has for a variety of reasons is not able to pursue this site. So we've moved in a different direction to use our existing wells. So we won't be taking any more water from the ground. We'll be using the existing wells. We just really need that storage. And that's where we're at right now. So we've kind of shifted from what was originally intended when we originally started talking with Touchdown. But this will be better and quicker for the city overall to get in and take care of that urgent need to have a storage for the watering system. And then Steve, anything else? We still have some research to do in this area. We know that the existing wells were more than sufficient to provide enough water for the golf course over the summer months. So that's good news. There's a particular test that we'll do prior to moving forward on the irrigation lake, which is a drawdown test to determine exactly how much water is coming from the wells. And then also we need to meter the wells. So there are a few steps that are required in order to make sure that this solution is the right solution. But historically speaking, it appears that there's plenty of water, more than enough water for the golf course. I've heard numbers, again, this is secondhand, but the numbers I've heard are north of 500 gallons per minute, which is more than adequate. And I know some golf courses are using treated wastewater for that. I think Windsor uses that. Is that a potential option to explore here at Benne Valley? It's possible. We have heard some discussion from the state about there possibly being some grants that might be possible, but it's extremely expensive to bring wastewater to an area like Benne Valley Golf Course. We're fortunate in that we have the groundwater. That's, we have a few golf courses that unfortunately use potable water. So the good news is we're using groundwater. That water does go back into the soil and the adjacent creek, much of it. So that's the good news. I'll add to that, I'll just add to that response. We do have a number of golf courses that we work with at your gate with treated wastewater. It is really a function of the infrastructure being in place to deliver the wastewater from the treatment plant to the golf course. Totally get that, because I know a lot of Santa Rosa's treated wastewater actually goes 40 miles north of here. But again, as we're considering options, if we're looking at sustainability, I think it's something that should be considered moving into the future. And my next question on capital improvements, we talked about tea leveling at 50K. I know previous studies of the Benne Valley Golf Course, they also talked about the distance between the teas. The front teas were not far enough up there compared to the white or the blue teas. Is there a consideration about making those adjustments as recommended in other studies? Yeah, that is not in the current plan, but we agree with that thinking and would recommend that we include that in future presentations and requests. So would that be included in this 50K or is that an additional cost? No, the 50K really covers the par three teas and a couple of other teas. It does not include the forward teas, but that is something that we can certainly consider. In the interim, just the placement of forward teas, we can cut some areas in some flat areas of the fairway and as an interim solution so that that is available. But nowadays, it's a very important point. A lot of golfers, older, younger, beginners, they need that shorter set of teas. And so that is a definite need of the golfers. And I would concur with that, especially with, I know there's a lot of material in that attachment about pace of play, and that's one of the things that would speed up the pace of play if you actually had the appropriate forward teas. So thanks so much for all you've been doing and really looking forward to the future of this golf course. Thank you. Council Member Rogers. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you for your presentation. I was able to attend an event at the restaurant and it was great. So it was definitely on my places to host an event. I think this question is for Ashley. How do you advertise the events and are we making the advertisements like go out to everyone in the city or what is that process? So right now we're sending email blasts and social media blasts and doing a few paid blasts. As soon as we're finished and we've presented the new brand and that will be in the next couple of weeks, we have completed three different concepts to present to the city and then it'll be full board. We'll be doing paid ads with, I think it was Sonoma social or Sonoma media, I'm sorry. We'll be doing some newspaper ads, more Google and paid ads in social media. So you'll see a very big push everywhere with the new brand as soon as it's out. And I will say we can definitely support that with all the social media we have here at the city as they develop that plan. We do have some advertising on the back of our youth activity guide right now to draw interest in the golf course right now. Perfect, thank you, Jen and Ashley. And then my last question is, what were some of the additional facility expenses that were needed for the reopening? That was, it was primarily equipment purchases to replace equipment in the cooking line and in the kitchen. The team has done a really terrific job bringing in repair companies and utilizing their ingenuity and experience to repair as much of the equipment that could be repaired. And unfortunately, there's been quite a bit of equipment that we have needed to replace. Thank you, Mark. Thanks, Mayor. Council Member McDonald. Thank you and thank you so much for the presentation. I just have some clarification questions for you around the budget. Just so I'm clear, I believe that you said that you fell short $90,000. Does that, is that in addition to the $250,000 that you were targeting as a loss? So for the total amount of $338,000 was a loss for this year. And then in addition to that, it looks like the golf revenue was down $97,000. So do we have a total loss of $435,000 for this year? The answer to that is no. The decrease in the golf revenue has been offset by increases in the driving range revenue and restaurant revenue. So we are on target with our revenue projections for the year today. The additional expenses for the startup costs for replacing equipment has added to the potential loss. However, we are working diligently to make up that amount by the end of the fiscal year. So right now we are 90, we have made $90,000. That's 90, or we've made $88,000. That is $90,000 below our projections. However, we're looking to make that short fall. Yeah, so you would add the 90,000 on top of the projected shortfall. Right now the intent is, of course, to make that up. Okay, thank you. That was what I was asking is, right now that shortfall could potentially be $338,000, but the goal is to only fall short the projected amount of $250,000, correct? That is correct. Thank you. And then just for clarification on a couple more things, had we talked about raising fees for the golf course for all of these, the green fees, the golf cart, had that been part of the RFP process when we started? I'll just say that we definitely anticipated that Touchdown would be coming in and assessing the golf fees situation, especially since it had been five years. We really wanted to rely on whatever contractor we ended up with to do that market rate analysis and to use their expertise to help us to come back with the market rate numbers so that we could get closer and definitely operate this as an enterprise fund whereby it makes enough money to sustain itself. So we had anticipated that. I don't know, Steve, if you have anything else that you had done previously as part of the RFP process. Great, thank you. During the process, we did study the market and made some recommendations and now we'll be coming back in January with that formal recommendation on an increase. Thank you. The final question comes along with the CIP capital improvements that you're recommending. Do we currently have any money set aside in our CIP budget for these requests for the golf course? Do we have anything in this fiscal year? Would this be something that we would be potentially looking at for the next fiscal year? Do we have, oh, I'll go ahead. Thanks, Jim, I can take that question. At this time, we don't have the actual money outlined but what we've talked about is bringing back pieces of the capital improvements for council approval. So we've talked about what do we need to do with the water? What do we need to do with the grounds? So we plan to bring that back to you in phases. Jim, do you wanna add anything to that? I'll just add that we do in this year's budget have design funds for the lake project. Other than that, those things as the city manager clarified or we'll be coming back with. Great, that's all my questions. Thank you so much. Thank you, Council Member. I only have one question for you. On slide 14, you put an emphasis on the average green in cart fee and said that ours are unusually low, just over $30 per round. For context for council, what would you have expected that number to be in comparison to other golf courses? Right around $35 in that range there. So the competitive courses, we don't have detailed information on their rounds played by rate but I expect that they're in that range. There's somewhere between $35 and $45. Okay, thank you. Let's go to go to public comment on our study session. If you'd like to provide comment, you can either approach the podium here in the chamber or hit the raise hand feature on Zoom. Mr. DeWitt, if you'd like to kick it off. Hello, my name is Dwayne DeWitt. I used to work at that Safeway out in Bennett Valley when they were building this golf course. I've gone there a number of times but never played golf. As a taxpayer and a concerned citizen, I've been quite, I guess you might say doubtful about how this helps the greater community. According to the slides today, you have 100 members and I believe that's what is your support base of your golfers out there. There was no market area research given to us about how many golfers have been surveyed to see whether or not they'll actually use this course and basically of that 100 members, it said 75 were seniors. So the marketing line I hear here is that you're going to make golf accessible to all and you're going to do it at a rate of about $35,000, excuse me, $35 per round. The concern of many people in the community is that golf is an exclusive type of endeavor. It's a sport that doesn't necessarily attract a lot of folks. So I'm hoping that you'll bring back market rate analysis and true market area surveys that show us just who this is going to cater to. What's this all about? Rather than trying to save something that for 50 years has been a drain on our system. I'm really quite concerned when I hear terms like, well, yeah, we'll use some groundwater during a announced emergency by the state, not by you folks, that we have a drought and we have problems. So you could quibble all day long about the different costs that are going to go on. Essentially, this is already a done deal. You're going to do it. So for what you're going to do to the taxpayers, we need to know exactly what's going to happen and what kind of costs are going to be put onto the taxpayers. It's said here today, there'll be a bit more loss than expected. That's understandable. We don't know if this is actually going to fly. So I would hope that you folks as the keepers of the ratepayers purse will make sure that you have some tight constraints on what your losses might be. And if you start to get too many losses, you actually cut those losses and look into perhaps privatizing this whole endeavor and then actually perhaps keeping some of that 150 acres of land for some housing, because you've also declared a housing crisis and affordable housing out there in Benna Valley would truly be an asset that the rest of the community could use, especially to those 16 and 24 year old youth. Maybe you could trade them to be caddies and they could caddy for housing living nearby. Thank you, Mr. DeWitt. Anybody else in chambers? All right, let's go to Zoom and I see Gregory Farron. Welcome back, Gregory. Thank you, Chris. I, like you indicated, my name is Gregory Farron. I'm a member of the board of Benna Valley Golf Club and I've been playing there for a lot of years. And I just wanted to bring to the new council members my perception. First of all, as a financial analyst for all of my life, I feel more comfortable having a multi-year profit loss statement that really shows what the out years are gonna look like. As much as you can not really guarantee that any of the figures are accurate, it's helpful to know what you're spending up front, what you're spending in the mid-year and what the out years are gonna look like. The problem with the golf club is, from my point of view, is that long ago, major mistakes were made in the building of it, which we've all known has resulted in the golf club's enterprise carrying such a huge debt service that it could never afford to do the things that you're now saying, I guess you'd like to do. Capital improvements and irrigation and all of the things you're talking about have been talked about for years and years and the thing keeping them from happening from the operator's point of view and from the golf club's point of view is this $400,000 or $500,000 every year you're having to pay for the debt service. Now, I guess I'm hearing, because I don't see it clearly stated that this council has decided it's gonna forget about the debt service and pay it out of the general fund. I welcome that because it should have been done in the first place and 10 years ago, we could have had a fairly financially solvent golf club, but I'd like to hear more about what happens with the debt service. I'd also applaud your trying to figure out a way of getting more people to play golf. I've spent 10, 15 years coming to your council asking for rates that allow for that every year when the city council tried to figure out how much to charge, the pressure was always, oh, let's bring it up, let's spend, let's ask more. And I would get you guys to make some compromises to let young people pay less and to let seniors pay less. And we'd have a, what's the sweet spot? I heard a council member, several of them say you all look for that sweet spot that's just high enough to give you some money but low enough to keep people playing. That's a dangerous game and it's something that because our course is so different from others, it's not really easy to do apples to apples in this county. We are not exactly like everybody else. We don't have exactly the same policies and we certainly don't have exactly the same course. Nevertheless, we have the more rounds than anybody in the county. And so something's keeping people coming back and I contend it's a love of the course. I contend that it's such a great group of people and a love of the course that we kept in there. Thank you very much. Thank you, Gregory. I don't see any other hands on Zoom. Did we have any pre-recorded voicemails? Good afternoon. My name is James Gert. I'm a member of the Bennett Valley Advisory Committee. I'm commenting on item 3.1 having to do with the Touchstone presentation with regard to management of the Bennett Valley Golf Course. I've personally known Greg Anderson, the general manager of the course now, for quite a number of years. And I think I can speak for a number of golfers that were very impressed with the change in management and the improvements that we've already seen at the golf course and the new Bennett Valley Grill. I've had an opportunity to go through the documents that have been submitted to the City Council. I'm impressed with the detail and their conscientiousness about how to manage the course and make a profit-making enterprise for the City of Santa Rosa. I'd just like to briefly say that I would support the recommendations that they're making with regard to the changes in fees. I've been an annual member of the Bennett Valley Golf Course since 2013 when my wife and I moved to Santa Rosa from Anchorage, Alaska. While I was very impressed with the management under the Borowitz, the previous manager, I'm very enthused about what's going on with the course now and accept the fact that costs are going up and the fee structure seems extraordinarily reasonable given the kinds of capital improvements that the course is going to require in order to increase its profitability. So in concluding, I would just like to say that I hope you give the documents that they've submitted to you that Touchstone has submitted your consideration and approve the recommendations that they're making for the fee structure in 2023. Thank you very much for this opportunity and Michelle, good day. Thank you again. All right, I'll bring it back to council. Jen, before we go to comments, can you please remind folks what type of feedback would be helpful? Sure, absolutely. Thank you so much. So we're really looking for feedback on the fees. There was an attachment to the staff report that's showing the proposal from Touchstone to raise the fee rates and receive that. We'll be coming back in January for any comments you have for that, as well as any feedback you might have on the capital side as well, that'd be great. Okay, I looked to my right. Any comments from council members? Council member Rogers? I would like to thank Touchstone for your partnership. It appears that you are doing exactly what we partner with you to do. And so that actually makes me someone that was really hesitant about the golf course. That makes me very happy to see that you guys are implementing what you set out to implement. As far as the fees are concerned, I am in support of that. You are the golf experts. That's why we put you where you are and it looks like you're doing what you need to do. So I'm in support of what you guys feel needs to be done in order to keep Bennett Valley golf course. Thank you. Council member McDonald? Yes, thank you. I also am in favor of the reasonable fees that you're planning on implementing. I think that to go up a few dollars, it makes sense to me on all accounts, especially when we know that the market rate is around $35. So I appreciate that coming forward. As far as the capital improvements, if you want direction on that right now, I think we need to prioritize, such as they did in the presentation of what is the most important to us to do right away. And I would say that that has to do with irrigation and water. And so I think that that's an important thing for us to set aside money in the CIP going forward. I would like to see some type of plan once we know our revenues on how we reinvest some of the revenue back into how we're buying equipment and doing equipment. I think if we're looking at the kitchen and the money that it's making from the grill, we might need to prioritize replacing some of that equipment so that it's functional and safe. And some of it just comes from clearly that's working, right? We have to have a functional kitchen so that we can continue to offset some of the debt from that revenue. So I would also like to know some of the debt repayment that we have on the bond on that particular building and seeing where that's at as far as where we need to go on repayment of that. And it's true when we have debt against something, it's hard to know the actual revenue of something. So I appreciate that being brought up in this presentation. But other than that, I do wanna thank Touchdown for their hard work. I know that this is a heavy lift, getting it done. I was sorry to see the delay in opening, but it's reasonable to think that there was a lot of improvements that had to be done. And so I am looking forward to seeing this, moving forward on this, thanks. Council Member Fleming. Thank you. I am supportive of the previous comments made about the capital improvement. I do think focusing on water is going to be where our future is as a community. And I would love to see if we're able to secure grant funding to use recycled wastewater, assuming there is sufficient capacity cause even that has become quite the commodity. That said, I'm also really supportive of the fee increase. I think it's very modest and reasonable. I look forward to getting more information when we see it come back in January. One of the things I'll be looking for is perhaps a couple more comparator agencies, municipal agencies in the North Bay. I see four comparators here if there are additional ones. I think that might be really helpful. It also might be helpful for context to see a few private courses. I know that it's difficult because they have a completely different business model, but it might be helpful for us and the public for that matter to place this in context because we are different than those agencies and to understand what the benefits of the municipal course provide financially as well as for our community. Another thing that you touched on and one of the reasons why I was so enthusiastic about supporting your contract award is how much you guys are working to engage folks across the community and beyond. And so further, I'd like to see something in the fees to either incentivize Santa Rosans to play. And in particular, I'd like to see a low or no fee for first time Santa Rosans or people who are under 18 or over 65. So sort of a loss leader in that way to get people who might not consider playing or are worried that it might be money down the drain, so to speak, to try something that they don't know how to do to get them out onto the course. Council Member Sveta. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I'm supportive of the recommendations. Initially, when I saw the $4 increase, it was like, well, that's pretty significant, but if you really look at it, it's a $2 net increase. Since we're, I agree with that, eliminate the capital improvement fee that puts us right in a ballpark. And again, one of the reasons why I was very supportive of Touchstone, this is your wheelhouse. And so your suggested changes with capital improvement and the fee increase in the future of the golf course is in good hands. So I'm supportive of all the recommendations. Council Member Sawyer. Thank you, Mayor. Well, I continue to be impressed with Touchstone and their recommendations, their operations, their diligence and their dedication to making a Benna Valley golf course, everything that it can be in the future. So I'm very much in favor of the recommendations moving forward and continued good relationship with Touchstone as they make the Benna Valley golf course something that we can all be proud of. We always knew that there would be investment necessary. Even before Touchstone came on, it was clear to us that there would have to be a change in how we look at the funding at the golf course. And because we do need it to be self-sustaining, it is an enterprise fund, it needs to act like an enterprise fund and I see that in the future. So I appreciate the recommendations and I will support them wholeheartedly. Thank you. Thank you, Council Member. And I'm gonna echo the same sentiments in even just floating these fee increases and giving us an opportunity to daylight it to the public. I think makes it a lot more palatable for folks to be able to weigh in. And I think Gregory's comments were really important when we do talk about that sweet spot. You are trying to make sure that the course is playable which requires investment and you also don't want to price people out of playing. And so I think keeping juniors low, keeping seniors as low as it has been relative to others. I think that that makes a lot of sense in terms of our user base and the folks that we're trying to attract through our marketing department to get out there. I think when it comes to the investments in the course, I agree on the irrigation, that's the biggest one. And then other things I think are a little bit less important such as the initial report looking at some of the cart path and whatnot. I think you've identified that maybe that can wait a little bit longer. But I do think that if you lose your irrigation system, I think that then we are scrambling to fix it. We're losing rounds. It's probably going to cost more to do it as an emergency measure. And so I'd really appreciate us continuing to prioritize getting that accomplished for the course. Outside of that, I'm really encouraged by the numbers that we're hearing from the restaurant. I think we've done a really good job on that. And I want to thank the chef and the team for being here tonight. I know it was long awaited. And I'm looking forward to a full event schedule next year to get more data on where we've been successful and where we need to put additional resources. So with that director, I want to thank you and your team. And we'll say good night for tonight to you guys. And we'll move on to our next item. Thank you. And Madam City Manager, we'll roll into our regular council meeting. I will take liberty to rearrange the agenda a little bit. I'd like us to do the consent calendar first because I do see some folks in the public who are here for consent. And I know that we have a lot of staff that are waiting to see whether or not they need to give presentations. I'd like to release them sooner rather than later. And then after consent, we'll go to our public hearing which we do typically try to do around five o'clock and we're a little bit behind on. Thank you, Mayor. Item 12.1, a resolution approving forgiveness of deferred rent amounts for city tenants impacted by COVID-19 orders. Item 12.2, resolution, so manufacturer bid award and purchase award of four new Cummins ISB 6-7 diesel engines to Cummins doing business as Cummins sales and service. Item 12.3 is a resolution extension of proclamation of existence of local emergency related to the threat of community health posed by COVID-19. Item 12.4, a resolution extension of proclamation of local homeless emergency. And item 12.5, adoption of ordinance, second reading ordinance of the council of the city of Santa Rosa amending title six of the Santa Rosa city code chapter six dash six six rent control mobile homes. Thank you. Thank you so much. Council, do we have any questions on tonight's consent calendar? Council Member Rogers. I did have a quick question. Item 12.1, do we ask for financials or proof that it was a hardship from anyone that we are waiving fees for? Thank you. I'm gonna have staff actually answer this question. I do believe this was approved by the prior city manager. So I'm gonna have, I believe Jennifer should be on the line or someone from finance. But I do know these were businesses who could not actually operate during the pandemic and there was a loss. Seeing that suffices, I just wanted to know if we looked into that. Thank you. All right, thanks Jill. I think Jill was coming up with thanks. Good evening council. I'm Jill Scott. I'm the real estate manager for the city. And on this item we did, we had specific criteria that each entity had to meet. And we did have to check for financial hardship on some of them. As you see in the staff report, there was a set of criteria that had to be followed. So it was either due to a closed order or a significant amount of reduced, of the order that reduced the capacity or a specific hardship. We didn't have any that were a specific hardship. So they mostly met the other orders, but we did confirm them all. Thank you, Jill. All right, let's go to public comment on the consent calendar. I've got Mr. DeWitt to start followed by Roger McConnell. Hello, my name is Dwayne DeWitt. I'm from Roseland. Item 12.3, the resolution to extend the proclamation of existence of the local emergency related to community health posed by COVID. I'm glad that you've had this in place, but I do believe we've got to get to the point where you say we're going to allow all of our public meetings to again, be allowed to the public in person. I've talked to people in the community who tell me that this idea that you've got going is fun having the technology involved in doing these hybrid type meetings. But as you saw last week, it can create other difficulties. Having the old traditional format, it might be bothersome to you