 if everybody could take their seats thank you welcome everybody and thanks for being here today as you know this is a a special meeting and a special meeting by law and a special meeting by sentiment as far as I know this is a historic occasion my memory is not perfect but in the 37 years that I've been paying attention to the board of supervisors in the city council I don't recall a joint meeting happening before if anybody has a different memory raise your hand or forever hold your peace so there's this kind of long-running myth that the city and county governments don't get along it's not true it's more like we just don't deal much with each other the county has its issues and the city has its issues and both of us are often too busy with those issues to work on a relationship that changed about four years ago almost exactly four years ago unfortunately it took the death of Andy Lopez to spark that change but it is something good that came out of that tragedy the good resulted last week in the annexation of Roseland and I think we should all give ourselves a hand for that and just by the way I'm looking for a Roseland resident to a point to our community advisory board somebody who was ineligible by address up until last last Wednesday so if you're interested see me or the city clerk today's meeting was planned long before the fire of course the fire makes this more timely but even without that disaster we face issues such as housing and homelessness that don't pay any attention to jurisdictional lines and we as the elected leaders of the city and county and members of our staff feel that there may be efficiencies to be gained and better outcomes to be achieved if we can find ways to work together more often and better so here we are to talk about those issues today before I turn it over to chairwoman zane for an opening comment I want to talk a little bit about today's format this is a special meeting and we will conduct it as a workshop between the two elected bodies and our staffs want to apologize right up front for any of us who have our backs turned to you but we certainly appreciate that you're here we're not going to take any action today as a collective body or as individual bodies but we may give direction to our staff at the end of the workshop at the end of the workshop we'll hear comments from the public those comments must relate to the subjects that are covered by this special meeting with that I'll turn it over to chairwoman Shirley zane thank you mayor Krusey I did I I think you took most of my talking point so my speech will be a little bit shorter first of all I wanted to welcome everybody here and I wanted to especially welcome my colleagues who we all work so hard to make this a better place the city of Santa Rosa and the county of Sonoma and it really is a joy to sit down together as a team because even though there are jurisdictional boundaries between us the intent and motive of what we all have is really we carry with our hearts which is how can we make this a better place and we're facing some really tough times right now in terms of the disaster that we all experienced only a month ago it's it's hard to believe because it's just a little over a month ago that we really were a different county in a different city and now we've got a lot of pain we have grief we have trauma and we have recovery and rebuilding and what I want to share with you is that these two bodies sitting here today have a unified vision we care about rebuilding we want to build better we want to build smart we want to build fast we want to get people back into their lives because when those homes burned down it wasn't just structures it was lives and that's what we care about we're here to serve you and I want to thank my colleagues for the last four weeks because I've seen you guys everywhere and we we've never the county in the city has never seen so much of each other before but that's a good thing because as the mayor stated things did change four years ago during the Lopez shooting we did realize that we needed one another in a whole new way and so it is a new day between the city and the county and we have a lot of work to do and even though you elected us to office we can't do that without talented staff and we can't do that without committed residents and citizens who live here so we need you as much as you need us and I promise you we will continue to hold a unified vision and to the best of our ability we will let those so-called arbitrary boundaries drop and maybe even drop our political egos enough to make sure that we rebuild as expediently and as successfully as possible so it is a special meeting as the mayor stated and we do have mainly three things on the agenda today and we're going to hear from some speakers and we do want to start with the fire recovery update and there will be a short presentation by the director of the California governor's office of emergency services and also a joint staff media briefing from the county and the city so we're going to start with Mark Ghirladucci and I did practice that a few times but the mayor helped me there Ghirladucci and there you are coming up Mark and we have seen so much of Mark in the last month and we're so happy we see him because we need him the governor's office of the of the of emergency services is really our life law lifeline right now and they are overseeing the debris removal they are overseeing housing with FEMA we just could not do this rebuild without our state and our federal partners we're so glad that they're here and I think Mr. Ghirladucci has some very hopeful news to share with us today as well as an update so I will go ahead and turn it over to you and thank you so much for being here thank you supervisor pretty sure very much with me is Bill Roach Bill is the federal coordinating officer from FEMA Bill was appointed by the president to coordinate the federal response and work with with the state in being able to address the various issues and challenges that we we are working on this together let me start off by I just again thanking you for coming together I want to tell you in my role as director of OES I manage a lot of disasters throughout the state of California and in my career across the country I can tell you that the way you've come together as a community the way you are working together in your effort to share experiences and begin the rebuilding process is phenomenal you know the fire itself occurred and really knew no boundaries and the way that you've come together in a unified way the way the city and the county have come together is is the appropriate and most beneficial way in helping to rebuild and recover after this disaster and so moving forward it's important to understand that the solutions that we bring to the table as government are not the sole solutions we are a component but these type of events in the recovery are really done in what we call a whole of community effort whole of community public private non-governmental faith-based and you the residents of the community all coming together to help to share and to rebuild and provide that guidance moving forward I can tell you time and time again I've seen this time and time again our communities come back stronger more resilient and and even better than they were before the disaster occurred to help you get there our role is really going to be to continue to work in support of the county and the city to be able to address the needs to help the county and the city begin that recovering process we're doing this in a way from the beginning of the fires not only in coordinating the overall response of all the fire and all of the EMS and law enforcement all the activities that took place but then transitioning into this recovery operation and to do that much like they've we worked with here in the city we've built several task forces at the state level which are state and federal and and tie in through your local task forces a task force on housing a task force on medical and health care a task force on debris management a task force on schools and then ultimately a long-range financial task force to be able to address what the needs are that the county and the city are going to need moving forward in the ensuing year and years to make sure that this community gets rebuilt and let's make no mistake about it this is no small disaster this is no small challenge there will be tough days moving forward but we are working together to minimize those tough days and address this in a very expeditious manner and I want to emphasize expeditious manner we have been really working very diligently to stay out in front of this evolving circumstance that means that we don't want to be late to need late to challenges that you all face we understand and believe that as we stay out in front of this and work with your local representatives to fill those gaps we do it fast we do it efficient and in the end it is your government working in the best interest of you the community and your economic base which is very very important for the long run and I will commit to you as I've committed from the beginning that this effort will be done in a very expeditious manner and we've done that in areas like working extensively to get the household hazardous wastes removed from your homes in fact we have built a multi-phased approach to being able to get the community clean and clear the first phase is to work through a tasking and going to our partners at FEMA which by the way FEMA has been an unbelievable partner in this whole process there are great there are great resource and and and they're with us every step of the way and they have not they have not been short on any resource that we've asked for but working with them we have tasked the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to go in and remove hazardous materials from the various properties that remove those those things like pesticides and paints and propane and freon and those kinds of things that were considered hazardous materials that was the first phase and and really we set a a regressive metric for them and I could tell you that they have they have actually exceeded their their metric to this to this point there you know I think there's six thousand one hundred fifty three parcels four thousand two hundred thirty those parcels have been cleared of household hazardous wastes and we know that they're way above way in front of the the metrics that we set forth which is good because that allows us to rapidly get into the second phase and the second phase is going in to be able to remove the debris all the ash all the fire debris and get that out of the way so that the lots are cleared and clean and certified clean so that the rebuilding can begin this is really important because the sooner we can get these lots cleared the sooner we can mitigate any public health threat or public health emergency from all of the ash and the materials that are in the ash and the sooner that we this the county and the city can collectively in unified way begin the process of doing their rebuilding in getting there we have worked with the city and county and the governor has done a number of executive orders to clear the way through regulation clear the way through administrative action provide any resource that necessary to ensure that the city and county have all of the items and resources that they need to achieve their objective and we stand ready to continue to do that again the governor does as necessary as we move forward to clear any further hurdles or any legislative action that he may recommend to the legislature to help the city and county recover I want to tell you that one of the most critical components to the phase two and the debris clearance operation is and many of you have heard the need to get a right of entry form signed that right of entry form is a critical document that sets opens the door for us to come in through the tasking to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and their contractors to come in and clear the lot of all this debris that is really sort of the deciding factor of us moving rapidly forward it's important and I encourage you all and talking to your friends and your neighbors to get those right of entry forms signed and submitted as soon as possible in fact there has been a deadline set of November the 13th for the need to get all those right of entry forms in and so in the in the process of where we're at now transitioning from phase one to phase two and getting the right of entry we've already received to this date 2058 right of entry forms 2058 right of entry so we're getting there but remember we've got almost 6000 parcels so we've got a little ways to go but we're not waiting we are where we can beginning the debris clearance operation and if I could Kelly do we have that video let me just show you a quick video of what they've accomplished as of today they started this morning beginning the process of clearing the lot and coffee park and I want to get you a sense just because I think a photo is worth a thousand words for you to get a good understanding of what it looks like when we come in and clear a lot and make that lot clean and secure for you moving forward like like while Kelly's doing that I can tell you as well sorry I can tell you as well that beyond the beyond the housing and and I'm gonna have Bill talk quickly about some of the federal programs in a second here about what you can expect from the from FEMA and the programs you're gonna get the other task forces have been very active and as of today we're really happy to report that all the schools that were closed the students that were out of schools have been put back in the schools we've worked with the superintendent of public construction at the state at the local levels to ensure that those students have a class from the go-to and in some cases they're doubling up in some places we're moving in portables but the key is to rapidly get them back into schools one of the most important things that we can do as a community to get people's lives back in and back into a place where they're feeling more comfortable the other piece is the watershed which has been very critical could we get the lights dim just for a minute so we can all see this because it's pretty cool so Kelly you want to talk about so this is on Monticello court just about two and a half hours ago and this is one of the Army Corps and of Engineers contractors doing the final stages the first stage as the director described was getting the household hazardous waste off then they put a little sign up that says this is ready to go so this homeowner here signed the right of entry they came on sorted all of the different debris on the property from metals to other things they loaded up into trucks and you take it to the proper landfill this last part is where they have the remaining ash and dirt that's mixed together and they're spraying it down to make sure it doesn't get up into the dust you know create dust and get all over the place but they're still using the hazardous suits so they're not getting and breathing it in and then as you could see here here's a truck backing in and what they'll do is they'll line this truck with plastic scoop the remaining ash and dirt mixture into the truck and then they're done for this lot so this would be one of the first examples so I wanted you to see that so you can understand what it looks like when we clean and certify a lot and how those lots as you can imagine once we get all those lots cleared that a lot is ready to be rebuilt on and you can begin that process the other piece is that the debris clearance from the mark west creek along the mark west road and and there's been a lot of effort because of some of the rains that are coming for us to do an immediate mitigation effort along that area and we've had crews in there from the cow fire to the CCCs to Caltrans and local local water districts and environmental protection groups going in to do immediate mitigation and remediation work to ensure that any debris that is in and around the watershed doesn't roll into the to the water and so they've been working at that the last couple of days and and will continue to they've got roughly about a three mile section left to go and they'll be complete from that that mitigation and and that that's important because we know that there are certain key areas outside of the larger watershed that have an immediate threat to to the water and the head waters etc so we want to make sure that we're working on that so debris the phases getting in those ROE so we can get everybody's lot cleared registering with FEMA which builds going to talk about quickly and getting into the programs even if you have insurance it's important to register and understanding that our other components of our community our watershed our environment our schools and then the infrastructures the last piece are being accounted for and all of this is being done roughly within a month of the actual event taking place so with that let me just ask Bill to talk about the federal programs a little bit thank you mark it's a pleasure to be here it's a fellow a fellow Californian it's important and not only for me but the team that we brought in here to make sure that we can see some good come from bad and we're here in full support of of mark California Office of Emergency Services and and the local governments especially this really needs to be a bottom-up approach working together across whether it's the debris component or the housing component and working together to help you all in a whole community environment solve for the issues that surround the recovery piece of this mark asked me to talk about some of the programs that FEMA brings is the individual assistance program and with that there's I want to share some statistics it's about registering for the program to get that that federal assistance and to date I think we have over 15,000 applications people registering in Sonoma County and within that we've already dispersed over five million dollars in individual monies to those individuals and over 6500 people have visited the local assistance centers and the disaster recovery assistance centers so that's all good news one thing is if you haven't registered register okay it's the only way we can recognize what your needs are and help and max out have you max the federal programs available to you mark also talked about the debris and what's going on the debris so debris falls under the public assistance program so that is has all has been turned on as well for a category a and b where a category a is the debris removal and category b is emergency protective measures so mark indicated is a lot of activity with protection of the watershed and for from rains in those denoted areas all those there's the federal cost share involved in that along with the states to help reimburse for those costs to take those actions some of the the housing within the housing programs we have a direct housing program that includes direct lease access to mobile home mobile housing units or RVs recreational vehicles those are all options that we're going to use to try to get those eligible applicants into some interim housing so they're in a safe place safe and sound while they go to the longer and much longer rebuild component of this so it will house these people up to 18 months and extensions beyond that if required so while they're rebuilding their homes and all those things are available so mark I think I'll stop there and if there's any questions I'm sure we can feel them later yeah so I am gonna we're gonna take turns in terms of the board and the council and seeing whether there's questions so I'm going to for the director so I'm going to turn to my board first and see if there's any questions supervisor Goran thank you for showing us the video is very helpful except that I'm a little confused it looks like you've cleared the entire lot and the information given is that you're going to really just clear around the foundation or however far you think there are toxic so is there a reason why it looked like the entire lot was cleared and is that what we can expect from all of the lots I think every lot is going to have its unique set of circumstances about what the degree looks like and how widespread it is we've been clear that that that we will certify that lot is clean when we're done with it it does it does if there's just a foundation that foundation is removed but and then any surface debris that's on there is removed I didn't know what that lot looked like beforehand except probably look like the lots that are next to it and they make that determination there and they remove what is considered the debris hazards material and the areas that would would allow it to be safe and and certified clean thank you and a follow-up question is you've led us to believe that you will not provide filtered on top of what you scraped off is that true or or are you going to take it down to four six inches and then the homeowner or the builder will have to supplement I'll have to eat them Mike thank you I appreciate that my question was about cleanup which you answered and are you going to fill refill the dirt that you scraped off when you're cleaning out so the regarding the field dirt we do not provide the field dirt after it gets cleared off that that material comes on and then that is then the as they do the rebuilding process they come back in that's engineering that needs to take place afterwards to secure the appropriate up to code foundation that needs to be put in place for the rebuilding of a home with the new most current 2017 building code standards welcome any questions from the council mr. Rogers yes thank you the first question that I have is more of a general one we've been hearing in terms of timeline that the debris cleanup should be completed by the beginning of 2018 we were hearing that about two weeks ago is that still on track to be the timeline assuming people get their right of entry forms in so the answer is yes it's that is still the metric that we are shooting for again a lot depends upon the right of entry forms and getting enough of those right of entry forms in place to be able to effectively meet that metric but I could tell you is everything we've briefed on today what you're seeing you know we are leaning as forward as possible to try to meet that metric and and and get the lots cleared by early 2018 all right can you talk also a little bit about the trees so I remember in Lake County it was a significant issue dealing with having independent arborists come in and assess whether a tree should be removed or not is that part of the debris cleanup process as well or is that taken into account during the rebate so that the private property debris removal policy only speaks to the removal of trees on those private properties that are in the way and threaten doing the work or the accessibility to those lots right so as they come on those lots they're going to take down right those those trees in order to do perform the work on the lots I know because in my day job in the region I'm the recovery division director well aware of the Calaveras and Lake and all that all that tree stuff and some of the challenges that happen there because of the circumstances in the environment of where this fire burned it's mostly on the private property debris removal stuff is we're focused on clearing those lots and if those trees are in the way they'll be taken yes supervisor Gore yeah director Gillarducci I want to thank you for being here thank you for your time there's one question that I have with respect to the closure of the FEMA and Cal OES incident right I actually you guys have been great about staying with us and working with us not only through the registrations that need to come through FEMA and through Cal OES debris removal and all these things also deployment of the watershed emergency response teams worked as we call them you know affectionately but but outside of that it you know for the county and for I think the city it was a little bit of I can't speak for the city a surprise to have that to be told that that was closed we haven't seen anything that shows us that the closure of that incident comes with a lack of services or lack of commitment or a closing down of the situation but can you just clarify what that means because we're getting questions from from people out in the community about that absolutely it's a great question so the incident period this was a wildland fire disaster and the incident period is based upon when the fire started and when the fires were 100% contained and so that is the period of time that the incident is is determined to be open and closed now that is different that what happens all in between that time the emergency response the debris removal the programs that FEMA have put in place the watershed management and actions that have been taken this is another reason why it is really important for the county in the city to rapidly take action to mitigate the various situations whether it's watershed whether it's debris whether it's infrastructure damage is because those are all eligible within the the programs and the Stafford Act and what's considered within that operational I'm sorry that incident period and and so all of those actions have been taking place and because of that they'll continue to take place and some of those that are started now will go on for months and maybe even years which will still be part of that the incident period really is speaking to the fire specific period councilor there are questions miss combs thank you very much for being here and for this the remarkable drink eat the mic is that better okay thank you very much for being here and for the speedy response that we're that we're seeing with the cleanup I have a question because a number of folks who live adjacent to fire damaged areas but who aren't necessarily damaged themselves have concerns about the air quality in their own homes so what what's the process if the air quality monitors are triggered to indicate that perhaps there's something unsafe if there were something unsafe what would that what would the process be and and how does a how does a neighbor understand what that process is yeah that's a great question too so we have between the state and our partners the federal government working with your local air quality management district we have put in air monitors throughout the region as well as you know where they're doing the debris removal as dust another kind of thing you saw them putting water on there to minimize the dust that but