in some ways. I know it seems old school to have a set time, start the meeting on time, let the public be there in person on time and everybody participate that's at the meeting. It shouldn't be that onerous to you to do that. We basically now can come into almost all buildings without masks by order of the government. So hopefully you folks will take the lead now and say, we do believe in participatory public involvement and open up our government again, all the meetings. It really is quite bothersome to come here and see many meetings canceled, to see that only certain meetings can have this hybrid approach such as today, where most of the decisions are being made behind closed doors and zoomed meetings with no chance for the public to actually really get involved unless they themselves are Zoomsters. There's a lot of older people out in the community, a lot of people who are not necessarily as financially well off as the Zoomsters, but it's gotta get to the point where you say, we are back to the way we were before this COVID crisis. I realize that the governor has stated that this is not necessary until the 23rd of February of next year, but I believe that's an arbitrary number that he just picked and that shouldn't be something that you can't on a local basis say, we welcome our public, we welcome the community to be at all the meetings and we're gonna have the meetings again. A specific example I'll give you which you might not think is important, but because of this nice rain that's just come. We have a Waterways Advisory Committee. It hasn't met very often in the last three years. It really would be good to reinvigorate that Waterways Advisory Committee to talk about how you're gonna save water, especially how you just talked, you're going to do an irrigation system revamping for a golf course, a really water intensive endeavor. So these kinds of things could be addressed better with the public actually being able to participate in a more inclusionary manner. Please take that into account. Thank you, Mr. DeWitt. We'll go to Roger McConnell, followed by Dean Moser. Good evening, Mayor Rogers, members of the council. My clock didn't start. Now, anyhow, I wanted to talk to you about the mobile home issue we had here last week. I left here very appreciative of what you folks had done. I really thought we had done our best for our constituents in the parks. Then I got to looking at this 10% increase upon sale of the home. Because of our age and our health, we have a huge turnover in our communities. I have 15 homes on my block and only three of us have been there 20 years. Some houses in that length of time have turned over four times. At today's rate, that'd be $300 as a $750 average rent in my community. So the very people we were trying to help is those people on social security only, about 80% of them are women, and they're trying to get by on $1,700, $1,800 a month. It's gonna eliminate those people from being able to come into our community. They may have the much money to put on the house, but the income is not gonna qualify for their rent. Other than that, I thought we did great. We were very appreciative. I had another story to tell, but that's okay. We won't do that tonight. I just thank you for all your time. I did wanna thank Mr. Sawyer and Mr. Schweldhelm one last time, you guys. I won't be here next week when your last week comes around. I did bring Mrs. Jane Vendor Flowers. Once she retired, I probably won't bring you guys flowers, but you are very appreciative for your time. Thank you. Thank you, Roger. We'll go to Dean. Good evening. My name is Dean Moser, and I am the Executive Director of HCA Family Fund, which provided $336,000 per year to the Sonoma Community Action Partners to support their Santa Rosa Rental Assistance Program. This year through October, the program provided rents, mortgage payments, and deposits to help 357 families stay in their homes. HCA Property Management, of which I am president, is Manager of 25% of the mobile home rental spaces in Santa Rosa, and I'm here to put into the record several items of contention with regard to the proposed changes to the Santa Rosa Rent Control Ordinance. Staff Report states several meetings with park owners and residents. That's true, but the residents were unwilling to do anything but push for their demands and in fact walked out of the meetings. These meetings were held only to be able to say the party's meant. Council asked several questions regarding how the CPI was used in calculating rents. What was the MNOI? How was it calculated? How was the fair rate of return calculated? What was the cost of an MNOI application, among other things? Staff was not able to answer many of these questions, but nevertheless, Council plotted on. Park owners offered a replenishable $100,000 program to help those mobile home park residents who were rent challenged. Staff and Council erred in drafting the revised ordinance by deleting the seven parts noted in Section 50B where Section 40A references that section with regard to the Vega adjustment agreed to between the city and the park owners. Council has breached its own ordinance by making these changes as Section 40B required the ordinance not be reviewed until CPI was equal to or greater than 6%. It is interesting that the city of Santa Rosa is the only city in the state of California that has denied park owners an increase in their base rents that is allowed under their ordinance based on the November 2017 executive order. There may have even been issue with the Brown Act violation given the preparation of the final amendment of the proposed ordinance by Council member Natalie Rogers as required be read by the mayor and the sound bites iterated by both Council members Rogers and Alvarez. In conclusion, it is requested that the ordinance be pulled from the consent calendar. We managed to staff for answers to the Council's questions that were summarily dismissed and hiring a moderator to prepare a plan to support those mobile homes. Thank you, Dean. I see one hand on Zoom. It's Trey Pinner. Thank you, can you hear me okay? Yes, we can. Can we get Trey unmuted? Sorry about that, Trey. It went back and forth. You have me again? Yep, we've got you. Okay, thank you, Honorable Mayor and Council member. I too am calling to speak on item 12.5. My name is Trey Pinner. I'm involved with the management of two mobile home parks in Santa Rosa. I have followed with great interest the matter of the proposed modifications to chapter 66-6 of the city's municipal code. I think there are two important factors that I would like to address today. One, the original intent of the chapter 66-6 and unintended consequences of your proposed modifications to this chapter. First, the original intent of the mobile home rent control ordinance chapter 66-6 was not intended nor designed to be a subsidy. As stated in the ordinance in section 66.010K, to protect mobile home owners from arbitrary capricious and unreasonable site rent adjustments while ensuring owners and or operators and investors a fair rate and reasonable return, period. It is not the purpose of this chapter to preserve affordable housing, but rather to allow reasonable annual rent increases to protect mobile homes while providing a fair rate of return. As outlined in the ordinance, this proposal, the proposed of the rent control was to make sure that park owners would not abuse the situation that a mobile home is not really all that mobile and limited the supply of sites and the end cause of the limited supply of sites. Therefore, the ordinance was established to provide protection against rent gouging. You cannot tell me that raising the rent at the same pace as the cost of living is rent gouging. Frankly, raising the rents at the same pace as CPI simply ensures that the park owner is receiving the same purchasing power as it bargained for at the start of the lease. Second issue, unintended consequences. The council seems to have a naive belief that since there has not been a fair rate of return hearing, the park owners must be satisfied with their return and therefore the council has said, let's see if we can push the limits and modify the ordinance for a fourth time. In addition, the city has stated that they have enough money to fight these challenges, so let's give it a try. I think you should be aware and direct staff to provide you with the evidence of other fair rate of return hearings around the state and learn what the actual costs and typical challenges have resulted for residents. Oftentimes challenges range in the range of 75 to $300 per space per month. Council members, are you prepared to push the limit and find out that residents of a park will potentially see this type of increase as a result of not following the staff recommendations and making these modifications to the ordinance without the appropriate facts? I understand your concern regarding the high cost of housing in California. It is expensive, but it's not the job of the park owners to provide a subsidized rent at a rate less than the cost of living. Thank you for your attention to this matter. Thank you, Trey. We'll go to Ken, followed by Doug. Thank you. Can you hear me? Yes, we can. Excellent. My name is Ken Cravenaugh and I represent the Orchard, a 233 site mobile home park on Piner Road. I respectfully ask the city council to postpone consent item number 12, 12.5, the adoption of the amendments to the Santa Rosa Mobile Home Park Rent Control Ordinance. Last week, city staff made an excellent presentation about the Santa Rosa Rent Control Ordinance. City staff recommended adjustments to the ordinance, which tried to strike a reasonable balance. Although I do not agree with the staff proposal, I understand that it was a compromise. It was based on intimate knowledge of Santa Rosa's mobile home parks and the needs of the residents. Council asked many valid and important questions. Some of the staff could answer on the spot and others that required more time to research. Many council members expressed interest in learning more about the fair return rent increase process. It's unfortunate that the council voted to amend the city's mobile home rent ordinance without giving city staff the time or the opportunity to perform adequate research and report back to the council. It's even more unfortunate that council decided to ignore staff recommendations and propose amendments that are sure to result in unintended consequences. Earlier today I provided all council members with documentation of three separate fair rate of return hearings that occurred in another rent control jurisdiction. A park owner was awarded over $330 per site per month of permanent increases in rent after proving that the restrictions in the ordinance did not allow the park to generate a fair rate of return. At last week's meeting, some council members mentioned that they were voting in favor of amending the Santa Rosa ordinance because they would rather err on the side of being overly restrictive on rents. Even if that meant there would be a higher probability of a fair return rent increase application. Additional comments were made about learning a lot from that first fair rate fair return application. I understand that those comments come from a desire to protect current residents. But as you can see from the information that I've provided, there is a real risk that the outcome of the fair return application is a rent increase that is well above what residents have been used to in the past. And it's the residents, not the council that may feel that impact. A vote to approve the proposed amendments to the Santa Rosa Rec and Control Ordinance will almost certainly produce multiple fair rate of return applications. I believe postponing a second reading of the proposed amendments to the Mobile Home Rec and Control Ordinance will allow city staff the time they need to gather the research needed to make a recommendation that ensures the most vulnerable residents are taken care of without risking the unintended consequences of a fair rate of return hearing. Thank you very much. Thank you Ken. We'll go to Doug followed by Greg. Can you guys hear me? Yes, we can. Okay, sorry about that. Good evening, Mayor City Council members and all others present. My name is Doug Hood. I'm the CEO of HCA Property Management. Thank you for the opportunity to speak tonight on item 12.5. My intent is to express my deepest concerns regarding the decision that was made last week regarding the rent control ordinance. Hastily a decision was made. One committee member stated a feel good decision was made which overturned the recommendation by the city staff. I have 40 years of management experience and my job as well as your job responsibility is the city council members is to make decisions, good decisions and fair decisions between all parties. The decision between the made last week was a poor decision and it will impact over 2,000 Santa Rosa residences. Here are the facts and the unintended consequences of the five in favor to oppose vote. Council relied on information that was only one petition for a fair rate of return study by landlords. Thus given the impression the landlords were receiving a fair rate of return since 2001. This is not true. Landlords continue to apply for applications. Prior to the 2001 amendment, five applications went to the mobile home park board hearing. Two of the five went to council hearing. After the 2001 amendment, nine petitions were made. Eight of the nine were settled prior to our arbitration. One went to arbitration and superior court. The council suggest a full court press for fair rate of return study which may have dire financial consequences for the tenant. And those in form understand the resident will bear the tremendous financial burden of the results. Not the city council members. Fact, at this time city council and staff have not presented landlords with the fair rate of return applications after being asked numerous times. Fact, 357 recipients of Santa Rosa will not receive the family fund next year. This funding has been provided to the needy of Santa Rosa over the past 26 years. Fact, tenants scoffed at the $100,000 voluntary subsidy fund per year to help provide rental assistance. As for now, it's off the table. We are all aware of the homeless crisis. Proposal, if the city wants to help seniors, then re-institute the redevelopment agency to provide funding to the housing authority to make direct payment to the needy residents. This program was suspended in 1990. Conclusion, pull the decision on the rec control ordinance for the consent calendar and reconsider. Do the right and simple thing tonight. Work with an informed arbitrator to make the right decision and reevaluate last week's decision. We know this is not an easy decision, but please find wisdom in the landlord statements tonight. I have faith you will make the right decision for all. Thank you. Thank you, Doug. Do we have any prerecorded voicemails? We have no voicemails for this item. OK, I'll bring it back. Councilmember Fleming, if you'd like to put a motion on the table, please. Yes, thank you, Mayor. I'll move items 12.1 through 12.5 and waive for the reading of the text. Second. Do we have any additional comments from councilmembers? OK, Madam City Clerk, please call the vote. Councilmember Schwedhelm. Aye. Councilmember Sawyer. Aye. Councilmember Rogers. Aye. Councilmember McDonald. Aye. Councilmember Fleming. Aye. Vice Mayor Alvarez. Mayor Rogers. Aye. That motion passes with six ayes with Vice Mayor Alvarez being absent. Thank you. Madam City Manager, let's go on to item 15.1, our public hearing tonight. Item 15.1, a public hearing, Jane dispensary appeal, City Planner Hartman will lead the discussion. Hello, can you hear me? Yes, we can. All right. Good evening, Mayor and councilmembers. My name is Suzanne Hartman, and I am one of the few new faces in the Plain Division. It's nice to officially meet all of you. The item before you this evening is the appeal of Jane dispensary, a conditional use permit to operate a cannabis dispensary with delivery at 4040 Highway 12, alternatively known as Sonoma Highway. Next slide, please. The project site is located within an existing multi-tenant commercial building and is surrounded by residential and some commercial properties as seen here on the project site location map. Next slide, please. So some general background for this conditional use permit application was that it was submitted in August of last year, and a neighborhood meeting was then held on November 22nd of 2021. The application was then deemed complete in August of this year, and a notice of public hearing, my apologies, not notice of application, was mailed out on September 9th, and the application was reviewed and approved by the Planning Commission on September 22nd, 2022, and an appeal was received by city staff on October 3rd, 2022, and I did want to add that the notice of public hearing for the appeal of Jane dispensary was mailed out a few weeks prior to this meeting, and I did receive two comments that I just wanted to quickly address. One comment was just of general support of upholding the Planning Commission's approval for the use permit, and the other public comment was in support of the appeal, generally stating the concern of the dispensary being in close proximity to children living in the surrounding residential areas, the concern of increase in crime, loitering, and on-site consumption, and just to address some of those concerns, there was no on-site consumption being proposed for the dispensary, and the applicant will have security personnel on-site during the hours of operation that would monitor the activities on the premises. Additionally, the project is conditioned to comply with all city requirements for cannabis businesses found in zoning code section 20-46. The cannabis ordinance also does not regulate the setbacks to residential uses, but it is regulated by the cannabis ordinance for the distance from schools and distance of operating cannabis dispensaries, and it was found that this proposed dispensary was located more than 600 feet from schools in this general area and other operating dispensaries, which makes this consistent with the required regulations. Next slide, please. And again, here's some more general background information in regards to the application. The applicant proposes to operate a cannabis retail facility with delivery within an existing commercial building, the retail hours proposed were 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., some days of week, and the applicant is not proposing on-site consumption. Next slide, please. So the appellant has provided the following six grounds for appeal. The planning commission did not consider at the applicant's past history of hosting consumption in the dispensaries, and the planning commission did not consider at the outstanding code enforcement action pending against the application for violations of a similar project complicated by the proposed conditional use permit. And the project's reports, including what's stated here, the odor control, traffic safety impact, and neighborhood compatibility of the project, did not consider the impacts associated with on-site cannabis consumption. And lastly, the staff report presentation and the application specifically state no on-site consumption is proposed despite the applicant's history of on-site consumption in stores within Santa Rosa. Next slide, please. In response, the applicant did state in their project description that no on-site consumption was proposed as such no operational plan, security protocols, or specific extensions of such provision is required of the applicant. And as part of the staff's analysis of the conditional use permit application, there was a review of city records, including any pending code enforcement violations. And as of the dates that the application was submitted in August of last year, there are no open code enforcement cases related to the property at 4040 Highway 12. City code section 20.050.080, section A5A, sorry, that's a mouthful, states that the director shall not find an application complete and shall not process the application any further if conditions exist on the site in violation of the zoning code, or any permit or other approval, sorry, or other approval granted in compliance with the zoning code, unless the project proposed in the application includes the correction of the violations. And as previously noted, after a thorough review of city records, there were no existing zoning code violations found on the sub or open on the subject site, or in the other site that the appellant is referring to. Next slide, please. The following required findings were found both by staff and the planning commission. The proposed use is allowed within the applicable zoning district, which is neighborhood commercial, and it complies with all other applicable provisions of this zoning code and the city code. The proposed use is consistent with the general plan and any applicable specific plan specifically policies related to economic vitality and the associated retail and business services land use as the addiction. And then number three, the design, location, size and operating characteristics of the proposed activity would be compatible with the existing and future land uses into the vicinity and that's the general operating requirements for cannabis businesses and the operating requirements specific to medical and adult use cannabis, retail dispensaries are in compliance. Next slide, please. Number four, the site is physically suitable for this type density and intensity of use being proposed in that the proposed use will be located entirely within an existing commercial building. And number five, granting the permit would not constitute the nuisance or be injurious or detrimental to the public interest, health, safety, convenience or welfare, et cetera, in that the applicant has provided an odor mitigation plan and a security plan and there are no schools or established cannabis dispensaries within 600 feet of the subject property. Next slide, please. And the proposed project has been reviewed in compliance with the California Environmental Quality Act which qualifies for the following exemptions, class one in that the project is located within existing structure involving a negligible expansion of an existing use that is not in result of significant impacts. Class three in that the project involves a change of use which will require only minor interior modifications to the structure slash site and class 32 infill development projects. Next slide, please. So it is recommended by the planning commission and the planning and economic development department that the council by resolution deny the appeal of the appellant and uphold the planning commission's decision to approve a conditional use permit for Jane dispensary, a cannabis retail facility occupying a 1,997 square foot space within an existing multi-tenant commercial building located at 4040 Highway 12. Next slide, please. Any questions that you may have here is my contact information and the applicant Mario Tamo is also available to answer any questions. Thank you. Okay, council. Do we have any questions for Suzanne? Council member McDonald. Thank you and thank you for the presentation. I have a question on the application you said is for no consumption on site. Is that correct? Correct. And then what happens if there actually is consumption on site? What do we do? Like, what's the punishment? Do we pull the permit or what happens in that case? It is to my knowledge that we have, if say if there is a report like that goes to code enforcement and they review that case. And I believe if there does happen to be evidence of there being on site consumption, there are fines. I don't know if Amy or Jess is on the line if they wanna answer further to that department. Thank you. I do see Jessica Jones' hand is up. If we can promote Jessica. Yes, good evening council members. Jessica Jones, deputy director of planning. Yeah, so just to help clarify Suzanne got it correct. If there is use is happening on the site that are not part of the approval process. Typically we would find out that through a violation complaint and that would go through our code enforcement. And we do have the ability through the conditions of approval to ultimately, I'm trying to, I'm blanking on the word that I want right now but the, you know, their condition use could become invalid. But ultimately it would go through code enforcement and the city would require the applicant to go through the process to amend their use permit to add on site consumption if that is what they choose to do. Great, and then my other question was you mentioned that it's not within 600 feet from a school which is part of our ordinance and what our recommendations are. Could you tell me exactly how far it is from the nearest school? I do not have that information with me at this very moment. We do have a general, let me just, we do have a general map that we can provide that shows the location of operating dispensaries. I don't think we typically look at how far it is specifically just to like one particular school. I can, Council members, I can look that information up if that is something that you'd like to have done. It would take me just a few moments. I think that's helpful since that's part of our ordinance when it comes to dispensaries that we know and just make sure that we're within that set ordinance. Thank you. Okay, yep, just one moment. Well, staff finds that. We'll see if there's any additional questions. Council Member Rogers. Yes, thank you, Suzanne and welcome. I see that you said, you believe in August, 2021, when the application was submitted, there were no violations or complaints. So my question is, if the application were to be submitted today with the city, would we find, would we have the same findings or just simply does Jane dispensary have a history of on-site consumption and other jurisdictions? And if so, where does that violation stand at this time? Yes, so there are no open code enforcement cases for this project site for the other sites that there currently is another Jane dispensary. There was an open code enforcement case, but it is now closed and it was considered I'm not entirely sure if I'm supposed to say the results of the case since I did not review the case, but it is now currently closed. So there are no open code enforcement violations for either site that has been mentioned. Madam City Attorney, am I allowed to know the... Yes, I would presume that the resolution of the code enforcement case is a matter of public record. Yes, so the code enforcement case was determined in conclusive or the, I should say the evidence that was provided for the case was determined in conclusive. I don't know if Amy wants to add to that. Hi, good evening, mayor and members of the council, Amy Nicholson. I just would add that Suzanne and I did meet with a member of the code enforcement team to review the history of that code enforcement complaint that was filed on the Jane dispensary site located on Armory Drive. They did go about their typical investigation and were not able to confirm that a violation had taken place. And so they did work with the applicant and they went ahead and closed that case. So that's the information I can provide. And if I may, council members, I do have the answer to the question of the nearest school. It looks like the nearest school to the subject site, it's about 3,000 feet away at, it's the Slater Middle School. Thank you for that information, thanks. Okay, any other questions from council? All right, let's go ahead and disclose expert day communications before we go into the presentations. Council member sir. Thank you, mayor. I did have a conversation with the planning commission chair. And council member Schwedem. Yes, I also had a conversation with the chair of the planning commission, but the information obtained is all contained in the public document. And council member Fleming. I have not had any communications with anybody outside of receiving emails which I believe were directed to all council members and the rest of the information contained in the council packet. Okay, council member McDonald. I received no communications and had no communications around this item. Council