we monitor and doing air monitoring throughout the region and that there's a coordination just much like you see the coordination around this table there's a coordination that's taking place each and every day with the Department of Public Health and the air quality districts down to your local folks to be able to ensure that if there are the reports that are generated each day if we see a an indicator that determines that there's something in the air quality then we would work back through your local air quality and public health and we would go in and work with your the community member or the community area that would be impacted but but to this point we have not seen any of that are those reports available for example online I believe they are and I could get that specifically for you thank you very much okay Supervisor Hopkins yes along those lines will there be any additional water quality testing done as the rains come particularly in the mark west watershed and the Russian River watershed to see if there is any potential contamination in those water bodies as a result of the debris so certainly the county you know working with us can can provide a for those those tests and and if they didn't have the resources to do it they could ask us and we'd be happy to do it and we're doing that in a couple of different watershed water areas water reservoirs I guess you should say in different parts of the fire area Napa and Mendocino as well so that would be fine to be able to do that council further questions any any further questions from the board Supervisor Rabbit yeah just to follow up on the watershed issues I know that EPA because of the health emergency was allowed to go on private property and do cleanup is there any mechanism in place I'm thinking some of the more remote hillside areas in the county to have watershed protection folks go into those properties without perhaps specific authority of the property owner to take care of I mean there's some houses that are on creeks or some houses that really do need to get some I can't imagine too many property owners really objecting to additional straw waddles and great question and and and so what we've done there is we've had these special assessment teams strike teams if you would going out and assessing those areas just as you described where you've got maybe a structure that has come down that is adjacent to a waterway or a stream or a creek and in those cases what we're doing is we are going to do a urgency protective measure for the sake of public health and safety and we are securing those areas both with straw waddles but we also have been using a approved spray that the spray is on there and it holds the material in place so that when the rains come it doesn't go all flowing into the into the water area and then they may be removing a little bit of debris around those areas just to make sure that it's not going to roll into the into the creek or the waterway and this is what we've been doing in in all of the counties that have been impacted by the fires now that's different than the larger debris when they when they're ready to come in and do the complete debris removal then they would need a right of entry form to do that but for the emergency protective measures we're just doing that along those areas and I just have one more question do you know if anyone here has a right has right of entry forms available I thought they were on the back but no they're not here we'll find out we need to have right of entry yeah yes we should have them we should have them here absolutely on the back yeah it's a great question yeah good no good just I know there are a lot of questions from the council from the from the board from the public about debris removal still we had a very well attended information fair last night at the vets building they're going to be two more chances at that this weekend on Saturday morning in this room before the Sonoma strong event in courthouse square and then on Sunday from 11 to 3 again at the vets building and trying to do a longer period of time to spread it out so the lines are not so long so the crowd is not so big all at one time so we'll have that information on the Sonoma County recovers org website as well and we also are aware that we needed more staff from the core of engineers so there will be a lot more staff available to answer questions again Saturday morning or Sunday morning to afternoon at the vets hall and then Saturday it is here so and that'll all go up on the Sonoma County recovery org site as well Mr. Girola Ducci director to Girola Ducci I just want to thank you on behalf of all of our citizens we are so glad that you are here and FEMA is here and I'd like to give him some applause as I know you need to get back to Sacramento and we've got two other brief presentations from the county and from the city on recovery events and Mr. Rumble will Peter Rumble who is our recovery director is going to give a brief presentation and then Sean McGlynn city manager will be giving a presentation I don't have a presentation I think this covered the presentation that would have been the talking point another good example of the county and city working together for efficiency for people to see yeah okay so he's gonna pull up a couple of slides so we will need the light stem so people can see this is children's playlist yeah we want to see mr. scrap yeah those pictures I'm hoping the pictures turn out better I'll move quickly through these slides I think the director and our FEMA partner covered a lot of the updates that I have but I want to yeah the graphics aren't fantastic but I'll run through the data itself I think it's important while we understand kind of what's happening on the recovery front just exactly what we're dealing with and I know everybody is experiencing this fire on a personal level in their own way either through direct loss or you know in my case most of my friends losing homes so there's a lot of just sort of intense personal understanding of the event but I think it's important to understand the totality as well this is the largest natural disaster in California history we have over 110,000 almost 111,000 acres burned which is roughly equivalent to 173 square miles and for context that's larger than the city of Atlanta that's larger than the city of New Orleans that several times the size of the city and county of San Francisco we have well up into the 6,000s in terms of structures destroyed the fortunate thing is we do have the fires 100% contained a couple points just to go into the impact a little bit further there's a tremendous amount of homes lost and we're projecting around 5,000 units that we need to accommodate for and that's just completely destroyed and we have many more homes that have suffered some damage we are around the mark of three billion in economic impact and some projections have that tally to about 4.6 billion when all the figures are accounted for as was mentioned there are 15,000 a little over 15,000 people registered for FEMA over five million in individual support almost three million in housing support and another two million in other cash support and this is the type of support that people need for medical expenses for personal items things that don't necessarily fall into the housing category and as I mentioned before these are not only the largest natural disaster in California history but the largest the costliest in US history and so I wanted to focus down on some of the neighborhoods and this isn't a complete listing of maps but I wanted to show in a little bit more detail about the actual neighborhood impact here and for the tubs fire we have about 55,000 structures destroyed for the nuns we have about a thousand structures destroyed all those little dots the chicken the sort of chicken pox map you could see all the structures looking at a coffee park neighborhood in particular with 1500 structures destroyed this is mostly a residential neighborhood as you know in almost 3,000 residents displaced from us in Fountain Grove about 18,000 structures destroyed 1800 I'm sorry it's been a long day Larkfield wiki up 750 structures Anadale Kenwood we talk a lot about Santa Rosa but this is absolutely a county-wide event 75 homes on the Bennett Ridge neighborhood in Oakmont as our board knows all too keenly to homes destroyed and I wanted to provide our overall work in a little bit of context the immediate response is that sharp red bump at the beginning in recovery what we're at now is a multi-year process and we're just starting our recovery efforts as the director noted we're just a month into the disaster and we're still very much in response mode these recovery activities that we're taking are very much still in response mode and we need to understand that this is a long-term process and we'll be in the business of recovery for many more years this graphic I am already seeing is not going to come through well I'm sorry for the AV but this is a graphic that shows how intensely our efforts are over the last month literally day by day we're taking multiple actions both on the response and recovery front I wanted to note the task force structure because this is where our work on the local level really connects with the resources and support at the state and federal level as the director mentioned we have six task forces stood up debris housing watershed schools and very recently economic development and health and human services I think the director provided a fairly succinct overview of our activity there the key point that I want to leave everyone with is we're taking active measures every day and have been over the last several weeks to advance recovery so we're making placements into temporary housing we're putting mitigation measures on the ground and this isn't just through sort of the quote-unquote official agency response I've already seen community partners in the audience now who are doing an incredible job particularly on the watershed issue making sure that we are protecting our watershed through every means possible and with that I think I'll make sure that I'm not the talking head and pass it over to Sean and then allow the yeah so yeah so if there are any questions from the board or the the council any questions for mr. rumble for the board no nothing there from the council any questions all right I just want to reiterate that we're going to take comment from the public at the end of this workshop I I know again that there are a lot of questions out there about fire recovery debris clean up right of entry forms and all and all the rest the time to ask those questions will not be today this isn't going to be a question and answer session it's a workshop for the council and the board the time to answer those questions Saturday Saturday morning right in this room before the Sonoma strong event in in courthouse square can anybody tell me what time that starts so people will know how long this this meeting may be going 8 a.m. 8 a.m. to the courthouse square oh no the courthouse square yes so this room opens at 8 a.m. on Saturday yes 8 a.m. to 10 a.m. in 8 a.m. to 10 a.m. what's the courthouse square the event I think people were asking yeah 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. in Sonoma strong strong in courthouse square when is the resource fair 8 to 10 in courthouse square no here 8 to 10 here 8 to 10 here is there a resource fair in the vets Sunday Jennifer come up to come up to a microphone please come on up Rebecca yeah thank you thanks Rebecca yeah okay so there will be a resource fair on Saturday in this room from 10 a.m. to noon followed by the Sonoma strong event in the square from 1 to 5 p.m. there will be an additional resource fair held on Sunday at the vets building from 11 to 3 p.m. yeah and and just to reiterate this is about debris removal removal and getting your ROE and your right of entry so we will help you with that we'll have lots more staff in terms of the core of engineers and you can drop in either on Sunday from 11 to 3 or here in this room from 8 to 10 on Saturday 10 to 12 you just changed it nope okay got it 10 to 12 on Saturday 11 to 3 on Sunday okay thank you Rebecca I'm sorry for calling you Jennifer we'll get it all right thank you and so that is the report from both the county and the city and so we're gonna now we're gonna go ahead and move it to the third item which is a discussion on enhanced infrastructure financing district and I will pass it back to the mayor Mr. McGlynn staff is coming up to the do the presentation and they will introduce themselves when they get to the to the podium I believe that this was a topic that we had already scheduled for the conversation prior to but it is it is one of the crucial questions that needs to be answered as we as we move forward as a community infrastructure is often the thing that is the most difficult thing to finance and I think that I'm gonna turn it over to the county and city folks to make this presentation but it is even more pertinent now if it could have been than it was when we originally scheduled this a couple of months ago good afternoon I'm Caroline Judy I'm the director of general services for the county of Sonoma and today with my colleague David Gouin we're going to talk a little bit about one of the mechanisms that the county and the city may want to