member Rogers. I had communication with my appointee for the planning commission. And I have no expert day communications to disclose, so no additional information from what's in the presentation. With that, do we have an applicant presentation? Yes, good evening. Can everybody hear me? And I do see really fast if I can before you do your presentation, I do see that the chair of the planning commission has their hand up and is on zoom. So chair weeks, if you want to make a couple of comments before we get into the applicant presentation, that'd be great. Good evening, mayor Rogers and members of the council. As mentioned, my name's Karen Weeks and I'm chair of planning commission. I'm here today to provide you with a brief overview of the commission's actions as it relates to this item. As previously stated on September 22nd, 2022, the commission reviewed this item. All members of the commission were present at the time. Our role as planning commission is that we are charged with carrying out California planning and zoning laws within the city of Santa Rosa, including implementation of ordinances and policies relating to land use matters. We have been reviewing cannabis conditional use permits for several years now and have reviewed and approved over three dozen within our community. When we reviewed this application, we did so in accordance with the applicable zoning code and city policies. And the application was consistent with policies laid out for the cannabis business. And I would like to also mention that council can rest assured that when we review these applications, we do review them based upon the applicable ordinance, including the distance from schools. So I just wanted to assure you of that. It's been council's direction to treat the now legal cannabis business as any other legal business. During the public hearing, we heard from two members of the public, both in opposition, who live behind the facility. The commissioners approved the conditional use permit with a seven zero vote. The issue of code enforcement complaint, which is the subject of this appeal tonight, was not raised nor was the appellant present at the meeting. As stated by the staff report, the code enforcement complaint was for a different site and was therefore not applicable to the consideration of the CUP as reviewed by the commission, even if it had been raised. If you have any questions, I'm happy to answer them. Just let me know. Thank you. Council, do we have any questions for the chair? All right, thank you so much, Madam Chair. All right, sir, go ahead. Thank you. I thank you, Mayor. Can you hear me? Yes, we can. Great. I'm gonna ask first Suzanne Hartman from Planning. I had afforded her PowerPoint presentation. I'm hoping that she can pull that up. It's a very brief presentation that just could accompany my presentation. I'm sorry, but she cannot pull up the presentation. Nothing was sent to the clerk's office, and so we are the ones who advance presentations. There should have been a presentation provided. If we take a brief recess, can we locate the presentation and load it? I have it on a flash drive as well, if that would be easier. Suzanne, can you email me the PPT version of the presentation and we'll get it loaded up? Thank you. All right, we'll take a five-minute recess. Is that enough time? Yeah, that should be enough time. Thank you, Mayor. We'll take a five-minute recess and we'll be back. Ready, John? All right, let's go ahead and bring us back. Madam City Clerk, please call the roll. Thank you, Mayor. Just one Council Member Schwedhelm. Here. Council Member Sawyer. Council Member Rogers. Present. Council Member McDonald. Here. Council Member Fleming. Here. Mayor Rogers. Here. Let the record show that all Council Members are present with the exception of Vice Mayor Alvarez. Okay, and we left off, we are going into the applicant presentations, and so that's Mario and Leanne, who I believe are on Zoom. Hello, Council Members. Can I, I'm going back and forth between mute and not. Can everybody hear me? Yes, I can hear you. Okay, so I'm happy to run through the appeal response that we created, but it can be summed up very succinctly in that the appeal stems from a complaint saying that they were looking at Instagram, seeing employees and vendors and patrons smoking inside the dispensary, which is patently false. That would be on-site consumption and we've never had on-site consumption within the dispensary. That would be in flagrant disregard for our CUP all the way up to our state license. We own two operating dispensaries here in town, one on Armory Drive and one in Katadi, and we actually own another operating dispensary, which we've owned for a few years now in St. Louis, Missouri. And so we're very familiar with state regulations and we, again, the allegation of smoking inside the dispensary is 100% false. Do we have any additional comments from Leanne? Nothing from me, no. Okay, and are you with the applicant team or the appellant team? Okay, we'll come to you in a few minutes. Council, do you have any questions for the applicant? I do, if you don't mind, Mario. So I understand that the basis of the appeal is the allegation around on-site consumption, and I understand you're categorically denying it, but I do wanna ask you about a press Democrat article from April 20th. The direct quote that I'm going to read for you says, the dispensary was buzzing as local acts DJ Techni and DJ Armin played house music and old school hip hop as clouds of smoke filled the air. And then the press Democrat reporter has pictures of people vaporizing, and it says in the caption that it is on-site April 20th, 2022. 100% false. I knew you were gonna read that line from the article and I was as surprised as my entire team was to read that. The pictures that were there are not in the dispensary. The further the pictures, all of which have white walls, there's not a single white wall in the dispensary. So I'm not here to speak any ill of the press Democrat, or I suspect they're reporting and I really enjoy local reporting. They've actually been a great advocate of ours for our recent opening in Katadi as well as others. And this one is completely false. They do have a history of not getting things correct as far as who's involved and what locations. And I've never been consulted once by the press Democrat on any of the articles that have came out about us. So there was never on-site consumption inside the dispensary ever. Okay, thank you. Any other questions from council? Okay, we'll go to the appellant's presentation. And then after the appellant's presentation, the applicant will have a chance to rebut as well. The council, my name is Peter Spurl and I'm an attorney with Raggiani Freitas and San Rafael. I'm here tonight on behalf of an interested member of the city's retail cannabis industry to ask that you grant the appeal that's before you and to deny the issuance of the conditional use permit for operation of the adult use facility by Jane dispensary at 4040 Highway 12. The basis of the appeal is simple and it does really rely on the applicants demonstrated and documented, well-documented history of non-compliance with the city's comprehensive cannabis ordinance. Can you move the slide up, please? Again, this is just a summary of the appeal, but essentially we're asking that you would overturn the planning commission September 22nd 2022 approval of the CUP for the dispensary at 4040 Highway 12 based on the applicant's prior business practices. We recognize it's a little unusual to be relying on past behaviors in different facilities to form the basis of a denial of a CUP. But we nonetheless, in looking over the applicant's history and in looking over the numerous social media and journalistic reporting on the facility seems to strongly suggest that these practices are taking place and we believe that it really results in an unfair business practice against our client and other similarly situated businesses in the Santa Rosa cannabis industry. Next slide, please. So again, the grounds of the appeal were pretty well laid out by Suzanne, but we're essentially arguing that there has been hosted consumption on site. I would note in response to the applicant's statement that it's not just smoking that's prohibited in on-site consumption, but also consumption of any edibles. So even if there weren't smoking, and again, we believe there's ample evidence that there has been at the prior facility, even on-site consumption of edibles would be prohibited under the city's regulatory ordinance. We believe that the planning commission failed to consider this on-site hosting and also were not informed of the pending code enforcement action. We understand that that complaint was resolved due to a lack of evidence, but of course it's difficult to ascertain whether or not something's happened after the fact. And we suspect there probably wasn't enough documentary evidence to sustain the code enforcement complaint that doesn't mean that it didn't happen or that indeed other violations of the on-site hosting have not been occurring. Similarly, we think that this failure to introduce that the planning commission hearing resulted in an inadequate study of noise and neighborhood impacts. And the staff report also stated that no on-site consumption is proposed and that may well be the case, but again, we believe that there's adequate evidence to suggest because the application is virtually identical to their other facility on Armory Avenue that these practices will continue in the new site. Next slide, please. These are just a couple of the press clippings and social media postings that show the type of activities we're concerned about. It may be that this picture is out of context and that there's no smoking on-site. That would be clearly in violation of the city's anti-smoking ordinance, but again, on-site consumption of edibles, which is clearly advertised both in the social media posting there and also in the press democats article would be prohibited under the conditions of approval. And we just believe that where there's smoke, there's fire, so to speak. If you look at these numerous social media and reporting instances of this kind of activity, it seems logical to conclude that they may be continuing those practices in their new facility. You know, I want to just clarify. The main purpose of this appeal isn't anti-competitive. Our client isn't simply concerned that, it is simply concerned that businesses and permittees operating under the city's comprehensive cannabis policy they should be bound by and comply with the same operational and use regulations to ensure a level playing field. This particular applicant's documented history of violations reflects poorly on Santa Rosa's retail cannabis business community. And to reward this applicant with another use permit also negatively impacts community confidence in the city's enforcement of its own land use regulations. I'm available and happy to answer any questions, but we appreciate your consideration. It's a matter, thank you. Thank you so much, Councilor. Are there any questions for the appellant? Seeing none, I'll give the applicant a chance to respond. My response is I'm unsure how to rebut something that is 100% false. I don't know what to say other than to invite the appellant and the press Democrat into the facility, which I'm happy to do, to show how silly this is. There is no evidence at all of onsite consumption, edibles or otherwise, because it has never occurred ever. I'd like to jump in just after these claims were filed against us. We had the DCC come in and do an audit and I personally walked our compliance officer through the whole day of video footage and he deemed it clear. So he looked at the actual footage for that day that were being charged and there was zero consumption. So, and also to elaborate on that, the complaint about onsite consumption is what initiated the random inspection generated by the state, which we welcome any inspection by the state whenever they want to. They don't even have to give us notice as far as I'm concerned, but that was deemed completely clear. The code enforcement issue also brought about a health inspection, which was deemed completely clear and due to the looking for some evidence, somehow of onsite consumption. And then further, the code enforcement employees came out, we met both of them and spoke to them about what happened and they left and closed the code enforcement complaint. I didn't even know there was an open code enforcement complaint that would be grounds for this appeal. So I'm happy to answer any further questions. I appreciate the appellants response to have a level playing field, but this has cost us time and money and delays that are unwarranted and it's for something that's completely false. It's, I don't know how else to say. Okay, I appreciate that. And from the Instagram posts that was put up where it says stop by between 10 a.m. and 7 p.m. for tasting stations, what are tasting stations? I'm happy to answer that, but go ahead, Leigh Ann, if you'd like to. They're just unmedicated. So typically we'll have people, some of our brands that are interested in getting their, having more knowledge about their brand and so they'll bring in unmedicated samples. So that's gummies, drinks, you know, all of that. And it's just an opportunity to taste the product without any cannabis. Okay, bringing back for questions from council, council member Fleming. I do have a question. So I'm looking at the press Democrat article on slide one of eight, it says it's at a booth. Does that mean that this was held at an alternate location as you're claiming that this was not, what we're seeing is not at your location might be helpful to tell us where it was held at. The pictures that were in the article are unrecognizable. I don't know where that is the, and it appears that that one picture of somebody of using a vaporizer, I don't know if that's a stock photo or not. Okay, the other question I have is I don't know if a code complaint was generated about it, but I did notice, and I think others did as well, some advertising sandwich boards on Mendocino Avenue in front of the junior college. And I'm just curious to know if you have plans to meet more compliant with our advertising codes as you move forward. We do, and we did receive that complaint. And I was unaware that that was against the rules. So we pulled them immediately and don't do that anymore. So then that begs the question. How do you plan to be more aware of the rules? I would say that the rules that we are extremely aware of are those that hinge on our license and our livelihood such as on-site consumption. A miscue in the sandwich board ordinances is something that we take seriously and we do wanna comply. But I don't think that's in comparison with the allegation of flagrant disregard for conditional use permits and state licenses. Okay, thank you. Any other questions from council? Council Member McDonald. Thank you. I just wanna go back to the use of an edible that is on site for tasting. I wasn't aware that they had made edibles that didn't have THC or cannabis in them for tasting. Can you just explain that further? That's not something I've ever heard in the past. Yeah, so as you know, the industry is very competitive and everyone is touting that they have the best tasting, this best tasting product. So what they'll do is they'll make a run that is just, they omit all of the THC. So they can hand that out at festivals. They can hand that out at stores. So what we occasionally do on site demos with our partners, with our suppliers and they can have those edibles or drinks without cannabis available to the public so they can taste it. It's just the same formula without the THC and it's a pretty common practice in the industry. Thank you. Council Member Rogers. So you're handing out candy? Is what I hear you saying? Candy and soda. Sorry, I just wanted to clarify. Yeah, I agree. Also, I did have a question. I was also looking at the Press Democrat article. If you did have the Sonoma County Humane Society there with the little dogs that would have been so cute, but why when this article was published, why didn't your business go to retract what was being said in the article if it in fact did not represent your business or your practices, your business practices? The answer to that question is we should have and as a partner that's an oversight on my part and I take responsibility for that. We had a great article that came out a week or so ago about our new store in Katahdi which we'd love for everybody to come take a look at if that interests you. There were a lot of inconsistencies in that article as well such as Who I Am and My Involvement. Leanne was listed as a CEO which she is extremely skilled and could very well be, but that is not her title. And so there were other inconsistencies there that we overlooked, but you're correct. When that article came out, we should have put a stop to it and I will reach out to the Press Democrat and inform them about Who I Am and Who Leanne is and hopefully we can have a little bit better of a relationship from here moving forward. All right, let's go to public comment on this item. I'll open our hearing. Mr. DeWitt, looks like you're up first. DeWitt, I was curious about a comment made by Planning Commissioner Karen Weeks. She stated earlier, 3,000 applications were reviewed by the Planning Commission in Santa Rosa and I think it's confusing to me to see mean 3,000 different types of applications reviewed by the Planning Commission because I don't think 3,000 dispensary applications have gone forward and I wanted to know how many cannabis dispensaries do we have now and does the city have a cap on it? Like I'm all for I guess letting the loadies loose wherever you want to now you put a dispensary over in Roseland recently and said, hey, business comes first no matter what the community says. There were dozens of youth from our Roseland community came and said, hey, we don't want this, we don't need it. And I remember Councilwoman Fleming specifically saying, hey, it's a business and we've given this business permission and business has to go forward. So how about telling us how many of these businesses exist in Santa Rosa now and how many will be allowed? I mean, I'm pretty cool that I guess now it's totally legal apparently and you can just go forward with as many as you want but how about letting the public know where we're going with it? It does seem odd that folks who engage in this type of business activity wouldn't have employees that occasionally might sample the product. I don't know what type of work you might have done when you were teenagers or where you were growing up but it's not inconceivable that some folks might break the rules. It might be often the break room having a little bit of a taste of what the product is. So I hear this man vehemently saying, oh, there's no way this could never happen and that's not our place. But you just have to look at it for what it is. Lodies do what loadies wanna do and if you're selling what loadies want some of those loadies might be tasting it out at your site. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Duit. Is there anybody else in the chamber who'd like to provide comment? Okay, we'll go to Zoom. First hand I see is Johnna followed by Paul. Hello, can you hear me? Yes, we can. Thank you. So I would like to invite any of you including Suzanne to come over and walk our neighborhood. 600 feet is not that far. And so I think that discernment in this case is what is needed. There's a playground that's probably just about 600 feet. From this proposed site. Our house is less than 600 feet. Two elderly care facilities are right next to this site. And I don't know what on-site consumption means if it's within the facility or in the parking lot or on the street next to our house or in the parking lot next to the facilities that house elderly and dementia patients. But I think the regulations were set up so that people who couldn't speak for themselves such as children and the elderly would be protected. And that's not what's happening here. So I would respectfully ask that you use discernment and deciding whether or not this facility should be allowed to operate in this small community. Less than one minute walk away is Flat Rock where we already have individuals who come to party. And it's not a place that we should have an additional dispensary. We already have two within a few blocks of this community. And our community is not set up for that. We're a family community and we would love to have you come walk through our community and see what it's like. Thank you. Thank you, Johnna. We'll go to Paul, followed by resident 3384. Greetings to the council. This is Paul. I am a neighbor as well. I'd like to, based on what I've been listening to here on this discussion, I'd like to suggest that perhaps this use permit be delayed until some things can be cleared up. The first flag I see is the fact that Jane dispensary doesn't seem to be aware of when they have a code violation. And that's a little bothersome. The second flag is we have an article from a press Democrat where DJs and on-site consumption have apparently allegedly occurred. It would be nice to have that article or perhaps the author of that article verify that information. The third thing is, and I apologize, I don't recall hearing this specifically, but if on-site consumption is an issue, then why not amend the permit so that it is specifically forbidden? That way, if neighbors happen to take pictures of a couple of DJs and some people whoopin' it up in the parking lot, then the enforcement division can do what they're supposed to do. Those are my comments. Thank you very much. Thank you, Paul. We'll go to resident 3384. Good evening. Can you hear me? Yes, we can. Right. My name is Bill Breland, I too am a resident. Our home is right behind where the proposed business is to go. A lot of my comments were the same concerns voiced by my neighbors in the community. I think sometimes that while the Planning Commission does a very good job enforcing the way that the code is written specifically in regards to the 600 foot setback for schools, I think sometimes what's lost on people is why that particular rule exists. The previous neighbor that I have said it very well is protect children, which we have right in our own neighborhood. And yes, we're not a school, but at the same time, I think the spirit of that rule is not being recognized with this applicant. I'm not against the business, I'm very pro-business. I just feel like this location, number one, it's over-density and it's not appropriate for our neighborhood. The last thing I'd like to maybe bring up is I feel like the process that we were able to go through to voice these concerns via the Planning Commission meeting and also the first information meeting, nobody really took our concerns to heart, I feel. Again, it's nothing against the business. I understand what they're trying to do and I understand what the commission's trying to do. We were even told that the commission is in favor of increasing the density of cannabis retail sites in Santa Rosa. Like the first gentleman said, how many do we need? Anyway, I appreciate your time. Thank you so much. Nope, thank you. I believe Parker would come on up. Good evening, council. Thank you so much for, I know that it wasn't really a choice to have this hearing, but as a member of the Flat Rock community, it is really valuable just to be able to be here and hear the perspectives of the business, the dispensary, and also the filing of the application and the different concerns that were voiced. As my name is Parker Stagnoli, that was my dad who spoke earlier, Paul, and I'm a 17-year-old. I don't consume cannabis products, nor do I intend to in my adult life. So rather selfishly, I don't see this project as having a whole lot of benefit to our community, but I understand it's greater than that, right? This is a business, and the business has to operate. Still, I think that this type of project could potentially have some sort of effect on our community, right? And I don't think that's hard to see. So I really would have a small ask of the city council. I don't think I'm really well educated enough to speak on the pros and cons of having a dispensary in this location or the building codes or that type of thing, but I just have a small ask, and that's that if in any some way the council could perhaps follow up six months a year after this project, if it is approved, if you do choose to reject the appeal here, just to see if gather some more qualitative data and see if maybe members of the community have noticed a change in the traffic in our community, maybe noticed on-site consumption, noticed odor, that type of thing. I think that at the end of the day, it seems to be a fairly unprecedented location for dispensary just like pulling up dispensaries in Santa Rosa on Google Maps. There aren't a whole lot that are right out front of neighborhood and also next to an assisted living facility. So I think that while I'm not innately opposed to this project, again, I understand that Jane dispensaries of business and they have to advance their goals. I just think that it would be smart to use this as a learning opportunity if the council does choose to allow Jane dispensary to move forward with a plan and just see what type of impact this will have, see whether we'll notice any sort of changes in our community just from the residents within, since I think that's the best way to gather that information. So thank you. Thank you, Parker. Thank you for being here. Anybody else who'd like to speak on the item? Do we have any pre-recorded voicemails? We have no pre-recorded voicemails. Okay, I will close the public hearing. I'm going to bring it back. Madam City Attorney. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I just, I did want to note and remind council that although our code allows you to consider code violations that are on the property of the proposed project, our code does not allow you to consider alleged code violations on other properties when you make your decision on this particular project and this particular location. Again, the issue of onsite consumption is addressed in the conditions of approval and violations as planning staff indicated any violations would be referred over to code enforcement and there are a number of different ramifications that could come from any potential violation. So just given the number of questions and amount of discussion that came up regarding what was happening at the dispensary at the other location, I just wanted to give that reminder. So thank you. Thank you, Madam City Attorney. Are there any additional questions? Council Member Sawyer. Thank you, Mayor. This is not a question, but I wanted to correct something that Mr. DeWitt said. I'm not sure what he was listening to, but the chairman of the planning commission mentioned that they had reviewed three dozen cannabis dispensaries or manufacturers. So what she said was three dozen. All right, Council Member McDonald, if you'd like to put a motion on the table. Thank you, Mayor. I move by resolution of the council that the city of Santa Rosa deny and appeal and uphold the decision of the planning commission approving a conditional use permit for the Jane dispensary to allow a 1,997 square foot of cannabis retail facility dispensary with delivery located at 4040 Highway 12, Sonoma Highway, file number CUP 21-071 and waive for the reading of the text. Second. We have a motion from Council Member McDonald and a second from Council Member Sawyer. Are there any comments from Council? Council Member McDonald. Thank you. I think that it would be in order for us to review the ordinance as it's come forward. There were many comments made about potential issues if something happens to any of our dispensaries. So I think it's time that we actually review that. We look at the setback from homes or potentially schools and there's probably a few other things that need to be updated as this moves forward. So I'd like to just maybe entertain the idea to Council that we bring that ordinance back for review in the future. Okay, we can definitely add that discussion to our goal setting for next year. Any additional questions or comments? You have comments or no? I do, but I was just gonna say it was in regard to a comment that was made by one of the public comment, but I can only discern that what is good for one neighborhood is good for another neighborhood. And if anything, my hesitation would be the on-site consumption that if they do it in one place, if they would do it for another, but I think our city attorney made it very clear about what we can do and what we cannot do. But there are so many unanswered questions and more just of a brush off like, well, it wasn't us and that was it. So I'm not very happy with the answers that we received tonight as far as the on-site consumption. Obviously it was the dispensary that either threw a party at their location or threw a party somewhere else without permits. I would think because they can't furnish those or say that this is where it was. So it's just more questions than answers. But one thing that I do know that if it looks like a dog and it barks like a dog, then it probably is a dog. We just can't prove it or go forth with anything with that. So it's a little frustrating. Thanks. Any other comments? Adam Clerk, please call the vote. Council Member Schwedhelm. Aye. Council Member Sawyer. Aye. Council Member Rogers. Aye. Council Member McDonald. No. Council Member Fleming. Aye. Mayor Rogers. No. That motion passes with four ayes. Mayor Rogers and Council Member McDonald voting no and Vice Mayor Alvarez being absent. Okay. Thank you so much, everybody. We are going to take a 30 minute dinner break and we'll come back at 7.30. All right, council. Let's go ahead and bring us back. Madam City Clerk, please call the roll. Thank you, Mayor. Council Member Schwedhelm. Aye. Council Member Sawyer. Aye. Council Member Rogers. Aye. Council Member McDonald. Aye. Council Member Fleming. Aye. Mayor Rogers. Aye. Let the record show that all council members are present with the exception of Vice Mayor Alvarez. Perfect. I'll go ahead and jump back to item number five on our agenda. It's our report out for our study and closed sessions. I'll just disclose for our closed sessions. We did do a performance review discussion for the city manager position. There's nothing additional to disclose at this time and no action was taken. We have no proclamations tonight. Let's go to our staff briefings, Madam City Manager. Oh, hold on, I wasn't ready. So item 7.1 is the Community Empowerment Plan Update. Deputy Director Tellus will present the report. Thank you. Excuse me. Good evening, Mayor Roger, members of the council. My colleague is here. With a very, very quick update for the Community Empowerment Plan, we would like to invite the community on January 19th at 6 p.m. to learn more about our wonderful in response team and all the great work that they've been doing in the community in the year that they've been out doing work. So at LCL in high school, we will be again January 19th from six to eight. We invite the community to come out, ask questions, any concerns or thoughts that they may have and also learn about all the work in Brown that has been covered by in response. So the Office of Community Engagement will be there in response, we'll be there. There'll be an opportunity to interact with the in response staff. So we do invite community to come out for that and that is the end of the Community Empowerment Plan report. Thank you, Deputy Director. Let me see if there are any questions from council members. Thank you so much. And item 7.2, it is the Hearn Avenue Community Hub Update and Magali will be presenting this report as well. Thank you. Magali, thanks again. So I'm just going to wait for the slide and I do want to apologize. I neglected to mention that Santa Rosa Police will also be attending our in response event. So thank you. So the Hearn Community Hub Update before we launch into the following slides, I want to extend my gratitude to the council members who joined us, listened, spoke and connected with community during these sessions. Thank you to the city manager's office who have supported us throughout the process. Our incredible partners from the Stoma County Library, our city partners from Fire Recreation Planning, Public Works and many others who showed up throughout. And of course, none of this would be possible without the relentless commitment from the Office of Committee Engagement staff and our phenomenal partners who were just on the line with us and were set to co-present which is Ross Drouless Cousinbury Architecture but unfortunately, due to a longstanding commitment and the extension of the meeting time, they'll not be able to join us at this time. However, my ask at the end of the presentation will be to be able to come back with a more robust presentation with more information and more items and also of course with our partners, RDC. Lastly, and I'll mention this many times, thank you to the community and the organizations and individuals who gave us time, their evenings, their Saturdays, their weekends, they gifted us time and they trusted us to provide feedback and input. And last, last, last thank you to our translator, Bob Rodriguez, who was a critical part of a lot of this. So jumping into the slides, I've been going to the next slide please. So again, this is going to be a very quick recap just to make sure the community knows that we've finished the listening session portion of it and this is what we've captured, but again, hoping to come back with something more robust. So quick timeline on January 11th, 2022, the San Jose City Council voted unanimously to approve the acquisition of a six acre site on 967, 980 and 1004 Hearn Avenue for a municipal project called the Hearn Community Hub. The property acquisition allowed the city to move forward on plans for the future for multiple public uses, including a fire station, a public library and a multicultural center. On February 15th, Council approved a resolution for the use of ARPA and PG&A funds to go towards the Hearn Community Hub project. On March 21st, the city released a request for proposals for the Hearn Community Hub needs assessment and on June 21st, we brought forward a professional service agreement with Ross Drula's Covenbury, also referred to as RDC Architecture Inc. Next slide please. So the purpose of the needs assessment, which will be presenting some of its outcomes was to gather community input and participation in the development of the multi-use site. The community assessment was an in-depth evaluation of the urgent and worthy needs of the Southwest Santa Rosa residents and community partners. The assessment was led by the City of Santa Rosa's Office of Community Engagement and Partnership with the Sonoma County Library, the Santa Rosa Fire Department, Transportation and Public Works, Recreation and Parks on the City site and again in collaboration with our consultant partner, Ross Drula's Covenbury. And the next slide please. Just some quick information about the community engagement activities, which included town hall sessions, listening sessions. We started off with a block party, which we thank everybody who came out to support that and provide feedback. We have projects steering committee meetings, service provider meetings, community working group workshops and a digital data gathering using the City's Let's Connect SR platform. And again, we did provide all of this in both English and in Spanish and had translation at all of our events. So the next slide please. So we deployed all possible modalities to make sure that the community wasn't formed, not only about the project, but of the listening sessions themselves. And we wanna thank all of our community partners who helped us in further doing outreach and posting on their newsletters, their social media and also our schools, our local schools who were near the site who allowed us to use their facilities to hold our sessions, which was great because it was a space that the community members were familiar and comfortable with. So I can go to the next slide please. I'm sorry. Okay. So many, again, we had a multi-layered approach in gathering information and the community needs and many themes surfaced. And here we can see that some of the activities that were deployed using surveys, using just various, just a range of different activities. And the beauty of this engagement was that there were opportunities to provide feedback in person, in large groups and small groups via surveys and our Let's Connect page, just to name a few. The next slide please. So the outcomes revealed deep community needs for not only the Southwest area and for the community at large. And many of these were linked to the values and priorities of the community which had to do with the importance of representation, multiculturalism and a sense of belonging. So we'll go on to the next slide please. So our partner, RDC put together a really fantastic video which I hope to bring back in the full report which outlines the community's vision for this space. On this slide you can see that the vision of those folks that joined us. The question was asked, all blank are welcome here. And you could see that many of the prominent themes were culture, race, religion, family, youth. All of those themes were at the center and of course many others that really reflected the need of forest space that really fostered belonging and representation. And we'll be talking a little bit more about that. The next slide please. Thank you. So going into the next few slides will be, I'm gonna briefly touch on some of the values and priorities again, reiterating that we are gonna be coming back with something more robust that'll be meteor and we'll talk more about how some of these came to fruition. So safety was very present in terms of priorities for the space in the sense of actual perceived safety and they both must be, and meaning that the ass was for both to be mindfully and proactively addressed and monitored to prevent unintended harm, especially for our most vulnerable community members. And that was sort of in the larger sense. So the next slide please. So it was crystal clear that the message was that the community must see their values, cultures and priorities reflected throughout the hub. This reflection must extend to the physical design as well as the design of programs and services and service delivery models. What is being offered, how it's being offered and who is offering it should be developed by or and with the community that was very clear. Next slide please. And we heard the ask for transparency, accountability, clear and consistent communication and shared power as this project unfolds and also what comes through with the actual development of the building. Next slide please. At the forefront was the message that the community needs to continue to have a constant voice and shaping the project goals as well as a role in the design implementation. Community members are truly committed to seeing a multicultural lens added to the entire project with the essential thread of belonging seen throughout the themes. So next slide please. Lastly, the importance of removing all impediments to participation including cultural, physical, financial and technical. The request was that throughout the project we are clear on what genuine access would look like in a space and really for the entire campus. Next slide please. So of critical importance which RDC can share in a more robust report will be the prioritization of indoor and outdoor programming. On this slide we can note some of the needs that were highlighted such as the need for youth focused program spaces, therapy suites. A huge one was providing access to healthcare access and support. And there was discussion also of spaces having multiple uses and we'll again bring that back as well. Next slide please. So for the outdoor spaces these were some of the themes and again we're happy to come back with a larger priority list but these were the ones that really were at the forefront in terms of asks. And we can go to the next slide. Thank you. So there was a lot of valuable lessons learned through this process specifically about the importance of meeting community where they are and the importance of showing up and if there's an evening event making sure that we are mindful of families and the various needs that come up. So multiple lessons learned throughout these couple of months that we launched into this project that we know we will be implementing in our future community engagement endeavors but with that that is the end of my presentation. Great, thank you so much Deputy Director. Questions from Council? Council Member McDonnell. I just wanted to know thank you so much for the presentation. Have we tried holding any of these meetings at nearby schools over in the area and potentially offering daycare food as an incentive for families to be able to attend? Thank you for that question and we actually offered food at all of the sessions because of the timing. And in addition for our kickoff we had the Children's Museum partner with us and so they brought their mobile unit. It had activity that were relevant to the day and also the library was very generous in getting their Bibliobus to join us as well. So those things were definitely considered throughout. Great, thank you so much. All right, thank you Deputy Director. We'll go on to item 7.3. Item 7.3, Nancy Adams Transportation Planner will present the shared scooter system pilot program. Good afternoon or actually good evening Council and Mayor. If the video recording staff could put the slide deck up I have like three slides that I'd like to share with the Council as part of this staff briefing. Okay, thank you. And I have to start off with a sort of a funny line, a one liner. So this is probably, I wouldn't call it my small song. As my slide represents I'm gonna become a free agent here at the middle of December and I've been with the city for many, many years. So I'm not gonna call this my small song. I'm actually gonna call it my bird song. So anyway, just a little levity as I kind of moved through this item. So just as Councilor remembers we got your approval to do a pilot scooter program and that was launched in July. So next slide please. Thank you. So what we did was we looked at their service through October 31st and you'll see I'll share with you some of the user statistics and some of the service calls that they've responded to and then talk a little bit about their past program and then have a couple other things just to share with the Council that aren't on slide. So just looking at the slides this is the total number of rides that Burr has serviced within our community. So around 7400 since July when they launched and the distance per ride is about a mile and three quarters. And then the average time per ride is about 17 and a half minutes roughly. So the types of riders, right? So a little over 2,000 were just one-time riders and then about half of that 1,100 were repeat riders and then service calls. So I asked them to provide me with just a log of all the service calls that they've responded to for the last six months and they have shared with me that they had about 110 calls and they're basically mixed between mis-part devices and damaged devices. So I did a quick math exercise in about 34% of that 110 or I'm sorry, 37% are related to mis-part devices and about 60, 63% are related to devices that were damaged that they had to service. So the last bullet on this slide talks about the distribution of rides over the last six months. And it really began more as a concentration in the downtown service area. But as we moved into the beginning of the school session, there was a slight variation they noticed more rides were occurring closer to the junior college which makes sense. So the next slide please. Thank you. So this is a little summary of the different passes that they sold. So they sold a little over 300 weekly unlocked passes. So their users were pretty active in buying kind of a group pass for weekly service. Monthly passes were a little lower as well as the five for five pass, which is income driven. Those are for communities, members in our community who meet their income eligibility. So those were both around 80, 87%. And then they sold a 30 minute passes and 60 minute passes at a little lower rate around 40 and 23. So a few things I just wanted to share that aren't on the slide. So while I didn't actually present this item to the downtown action organization or the Redwood Square Association, their staff did share this information with both of their memberships. And I asked their staff if they had any, the merchants or the members had any real concerns or comments and really they were just glad to hear the information and I didn't get any feedback that there was any concerns from either of those groups. And then I just kind of as a way, I know that there's been a notice that the scooters have been removed from the city. And I just wanted to take a minute to talk a little bit about that. They were removed I think right before Thanksgiving. And it had to do with their fleet manager. They were having some difficulty with their staff performance of that fleet manager. So they needed to remove the scooters and they're in the process of recruiting a fleet manager. And I did talk to Bird and I actually had invited the Robert Singleton. He's the Bird contact to the meeting but due to the lateness and the shifting of this item, he was unable to attend, he had a commitment. So if there are any questions from the council members that would be more suitable for him, I can certainly take those down and share those questions with him and get back to any council member as necessary. So we are in conversation about just making sure that we are sufficiently noticed and if there's difficulties or if there's issues with their service that we are, and I have talked to the staff person at Bird that we wanna make sure that the communication is in hand. So we are working with them to make that a part of our operations and working with them. And then the last thing I wanted to talk a little bit about, I did ask them to give me some information about their service in some of the other Bay Area city. So as you know, Windsor had the service as well but there is a much smaller scale. They I think only have 50 scooters. We are permitted for up to 200. And I think at one point we were just around 150. So we didn't quite meet the cap of what the permit condition allowed. And then the other communities that they serve are more, it's the Sunnyvale, Santa Clara and the San Jose and they have much higher rates, riders per day rates just because of their population density and they're very close to the VTA and Caltrain's service nodes. So I hope that gives you a little update and I would say this will be something for the council to think about probably next summer. And so I'll stop there and certainly take any questions. Thanks. Thank you so much, Nancy. And obviously you and I've had long conversations and thank you for your years of service to the city of Santa Rosa. I know we'll miss you in our transportation public works department. Council, do we have any questions? All right, thank you so much. You're welcome. We'll go to public comment on our staff updates, item 7.1 through 7.3. Go ahead, Mr. DeWitt. Hello, Duane DeWitt from Roseland. Regarding 7.1, the presentation was nice and encompasses something that scholars call engagement theater. That's actually more show than go. It's where people get involved in an activity stating that this is what we're doing without actually showing that things are getting done. This is really quite important because this is now a multimillion dollar branch of our government. Doesn't have much accountability or oversight. And it certainly is not really empowering members of the community that reach out in our area at least and have any type of, I guess you might say, empowerment. This is especially noticeable during this activity that you're calling the Herne Community Hub. It's actually Bellevue Build Out. It started a year ago and we understand why it came forward because it's the outgrowth of the 30-year-old Southwest Area plan. This is something that's been in the works and just waiting for the opportunity to arise. The important thing is, please, don't pimp out Roseland to build out Bellevue. And that's what's occurring. You're taking the Roseland Census District a mile north of Bellevue, showing our basic disadvantages and the things that we've suffered for decades and saying, okay, because you folks went through that, we'll rationalize it and build out Bellevue down here and utilize this money that came from the American Rescue Plan helped with plans for building out Bellevue into a new neighborhood of tens of thousands of people. It's gonna be great that they get those things there, the library, the swimming pool, the things that we've all asked for for decades, up in Roseland, a mile to the north along the Sebastopol Road Community Corridor where it's needed. One of the questions that comes up out in our community, when we speak with local folks who live there, is who is the Roseland Community Benefits Initiative now? It started almost 30 years ago with Memorial Hospital coming forward, putting in a quarter of a million dollars a year to help a community along Sebastopol Road get organized to fight toxic pollution. Memorial Hospital continued to put forward the money and they underwrote a group that they called the Community Benefits Group. Now there's a group called the Community Benefits Initiative which may be based with the Community Action Partnership but we're not certain who they actually are and we saw that today over at the Board of Supervisors Mr. Corsi was putting forward $3,500 to these people. And it's like, well if it's Memorial Hospital which is a multimillion dollar organization, why are they getting that taxpayer money? So who is the CBI and where are they and how do they play into this? Because apparently they get a giant voice now in the build out of Bellevue. And if they're Roseland folks, why is this occurring that way? I'll leave you with this note. Southwest Community Park in Bellevue with a rock that states it's the Bellevue District being served by it from then Supervisor Ernie Carpenter, is a dangerous park. It's got problems that aren't overseen well even though we asked for police to come out there a lot especially after dark. It's full of drinking and drugging and problematic behaviors. Thank you so much Mr. DeWitt. Pardon sir? Thank you, I need you to wrap up. Okay, so the bottom line is if you're gonna talk about community values and priorities we've been coming here for over 30 years talking about helping Roseland to the North don't use us to verify what you're gonna do in the South and you've already got planned. Thank you Mr. DeWitt. That's Bellevue. I don't see any hands on Zoom. Did we have any pre-recorded voice mails? There are no pre-recorded voice mails with this item. Okay, go ahead bring it back. Thank you so much, Madam City Manager. Let's move on to item number eight. That's our City Manager and City Attorney Reports. I have no updates, thank you. And nor do I, Mr. Mayor. Thank you. All right, we'll keep moving. Any statements of abstention from council members? Council members, welcome. Yes, I'll be abstaining from item 11.1 as I did not attend the meeting. Any others? All right, let's go to mayors and council member reports who has a report for tonight. Council member Fleming. Yes, thank you. Just been one busy week with only a couple things to report out here. I attended a state route 37 planning meeting as a member on that committee for Metropolitan Transportation Commission, which is really an interesting and enlarged project. And if anybody has any questions, I'll be happy to provide them with information about that. Also the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, we are in the process of hiring a new executive director, which is an interesting process as well. And then on Sunday, following the storms, we went on, my family and I went on a storm drain tour of our neighborhood. We live in a neighborhood that has few storm drains and got to follow the water and had a really interesting conversation about creeks and how all that works together. And the point of this is to talk about a little bit. You know, we found a lot of debris in the gutters and it's important to remember that all the debris that's in the gutters does go down into our waterways and out to the ocean. So if you do see something in there, you know, it's worth maybe taking the time as long as it's safe to pick it up and throw it away. And it's a fun thing to do with your kids, put on the rain boots, and they really enjoy it. Thank you. Council Member Sveta. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Just want to update our progress with the continued care board. As I mentioned, our last meeting November 30th was our next scheduled continued care board meeting. We were supposed to hopefully adopt the strategic plan. That did not occur. And so I continued that meeting until December 14th. So the hope is we'll be able to review all the material there, adopt it on the 14th. And then on December 15th, we will have a new board voted in. So continue to move forward, but not as quickly as we had hoped. Thank you. Thank you, Council Member. Council Member Rogers. Thank you, Mayor. Just really quickly on December 3rd, I was able to attend a tree planting even at Southwest Community Park. It was put on by Landpath, the Climate Project, California Relief Prop 68, and Santa Rosa Parks. We were able to plant 21 new trees around the park, which was really exciting and dirty because it was raining the whole time. I still have mud caked on my shoes. Okay, and I was able to meet a lot of students from Roseland University Prep, Pioneer Key Club and Sonoma State University, which was exciting to speak to them about what they wanna see done in our community. I look forward to working with some of the students on other community projects, but I wanted to take the time and send out a special thank you to our park staff that helped out on Saturday and did a wonderful job. I'm gonna try to get the names right. Elio Terreno, Dylan Lester, Patrick Schiller, James Castro, and Moses Ramirez. I just wanna send out a special thank you to them along with the rest of the park staff who are showing that they are very passionate about our community and about our parks, and they are happy to serve. So thank you so much, you guys, for your help on Saturday. Thank you, Council Member. I have just a few things to report. One, I wanna start off with a thank you to Senator Alex Padilla on a number of different fronts. First, he had his Northern California District Representative here with our team all day this morning, touring our different projects that we're working on, riding the little car at the Advanced Energy Center. We had a good time and showed him what we're working on and some really innovative things here in our community. But the other is the progression of the Fire Act, which I think we have all talked about a number of times from the dais, about a year and a half ago. The Senator was doing a tour around California of impacts that we all felt from the Stafford Act being mostly written for floods and tornadoes and not really being particularly geared towards fire. He listened, he took that back, and he introduced the Fire Act, which has now passed both the House and also the Senate. It has one more reconciliation vote that is not expected to be controversial and we think will happen this week. And then that bill will land on President Biden's desk for approval. So I want to thank him for listening to our team, working with our team, introducing the legislation, and then shepherding it through. And I was remarking to his staffer earlier today, there are folks who've been in the Senate for decades who have not had a bill move like this one moved. So it really was good work, and I want to thank him for that. I had an opportunity to be up in Sacramento yesterday for the swearing in of the new legislature. Want to say congratulations and welcome to our newest assembly representative for our city, Damon Connolly. He represents the Oakmont area out using his sort of guide Highway 12 and being South for the South Park and Roseland and Southwest areas for the city. He was a supervisor in Marin County and I've known him for 15 years. He'll do a really good job for us. And then obviously a congratulations to Assembly Member Wood and Senator Mike McGuire who were re-elected, each of them having four more years to help represent us. Jim Wood in a two-year term, McGuire in a four-year term, but they do still have four years left on their term limits. Finally, last week we had our Sonoma Clean Power monthly meeting. Like many of our boards and commissions, we're saying goodbye to a couple of good members. We actually have three that have been on Sonoma Clean Power for at least eight years, who chose not to run for re-election this year and will be cycling off. So it was nice to say goodbye to them and a thank you to Dave King from Petaluma, Patrick Slater from Spastopol, and Mark Lamman from Qatadi. We also received a really interesting update on the heat wave that occurred in September, just to be quick because it's getting late. Sonoma Clean Power had the forethought to purchase about 90% of the energy that we ended up needing for that incident and for the month of September. The estimate for that 90% in cost was about $15 million. For that final 10%, and we saw this across the board, not just here, it cost $8 million for that final 10%. So it really reiterated how important it is for all of us to be working together in those situations to lower the demand curve. And also huge kudos to the Sonoma Clean Power team for having the forethought to make sure that they had that energy available for our community. With that, I'll see if there's any additional comments from council. Let's go to public comment for mayors and council member reports. Do we have any pre-recorded voice mails? We do not have any pre-recorded voice mails. All right, we have one set of minutes tonight that is for the October 11th, 2022 city council meeting. Did anybody have any amendments to those minutes? Do we have any public comment on the minutes? Any voice mails? There are no voice mails for a minute. All right, we'll show those minutes adopted as presented without any objection and with council member Schwedhelm recusing. And I see no objection from council. We already did our consent calendar earlier today. Let's go to our public comment for non-agenda items. That's item 13. Dwayne, go ahead. Hello, my name is Dwayne Dewitt. I'm from Roseland. Tomorrow's December 7th, a day that lives on in infamy ever since 1941 with the Japanese attack on naval base Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. It's a somber day for many, but it's not recognized as much now because most of our survivors have passed away. When I was young, two Pearl Harbor survivors worked in the Roseland School District, Mr. Bothern and Frank Sanello. Good men who've left us early. The reason I bring this up is because for a number of years over in Roseland, veterans have been trying to get an opportunity to better serve veterans who lived in Roseland and remember those. One of the difficulties has been getting some recognition from city staff. One of the members of the Roseland community that lost his life on Pearl Harbor Day originally in 1941, George Mayby, lived near what's now called Davis Park. He was on the USS Arizona. Two Santa Rosa members were there. One's recognized in Montgomery. One has not been recognized over in Roseland. We've asked city park staff about this. They essentially are not just non-committal. They just don't care. So I bring it up here again today, and I especially wanna thank city council member Rogers for her help on Veterans Day and also her help planting trees at Southwest Community Park. It's nice to have council members who are paying attention to the concerns of the Roseland community that have come forward over the years. I can't stay for the rest of the meeting, so I'm gonna add some things in my comments. I sure hope that you take measure of money and split it evenly behind this organizational situation you have. Two groups get 40%, one gets 20%. Make it 33 and a third for all three groups. Also, you're gonna be selling some city land, which is good. It's been talked about in the past. The White House site actually has a study already paid and done for that you should use to get that place developed into a nice, tall, multi-use building. And then I see that you folks are gonna give yourself some more money tonight. One of the really nice things would be is if you'd handle it like a typical employment organization and have there be time cards and accountability so that you could show how much money was earned by the folks that are doing the different work that's being done. In the past, it was pretty much seen as well. What does staff say, and you folks would act on what staff have been doing now that you're balancing it and council will be doing more, please do something that shows the community how you used your time so that this extra money you'll be getting can be qualified in an accountable manner. Thank you for your time. Thank you, Dwayne. Do you have any other hands? Do you have any pre-recorded voicemails? There are no pre-recorded voicemails. All right, I'll bring it back. Let's go on to item 14.1, please. Item 14.1 is a report FY 2021 to 2022 measure an annual report. There are actually several team members who will be presenting so I will introduce administrative service officer, Jason Parrish. Thank you. Good morning, Mayor. Good evening, Mayor Rogers and members of the city council. My name is Jason Parrish. I'm the administrative services officer with the recreation and parks department. And I am hoping that the measure O and your report for fiscal year 21-22 can be initiated. We're bringing that presentation up in a moment. Thank you. As part of the presentation, I'll be initiate starting out the presentation and joining me in the violence prevention section. There we go. And if you could advance the slide, please. Joining me in the violence prevention section will be deputy director of recreation, Jeff Tibbets and then deputy director of community engagement, Macaulay Tellas. So following there, we'll be having our excellent fire department and police department. So if you could please advance the slide. So we'll be kicking off our violence prevention or youth services section. And if you could advance the slide for two quick financial overviews, what I'd like to quickly point out is if you look at that beginning fund balance and the ending fund balance, that shows we use probably about $50,000 in our fund balance for 21-22, meaning that almost the entire out 2.3 million dollar allocation for violence prevention was put out to direct services either through recreation directly to youth programming or through the choice program and through the outreach efforts as a violence prevention partnership. So what it also means is going into 22, 23, or excuse me, 23, 24, we are going to have a little bit over 20%, roughly around 20% of a reserve to be able to begin the future visioning process. And if you could advance the slide. Within the violence prevention, the single largest piece that you'll see here is the choice grants. And if the council recall approving the acceleration or the extension of the cycle 10 for an additional six months that put more money directly into our nonprofit partners as well as initiating the cycle 11 choice grants. And so it's ensuring that we're putting a lot of direct money into the nonprofit community for the youth services. The second largest piece are the salaries and those are split roughly one third each between the regular staff within violence prevention that administers choice and does the outreach the regular staff within the recreation division who is overseeing and coordinating all the services throughout the community. And then the last third are the seasonal temporary employees supporting the recreation neighborhood services. And they're out in the communities at the housing sites providing direct services to our residents and the kids who participate. And what you'll see here at the very bottom the administration represents the participation in the overall citywide cost allocation plan. And so with this, since it's late I will turn it over to Deputy Director Jeff Tibbets to talk about our neighborhood services programs. Next slide, please. Thank you, Jason and oh, Jason, I think you got one more. Excuse me. This is a slide that shows the overall growth and some of the hiccups that have occurred in the program expenditures and the revenues. And again, reinforcing that as the youth services and the violence prevention receives the funding from Measure O it immediately gets turned around into direct services and put back out into the community. And if you could please advance the slide now. Thank you, Jason and good evening, Mayor and members of the council, Jeff Tibbets, Deputy Director with the Recreation Division and reporting on our Measure O programs operated through our neighborhood services section. As you can see on the slide here we've kind of broken down what we did. I'm gonna do my best here in this presentation that it's very hard giving these fiscal year recaps in December where we're halfway through this year and we're thinking about future programs. So I will do my best to stay on topic with recapping what took place in 21 and 22. And then we kind of summarize those programs in three different areas. The after school programs that we offered kind of enrichment enhancement programs like sports clinics, dance and cheer programs and then our out of school time summer and winter, spring and Thanksgiving break camps that we offered. So going a little more in depth with our after school programs, it's been about a decade since we've offered the more traditional, located out of school after school programs. But from our experience with that and continued experience with the community, we know that there's a need in Santa Rosa in most communities, but certainly in Santa Rosa as well where those, while those programs are very large programs often serving 100 plus kids at each site that they're still typically have wait lists of 50, 60, 70, 80 even 100 kids at those sites. And so we have partnered with primarily Burbank housing and other locations throughout the different years where we can offer programs for those kids who are being sent home because they're on wait lists and those types of things and we're able to provide snack and homework assistance, arts and crafts, sports activities, field trips, those types of things so that those children that are slipping through the cracks are still having that safety net and that support that they need after hours and helping those families know that their kids are in a safe program and being looked after and getting the assistance with academic and those things. I look forward to the point that I'm giving one of these presentations and it's strictly a normal circumstances, but while we still were dealing with some COVID ramifications through programming, I will take the opportunity to once again highlight how fortunate we are to have such a talented group of staff that continue to impress me and continue to cope with creative ways to serve the public. And so I'll highlight the KinderCare program there under the after school programs. The reality is at this time, pretty much every organization that was struggling with getting staffing, there were still some protocols and some rules around COVID that made things a little bit more challenging to offer some of these youth programs. And so we became aware that some of the more traditional after school providers at the school sites were not able to serve the kids at the same level that they were and in particular, some of the schools were declining, accepting kindergarten students, TK and kindergarten students for after school program care. Our staff found out about this, one of the sites that was the case was Steel Lane Elementary School. Of course, we have the Steel Lane Community Center right next door. And so as our staff have done throughout these years of these emergencies and situations that we've been dealing with, they came up with a way to meet the need of the community and ran the program at the Steel Lane Community Center going over to Steel Lane and picking up the kindergarteners and bringing them over. And then as we had a few spots that were still available as the program was able to grow a little bit, working with some of the other schools and then dealing, getting transportation, those things so that we could serve more kids in the community. So again, just wanna highlight that as our staff really continuing to think outside the box, be in tune with what's going on in our community, what the needs are in our community and meeting that need the best that they can. Overall, you'll see 118 participants registered through our different after school program models that we've offered. And those hours, their total service hours, service hours we consider having a youth for an hour as a service hour reported weekly just because of nature of that program. You're talking about 1,400 hours of service. So 1,400 hours of having kids in those programs on a weekly basis. The sports clinics dance and cheer again as an example of the staff thinking outside the box and adjusting, we've been trying fortunately now. We're in a state where we're bringing back some of our more traditional sports league programs, but it just continued to not to be possible in the 21-22 fiscal year. And so staff had to be creative and not being able to use the large gymnasium spaces that we partner with the different school districts for. We had to run things out of the steel and community center hub room, which is much smaller and limits what we could do. So staff did a great job developing sports clinics. They did such a great job developing these sports clinics that even though we're bringing back the leagues, we are maintaining the clinics and finding way to continue to provide those as a feeder program. So we're serving the younger children with the sports clinics that gets them into our programs. We built the relationships and they start to develop some of the skills that allow them to transition and be successful in some of our league programs that are for the older elementary and middle school-aged students as well as the dance and cheer program. Cheer program we've offered for a number of years now it's been successful, it's been growing. We just had to, our current session we had to expand and add more rooms because it just continues to grow. But during 21-22 fiscal year, we were not able to offer the program. They wouldn't have had anywhere to perform. So again, staff adjusted, offered a dance program and did a dance program that we called colors in motion and they did a performance here at the family where the families were able to come meeting all the safety protocols. So again, just amazing work by the staff to continue to come up with new programs and new ways to do it. And again, across those serve 306 participants and not a yearly total there of over 4,000 service hours through those programs. And then a big development for these programs and allowing us to serve more youth with the summer and break camps is that towards the, I believe, as we got into the spring and then into this last summer season we were able to start getting back onto the school campuses, which is a huge development for us. We got those agreements in place. The school started having some of those outside programs on campus. And so for example, some of our break camps and sites instead of serving around 40 kids we're back up to serving around 80 kids. Our summer programs instead of serving 40, 50 maybe 60 kids at a site we were serving 80 to 100 kids at a site. So again, releasing a nice increase in those participants registered up to 639 participants in our break camp and over 100,000 total service hours on the year. So that is a recap of what neighborhood services we've been doing with our internal city program. And now I will pass on, excuse me to Deputy Director Teyes to report out on the violence prevention partnership and the collaborations that we do. So next slide for Deputy Director Teyes, please. Thank you so much. My honey, they is here again. So for on the violence prevention partnership end our efforts with outreach have been to provide information and awareness about the standard of violence prevention partnership measure of the choice grant programs and resources for local youth and families. These events included large scale community events like Earth Day, Cinco de Mayo, Juneteenth, et cetera community meetings, town halls, neighborhood specific meetings and events choice grantee events crisis response to schools and presentations. So as you see on this slide in the last fiscal year we attended hosted or co-hosted 54 events and we're able to outreach to almost 4,500 community members. One of those co-hosted events being Wildfire Ready which was coordinated in partnership with the Santa Rosa fire department and the communications and intergovernmental relations office, a total of 25 community partners participated and there were over 200 community members and attendance. Information was provided to attendees which included individual family preparedness home and property preparedness, emergency alerts and notifications, evacuation zones, mental health and other wellness resources and disaster resources for neighborhoods. For the crisis response team we continued to respond to community acts of violence through the crisis response team we activated its protocols three times during the last fiscal year. This protocol activates police, the partnership and other city departments as appropriate along with community service organizations, social service agencies and schools to respond promptly to acts of violence by providing guidance, resources and engagement opportunities. The crisis response protocol aims to restore peace in the community and to assist family members, relatives and those impacted by violent incidents. School outreach pilot program in response to acts of violence in the community and due to a gap in services for youths ages 13 to 15 the partnership created the school outreach pilot program which was a 12 week life skills course which offered participating students classes in anger management, conflict resolution and exposure to various violence prevention strategies and activities. The pilot was implemented at Santa Rosa middle school and an average of six youth participated in each weekly session. Each session followed a restorative circle format where youth were provided the opportunity to dialogue with one another about their feelings and experiences as well as journal and engage in interactive activities centered around a weekly theme. The pilot was modeled after the aggression replacement training program and included wraparound services provided to all of our participating youths and their families. Next slide, please. Thank you. With funding leveraged by the Sonoma County probation department, the partnership continued implementation of the guiding people successfully program. Many of you may have already met a wonderful coordinator for that program, the GPS program provides critical funding or system level improvements to the partnerships referral system while also supporting evidence informed prevention and intervention programs, including serve probation totally in 60 youth. This would be an overall increase of 23% in total youth referred both probationary and non probationary. There was also a 40% increase in number of non probationary youth referred. One of the reasons for the increase in numbers is the creation of the green spaces for all faces program to close the gap in services and take a proactive approach to support youth participating in the GPS program. The partnership created green spaces for all faces in partnership also with the Sonoma County probation and Sonoma County regional parks. The goal of the program is to provide space for high school age youth to participate in pro social activities off campus in an outdoor setting to access the health benefits being outdoors or community service hours and learn more about local parks. The violence prevention partnership services as well. Since the program launched in March of 2022, a total of 51 youth have participated in that program. Next slide, please. Thank you. So our choice cycle 10 year two, we had 10 grantees implementing programs under the partnerships for pillars, which are school readiness, student engagement and truancy prevention, street outreach and mediation and workforce development. So picture here, you can see one of our partners conservation for North Bay with their core members. We continued the use of results based accountability framework, all community partners use specific performance measures to evaluate their impact. At the close of each choice cycle, we ask ourselves, how much did we do? How well did we do it? And is anyone better off? The County of Sonoma's Human Service Department planning research evaluation and engagement unit was engaged by the partnership to provide evaluation and scorecard development services. The staff provided training and technical assistance to partnership staff and cycle 10 choice grantees on the clear impact scorecard. This included development and the development and launch of the standards of violence prevention, clear impact scorecard database, how to access the scorecard, how to enter data, development of choice program indicators and performance measures and the development of performance measures specific to each choice grantee. All participating grantees began entering their own data into the clear impact scorecard in the fall of 2021. And moving forward, staff will be training all future grantees, including the cycle 11 grantees on how to enter the data. Unfortunately, the evaluation of choice cycle 10 year two was not completed due to the departure of the program manager in mid 2021 and multiple unexpected of absences from key program staff. While data was entered into the clear impact scorecard, a full analysis was not conducted. So recently hired partnerships that is currently working on the process of procuring and onboarding an evaluator to assist with these services moving forward. And also with the choice mini grants that was suspended due to COVID-19 sheltering in place and due to staffing shortages. Next slide please. And we are up to our questions and comments. Thank you so much. Council wants to start with questions. Council member McDonald. Hi, could you just tell me why the ending balance was so high? Is it because of where we're at in our fiscal year? Is there plans for that money? I noticed that in several of the different accounts. The, especially since measure O is budgeted within a special revenue account, we have to make sure that our revenues match with our expenditures. At this time last year, we were actually in an uncertain fiscal economic future. So it was looking like we might have a fiscal deficit within the violence prevention. Thankfully, the economic picture improved for us. And so we do have this ending fund balance for the moment and we'll be evaluating that in January as part of the 23-24 budget process and how those resources can be put to use. Thank you so much. Seeing no other questions, we'll go to public comment on this item. If you'd like to provide comment, go ahead and hit the raise hand feature on Zoom. Have any? I believe there's some more presentations. We still have more slides to go through. My apologies, chiefs. Go ahead. I thought you were letting us off easy. Appreciate that. No, just splitting the presentation into two. Correct, perfect. Good evening, Mayor Rogers, council member Scott Westrop, fire chief with the city of Santa Rosa. And as soon as the slide comes back up, we can get started, please. Thank you. So I'll be handling the presentation for the fire department tonight in totality. My finance analyst is unavailable, so I will get through it the best I can. Next slide, please. So this slide is an overview of the fire department's measure of fund. You'll see the sales tax revenues came in slightly higher than anticipated, about $4.6 million last fiscal year, whereas expenditures were a little over $4.1 million. You'll see an encumbrance for $665,000. This is for a Motorola radio contract, and I'll discuss that allocation later in the presentation, leaving us with a fund balance in fiscal year 21-22 of $3.1 million. And just to address the question that was asked earlier, the reason that we leave our fund balance as high as we do, not only is it to meet baseline, but it's also to, it's initially designed to build up enough to build a fire station. Now, the problem with the sales tax in 04 until now is that the cost to build a fire station is far outpaced, the sales tax revenue, but it does leave us the ability to do things like go out and purchase property, do improvements to fire stations, or enhancements to fire stations, or in the case of the HIRN project, if we need additional funding, we can leverage measure of funds to build that station. So ours is gonna be typically higher than other departments, and it's just essentially saving up for large infrastructure purchases or construction projects. Next slide, please. So this is more of an itemized breakdown of our expenditures last fiscal year. You'll see the salaries and benefits added up to about $3.5 million. Service and supplies were 114, and our admin costs are about $113,000. The transfer out is debt service to the lease of a fire station that occurs annually, and will fall off in June of 2025. Next slide, please. This slide shows the revenues and expenditures from 2005 to 2022. You'll see that the revenues have continued to climb since the drop in fiscal year 1920. And you can also see the expenditure line, which is the blue line, have remained less than revenues since that drop. So we're splitting that line as we like to see where the revenues outpace expenditures. Next slide, please. So for the fire department, essentially by ordinance, we can use measure O for three different things. It's for personnel, its facilities, and for special equipment. So to talk about the people very specifically, because that's our most important asset, measure O funds 10.25 positions within the fire department. Three fire captains and their paramedic incentive pays. So three fire captain paramedics, those are our frontline supervisors on the fire engines and ladder trucks. Three fire engineers with paramedic incentive pays. So those are the driver operators of our equipment and three firefighter paramedics with their incentive pay. It's for our training captain, who takes care of all of the training needs out of our training facility on West College Avenue. And it pays for 25% of our EMS division chief or emergency medical services division chief. In addition to these positions, measure O also pays for the paramedic incentive pay for six personnel assigned to our two truck companies. So this allows our truck companies to remain advanced life support equipped and staffed. So that's one FTE on three shifts on two truck companies. So measure O pays for both of our ladder trucks to be advanced life support. Next slide, please. Sorry, the picture kind of got a little covered up here with the script, but the impacts of measure O for the fire department have been monumental and we're really happy that we're now going to see this in measure H as well. But on top of the 10.25 FTEs, one thing I want to call out is it takes nine suppression personnel to staff a fire engine company full-time. Three people, three shifts, nine people. So essentially measure O covers an entire fire company. And if we were to lose one of our fire companies that equates to about 20% of our staff. So our companies in service. So it's really vital to us and just want to call out how important it is by making that equation add up. It provides for three of our engines and two of our trucks that are in service every day to be paramedic units. We have 12 units in service every day. So this pays for almost half of those. It enhances our emergency medical services management with our EMS division chief being part of measure O. And with all this, it improves our response time and our deployment of resources. And with that comes