consider using to assist us in the long-term recovery so enhanced infrastructure financing districts are a mechanism that was created in the post redevelopment world signed into law by the governor in 2015 they were modified in two different subsequent legislative actions AB 2 and AB 313 and they were enacted from legislation SB 628 they have allowed governmental jurisdictions I'm sorry okay there are very flexible financing mechanism and it's there are flexible financing mechanism that can be used by jurisdictions for various types of financing for infrastructure investments and as as the city council and as the board consider the long-term recovery and are looking at housing and various other types of investments in infrastructure this mechanism is one of the very important ones that we wanted to bring to your attention so that we could get further direction on how to move forward there are advantages and disadvantages of using enhanced infrastructure financing districts we've outlined some of the pros and cons won't go into great detail on those but just wanted to provide you some basic information on them David I'm David you and the director of planning and economic development for the city of Santa Rosa and what we want to do is provide a little concept of what this means an enhanced infrastructure finance district basically it's a tax increment so the base tax level which is represented by the greenhouses up above is what the base property tax level is for that the cities and counties are receiving as we develop in those areas additional tax revenue will be generated from the additional property values that are added to the city or the county the idea is that the city and county would work together to identify what what how to use that additional tax revenue that comes in over and beyond the baseline and distribute that to the general funds to help pay for services that are critical from the city and county and then a portion of that to go to pay for the infrastructure to help support housing development and other activities the great the way that these can be used is fairly broad could be used for affordable housing could be used for water sewer infrastructure environmental mitigation mitigations transit oriented projects transit stations parking facilities so it has a pretty broad range of uses but what it does is it allows that cost to be leveraged from the tax increment reducing the cost to the development the housing development component and hopefully encouraging more housing to be built the way we would look at this is working with the county the city and county it would need it's better as a partnership again that tax recommend working together we can leverage more and achieve more together so what we're recommending is if there's direction from the the board in the city council is to start looking into the feasibility of what this would look like what the districts would look like what type of increment would be generated and what we could potentially get done with that increment to support housing development as we move into the long range housing plans as for the city and the county and then after that feasibility analysis we'd come back to the city council on the board the board of supervisors identifies as a good choice and then move forward with the infrastructure plan on what those projects are and and and start to move off so thank you so as as Sean mentioned as Sean mentioned part of the reason that we're bringing this to your attention is just it's one of the mechanisms that can be used to help pay for some of the infrastructure investments that are necessary for long term housing recovery and so that's why we're here today and if if I can I'm I'm actually going to challenge both governing bodies because I believe this is someplace where you can work together so I'm not going to I'm not going to take credit for the title of this but somebody today mentioned that what we really need because this process that you've seen in front of you requires voter approval some locations that we would have would require the vote the the property owners in that location to approve that that's a long long road to go I do not believe that we have a long long time to address these issues what I would be asking is that the council and the board of supervisors find some way to come together whether that's through an ad hoc committee to talk about visioning and in fact push something like a rapid rehousing redevelopment district I know redevelopment has a bad a bad connotation for some folks maybe even our governor but this is a place where action is required we can't wait for a vote this is the place where visioning can take place between both bodies a special consideration can be asked of this particular item and this can be a way to push forward the community not just the areas of impact that have been burned but the opportunities that lie in our community beyond that specific place this is where I believe both bodies need to invest their time invest their energy in advancing a vision for the county advancing in a vision for the community and this is the type of key choice that could be made demanded of the of this state to recognize the special circumstance we find ourselves in where there's only where 5% of the housing stock of Santa Rosa is destroyed in an opera in an environment where there wasn't enough housing to begin with challenge our state leadership both of the body but governing bodies to come together take on this mantle take on something like this to say we want this rapid rehousing redevelopment district today. Mr. McGlenn thank you for thank you for the passion there I agree that this is important and it's it's something that we needed to do four weeks ago it's it's more necessary now but I'd like to ask our staff and I don't care who it is but but to make clear the distinction or not between rebuilding 3,000 houses that we lost in Santa Rosa and 5,000 plus countywide and what we're looking at doing with this whether those overlap whether they're separate and if possible maybe even give us an example a hypothetical of what something like that might look like so we have so we all in this room have a better understanding of what we're talking about here. So the boundaries for an enhanced infrastructure financing district can be determined by your your elected officials they can be narrowly construed or they can be broadly construed so it depends upon the goals and objectives of of the elected officials and what we want to try to accomplish with the enhanced infrastructure financing district so just a couple of examples the city of Santa Rosa I'm sorry city of Santa Clara used the enhanced infrastructure financing district to help pay for the Levi Stadium they used that as a mechanism that was a single project that example I'm not a 49ers fan many of us you know maybe raiders fans instead of four dinners. Anyhow that was a single project it was used in that manner to drive forward that particular stadium project it's been used in other areas much more broadly city of Los Angeles has used it to do transit oriented development to do housing to do roads improvements to do transit stations etc. So it's very it can be flexibly tailored to the needs of the local jurisdiction and that's really somewhat of the beauty of it it sort of depends upon what our goals and objectives are. But I would like to add that for to be successful in the increment to be large enough and I think this is the question in front of both the bodies is the increment needs to be a joint venture between the municipality and the county if we if we there wouldn't be enough there wouldn't be enough increment thrown if any one body went by itself one jurisdiction went by itself it requires both jurisdictions to work together to create the enough investment capital to have this this particular endeavor work. And again for clarification is this a tax increase? It's not a tax increase what it does is it takes the tax increment from new development rather than just all going into the general fund we specify where we want it to go and how we want it to be used to benefit future development so future development of housing so another example could be to increase the amount of affordable housing that is done as part of housing projects and to help support and more densification of housing in the urban setting to provide additional housing as we rebuild the rest of Santa Rosa so the barriers that were that were burned so we want to work together both rebuilding but we also need to build for the housing that we've had a severe shortage at before four weeks ago. So just just for example if say we had a parking lot downtown that got turned into a higher density affordable or mixed-use housing project that that the value of that land being increased by that development would increase the tax base and those taxes that could then be put to use on something else even more advantageous to the community and build on that and it snowballs upward. That's correct. Thank you. All right I've monopolized the microphone enough I'll let Chair Zinni ask. Well I think one of the things that we are looking for in bringing us together is to be able to have our two bodies under the Brown Act to be able to really dialogue about this because as the city manager put it forward it is a great opportunity to build housing and infrastructure so I know there's questions so I'm going to go ahead and turn to the board and I'll start there with you Supervisor Gordon. Thank you I appreciate your passion and the complexity and the the priority of building housing in the city. It not only benefits the city residents but folks in the county who may have lost their homes. So I represent the first district Eastern Santa Rosa 2900 structures probably a little less in housing 2500 a small part of that is in the city and so part of the discussion that the county needs to have is if we define the boundaries as just being the city of Santa Rosa and I maybe that's appropriate what will happen with Kenwood Glen Ellen Mark West area where how will we finance the improvements for those areas that lost huge numbers of homes in the county. Okay good question and I think we're going to take we're going to take into account all the input we get again at this point and we'll evaluate that and look at the boundary says Caroline mentioned the boundaries are developed through a process we'll get input from the elected officials and then those boundaries would be approved prior to developing but we're going to take that feedback thank you that that I won't expect a question but you know where my interest is a large number of folks lost homes thanks and and what I understood Mr. McGlynn to be saying is that we can draw the boundaries where we want to draw them so I think that's encouraging yeah so okay councillor their questions Mr. Rogers all right thank you I just wanted to make sure that I understand this a little bit is the difference between the EIFD and the community facility district in Melrose is it really in the funding option and what I mean by that is in a community facilities district in Melrose it's through the issuance of municipal bonds this is not funding the district through municipal bonds it's funding it through the increased tax revenue within the district on the new development that's correct it's funded off the increment you can bond off that increment that does require a vote a 55 percent 55 percent vote but you can otherwise you can use the just the increment off without without that vote so it's essentially it's using your future earning potential to reinvest to try to grow your base correct okay and you have a number of the potential areas of investment that are here one of the things that I'd be interested in us looking at with our housing I've been particularly concerned in the rebuild on the difference between when we talk about rebuilding better and in a more efficient and resilient manner that all of that is potentially added cost on top of the homeowners who may or may not have their insurance covering the cost for them to rebuild what they've lost I'd like us to look at this as an option for how we get to that better part of that equation looking at resiliency and better greenhouse gas reduction programs through incentives through this program that might be able to fund it as well thank you so thank thank you supervisor rabbit then supervisor Hopkins yeah you know thank you very much thank you for the presentation and I I think the other piece of this that we need to look at is if we're talking about infrastructure what's really true of all of us in I think this is throughout California certainly since prop 13 it goes way back the the way that we finance cities has changed drastically in counties prop 13 changed the landscape dramatically we never really recovered from that but we hid behind redevelopment and then when redevelopment went away it really was stripped bare you look at my hometown at Petaluma which if you were down there you would think it was thriving in two years time is going to go in the red that is not a healthy place to be and since then I will say that all of us have put a lot of the costs of infrastructure on every development project that comes through and that's something that we need to look at going forward I could I give an example I had a