reduced fire loss, improving of EMS patient outcomes and increased community outreach. Next slide, please. So the fire stations that measure O help build, fire station 10 was completed in 2008 in the Southwest, fire station 11, which opened in 2009, which is in the junior college district and fire station five, which opened in 2016. And it is the station that we lost in the Tufts fire. Next slide, please. And lastly, some of the equipment that's been added and enhanced via measure O. We've purchased two type one fire engines with measure O. You'll see next year, you've actually approved the purchase of a type one fire engine via measure O. So that'll be in next year's annual report. We've purchased one type three fire engine, four command vehicles, swift water rescue trailer and the equipment that goes in there. And this year, the $665,000 encumbrance that you saw is to purchase 55 mobile radios, which are the radios that go inside of the equipment or mounted inside of our apparatus and eight mobile repeaters. And we brought this to the measure of citizen oversight committee because we really saw that there couldn't be an enhancement in our communications day to day, but also on the large scale incidents. So these radios are special and that they're dual banded, meaning they can operate on both VHF and UHF frequencies or simply put, we can be on law enforcement frequencies and fire and EMS frequencies at the same time. This provides a huge advantage in the case of a major wildfire, an active shooter event, anytime that we're in unified command with law enforcement or coordinating efforts with law enforcement, we can be on the same communication and we're not playing the telephone game by passing information around through different dispatch centers. So it's a huge enhancement. That's exactly what measure I was forced to enhance our operations and our communication. So they're currently being installed, they've been received and they're being installed in our resources right now. So we're really excited for that. The eight mobile repeaters will be essentially discs that will go on top of our command vehicles. And so either in a large wildfire situation, we can, when we're in our vehicles, we can flip the switch and turn those repeaters on and turn our cars into repeater sites. If you recall during the Tubbs fire, we lost 72 cell towers in the matter of hours and most of our repeater sites are on that high, that high range infrastructure. So we lost some repeaters and lost some of our capabilities. So not only does it expand our network, it makes our network more resilient in the fact that we now have these in a mobile capability and our tactical channels are no longer just line of sight, we can expand them further. So it's a huge enhancement. We're really happy with it. I'm really proud of the program and how we got there and how quickly we were able to get these installed before we hit next fire season. But with that, I'll ask for the next slide and I'll turn it over to council for any questions or comments. Council, any additional questions? Thank you so much, chief. Thank you. And I'll be sharing it over to chief Griggin. Great. Thank you very much, chief Westrop. Thank you, mayor Rogers and council for hearing our presentation. And we're going to start off first with our administrative service officer, Pam Lawrence, who's going to talk about our revenues and expenditures for this fiscal year for measure over the first three slides and then I'll join at the end. Thank you, chief. Good evening, everyone. Next slide, please. Okay, just like everybody else, this shows our beginning fund balance. We had $958,000 in reserves at the beginning of the year. We had higher than expected revenues of 4.6 million. We had a loss in fair value revenue of about 27,000 and our expenditures were 3.6 million, ending a fund balance of 1.9. You had that question had been asked about why we keep so much in reserves and some of it is for our salary and benefits because they continue to increase and we have 16 positions in this fund. And we are also saving up for some large projects as fire is doing. We are looking to lease or purchase a substation probably in the Roseland area where we're actively working with the real estate folks now finding a location. We're also, this fiscal year in 2223, we are purchasing fleet cameras and some other resources for the department. Next slide, please. This slide shows just a different breakdown of our expenditures. As you can see, the majority is spent on salary and benefits for those 16 positions, about 93%. We spend 210 around services and supplies. This covers our downtown enforcement team substation, vehicle maintenance and fuel as well as insurance. And then we have overhead administration of 112,000. Next slide, please. This shows the revenues and expenditures since the beginning of measure O in 2004. As you can see, our expenditures have slightly outpaced our revenue year over year except for this past year where there was a dip in our expenditures and anticipation of a reduced revenue. Luckily, that did not happen. We did reduce our staff level by three school resource officers this past year in anticipation of that reduced revenue. Next slide, please. I'll hand it over to Chief Regan to continue on now. Okay, thank you so much, Pam. So as Pam touched on, we have 16 funded positions in measure O. 11 of those are sworn positions and five of those are civilian positions. And kind of the breakdown of that, the one lieutenant, which is a mid-level manager, manages our special events, our traffic and our downtown enforcement team. We have one sergeant who's dedicated to our traffic team with our motorcycle officers and DUI and accident investigators. Nine patrol officers and those are five of those who are assigned to patrol. And they're helping with our call volume and going on the 911 calls. They're also helping with our emergency evacuation, another emergency planning. Two of those are assigned to our downtown enforcement team. And the other two are assigned to our traffic team as motorcycle officers. That combines of the nine patrol officers. Then our civilian positions, two of those are filled in evidence technicians and they're processing all major crime scenes, collecting DNA, blood evidence and testifying an expert relating to DNA evidence collection in criminal cases. A community service officer, which was responding to the traffic collisions and non-suspect info reports across the city and helping with parking violations and other assists with that with our officers. Communication supervisors. So we have three supervisors over our team of dozens of 911 dispatchers that are handling all the calls for service that are coming into our 911 dispatch center. And one police technician and the police technician is helping us to be able to process the thousands of reports and citations and other community requests that we get of receiving those reports back out in the community. Next slide, please. And this one kind of breaks down more what we're doing with that. I talked already about some of the enhanced patrol services we're doing with those nine officer positions. That dedicated lieutenant is such an important one too and really enhances our response of managing some of the large events that we have here in Santa Rosa, including country summer where we have thousands of participants coming down to the fairgrounds, the fair itself every summer, our Wednesday night market and the dozens of other community events that we have at Old Courthouse Square and other locations throughout the city. And this lieutenant manages all those special events, looking at some of the enhanced safety protocols that we need to put in there, working with our traffic team to ensure that all of our community members can have a fun and exciting time here in Santa Rosa while being safe at these major events. We also help coordinate with our partnership with the Santa Rosa-Vinus Venture Partnership and the police technician that we talked about and the records are in the dispatch or help us with expanding our dispatch hours and our record hours there and our dispatch to some of the critical incidents when we're utilizing our tactical dispatch team out in the field and those are managing some of the response with our SWAT team, with our Hofstra's negotiation team and having that tactical dispatcher out in the field with those teams. Next slide, please. And then community engagement and this is key to some of our focus here at the police department is getting out there, engaging with the community, hearing about some of the issues in the community and that's what some of the addition of the staff allows us to do. We've also seen that we've talked about the expansion of our downtown enforcement team directly through Measure O dollars and this team is focused on the vibrancy of our downtown at Courthouse Square, the Prince Memorial Greenway and really helps respond to incidents throughout our city dealing with some of the homeless encampments that pop up and work toward getting them into services and ultimately taking some enforcement action when necessary. This has also allowed us to be able to create our special enforcement team this year by being able to backfill these patrol positions and our special enforcement team has made a dramatic effort in reducing some of the violence occurring in our community and it sees literally dozens of ghost guns off the streets of Santa Rosa, helped also with our sideshow enforcement and we've seen a dramatic decrease in our sideshows by our more proactive approach and with some of the council support with our recent ordinance that and we discussed the ghost guns already. Next slide, please. This is providing a brief snapshot of some of the crimes that we're experiencing and I won't go through each one of those but we've seen a significant increase in some of the gun violence in the streets of Santa Rosa homicides that are occurring and also looking at some of the property crime things and that's some of our focus is using these Measure O dollars to be able to enhance some of the services that we're putting out there with proactively patrolling in our community, working with the violence prevention partnership to address some of the root causes and seeing a decrease in some of the violence in our community and we've seen this work coming together in Santa Rosa that year over year, we've seen a 31% decrease in some of the shootings in the cross the city of Santa Rosa and that's due to some of the hard work by our team here and they're certainly supported by the Measure O dollars. Next slide, please. Quick snapshot of just the calls for service that we saw over 241,000 calls in the calendar year 2021 that came into our 911 dispatch center. Our officers actually responded and contacted a community member over 109,000 calls times a year and we saw our average response time for that year of just over seven minutes and we're continuing to work that and we've seen that creep up and creep up over the years and right now we're currently trending right at nine minutes and eight seconds for our 911 priority response calls and so we're working to be able to fill some of the vacancies in the police department and continue to best manage the resources that we have in these Measure O dollars to bring that call response time down. Slide, please. I know we quickly went through that information but I wanted to give everyone just a quick snapshot of what we have and here to answer any questions that you may have about our Measure O resources and how we're utilizing them. Council, any questions? All right, thank you so much chief. Let's go ahead and go to our public comment then for this item. So I'd sit tight in case there's any questions. There's nobody in the chamber. I don't see any hands on Zoom. Do we have, I apologize. There's nobody making their way to the podium in chambers. Mr. O'Crepkey, do we have any prerecorded voicemails? We do not have any prerecorded voicemails. Okay, I'm gonna go ahead and bring it back. Council Member Swedum, do you wanna put a motion on the table for us? Sure, be delighted. I'd make a motion to accept the Measure O annual report for fiscal year 2021 and 2022. Second. Is that a second from Council Member Rogers? Just making sure I heard it correctly. Any additional comments? I just wanna thank the team. Obviously we know that Measure O has been a critical component for our community and you see it definitely when we have these presentations every year. It does always seem to come towards the end of the year and late into a council meeting. So I know we don't have as much public participation. But what we do hear from the community who participates in the actual programs is how life changing it can be. So I wanna thank all of our team who works this and lives it day in and day out for the effort. With that, Madam Clerk, please call the vote. Thank you. Council Member Swedum. Aye. Council Member Sawyer. Aye. Council Member Rogers. Aye. Council Member McDonald. Aye. Council Member Fleming. Aye. Mayor Rogers. Aye. That motion passes with six ayes and Vice Mayor Alvarez is absent. All right, Madam City Manager, let's go on to item 14.2. Item 14.2 is a report, Declaration of City Owned Parcels in the downtown as non-exempt surplus land, real estate manager Jill Scott will lead the discussion. Thank you. Good evening, Mayor and Council Members. As the City Manager said, I'm Jill Scott and we have a whole group of people here tonight to help present this. So with me is Alan Alton, our CFO who will be presenting part of the presentation. We also have Ethan Walsh from BBK Law who is our legal counsel, as well as Walker Consultants, Amy Nicholson from Planning, Ray Zadele Rosa from Economic Development and Chad Hedge, our parking manager. And we are here tonight to talk about the declaration of Four City Owned Parcels as non-exempt surplus. Next slide, please. So just a recap of where we've come from, this has been a really long process to get to this part tonight of actually declaring some parcels surplus. So staff has been working on this for many years now, four to five years. Over the last year, we've been to Council and Study Sessions four different times. The first was on January 25th to discuss the downtown strategy. The next one was an updated parking presentation on August 23rd, September 13th was the full Civic Center Feasibility Analysis as well as an overview of the Housing Action Plan. And then the last one prior to this was October 11th where we reviewed all of our downtown parcels, reviewed the Surplus Lands Act and received direction from Council on which sites to surplus. Next slide, please. So where did this come from? So this has been many years in the making and has come from basically been handed down to us from the state. So the state and Governor Newsom in 2019 really updated the Surplus Lands Act. They did a major update. That update really changed the way that we look at lands, underutilized lands as well as surplus lands for California and for our specific agency in Santa Rosa. So those needed to be now as of 2019 really prioritized for affordable housing. And then in addition to that, the governor addressed the housing shortage after that 2019 update by ordering several of his departments, Department of General Services and the Department of Housing and Community Development to identify all the excess state-owned property and to prioritize that aggressively for affordable housing. Those mandates were also pushed down and ordinance were also pushed down and those expectations were made of local agencies and counties throughout California. Additionally and more recently, DGS streamlined a plan and was ordered to streamline a plan through an ordinance by Governor Newsom to transition all of the states underutilized multi-story buildings into housing to expand affordable housing. And this relates a lot to what we're doing tonight is because the state is using themselves as an example and the expectation is that the cities and counties will as well. And what we're looking at tonight is mostly underutilized land. Next slide please. So the Surplus Lands Act, you guys have seen this slide several times now over the last year, but just a quick update. This was the 2019 update to the Surplus Lands Act. Of course we had a Surplus Lands Act prior to that, but the 2019 update declared, said that all city property prior to a lease or a disposition had to be declared surplus even if there was a government use. So surplus that word surplus means all to most of us. It's very confusing process because it means to most of us that we don't need the property anymore. But it really is just a word that is used to now in the Surplus Lands Act. And it applies to underutilized property. So it's what we have to do to be able to utilize that property, but it doesn't necessarily mean we don't have a government use. And then of course we have to, once the property is surplus, we have to make it available to the housing affordable housing sponsors through a notice of availability with HCD. Next slide please. So council direction. We received a lot of council direction throughout the last year and looking over our feasibility studies, our housing action plan or downtown station area specific plan that all feed into what we're doing tonight. And the direction that we heard from council on October 11th was to declare several of the parking assets as a non-exempt surplus. And those lead into our goals and the council goals of meeting our housing goals for the council goals and also the state as well as bringing more activity and economic vitality into the downtown and more people, more business usage, more restaurant usage, et cetera. And then additionally, we heard council say to declare the city hall, the city hall annex block, public safety buildings, municipal services center as surplus with a replacement of a civic center. And then additionally, we heard council say that they wanted to bypass the city council surplus policy and use the SLA process requirements specifically. Next slide please. So as staff went back and looked at updated everything. So we started all of this many, many years ago. We, after the last meeting, we updated everything and what we found that there were a few things the current staff wasn't aware of. And some of that was collateralization of certain downtown assets. So, and we collateralized or last a few councils ago, past councils made the choice to collateralize certain downtown assets for public improvement projects. So for instance, city hall annex and the buildings, the associated buildings next to it on that block were held as collateral for the purchase of the 2000, in 2007 of 655 First Street which is the old West America bank building that's at the end of that block. Those bonds and that collateralization were later refinanced in 2016 to rebuild and reconstruct courthouse square. So those are currently held and collateralized. Another example is MSC and PSB are collateral against 1996 redevelopment bonds that were refunded in 2016. So as staff went back and looked at this, we already knew that we did not have a fully vetted financial plan for a new city hall yet. And as we layered on these things such as the collateralization and knowing that we needed to come up with a plan for how to either pay off bonds or refinance bonds or build that into the building of a new civic center. We really realized that we're just not there yet. We need to come up with a fully formed financial plan and a way to fund it. Cause we do know from past study sessions that it's quite a huge undertaking and our current budget does not allow for that type of debt service. So you will see through this presentation that staff tonight is not recommending that we move forward with surplusing the civic center sites at this time until we have a plan in place. Next slide please. So this is the map that we've used in the last few study sessions. And I just with the current information I wanted to go through this with you all really quickly. So if we look at the city hall annex block that has chamber building, West America Bank building, garage nine, additionally city hall. And then to the east and west, the fire station and MSCS, as well as the central library which would come with city hall or be rebuilt with city hall and a civic center project. All of those right now, staff is recommending that we just hold until we can figure out a financial plan. We've already heard from council that lot 10 and lot six are not spaces that we wanna move forward with anything with that we're gonna leave alone. And lot 10, we are in the process of working on a reconstruction of that lot. Lot two, we know we've sold and we're in a development agreement. So for a second, let's look at the three largest garages would sort of create a triangle over the downtown. Garage three, garage one. So garage three is in the, would be the northeast of town. Garage one would be the northwest and then garage 12, which would be sort of southwest. They create, there are three largest garages, 700 and something spaces in each, much, much larger than any other parking asset we have in the downtown, all three of them. They create this triangle of walkability within the downtown, they are the three newest garages and they are have the least amount of deferred maintenance and require the least city investment. So staff is recommending at this point that we leave those that triangle of parking alone as parking assets for the downtown and for the future development. So that leaves us with lot 11, garage five and White House site. And those are the three lots that staff is recommending that we move forward with this evening. Next slide please. So let's take a look at the housing potential for those three sites. So of course we had to use some assumptions and coming up with this. And these are just examples of what could be possible. So for garage five, it's a 0.66 acres and it has a floor area ratio of eight. All of these spots do all of these three lots do. So just a very quick reminder of what far as floor area ratio because it's quite confusing. It is the ratio of the total building area in relation to the lot size itself. It's calculated by taking the total building square footage and dividing it by the area of the lot. It doesn't limit the height or the number of stories of the building. It just controls the amount of building space allowed on a given lot. And that's how planning comes up with the figures with these figures. So right now garage five only has 195 parking stalls. For example, we could get something like 230 housing 800 square foot housing units or 184,000 square foot housing units just as an example or a mix match of any of these size of units. Lot 11, the same thing, a little bit larger. This is all three of these very underutilized parcels exactly what the state is talking about for affordable housing and what they want cities and counties to prioritize. So 65 parking stalls, very, very small amount of parking and potential units, 268, 800 square foot units for a lot of units. White House site is specifically 1.31 acres just a flat open lot right now, 113 parking stalls one of our smallest as well, 309, 1200 square foot units or 463, 800 square foot units or a mix match of any of those. So the potential on these three sites for housing and affordable housing is great. Next slide please. So I'm gonna turn this over now to Alan Alton, our CFO to go through the current parking study. Thanks, Jill. So after we finished our study sessions in October, we knew that we had a number of underutilized spaces, I believe 3200 underutilized parking spaces in the system. As a part of a study that we did in June, we reached out to Walker consultants who did that study to see what the demand would be on for future development, the demand on the parking system. So we engaged them again. They used the June 2022 parking study of the baseline. We also provided them with additional information including current permits assigned in the garages and lots and a detailed list of current and projected developments in the downtown based off of what we had in planning and economic development. Walker then utilized their models, a shared parking model to determine what the future parking demand would be and determined that there was adequate parking to sustain proposed development if public parking was not provided in the lots and the talking about which is why 11 white outside in garage five. It's a rather complex study that they did. So we've invited them here and they've been gracious enough to hang out with all of us this evening. So we have Chrissy Nancy and Tonya Schleck from Walker consultants and they're gonna walk through the study and what their findings were. Next slide please and I'll turn it over to Chrissy. Great, thank you, Allen and good evening council members. Thanks for having us back to discuss the parking study in downtown Santa Rosa. So during our previous presentations a few months ago we discussed findings from our analysis of parking utilization in 2022. And during that time we talked about what we found during what we call the design day. So how parking is utilized during this design day. This is a day when we expect parking to be very highly utilized. One of your peak parking times. But in fact, parking in downtown was only 30% utilized during that design day leaving thousands of empty spaces. And we even looked at the 2022 data. We analyzed it comparing it to pre-pandemic levels and made some adjustments to our analysis for those pre-pandemic conditions. And even making those adjustments, we found that parking again was very underutilized. There were still 2,500, 3,000 spaces available at each time when we would expect parking to be very utilized. But we know that there's a need for downtown parking that will tick up given these new developments coming online over the next few years. So we took a deeper dive into that utilization analysis to consider how these proposed new developments would affect parking demand with the 990 new residential units, new commercial development that's going to be built over the next few years. We know developers aren't fully parking their developments which is permitted within the zoning code. So we wanna know where those residents will be using some of the public supply. And we found that, and we're gonna walk through the analysis in Tanya. I wish like it's here to walk through that data. We know that considering new parking, developers will actually build some new parking on site. But we want to know what the spillover is to the public parking supply caused by these new developments. And we again found that even with all the new development that's under consideration right now, there still will be an adequate supply of parking downtown to accommodate the current demand and the demand generated by that new development. This slide shows you the study methodology that we used for this analysis. So what we did was we took our 2022 utilization study. We've talked about many times the map of parking with all the green areas. So that data, we combine that with the new parking demand from the new developments using what walkers, we call our shared parking model. The shared parking model is takes a shared approach to evaluate future parking needs downtown. Essentially, we're sharing parking between different land uses. Residential during the evenings, office during the day, when people are parking the most depending on where their final destination is. And we want to share parking. We encourage this as a best practice so that we can get just the most out of that asset that you've already invested a lot of resources in. Walker, we've developed our model in partnership with the Urban Land Institute. So our shared parking model that we use for this analysis is a partnership that we've had with Urban Lands Institute for several decades. The model is in its third edition. You can go to the next slide, please. And the model is based on parking utilization data from thousands of developments across the country and in California. We take that data that we've collected over time. We account for local conditions like transit access to project the parking demand for these new developments. And honey's gonna walk through the analysis now, but one caveat that we want to make is, as