meeting there's 184 unit downtown no opposition from neighbors transit oriented development that has nine million dollars of off-site improvements that the city is trying to get out of it plus another seven million of development impact fees that's eighty seven thousand dollars a door before you even build the building and then we wonder why our housing costs are so expensive and trying to subs and then you put 20 percent of affordable housing in there and that increase each unit subsequently and so on and so forth so I'm not opposed to this I just think it would shouldn't just be a diversion of the monies that we should be putting into that infrastructure in the first place coming out of a different pot I think if you really want to incentivize the building we can really look at that type of you know infrastructure improvements that are totally off property that are lovely to have but not necessary for that development and part of it has to do with the nexus between the two and the the fact that yeah people will end up doing it but they'll end up selling the property for twice what we think it should be worth going forward I mean I could give you example after example in my own career as an architect and you know a son of a quote unquote developer from Ireland who ended up building in San Francisco it's been going on for years in that fashion and if you look at San Francisco prices that's how you end up in that situation and I think we really need to look at that hard and fast to not just use this as another avenue to gather money to do projects that we can't do with any other dollars and I will say something and you know that the the idea that development needs to pay its own way is a great mantra but this is what happens with it it becomes unaffordable and that's why there are thousands of units today available for building that aren't being built because they don't pencil out yet because the costs that 87,000 a door doesn't quite make sense until either the rents are going to go up or the property values are going to go up and then we're going to cry about the the amount of housing costs so I think it's something to keep in mind I'm not opposed to going after the the idea of the tax increment I think it's great I just think it needs to be used in the right way okay great thank you Mr. Tibbets thank you Mr. Mayor actually I want to echo some of the comments that you made Supervisor Rabbit in going forward with this because I think there's a lot of things that we need to do within our own at least speaking from the city's perspective within our own city's department about making greater efficiencies and using various methods to make sure that we're getting the most bang for our buck and we're using our staff's time in the wisest way possible one of the things that I've witnessed over the last year being my first year on the council is I ran on a platform of creating affordable housing and the city council has a criteria established where projects that have the most affordable housing go to the top of the application pile and what that's done is is even though we've had developers with the best of intentions to build we've also had developers come forward with project proposals with affordable housing built into it with the intention to frankly just sell the property and the entitled property and make a buck and nothing actually gets built meanwhile our staff which has been doing a yeoman's task has put thousands of hours into actually building that housing did absolutely really absolutely nothing to build affordable housing and so one of the things that I'm going to be talking about in the next couple of weeks is putting a capital check on developers to make sure that in order to get staff's time get that top of the pile preference in addition to providing affordable housing will also have to put forward some sort of proof that they have skin in the game to actually build a unit other things that I think we ought to be looking at is waiving fees in many cases and capturing and collecting them post occupancy of the unit which also goes to what you were saying supervisor rabbit about making it easier for developers to pencil the project and get it going but I do want to say that I'm very supportive of EIFD's I was following it through the legislature when it was moving its way through I think starting in 2014 I think that has a lot to offer to Santa Rosa but we are going to have to be really diligent about how those funds get spent because the other question I have and this is a question for for you director Guin is if we're using that tax increment it's my understanding that otherwise in the future we would use that increment to reinvest in our roads reinvest in those very things that property taxes pay for and now that we just lost all this housing and all this property tax revenue you know I'm sure you haven't run the numbers but I'll be really interested to see how we're going to prove that we can pay for this new construction and simultaneously also keep up the infrastructure that supports them okay great supervisor Hopkins has a question and then and then we'll go back and forth I did want to announce though that the right of entry forms are now on the back table so you can pick them up on your way out supervisor Gore has to leave soon for a community meeting so I'm going to let him go first and then I'll go after oh okay thank you supervisor Hopkins I apologize there's as we know there's so many meetings going on at once there's a community meeting going on in in my district with people who've lost their home and I guess they're calling on that and I think that's a great point to make because you all have been all of us have been in the situation where the two bookends that have to guide us are taking care of the people who lost their homes so they don't become more victimized from process and from rebuild than anything and then the second thing is this this kind of using the shock to our system to shock these system I just wanted to say just respectfully I'm fully on board with in it with looking at an enhanced infrastructure financing district through the california economic summit and a lot of different avenues we've identified and looked at models in san diego to truckie from los angeles to other areas and it what it does basically is as as city manager mclinus talking about and the others is it creates a box that you can look at different financing options from within so as you say tax increment yes but it can also look at bonding based off of that too the other thing that it can look at is if you do so desire it can use serp existing taxes that come out of that area one thing we were looking at is in some of our unincorporated areas that are really kind of cities like mark west wiki up very impacted by this is maybe that's a way to keep some of the transportation property taxes from going directly into a general fund and then us all having to fight back to do it so I think that's the key is we won't be able to identify what it is until we have good analysis good structure on where it goes but if we're going to be advocating for the state and the governor and others to be able to leverage something we have to have a vehicle that can bring things together and leverage it so thank you very much for bringing this forward it's a great surprise Mr. Sawyer did you have a question comment not a question I appreciate this coming forward as well I think it's gives us an opportunity to use this tool to especially when it comes to city-centered growth and to remove the negative element of sprawl in our city it will give us an opportunity to take advantage of those models that have been successful across the state to give us the the a successful mixed use and affordable and market rate homes that the city so desperately needs it has needed them for a long time and I think it's it's time that we look at this model it's important of course that we are that we move cautiously but we do need to move expeditiously so I'm very thankful that this has come forward and I look forward to to the the research and and recommendations in the future. Supervisor Hopkins thank you first I just have a clarifying question and some comments to follow up and that's that my understanding of EIFDs was that if you've got an active redevelopment project in an area that you can't put an EIFD overlay until that is completed I know we've still got some activity in Roseland and other areas in Sonoma County so just wondering how that factors into the conversation the other thing is that you know I'm one of the few folks in this room who represents a primarily rural constituency and we don't have very many tools in our toolbox to address rural poverty I've got schools that have you know some of the highest rates of free and reduced lunches in the county some of the highest rates of high school dropouts and so we really struggle to find tools to enhance rural infrastructure. One of my concerns is that some of those rural areas actually do subsidize city services you know like you look at the C Ranch for instance which has a lot of property taxes coming in they don't get they don't get a lot of services which is fine they're actually fine up there. Geiserville is another one actually and a supervisor gorgeous left but Geiserville actually subsidizes the county fire system tremendously in terms of the tax revenue generation they bring in so I guess my concern is that you know if you've got an EIFD you're keeping more resources within the city centers what happens to rural services I just want to be clear that I absolutely love Sean Wiglin's passion I think this is fantastic we need to build affordable housing but it's not free because it will limit resources it will limit as council member Tippett said you know our ability to invest in roads and rural services and other things and one of my concerns is then are we going to start forming all of these out in rural areas too and so rather than kind of looking at county-wide concerns we're just sort of dividing up the pot and focusing on individual geographic areas trying to keep their resources where they are so love the need for affordable housing love the concept but also want to think about the impacts to other areas where those lines will be drawn and how we can still have toolboxes to fight those major social issues that we have outside of the city of Santa Rosa. Council, Mr. Schwedhelm. Thank you, Mayor. Yep so you're correct if there's an active redevelopment project going on you can't have both at the same time so we would again be looking at boundaries that address that and again the boundaries do not have to be contiguous so it's something that we could be looking at and have a creative boundaries that address a lot of the issues that are being brought up so we will have to do that analysis make sure that the redevelopment projects that are currently active are not included in those areas until they're complete. Thank you for the presentation I have a question about you know how we get things done so I'm supportive of this direction and I heard somewhere in the presentation talk about an ad hoc so my interest and I have an interest in understanding where do members of the public talk about what their interests are because I think we had slide for the potential areas of investment we've heard some of our colleagues talk about that so I'm very supportive of the process but again on a task force where does the community input get inserted into the prioritization and at what point does it come to each of these bodies for actually some decisions and is there a potential timeline because I know we I know a lot of our resources are going towards the recovery and I know staff at least on the city side I'm sure for the county I think Peter could be our poster child for at capacity the number of things we're asking the staff how does this fit in with all the other things that we're expecting of staff from both the county and the city. So I'll talk to the the public input process one idea is the first step is to get direction from this body to evaluate it so we do run some numbers to see what the potential is and potential boundaries based on the input we're receiving again study sessions are probably a format that we could use both the city council and the board supervisors to accept feedback in terms of an ad hoc I think that's something that city manager McGlynn brought up as a potential that could be a vehicle so absolutely we do want to get feedback we need to flush this out but until we have some numbers and some potential boundaries to talk about we felt that it would be better to bring something forward to react to and get input from that to answer your other question I'm sorry the second part of your question well it's kind of like a timeline so where would they went how soon would this actually start moving towards realization in those community conversations. Yeah so I think the the sooner we can get something in place if this is the direction we want to go and it does look like it's something viable the better before development happens so you can capture that tax recommend and put it back into things that people just brought up it will probably take a few months to run the analysis piece so my guess is we'd probably be getting in getting public input over the next month or two and we'll