downtown grows and if you do surplus some of these facilities, you have a great parking management program now and just to maintain that and make sure that you adequately manage parking to accommodate that demand. So I'll hand it over to Tanya to walk through the data. Thanks, Chrissy. Next slide, please. So Chrissy mentioned the shared parking model. So I'm gonna walk through kind of the general steps of the shared parking analysis. So first we take the land use data. And so this is the number of residential units, the amount of commercial square footage. So this is data that we received from the city from future developments that are proposed or under construction in the downtown area. So we take this data, we apply a base parking ratio that's tailored to the specific land use. And as Chrissy said, they're based on hundreds of studies that have been conducted over the years, specific to the land use in question. We use third party commute mode data to see what the driving patterns are and what the transportation mode patterns are in downtown Santa Rosa specifically for the different land uses to adjust those base ratios based on driving. The base ratios are really kind of from suburban locations, very auto-centric. So we always adjust those specific to each community. So we looked at commute mode data specifically for downtown Santa Rosa. And then the model, as Chrissy alluded to, also adjusts for captive market effects, peak hour adjustments and time of year, monthly adjustments to yield the overall recommended supply for the developments. So in looking at the, we looked at nine future development projects that are proposed in downtown. And we saw overall 816 spaces are recommended, 351 spaces are proposed to be provided on the development site. So we project that approximately 480 spaces will be needed offsite. And so we're assuming that those would be, offsite needs would be accommodated in Santa Rosa's public parking facilities. Next slide, please. Thank you. So this slide is showing those nine developments and as well as the removal of the White House site, proposed removal White House site, lot 11, as well as garage five. And so this slide is basically showing how we would allocate the demand from the future development and the removal of the parking facilities within Santa Rosa's public parking system. Next slide, please. So in looking at the data, as you know, as Christy said, we use the June 2022 study as the base. We understand permit sales are increasing downtown and some permit sales have already been, additional permit sales have been executed. So in looking at the additional permit sales, future development as well as the loss of the three proposed surplus parking facilities, we are still showing that there is availability that most lots are still staying, at least 25% availability. Next slide, please. So overall to summarize, as Christy mentioned that our June 2022 study showed substantial public parking availability, only 30% of public parking spaces which are utilized, which is quite low. And even looking at what the demand might be like based on transaction data pre-pandemic, we're still showing, we still showed a substantial amount of availability. Certainly with the new development projects, we project that approximately 480 spaces would be needed off site. So that certainly does increase demand. Permit sales are also increasing. Next slide, please. But even with those projected increases in demand and with the loss of the three proposed surplus parcels, we are projecting that there will be a surplus of parking overall downtown. We are expecting it study area wide for utilization to grow up to approximately 48%, up from 30%, which is still, still is quite a bit of availability. And we anticipate that the demand to be relatively spread out, but with few locations exceeding that 85% utilization threshold, which is a standard that Walker typically recommends to kind of stay under that 85% utilization threshold to ensure there's availability of parking for those who need it. So I think that concludes Walker's study findings. So I guess I'll turn it back to Alan. Thank you, Tanya. I'll actually take it from here. Okay. Can we go to the next slide, please? So parking recommendations, where are we? Staff has really taken all of the information and tried to balance the needs of council goals and council visions. So we're looking at state housing goals, council's housing goals, or state housing requirements, I should say. Council's housing goals, council's green vision and the needs of the downtown, the needs of the businesses downtown, the needs of folks coming in for events or for restaurants or for usage downtown. And we came up with the following really thought out recommendations. So you'll see tonight that we're recommending three separate resolutions for surplus. And that's on White House site and lot seven. Staff is recommending that we do not have a requirement for replacement of public parking. Of course, the council can be open to negotiations as we go through this process. If someone didn't want to put public parking in, but we would not have a requirement in the resolution for that. On garage five, we're proposing a minimum of 75 public stalls of public parking be required to be replaced. And here is why we did that. We're trying to balance the needs of everyone. We know that nearby businesses, it's not that we need or the city or the downtown as you heard from the study from Walker needs parking spaces at garage five. We do have enough. We have that nice triangle of spaces to be filled in. Additionally, we still have garage nine as well and on straight parking, but we do know that a certain amount of spaces are important in garage five to the surrounding businesses. So staff is proposing a compromise to replace 75 of the parking stalls and then negotiations to include a potential city investment to be able to do that. So we know several things. And we know that likely a redevelopment project where a developer would have to pay for the replacement of public parking does not pencil for anyone. We know that the city would have to, this is a very old garage and the city would have to put quite a bit of funds in city investment in and in the near future in garage five. We know that it needs a deck replacement in the very near future. And that is one deck that would just complete one deck for four to $6 million and still leave us with a very old garage. Knowing these things, staff is recommending that during negotiations that council may be open to an investment equal or somewhere around the amount of money that we would have to invest in just one deck to replace 75 or more spaces in garage five. Next slide please. So next steps, where would we go from here? So if council does approve these resolutions tonight as we have gone through this whole process of all of and the direction that we've received, then the next step would be council enclosed session would consider price and terms for a long-term lease or even potentially a sale on some of these assets. We would send the resolutions to HDD for approval. So HDD would need 30 days to approve the resolutions. And then once we get approval from HDD on the three resolutions, we would submit a notice of availability to HDD making this property available to affordable housing sponsors. Now, any development that could come out of that because we are seeing a lot of affordable housing sponsors work with market rate developers to come to submit on a redevelopment for items like this on underutilized land. Any development would have to have a minimum of 25% affordable through this process. So it can have more, but the minimum is 25% affordably. Next slide please. And then from there, it would be the regular steps that you taken through a development project. We would negotiate with any interested housing sponsor that would submit. We could enter from then enter into agreement for development. If there were no interest from anyone on the affordable housing sponsor list, then likely we would go back to probably project sounding and possibly an issuance of an RFP for private developers. Next slide please. So this is the recommendation for tonight and I apologize, it's a little bit long, but it's what we have to do for HDD. So the recommendation is recommended by the finance planning and economic development and transportation and public works departments that counsel by three separate resolutions pursuant to government code section 54221. One declare that each of the following four city owned properties located at 625 and 637 Third Streets, APN 009013011 and 009013012, also known as garage five, B, 505th Street, APN 010, 053, 028, Lott 11, and C, 733 Third Street, APN 009072044, Lott 7, also known as White House site, together with garage five and 11 collectively known as surplus lands are non exempt surplus land. Number two, direct staff to prepare and submit notices of availability for the surplus lands and three, authorize the city manager to take all necessary actions to comply with the surplus lands act and to carry out council's direction in the disposition of the surplus lands. And that is the end of our presentation. And we, along with Walker and Ethan our, Ethan Walsh, our legal counsel and the whole team are here for any questions that council may have. All right, thank you so much to the team. Let's see who wants to start with questions. Council member McDonald. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you for the presentation. I have a couple of different questions. Can you tell me which garage is the most used garage because I've heard the word underutilized properties several different times tonight, but can you tell me the most used garage that we have? So I'm going to let parking answer that because I'm not sure of that, but I do want to clarify council member McDonald that when I say underutilized or we say underutilized properties, that means that the property itself is underutilized, meaning that it does not mean that the parking itself is not utilized. It means that the airspace above it could be activated to add housing and that makes it as the state declares it at underutilized property. Thank you for that clarification. I still have the same question. Sir, council member McDonald, I believe that would be garage five on third street. Garage five is the most used garage. I'm sorry. Yes. Thank you. Has there been any analysis done of what it specifically does to the businesses in the downtown area when parking is actually a little bit more difficult for people as far as businesses go. If they're having to park maybe on the outer edges of where to utilize downtown businesses, have there been any analysis done on that? Of that specifically, no. I mean, I don't know, Chrissy, if that was part of what you noticed in your analysis of that, I mean, I would say that in a probably half block distance from, let's say a garage five, you have a garage nine, which has more open spaces. You have the White House slot as well. So, I mean, but that particular type of a study of the business impact to that, that's not something that I've done myself. If it's helpful, this is Ray Sidellarosa, Economic Development Division. We have not done a specific study at this point on that, and we certainly can do something a little bit more robust. I will say in the discussions we've had with businesses in the area, both in Railroad Square and Port House Square, if you look at Railroad Square, there's a lot less parking. And parking tends to be a little bit further away, either they park in the mall or in farther areas. And the discussions I've had with Railroad Square merchants is that they tend to do very well. One business I can, or the parking I should say in front of their businesses is of less concern to them because they've never had it there than it is to some of the merchants that speak up against losing parking in the Courthouse Forest side. One business I can call out because I had a long discussion with them about parking before is Miracle Plum. They point out that the argument that having parking right in front of your business or right nearby being critical to the success of the business is not something that they've ever found to be true in their area. They have no parking in front of their business and very limited parking. Or it's a little bit further away from them where they are. So that's an example of the kinds of conversations I've had with businesses who are successful in areas where they don't, they have less parking. That said, on the Courthouse Forest side, parking for the merchants in that area has always been of great interest to them and of great concern. And then my last question really has to do with the, I believe you called it, collateralization of our properties. Do we, and have we done an analysis to make sure that there's no more bonds or properties that we have sort of mortgaged when we're getting this information? Cause I feel that the three different presentations that we were given, we didn't have all the information specifically on this. And so I just am not sure without all the data and information around that specific thing that I have all the information tonight. Right, so we have, and none of the parking assets are involved in those, in the 2016 COPs. The ones that are involved with that are the West America building, the Chamber building, City Hall at Annex, the Family Center and Ranking Valley Library. So as Jill was saying before, because those are tied to that, to those certificate of participation, they are basically encumbered with that. So we're not able to, at this point, those assets aren't free for use. And the ability for us to pay those off wouldn't be able, or pay off early, wouldn't start until 2026. And that's just the call date that was put into the COPs. So, but other than that, we have looked at all of them. We have pulled our records and made the accounting. Just so I'm clear, you said that we're not able to pay those off. Can you tell us about how much we owe on those? And I'm sorry, I couldn't hear, and it didn't translate down low for you, which is what I read. Can you tell me about how much we owe on these different properties that now we're not able to surplus, but originally were given to us as a potential to be able to surplus? So the amount of those COPs was about $10 million. And today we haven't really paid off much of the, because of the long debt repayment schedule of that, we haven't really touched the principal. So you can figure that we have about $10 million to pay off on it. And we wouldn't be able to do any type of early payment until 2026. So that's the amount. Those, it's not that we owe on those specific properties, they're just there as collateral for those COPs at that time. And Alan, just so I'm clear, you're saying 2026, because it's coming up Intel on my screen. So I just wanna make sure I'm hearing the right year from you. Yes, 2026. Thank you, I appreciate that. And I'm sorry for my bad ears. And then just my last question on that, do we have any indication how much the White House site or a lot of 11 would be if we were to surplus those, the value of those, if I'm sorry, I wasn't clear. The dollar value of those sites? Is that what you're asking? Can I ask one more question? Yes, thank you. So that's a closed session discussion that we would have. We wouldn't wanna put a dollar value on those as of right now. Just so I'm clear, then we're surplacing land that we don't know the value of them. We do know the value of them. The value is a negotiated item that we would talk about in closed session. Thank you. Council Member Sawyer. Allen, could I get some clarification on the usage of lot five or garage five? You said that it was the most used garage. Is that relative to the number of spaces, like is the percentage of use the highest or are the number of spaces that are used on a daily basis higher than the other garages? It's the percentage of use. So I'm trying to look back on the last report. That one was coming in at in the 50 to 70% usage range. Whereas all of our other garages were less than 50% and as Jill mentioned, several of those are much larger than garage five. I believe garage five is our smallest garage. It is. Smallest. And as a point of clarification, I think that the presentation was making a distinction between garages and flat lots. Also flat lots with a higher usage. Chris, did you wanna add some clarification to that? Yes, thank you. I just wanted to clarify. So garage five is Allen saying it was in the 50 to 75% specifically. It was, we found it was 55% utilized. So at the lower end of that range and during this peak demand design day, the occupancy was 107 spaces used with 87 spaces unoccupied. That makes sense. And especially in my experience with that garage, the not unlike probably all of our garages, the top deck and the approach of the top deck remains empty most of the time. So to have the smallest garage be the, have the highest percentage that makes perfect sense, especially since it's right in the middle of the downtown. So I just wanted to make sure that we were looking at those numbers with the reality of that, of the size of the garage and its location. Thank you. Council members, what up? Thank you, Mr. Mayor. And thank you all for the presentation. You know, this is the, I guess the fourth of dealing with this topic. And I really did appreciate slide eight where we talked about the potential of what our intent is. It really helps you wrap your arms around what could be in our downtown that I think we're all striving for. Jill, the question I had for you on slide 17, we talked about the parking recommendations. I get the White House site and lot 11 go to HCD but no public parking requirement. But on garage five, can you share a little bit more insight? We go through the HCD involvement and what does our interest in the 75 public stalls, what impact would that have with any negotiations through any non-profit service provider or affordable housing service provider going through the HCD process? Sure, I'll be happy to answer that if I think I understand your question. So even if the city does have an investment to replace some of the parking and we negotiate a long-term lease for an affordable housing development on there, it is more difficult of a development to include public parking. I don't think it will have a big, a huge impact but it will, I guess I should say, it will make it more difficult for another an affordable developer may be interested in doing 100% affordable on that project. That could be a scenario. And if we make a requirement for some replacement of public parking, they would need to likely partner with someone to make that happen even if there's a city investment. Is that clear or is that what you're asking me? Right, so would we still be able to negotiate? HCD couldn't impose this upon us. You said it was surplus property. I understand the city has an interest in 75 public stalls but the affordable housing developer says we don't have that same interest and therefore we're gonna get it anyway in spite of your interest. Is that a possibility? No, that's why it's stated in the resolution. So the resolution, because the resolution states a minimum of 75 parking stalls, that would be on the property. And Ethan, did you wanna add something to that? Yeah, I was just gonna say as far as the surplus lands act process, we do, it's a negotiation process and we can't be compelled to sell the property to anyone. We do have to negotiate in good faith with affordable housing providers if they express an interest, but we can't be obligated to sell any one through this process. Ultimately, if we can't come to terms with somebody, then we go on to the next step of negotiating a deal based on kind of an RP process or something along those lines. Great, thank you, that's very helpful. Council Member Fleming. Yeah, my question is for Ms. De La Rosa if she's still with us. We had a question previously, hey there, about the potential economic impacts of removing the parking asset. I'm curious to know what you see as the potential on the other side of adding density in people living in those spaces rather than cars that aren't doing a whole lot and the people that are drawn downtown by the cars. And if you think that there is a balance to be had there and if so, if you have any sense of which way it goes, if the parking asset is more valuable economically or the housing is more valuable? Well, overall, we should see a greater return on the intensification of our land uses specifically with residential mixed use properties and the increase in services that are available, especially if, as the Walker study points out, we retain enough parking to accommodate that growth and we still have, as I understand the study, enough parking to accommodate that growth. So the vibrancy of any downtown is, residential development is critical to the vibrancy of any downtown. So I see both in terms of the potential of property and other sales tax and other taxes that in revenue generating uses that come out of the intensification of the downtown land use through specifically residential uses, we should see ideally more revenue coming into the city. Okay, that is helpful, thank you. And I will add that we are looking at a study, but we have not yet completed the contract. We should have a study that should be able to quantify the value of downtown infill housing in our market that will give us a more specific information and we'll present that to council when that's done, maybe six months from now, hopefully. Yeah, it would be fun to see also alongside that the urban three presentation for our council. That's one of the all time top 10 hits and my opinion, thank you. So I think this is mostly a question for the city attorney or perhaps Ethan or somebody from your team. We council members received an email earlier today expressing interest potentially in a land swap to accommodate some of the city's priorities. In your opinion with the surplus lands act would there be the potential to do a land swap without declaring a property surplus first? I'll go to the city attorney. I thank you, Mr. Mayor. The government code provides that you can, there is an exception for a land exchange provided that the land that you are exchanging you're gonna exchange your surplus property then the other property that you're gonna receive has to be property that's necessary for the agency's use. So unless the particular property proposed for exchange is necessary for an existing project or proposal it would not be exempt. So given that there are no current projects or proposals. Yes. Would it be difficult for us to meet that standard? Very difficult, yes. In the event that we did declare the land surplus and a project or a proposal came forward would we be able to consider that within the context of responses to the RFP? I may let Mr. Walsh respond but I'll take a shot at it to begin is that once it's been declared as surplus property and put through the process I don't, I'm not aware of any way that you could reverse that decision but I would ask Ethan. So if we went through the, if we declared the land surplus and then we made it available we listed the notice of availability and solicited proposals from folks as a first step you need to entertain any affordable housing proposals and then following that you go through the RFP process and at that point you have a lot more flexibility and so at that point you could certainly entertain creative ideas if there were some out there and you wouldn't be restricted in the same manner. Jill and I did discuss kind of this I think conceptually at a very high level with HCD and they did indicate that you could that you could entertain proposals like that as part of this process but you would have to do it in the context of the Surplus Lands Act and I agreed with everything that the city attorney mentioned with regard to how we would interpret this at the outset if we didn't have a specific property that we were targeting as something that was necessary for public purpose. And how does, because I know we've done these in the past how do exclusive negotiating agreements play into or impact the Surplus Lands Act process? So the way that they would claim to this process is that initially you would issue the notice of availability that we would prepare as part of this process and then see what we get in response to that and then enter into a negotiation process with one or more developers if anyone expressed an interest. If we went through that process and did not select a purchase or a property at that point what I think staff would recommend is that we issue an RFQ or an RFP for developers we would go through that process, select a developer pursuant to the RFP process and then at that point we would likely enter into an ENA to negotiate the actual structure of the transaction. And if I may, Mr. Mayor, I know that you're aware that we did engage in an ENA on a different property with a different parking lot. I think that's lot two. That predated the amendments to the Surplus Lands Act so that's why we were able to continue that process with that particular project and that particular property. But anything that we started now as Mr. Walsh indicated would have to first go through the Surplus Lands Act process before we could move into an ENA. Really helpful, thank you. And then my last question is for the purposes of CEQA at what point does this become a project? So does the Surplus Action itself become a project or is it not until we've done the RFP and received back proposals? So I can speak to the action that we're taking today. And this is obviously just a discretionary action that the council has taken. Any discretionary action is subject to CEQA but as part of the resolution or as part of the overall action we determined that this is exempt from CEQA because it doesn't rise to the level of a project at this point because we don't really have any specific use that's articulated at this point. So there's nothing to actually propose. I would think when we go to the point where we have a concrete proposal as to what would happen with the land that that would then likely be a project and we would have to analyze at that point whether it was eligible for any exemption from further environmental review or if there was additional environmental review that we would have to do once we have kind of an articulated use for the property if we were going to sell it. And Sue may have something to add to that. I was just going to add that it is going to be pretty fact specific. I agree completely that at this point the other resolution to declare it the property surplus is exempt from CEQA because there's not enough. We don't have a project yet. We don't know what's going to go on. As we go through a negotiating process it will depend on how formulated the actual project will be. What level of environmental review will be required but as Mr. Walsh indicated we would certainly be looking at all of the requirements of CEQA the possible exemptions it's going to be very fact specific. So even I just want to make sure I'm really specific even with one of the resolutions stating that 75 parking spots need to be replaced that still does not rise to the level of a project. Correct. Any other questions from council? Council member McDonald. Thank you. I just wanted to know if we did have any plan for relocating City Hall at this time or have there been any conversations about that in the past and would that constitute something such as maybe a plan? There have certainly been many, many discussions of the potential to move City Hall to a new location but at this point there is no plan there is no specific proposal. There are a lot of different options that would be at the table. And then I just have one more clarifying question and some somewhat of a comment. I want to be clear that I'm not against any building in any of the downtown area. I think that my comments often come across that I'm against building. What I haven't seen and maybe you can clarify for me as have there been any strategic planning done is showing what is the least impact on our businesses as we build or as we decide to declare a land surplus. So meaning if we started from the outside and worked our way in so that we did have patrons and we did have people living in and say