figure out what those forums look like we'd be best to do them as a joint meeting so we can get feedback from both if we're going to work together on this. Any other questions from the board no other or comments no okay great. Miss Combsom. Thank you thank you for bringing this item forward and I'm very much looking forward to seeing how this develops and pans out particularly as my colleagues said with public input I have a really basic question if I may we have a number of homes that were being taxed at one level in the Fountain Grove area that are now land as as hard as that is to say so they wouldn't be taxed at the same level they were being taxed at then we are hoping we will have significant rebuild will those be increment or will those be at the level they were prior to the rebuild and I'm sorry to ask such a basic question it just seemed like we should take that into account yeah my my understanding is it is it depends on when yeah so I think the question being when when we rebuild in the increase in property tax revenue rebounds from where it is today yeah my understanding is it would take place based on when that when the district was put in place but again it depends on where that boundary is drawn in terms of what it's encompassing so that's something we'll have to look at I think that's a good feedback that we'll take that new account as we look through what may be worth looking at whether or not we can say it was the value the tax base value at the time prior to the fire and we may want to have that conversation because we also want those resources to be able to go into the infrastructure for those areas although as you know I'm strongly interested in having funding for affordable housing so I think we have a little delicate balance to do there I look forward to hearing how that develops other questions from the council mr rogers thank you mr mayor just responding a little bit to the comments that the vice mayor and the supervisor made about the dollars not being free essentially I agree one of the things that I'd be interested in looking at is when we talk about things like the implementation of the climate action plan or about the construction of secondary units there's a first cost barrier that once people get over it are actually able to implement it it pays for itself and so one of the things I'd be interested in looking at that would leverage these dollars in the forefront as an example just spitballing eliminating the fees for creation of a secondary unit that then is paid back incrementally but using the pot of money to get over that first cost barrier and allow people to realize the savings as they pay it off I'd be interested in seeing that I think that's it I just wanted to make a comment here you know since the fires there's been a lot of talk about how the fires have created an opportunity to build transit oriented development in Santa Rosa or senior housing or affordable housing higher density housing all of those opportunities existed before the fires started and all those opportunities exist where they where they should exist and that's in the downtown in the core of the city in our transit in our transit corridors along the smart line and these are these are the kind of projects that can benefit everyone in the county by creating that that affordable housing that transit oriented development the things that this city is talking about so I think this is a great tool to be looking at I will support direction to the staff to pursue this I don't see any heads going east to west on the council I think the council supports that direction I hope the board will too yeah and I and I will also support and I hoping to get also a word from the three of you in terms of supporting staff to explore this with the city staff I would like to name an ad hoc to work on this but I don't I'm not prepared to do that tonight I'm going to let you guys talk to me and see who's interested to be on that but yes Supervisor Goran well I would appreciate the conversation of moving this forward but I think Supervisor Hopkins Supervisor Gore myself and we all represent we all represent much more than the city boundaries and so we have a basic conversation that we need to have what would an EIFD accomplish and how would the rural counties benefit from this and other communities do we want to just limit it to the city so there the the complexity of who we represent is a little bit more challenging right and and I do think that the city staff is farther along than the county staff on this but I think we can at least give direction tonight for the county staff to begin to speak to the city staff in more depth because we we haven't heard a lot of of this yet and and then I'll appoint an ad hoc after I talk to all of you offline so Supervisor Gore and I just want to reiterate that that that I wouldn't support an EIFD that that took the county's increment into the count unless it benefited the county yeah so I actually think that we can do that with some of the the the knowledge that I've gained in looking at this over time and I understand that that needs to be communicated to everybody here and to everybody in the community as well yeah and you know I and I just want to add that we all represent on the board portions of the city incorporated and unincorporated I represent the least amount of unincorporated but nevertheless we all have interests in terms of representing the constituency and Supervisor Rabbit is smiling because he does not represent Santa Rosa. I am the only one of the 12th year that does not represent a portion of Santa Rosa but I do represent the second largest city in the county absolutely but I appreciate very much the Mayor's comments and I think that everything is worth exploring I think that's definitely the case and then finding out making sure that there's no unforeseen consequences to that at a time when as a county in a city we're struggling quite frankly so thank you yeah okay great um are we ready to move on to the last item yeah the last item is the homeless system of care redesign and um we have city and county staff will be talking about this one and just a little background for the public that's here tonight um we uh this is staff from housing and community services as well as Sonoma County Community Development Commission and the consulting firm home-based the Center for Common Concerns and they're going to review the recommendations for redesigning the homeless system of care um or as we often know it or talk about it the homeless continuum of care um these presentations have already been offered to both the county and the city um it was offered to the board of supervisors on august 22nd and it was offered also to the city council on september 26th so we have seen the recommendations before but we haven't had a chance to sit down as two bodies and to be able to dialogue about this and talk about how we're going to move it forward and i think the public will find it very interesting in terms of how we provide care now and how we hope to provide better care in the future so with that i'm going to turn it over to margaret van vleet who is the director of the sonoma county community development commission thank you madam chair and mayor and uh council members and supervisors uh glad to be here and as the chair has said we did do these policy briefings in august and september so we want to be very brief and just remind you of a few of the key high points i'll kick it off and then turn it over to my colleagues we started looking at this redesign in the summer for a few key reasons one was that there was some confusion and sort of differences of approach in adopting and implementing what we call housing first as part of the response to homelessness uh we also were finding that there was a lot of confusion about metrics and what benchmarks we ought to be using to gauge our process our progress and trying to end homelessness our providers our nonprofit partners have experienced way too many masters we've made their job very difficult and so that was a key factor and we were constantly struggling and talking with you all as elected officials about budgets and there was never enough money to to really do what we all wanted to do with homelessness so for all of those reasons we engaged with the city of santa rosa the two jurisdictions in the city of pedaluma as well a conversation with the national consulting firm known as home base patrick wigmore is here and he'll provide a few comments and remind you of a few slides and so we went through this process and we're just about to talk about implementing some recommendations prior to the fires so tonight we want to remind you of where we were and really get your nod of approval to continue to proceed towards implementing and bringing back more specific recommendations for redesigning the homeless system of care so with that let me see if kelly wants to add anything and then we can give it to the consultant from out of town good afternoon i'm kelly keigendahl i work for the city's housing and community services department and i'm the homeless services manager we saw myself dav guine and i work very closely with margaret's team on homelessness and another a number of other issues surrounding affordable housing i've worked closely with margaret and her team on the redesign and i'm also the city's representative on the sonoma county continuum of care board look forward to subject to your direction this evening to continue to work with margaret and the cdc staff on the redesign process and just want to note that all the work that's being done around the redesign ties into the city's efforts on homelessness and specifically its housing first strategy with that i'll hand it over to patrick thank you kelly and margaret before we get started for most of my career when we've done this work i want to give a little bit of background for some of the key terms i know we have i know i've given presentations to the to the board of supervisors and the city council but the the key thing to remember is that homeless systems need to operate as a system and when we came in to do this work and i've worked in numerous other communities across the country uh too many to count it's oftentimes very helpful for me to just get a very good lay of the land to see where the community is at see how it's operating and i usually talk communities back a lot of communities want to think that their community is different that the population is different and in many ways people can have unique situations but the the plight of homelessness is often very similar across communities i will say when i came to sonoma that one thing off the board that that was very different was just the amount of groups that were involved in ending homelessness in the community and i can confidently say in the 10 plus years i've worked for the federal government primarily as a consultant i've never seen this amount of activity centered around the issue of homelessness and part of it is part of it shows the concern and care that the people for the city or for the county of sonoma and the city of san aroza have for this issue and that's certainly to be applauded but part of it also we detail in the report which is available that in many ways this is a outgrow i use in the reporting example of a house that's had multiple additions put on and each of these bubbles is really in addition to the house that we probably started building 15 20 years ago when street homelessness first started to appear here in this community and communities across the country and i think one of the key recommendations for the redesign will get into those in the letter slides but is to really try to simplify this process and i think we're here today with city of san aroza and sonoma county to make sure we've increased coordination on various topics and a lot of these bubbles there are people in here constituency groups that unfortunately cannot be here all in one room and so it's important to remember when you're designing a homeless system that you really have to have broad coordination both present and then sometimes removed for the system to work and so if you felt a level of frustration or felt that the system here does not work in the right way it's probably reflective from just how many people are involved in the process quickly kind of what an ideal structure would look like and this this is these are reflections from other bay area communities and systems of care that would exist so the first thing you have to remember is that this is one system of care so it is sonoma county so i mean we certainly have joint representation here but also the city of petaluma and then other municipalities that might not be as involved because of smaller or it's not an issue really need to come together and see that this is their issue to end and i think one of the main struggles we've had is you have multiple funding streams we have the city of san aroza sonoma county and then to a less extent some of the city of petaluma and some of the smaller communities pooling their funding together and creating their own systems of care across the county and so you also have that reflective in the staff that are presenting here today and just the level of coordination that's required in order to really just make decisions and that's the primary thing that we looked at in the report was just how our decisions made for ending homelessness because it's an unfortunate this comes from the federal government there are not enough funds available to house everyone who's going to experience homelessness and so the key and that's unfortunate and there's certainly we can there are ways we can we can max we can maximize them but the key is going to be to prioritize the resources that we do have for those the most in need and in order to prioritize those the key thing you really need to have is a structural body i call them a primary decision-making group in the report that has the authority to really make those tough decisions decide where we're going to prioritize resources how we're going to do it in a fair and equitable way how we're going to do it in a housing first mentality that encourages the dignity of the people that we're trying to help but also does it in a way that's fair and equitable across the county integrated within this are key working groups that need to exist so we heard a little bit prior about the tax implementation districts and conversations like that need to occur within the homeless field as well too especially with the fires and the additional disaster recovery funds that are coming in one of the key recommendations is to create a pipeline committee a committee that will help you organize all of the different individuals who have the knowledge and expertise for how to develop new units to try to increase the supply that we have in the community but do so in a much more coordinated way across the county there's other recommendations in the report for very streamlined committees that can exist i mean it's unfortunate to try to have more committees and obviously the the hope would be we would sunset some of the other ones that are in the chart but trying to create committees that really bring together the best and the brightest and have a very clear direction from a decision-making group so that they're not bogged down and and bigger picture ideas that they don't really have a say in but can really focus on a key deliverable and and bring it back to the group for approval the go through quickly some of the recommendations that that we proposed so the first is a collective impact decision-making group in sonoma county that owns the issue of homelessness for the county and i think when you have such a split of where the issue of homelessness lives in the county there's not a clear owner and lacking that clear owner it's easy to point fingers at the at the city or the county or just the issue itself and in communities that have that have ended homelessness or have come a very long way and close to it that ownership is the key part so they really have a vision and an idea and they might not agree fully on it but they they know that there's one group or one plan that exists that identifies all of the strategies that they're going to focus their resources on and and drive collectively towards that vision the second piece and it goes part and parcel with the group is to really brand the issue of evending homelessness in the community and branding is an odd thing to kind of hear with an issue of homelessness but communities across the country have found it is a very successful way to for good or bad have a name for ending homelessness in the community so a way home america as an example in seattle a way home in los angeles is another example where there are ideas behind the brand so integration of housing first creation of new units targeting towards certain populations and that brand good or bad has the ownership of the issue throughout the community and so people it's really allowed individuals who might not necessarily be part of the system rally behind it once success starts to to build. I talked a bit about some of the creation of key working groups but these would really be dynamic groups that have clear charges from the community itself. Approval from this group of the first charge that we had was to integrate housing first within the community and I know people from all the multiple interviews we've had certainly had a lot of trainings and various exercises for how to integrate housing first but a lot of them still did not know if that was necessarily where the county itself the whole system of care wanted to go and I think having different bodies in charge of each of the process they didn't necessarily feel that this there was complete buy-in across the county for completing a housing first mentality and in order to do that it really is a philosophy of helping individuals first and requires a sea change for how providers operate within the community and if you have any doubt that this might not be the key way to go from the decision-making group you certainly will hesitate to be able to make the the kind of required changes for you to your project that are necessary and then the the final piece is approval so one of the ways to be able to do that is to have this group really complete a housing first the philosophy as the the guiding principle for this group for where they want to go and then the final piece is to be able to really adhere in some way there's various ways in the report to do this but to make sure that providers are adhering to this so helping the hardest to serve in the community making sure that they're helping taking them directly off the streets into housing and being assessed across the county so that other providers aren't kind of cheating the system so to speak and so that they're helping the hardest to serve in others art i think with that so i would just add i think to the system recommendations from patrick we talked about some recommendations which we are beginning to implement to just align our work as city staff around deliverables in contracting around our ways of thinking about coordinating our funding processes so we're working at a staff level really as much as we can to just bring that alignment and for clarity for the system and for our providers and so we're trying to move in these directions i think what we were hoping is that we would get again some nods of approval if you will to sort of say go back and bring some more specific recommendations around what a primary decision-making group might want to look like we had started those conversations before the fires and so i think we want to we intend to pick those back up assuming you want us to do that and and i think in this moment a couple of you have said it tonight it certainly resonates for me i think everything needs to be on the table in terms of what we're willing to do many more people in our community in the last 30 days had the unpleasant experience of housing insecurity and i think if that doesn't bring home the sort of the question in a very personal and tangible way for those of us who thought we'd never go there i don't i don't know what else would so i i do think this is a moment where as staff we're certainly ready to take up the charge and do whatever it takes we're we're willing to sort of put everything on the table and just are eager for your feedback and direction so thank you thank you just one clarifying question before we get started and if one of you hit the lights also so the collective impact decision-making group is that another name for a re-engineered continuum of care board so they would be part they would be one in the same so i think one of the key issues here is merging that group with the county funds and the city funds that are making decisions funding decisions and performance-based decisions so it would be one collective group and you and what you're recommending is that we as electeds get together to try and figure out what that group looks like working working with staff to okay thank you i would say i mean there is an existing operating functioning continuum of care board they obviously have been thinking and doing a lot of work around this as well so our intent would be to do it in consultation with the providers of course but i do think there's a leadership question that you all will want to take up great thank you and um i'll just add i think we will be prepared after we have a discussion tonight to appoint a joint um city county task force that can look at this and and move this forward um we're definitely in need of it we've tried a lot of things in terms of ending homelessness and housing and first um housing first and um we've put a lot of money into it but like a lot of entities around the united states we still have a huge problem so we got to wrap our arms around it in a way that's strategic and efficient in terms of the resources that we have um i'm going to first look to uh the board of supervisors to see if any of my colleagues have questions or comments about this and supervisor goren thank you um i i mr churnoff if you continue to disrupt this meeting i'll ask that you be escorted out thank you um better enough mr churnoff uh both on the city and the county it's always fun uh thank you for the report appreciate that and at you can appreciate the conversation that we had we both in the council and the board several months ago just has been sort of blown out of the water uh and how how will you overlay your recommendations dealing with the calamity that we have on homelessness now and the conversations that i've had with fema and hud over the temporary emergency housing conversely how will those conversations and solutions help with uh the recommendations that you have over the long term so one of the the key projects i've worked on is with the city of houston it was the example i used for a lot of of you and one of the things that they have told me has helped more is from the disaster they had with the hurricane is having an organized structure and really being able to use it to make on the spot changes for how homelessness was working in their community and so there certainly are ways in which especially given the long timeframe for the disaster recovery to make sure that you integrate all of the resources that you're going to be able to have for the disaster recovery into the process but it certainly um is probably going to be challenging to be able to do it at the same time while this is occurring but there we've worked in communities in the past that have had disasters trying to create this on the spot to be able to to do this so it's not unheard of to be able to do it and how was houston doing given their disaster recent disaster are they moving ahead yet i mean the system that they'd set up which is similar to what i recommended really allowed them the they had the ability to handle the scale that that came with the just record number of individuals experiencing homelessness that's encouraging thank you yeah council are there questions mr. Sawyer thank you mayor and i'm i'm curious you said that in houston they were able to move forward and uh rather quickly um is part of that ability to move forward the um the ability of this of that board to act quickly and for the the both the political bodies in the community to trust their decision making um because government can get very very slow when we go back to our individual bodies and take months to make decisions not because we want to but because that's the way government functions at times so is that so is their ability to be they need to be trusted and be able to be nimble is that correct yeah the example that i used for them was fitting for you because it's not we say houston but it was harris county and so all of the approvals for the governmental approvals that we recommend in the report so creating a joint entity that can make decisions had already been set up ahead of the storm and so it certainly allowed them to operate and make decisions in the same way that they were before the storm but just handle the scale that the storm presented okay um questions or comments also from the board uh supervisor hopkins or supervisor rabbit yeah i just wanted to say that i am so grateful for all of the i'm sure hundreds of hours of work that went into interviewing providers sitting down with the local elected officials um and i am wholeheartedly in support of this recommendation i think that it couldn't come soon enough and this is really truly i mean i i've i've said this in the past but we will actually share a homeless population that migrates along the jober dota trail inside and outside of city limits and so the fact that we were both trying to address this with different funding pots and different strategies um just makes no sense and so i'm really looking forward to working with the city council and so grateful that it feels like i hope hopefully i'm not you know sort of stepping too far that we're all really truly partners in this effort and coming together to address this crisis so thank you i i think i wanted to i want to make my own personal comment as somebody who's worked a lot on some of these issues and and if at times i've been very hopeful and other times i've been discouraged and i think the bubbles slide that you put up earlier showing all the different bodies and involved in the process um i think that's encouraging to me because even though it may not be horribly effective what it does mean is that santa rosa and sonoma county have great passion in terms of in social justice pride that we do want to end homelessness and we do realize that