the outside area before we would move in. Has there been any strategic planning or discussions around that so that it would be less impactful to our businesses in the downtown area? Rice, I might want to weigh in on this one but I will tell you know we haven't done a specific plan to look at what lots should go first as far as the impact. We are aware from many other agencies and cities and counties that have done this in the past that and are continually doing this that we do need to stagger our construction and so we know I'm going forward that if any of these parcels if we do get developments on these parcels that we'll need to look very closely at parking and where parking can be done and when we are doing construction and what is impacted but I'd like to hear what Rice I would say about that. Yeah, I would agree with that. We have more opportunities on certain lots than other lots from the development perspective and there's some interest in certain lots over other lots but we have to take the time to consider everything with that, what the timing is and what the needs of the downtown as a whole are in order to come up with a strategy and which would go first. If that's how, if I answered your question correctly. Just so I'm clear what I was hearing from you was that you needed to take the time to make sure that whatever we are surplusing was going to be the least impactful on the downtown area. Is that what you said? I apologize. Yeah, that is one component. We want to be, we want to move the lots that will have the greatest impact and have the greatest opportunity to be successful as to be successfully redeveloped but we also need to consider what the impact will be on the downtown and so one is not an isolation of the other is what I mean to say. And do we feel that that study has been done properly before we surplus these specific lots tonight? We feel very confident about the lots that we've selected to surplus and that these are the correct light lots to look at now and first of all the assets that we have in the downtown and then within those three lots we will take some additional time to assess the progression of which lot gets developed first given the things that we just mentioned. Thank you. Any other questions? All right, let's go to public comment then on this item. Is there anybody in the chambers who'd like to provide comment? Let's go to Zoom then we'll start with Natalie followed by Joshua. Can you hear me? Yes, we can. All right, hi, Natalie Balfour on behalf of Airport Business Center. Good evening. I'm just here quickly to request that the council just postponed deciding whether to deem garage five as surplus land. We just came up with an exciting idea that we wanted to discuss with all the council members but we literally just thought of it last week. So we haven't been able to meet with everyone and our pitch is that give us like a month or two to meet with everyone, see if it's something you guys like and then if not, you guys can just come back and deem it surplus then once you have figured out if it's something you're interested in. So that's my only pitch. We did, our lawyer did send in a letter that goes into in detail, the debate of whether or not it should be surplus. I just didn't wanna get into that tonight but I did also send in a letter from the downtown action organization that I'm a part of on the board and we took a vote back in January when this first came up and I sent in the letter of support of not deeming this garage five surplus at all but instead of getting into that back and forth I'm just asking tonight that you guys hold off on just the garage, move forward with the other two properties and then come back if you guys don't like what we have in mind. So thanks. Thank you Natalie. We'll go to Joshua followed by Cliff. Great, can you hear me okay? Yes we can. Great, thanks so much for working on this late into the evening. So good evening Mayor Rogers, council members and staff. My name is Josh Shipper. I'm the new director of special initiatives with generation housing where we lead the movement for more, more diverse and more affordable housing. We really appreciate the city's commitment to moving forward on this plan using both the findings of the Walker study and the provisions of the downtown station area specific plan, sorry it's a mouthful to reduce parking burdens for future affordable housing. While we strongly endorse the lock 11 and White House site plans requiring no replacement parking we do also understand there is real concern from local businesses about losing parking spaces near their stores as has been expressed. However, we do worry that more parking allowances at garage five or a lack of clarity regarding the terms of that retention could interfere with future development of the site for affordable housing in particular. So we would ask the city for as much clarification of the relationship of the committed parking spots to any future development as possible so that developers will know exactly what they have to preserve and where parking will be set in relation to the site. For example, if these spots are totally necessary could the city add stipulations to ensure that development is easily allowable in the airspace above a ground level or a below ground level parking lot. Either way we urge the city to meet the spirit of the surplus land act and the DS ASP by keeping replacement parking to a minimum. We believe that there is sufficient evidence that additional car parking is not needed to maintain existing consumer traffic. Multiple studies have found that small businesses often overestimate the share of customers arriving by car. We know that pedestrians and cyclists are often very loyal customers, repeat customers who make frequent visits and spend more per month than folks who engage in the drive by shopping. So we really think that downtown Santa Rosa can better compete with more car heavy areas by offering an experience that's free from the hassle of parking. And we encourage the city to find a solution that maintains some parking, but also builds up. And we think that you all can do both. So thank you very much for your action on this step and for your leadership going forward. Thank you so much, Josh. We'll go to Cliff. Hello, can you hear me? Go ahead. Okay, I had it on mute. Is my time start? Okay. As I understand it, you want to demolish what, three parking garages, one of them being the Fifth Street garage to make way for 990 new residential units by eliminating 800, approximately 800 parking units in these garages. Where are the people that are going to live in these 990 new units going to park? Do you know affordable housing developers that are willing to build structured parking for their affordable housing projects? Or is it the expectation that no one will own a car that live in affordable housing units? As I can see, 90% of the people in Santa Rosa and Sonoma County own cars. Renting, I've talked to a lot of affordable housing developers and nobody's willing to build affordable housing without attached parking of some kind. It's a nice idea that everyone will take public transit, walk over to Smart Train, take the bus to go on the bicycle. But the truth of the matter is everybody owns a car. And requiring structured parking is a huge expense that developers don't want to stand in. And market developers won't step up to the plate either if they have to put in structured parking. And this comes back to the zoning of the density. I understand downtown makes sense to go with an eight point floor area ratio. But if you expect a developer to build without structured parking, I don't think we're going to have any takers. Because at least my experience is I represent most of Roberts district. And no one will step up to the plate with a 6.0 bar. And now downtown you're at an 8.0 bar. Those are under utilized parking structures. Maybe they should look at building, holding onto the parking structure and building the housing right on top of the existing structure. The city keeps on owning the parking structure and the developer will own the apartments on top. That's one concept, but changing the use for these parking garages makes sense. But we're going to have to replace parking because people that are moving in downtown are going to need parking. And it's a wish that they don't, but the reality is that they are going to. Thank you. Thank you, Cliff. Let me see if there's any other hands. Do we have any pre-recorded voicemails? We do not have any pre-recorded voicemails for this item. All right. I'm going to go ahead and bring this one back then. Council, did you have any additional questions or Ms. Scott, did you want to respond to any of the public comments? I don't have any specific responses to the public comment other than two of the structures that we're looking at tonight. The gentleman that just spoke was talking about building on top of parking structures. Two of the spaces that we're looking at now are surface slots. So there is no structure. And although I'm not an engineer, I would say that with the how old and the deferred maintenance on garage five that we would not be able to build on top of the structure. So these are things that we've looked at very closely and all of our feasibility studies going forward. I did want to mention one more thing as we're talking about potential land swaps. I do want to remind everyone as our CFO is reminding me that the parking assets that we're talking about tonight are assets of the parking enterprise district, not the general fund. So if we were to swap one of these lands in exchange for a land that would be for general fund purposes, the general fund would have to repay the parking enterprise fund the value of the property. So I did want to bring that up for thought for everyone. And otherwise, I'm here for any questions. All right, thank you. Council Member Sawyer, I'm gonna have you put a motion on the table for discussion. Mayor, do you want me to do it in the order? There's three resolutions in the order in which they are listed. Whatever the dealer's choices. Okay, we'll start with number one then. I'll introduce the resolution of the council, the city of Santa Rosa, declaring pursuant to government code section 45221 that real property owned by the city located at 625 and 637 Third Street, parking garage five, is non-exempt surplus land directing staff to prepare and submit a notice of availability therefore and authorizing the city manager to comply with the surplus lands act subject to the condition that not less than 75 parking, public parking stalls will be retained on the surplus land and waive further reading. Second. So we have a motion from Council Member Sawyer, a second from Council Member Swethelm. Discussion from Council. Council Member Rogers. Yes, so Madam City Attorney, I do have a question about this one. If we are to go ahead and approve this today or tonight and Natalie says that they have a great brilliant idea and it turns out that it is a great brilliant idea that we can actually make work, what would be the process of backing out of this? It would depend on what stage we're at. As soon as we start moving forward, it's gonna be very difficult to unwind it, but there will be some period of time before we're into the process submitting. I don't know what the timing is and maybe Jill can address that in terms of submission to HCD. That kind of starts getting the ball rolling. So Jill, do you wanna add or weigh in? Sure, I'm happy to. So once we submit it to HCD, it's gonna take them about 30 days to approve it or they have up to 30 days to approve it. Once we have approval for them, then we would issue the notice of availability and then we're down the line, we're down the road with this. I would say we would have until we, and maybe Ethan wants to weigh in on this to make sure I'm correct, but until we send in the notice of availability, what do you, Ethan, do you wanna weigh in on this? I think that's true. I mean, it's hard to say exactly how we would unwind it, not knowing what the proposal is, but I would say before we issue the notice of availability, if we declare a surplus at this point, we could always rescind that declaration if we decided that we weren't ready to declare a surplus for some reason. And Council Member Rogers, I will add to your question, which is a good one. We've had many, and I'm sure that Natalie's idea is a good one. We've had many developers come to us with really good ideas on what to do with these, but we have not been able to take advantage of those until we go through this surplus process and this SLA process and the notice of availability. So as Ethan talked about before, per state law and there are very few exemptions that will work to remove that this process, we have to go through this part declaring a surplus and putting out a notice of availability and putting it on for 60 days. Before we can, we need to look at this affordability as the number one aspect before we could go to something as an RFP or speaking directly to individual folks or developers on what could be done. Thank you, that was a very comprehensive answer to the question that I probably didn't ask, but I was trying to ask. Thank you, Jill. Additional comments? Just a question. I have a question. Oh, go ahead, Council Member. This was brought up by one of the callers and this question is about whether or not on lot five with the 75 space requirement for redevelopment, if that would pencil for developers, have we talked with developers who might be interested in the property with that requirement or is that a deal breaker for all of them? It only takes one, obviously. Thank you for that question actually. So a couple of things. We have talked to developers that are very interested in the property. There's, grad five has the most interest of all lots from developers, affordable developers and market rate developers so far, as we've seen. But to address that, probably not interested if they have to build the replacement parking at their cost. And that is why staff is recommending to Council that through negotiations, we consider the city investments of the replacement of those parking spaces. So we know that it's gonna take us a minimum of four to $6 million within the next few years to just replace one deck that will have to be done on garage five. So one deck is replaced, we spent four to $6 million out of the parking enterprise fund and we still have an old garage with one new deck. If we took that investment and put it into or negotiated as part of that replacement parking, we're getting new structured parking and activating that land, that airspace for affordable housing and market rate housing. That makes sense. And the other thing that came up for me earlier asking about unwinding this is, I don't know if we'll have the second reading next week or next month, but we will have a little time to hear Ms. Balfour's idea before this becomes active law in the city. Yes, we will. Council Member McDonald. Just a follow up question. You said that the parking enterprise would pay for some of the repairs that would be done. Would that be so in the negotiation of the 75 different available parking slots that we're requiring? Does that get paid out of general fund or does that get paid out of the parking enterprise fund? Parking enterprise fund. That would come out of the parking enterprise fund as it is a parking enterprise asset. Thank you. Any of the maintenance or deck replacements that would have to happen would come out of the parking enterprise fund. Any other comments or questions from Council? Okay, Madam City Clerk, please call the vote. Council Member Schwedhelm. Aye. Council Member Sawyer. Aye. Council Member Rogers. Aye. Council Member McDonald. No. Council Member Fleming. Aye. Mayor Rogers. Aye. That motion passes with five ayes. Council Member McDonald voting no and Vice Mayor Alvarez absent. Go ahead, Council Member Sawyer. Next resolution. Thank you, Mayor. Number two. Resolution of the Council of the City of Santa Rosa declaring pursuant to Government Code Section 5421 that real property owned by the city located at 733rd Street, known as Lot 7, is non-exempt surplus land, directing staff to prepare and submit a notice of availability, therefore, and authorizing the city manager to comply with the Surplus Land Act and waive further reading. Second. We have any questions or comments on the motion? That was a second from Council Member Rogers. Let's go ahead and call the vote. Council Member Schwedhelm. Aye. Council Member Sawyer. Aye. Council Member Rogers. Aye. Council Member McDonald. Aye. Council Member Fleming. Aye. Mayor Rogers. Aye. That motion passes with six ayes and Vice Mayor Alvarez absent. And the third motion, please. Thank you, Mayor. The third and final resolution, I will introduce the resolution of the Council of the City of Santa Rosa, declaring pursuant to Government Code Section 5421 that real property owned by the city located at 505th Street, known as Lot 11, is non-exempt surplus land, directing staff to prepare and submit a notice of availability therefore, and authorizing the city manager to comply with the Surplus Land Act and waive further reading. Second. Motion from Council Member Sawyer and second from Council Member Schwedhelm. Any discussion or questions? Let's call the vote. Council Member Schwedhelm. Aye. Council Member Sawyer. Aye. Council Member Rogers. Aye. Council Member McDonald. Aye. Council Member Fleming. Aye. Mayor Rogers. Aye. That motion passes with six ayes with Council Member Alvarez being absent. Excellent. Thank you so much, Jill, Ethan, Raissa, and the entire team. We really appreciate the presentation and the work that you've been doing on this. Madam City Manager, let's go on to item 14.3. Item 14.3 is a report, ordinance introduction, increasing council compensation in accordance with the provisions of section four of the Santa Rosa City Charter. City Attorney Gallagher will present. Thank you. Good evening, Mr. Mayor and Council Members. I know it's getting late, so we'll try to move through this item pretty quickly. I have just eight slides and I know you are all familiar in general with this issue. So let's get started. Next slide. So more than a year ago, the council did identify council compensation and a potential increase in council compensation as an issue for consideration by the Charter Review Committee. And the Charter Review Committee did take that issue up, held three separate meetings over the course of a number of months, I really dove deep into the issue. Really the two concerns about current council compensation, first is that the pay really does not reflect or respect the extensive work and responsibilities undertaken by council. And then second, the concern is that the current pay doesn't adequately allow for full diversity on the council and in particularly diversity in economic situation. So it's very difficult that the current pay for families with young children to join the council. Individuals that have lower paying occupations or individuals without separate means of support. So those are the primary concerns or other concerns that are identified, but really to open the doors for additional candidates for council. So the Charter Review Committee did recommend a Charter Amendment after all of their examination of the issue. And that recommendation was again for a Charter, for an amendment of the Charter to place a measure on the ballot to amend the Charter to tie council member salaries to the area median income. And the proposal that the committee made was that the mayor would receive 100% of the area median income for a three person household and that council members would receive two thirds of the area median income for three person household. The council took this up last fall, last summer, determined, was very interested, had a lot of lively discussion about that proposal, decided in the end not to move it forward in this election cycle, but to put off consideration until November, until the November 2024 election. So where does that leave us now? Next slide. This you all well know because you are council members, currently a salary of $800 a month, total of annual salary of 9,600. And what we heard from the, during the Charter Review Committee's deliberations was that council members generally are working about 20 to 30 hours per week. That's really about, that equals about 85 to 130 hours a month. So considerable amount of work for $800. And also the significance and importance of the work. The mayor currently receives a salary of 1200, as you know, for a total salary of 14,400. And everyone agreed that the mayor's position is easily full-time as those of you who've held that position well know. Next slide. I know in the past we've gotten questions about this. So I wanna acknowledge and be very upfront. The council members also receive benefits. Those benefits are essentially the same types of benefits and volume of benefits that other city employees receive. So it's not exceptional. Those benefits include health, vision, life insurance, long-term disability retirement and a couple of others. And the value of the benefit varies depending on the person's, the number of people in their household, their choice of plans and so forth. And the value ranges from between 19,400 to 33,700. So next slide. So the concerns about compensation are still, a present still valid. And so we've been asked, the Charter Review Committee looked at a lot of different options. One option was let's work within what the current charter provides. So we were asked to bring forward a proposal to increase council compensation in accordance with the existing provisions of the city charter. So the baseline is section four of the city charter, which addresses the council and talks about council compensation. Section four allows the council to provide compensation to council members and the mayor in accordance with the provisions of state law. It's state law, references state law that governs general law cities. And before we start looking at those provisions of state law, the second element of the baseline is that section four also provides that the mayor will receive a compensation equal to 150% of that paid to the council members. Next slide. So now turning to state law, state law provides a schedule for council compensation based on city population. For a city the size of Santa Rosa, state law provides for an initial council member salary of $800 per month. And Santa Rosa city council adopted that $800 per month salary by ordinance as required by state law in 2005, so 17 years ago. And the council's made no adjustments to that salary since that time. Next slide. So state law sets that initial salary, but state law also allows the council salaries to be increased up to 5% per year. The 5% is a flat rate, not compounded. We've talked about that before. So for Santa Rosa, for the council members, it's $40 per month increase is permitted annually. And the state law, the annual 5% increase can accumulate if it's not immediately applied. And so given that the council has not adjusted the salary for 17 years, that 17 years worth of increases has accumulated and can be applied now. Next slide. The final element is that adjustments under state law, adjustments can be made only when at least one council member begins a new term. And so we are at that point now next week on the 13th for council members will begin their new terms. So this proposed ordinance in front of you today for introduction. Number one would make these adjustments that are allowed under the city charter and state law and it would make the salary increase effective on December 14th. Next slide is simply the calculation, how that works out. So we start with 800 a month. We add $40 a month times 17. That's a $680 a month increase that equals $1480 a month. And for council members that would total a salary of 17,760. Calculation for the mayor based on the city charter, we use the 150% measure. And that equals monthly salary. I'm sorry, this says monthly council salary. That should say monthly mayor salary of $22,220 a month for an annual salary of $26,640. And that's it. Next slide is happy to answer any questions. Council member Fleming. Thank you, Sue. I have a question about the only at the time when new council members or council members start a new term. Would that mean that let's say next year at this time we wanted to increase again for the, because it's $40 a year, would we have to set forth that today so that it would increase again then when it's legally allowable or would we have to forego that increase for 2024 and then could only increase it thus then by $80 in starting in 2025? Right, your second version. We cannot, the council cannot agree to an automatic increase in the future. You could, but you, it does, it can only go into effect when there's a new council member that takes a seat. So you could anytime next year adopt a new ordinance to increase council compensation but it would not be effective until 2024. But I would not recommend trying to do that now because of the restriction against any automatic increase. And when you say 2024, you mean the beginning of 2024 or the end of 2021? It would be when a new council member takes a seat. So barring, let's not have a vacancy on council. We've already done that a couple of times. We've had very good results, but I just, let's not go through that again. Barring a vacancy, an unexpected vacancy on council. The next election is in 2024. So the next time that you can increase salaries is when those new council members take their seats. And at that point, you're exactly right. It would be an $80 increase at that point. Okay. It's just really interesting that state law has those two, that little thing in there. It seems like a hiccup, maybe an unintended little bit of the law. It is an odd way that it's structured. I'm not sure what motivated that. So, and again, in 2024, the council can decide if it wants to take up a charter amendment. If you take up a charter amendment, you can structure it any way you want. Thank you very much. Council Member Rogers. Hi, I have one question and one point of clarification. My question would be, because this is effective December 14, 2022, would that mean December would be prorated for the current council members? That would be my question. No, it's prorated beginning on the 14th. It can only apply to the council members that are on the council at that point. So, apologies to the two council members who are departing. And then my second, not a question, but a point of clarification, the value of benefits. For me, I would think range between $0 and $33,000 because some council members choose not to partake in the benefit package at all. So that would make them out of zero, right or wrong? That could be, there may be some of the benefits that, I know that you can waive your health benefits, your vision, your dental. I'm not sure about some of the other, the long-term disability and some of those other benefits, but it may be that you can waive those all, in which case the value would be zero. Thank you. Any other questions? All right, let's go to public comment on the item. If you have a comment, go ahead and hit the raise hand feature on your Zoom. Do not see any hands. Do we have any prerecorded voice mails? There are no prerecorded voice mails. All right, I'm gonna bring it back. Council Member McDonald. Thank you, Mayor. I move the ordinance at the council of the city of Santa Rosa to increase council compensation in accordance with the provisions of section four of the city of Santa Rosa, city charter, sorry, and waive further reading of the text. Second. We have a motion from Council Member McDonald and a second from Council Member Rogers. Any comments from council? Let's call the vote. Council Member Schwedhelm. Aye. Council Member Sawyer. An exuberant aye. Council Member Rogers. Aye. Council Member McDonald. Aye. Council Member Fleming. Aye. Mayor Rogers. Aye. That motion passes with six ayes with Vice Mayor Alvarez absent. All right, thanks Council. We'll go to our last public comment for non-agenda items matter. If there's anybody who'd like to make a comment on something within our jurisdiction that was not on the calendar tonight, hit the raise hand feature on Zoom. All right, seeing none, we'll adjourn. Thank you, Council.