it's it really is a horrific blot upon um our county um as as a community and we all want to do better so um i'm encouraged um by the presentation and the recommendations and i'm hoping we will move forward tonight mr rogers yeah mostly just wanted to make a comment i am supportive overall of of realignment of our services to make sure that we're being as efficient as we can be uh i was reading an article earlier today about sacramento that they've got about 3 000 homeless individuals and the mayor is actually asking for 54 million dollar increase in their homeless services budget so just highlighting that we're not alone in this in santa rosa but i did want to bring up i've had a number of constituents reach out to me a general perception that right now the city and the county are having a hard time walking and chewing gum at the same time and wanted to make sure that we're putting out there that while we do this to make sure that we're realigning that we're also not losing sight of it as a priority and really understanding that the rain is here and we still have people living under underpasses and out in the public and making sure that we are continuing to move forward even if it's not in the most efficient manner but still moving forward nonetheless and helping people yeah councilmember absolutely i i i think i can speak for all the folks i work with in county government we we very much intend to to be able to walk and chew gum and probably build an airplane while we're at it i mean if we can and we understand the urgency and i think without naming names there's at least one provider uh who got caught in some of the back and forth who's on first conversation in the last few weeks especially the last 10 days around wait what's happening is the red cross leaves who's picking up the people were they really disaster impacted or what and so that really brought to mind exactly the point you're making and i think we all take it very much to heart so thank you and then my my last comment is actually related to that about red cloth red cross leaving there were a number of donations that came in whether they be cots or blankets or pillows that we still have and those resources are still available and maybe there's room in the conversation to talk about how those new resources can be utilized to help with this priority that we had before the fire even absolutely and i think part of what that demands is a a recognition that the the structure the command structure if you will that we stand up in response to the emergency is not the place to do those policy things and that strategic thinking and so we've got to do a warm handoff and i'm very much working with my colleagues in county government to do that and i've got kelly on speed dial so yeah great um i think um i'd like to put forward um two of our board members now a couple more questions oh you have a couple more oh sorry we have more people i know you have more people yeah sorry about that go ahead mr schwedhelm thank you mr maner a concern i have with some of the recommendations is a boy more meetings just like this slide was um in you know my understanding that homelessness has never been solved by a committee we actually need to get to action so i'm wondering patrick given your experience across the nation when we talk about that first bullet point about establishing an ad hoc group a frustration that i share with councilmember soyer is that they make this recommendation then goes to the bodies who quite frankly aren't the subject matter experts of the task force and quite frankly you know we have a city manager too from the city side who also is balancing resources do you have some models about the decision-making authority of the ad hoc and some of this group that has been practiced and shown to be successful at other parts of the country that maybe we could model ours at yep so the ad hoc just to be clear would be a group kind of to create the group itself and so we there's certainly different ways that i've done this in the past for reconstituting a group and i think given the multiple parties and some of the jurisdictions that are involved an ad hoc group was was my recommendation given that it can let all parties come together and so we certainly will have examples from other communities that have been able to use this to be able to share margaret worked on one with me in the past i'm in a project a few years ago in portland oregon and so i think there are certainly other ways we could do it but just given the number of players that's my recommendation just be able to get everyone on the same page and i believe an active facilitator for this process would be needed is that something that is within the purview or the contract with home base or is that another discussion that the city and county would need to decide how are we going to get someone on board who can shepherd us through this process again for efficiency so uh we're out of contract dollars for this guy for the moment but uh we can we can talk about sort of how we operationalize that next step i also wanted to just underscore i think you're right the decision making body is one piece that's important but it's not where the sort of tactical work is going to happen and and so i think this idea of task groups and clarity of staff roles have to go part and parcel with it and and so i think the the providers and the government staff are really eager to jump into those other roles under the leadership of a new decision-making body because i guess that creation of that task force that's what my interest to be all that you can't have everyone being part of the task force but i think venues again for public participation about what's the solution to ending homelessness everyone i shouldn't say everyone many people have different ideas that maybe counter to each other so you're on the big proponent of using evidence-based models have been successful elsewhere but again getting to the point where we're actually doing things versus just talking about it i'd love to be able to you know get there as quick as we can i'm supportive of these recommendations mr olivers thank you mayor i believe when you came to present the council i've mentioned this as well as and i think you mentioned earlier that you used the word ownership as far as this body and others as well and i talked about the need for our community taking ownership of this issue as well because it does impact every person in our county everyone's impacted by homelessness in some way so again i encourage that as we move forward is that we work really hard to educate the community about what it is that we're doing to give them opportunities to weigh in along the way because we're in a certain sense we're using a new language in some of these areas for example the housing first model coordinated entry and others so we need to make sure that our community understands that and they understand what what is our goal what is our plan and where do they fit it in as individuals as well because there is something that everybody can do and sometimes well intention we try to do something that may not be the most productive thing that we can be doing so again it's it's providing then the tools too to be active participants along the way any other last questions from the council okay great um well i want to put forward that we do appoint uh joint city county ad hoc to move forward with some of the recommendations that have been given to us and i'm going to appoint a supervisor hopkins and and supervisor goren from the county side to be on this and thank you to council member combs and council member schwedhelm who've agreed to serve with me on an ad hoc to this end and um the county with the county ad hoc with the county yes don't forget the county so um you'll be hearing more about that soon thank you very much for the presentation thank you thank you very much appreciate it you guys are great um i i think that maybe some of the members of the public would like to have these slides uh margaret are they available on the community development commission website okay so if you go to the county website and then click on community development commission you can pull up these slides in case you want them as a member of the public okay we're to the portion of the workshop where we get to hear from the public i'm going to ask a couple of things during public comment one is that uh i'll call a couple names so people will be ready we've got a lot of speakers tonight um also that uh you refrain from applause or booze or um exclamations of any any kind during uh people's presentations just for the for the sake of efficiency and getting through these many many cards finally uh because we have so many speakers i'm going to ask you to limit your comments to a minute and a half and we will get through these i know but i i trust that all of you can say what you need to say in a minute and a half we're going to start with maggie o brian and she will be followed by ann cealy you got it so is that it yeah um hi so my name is maggie o brian i um live in the west end and i work in downtown san arosa and i bike commute and um that's been adversely affected more so than usually recently i was actually attacked on my bicycle going under fistry last week it brought daylight by some people who were living in a tent so this is extremely refreshing stay close to that microphone please this is extremely refreshing because i really think it is a great idea exactly what i'm seeing here but i guess the question for my neighbors and i is what is the immediate plan to maintain the safety of my neighbors and the and basically the sanitation and the safety of the people underneath the freeways i don't like to see them living like that anymore than i like to be attacked by one or two of some people who are living under the freeway so i that's our biggest concern is this wonderful planning in the future is great but what are the what's your plan for tonight when my neighbors are up awake because they're screaming and fighting under the freeway thank you and i want to assure you that that council and the board and and our staffs are listening to you we're not going to be taking questions and giving answers in this portion it's time for the public to comment to us so thank you we do hear you Anne Sealy and she'll be followed by Dwayne DeWitt though i'm Anne Sealy i'm chair of concerned citizens for Santa Rosa board member of conservation action and a very very very unofficial spokesperson for the southeast greenway campaign i have i understand you county board members and the city council will be considering every parcel of land in Sonoma county for housing development in the future there is one jewel of a piece of property that i hope will you you will take off the list and that is the southeast greenway project area it has been mentioned in a somewhat cavalier fashion as oh that that's open land it's not really it's going to be a great amenity for a large number of people in this city so i hope that that's off the list thank you thank you Dwayne DeWitt he'll be followed by Maya Kosla hello my name is Dwayne DeWitt i'm from Roseland now in Santa Rosa i was given this sign thank you so much i brought this hat it's a gift for you that you all should be united and allied to make a better community and i believe after listening to this tonight you can do that i take the hat off to you what i'd like to say is i think it's really important that you look over to Roseland as that jewel in the rough and that you polish it up because you've got an old 264 acre redevelopment project area that just kind of languished for a long time it now has a homeless encampment that's been there for two years in a peaceful way and is working but they shouldn't be intense we could get them into the large warehouses that are there we could find ways to protect people from the weather this winter and treat them as refugees from the fire just like everybody else is so also i have a letter from uh Mike Thompson back when he was in the state senate 20 years ago and uh the mayor at that time was Sharon Wright and they were supportive of working to redevelop Roseland and the brownfields and brownfields is a federal program that could help you folks in the future so as we go forward please look to the regular people in the community the people who've been homeless and the people who've advocated to make things better and let them be part of your decision making process if you plan for us let us be a part of it don't plan without us thank you thank you mr do it Maya thank you very much for all your presentations i'm very impressed i have two questions only and maybe their comments one is to do with the rebuilding plan and one is to a little more of a nitty gritty question basics of erosion after clearance so the first question comment slash comment would be with the current proposals for redevelopment are they the pace is important and i understand the need to go as fast as possible i'm wondering if they're considering the juxtaposition of the 1964 Hanley fire footprint with the 2017 Tubbs fire footprint both of which are really similar and the 1964 fire of course destroyed far fewer structures is that an indication of what the planning should be and where the planning should look in the future given the fact that some areas have a history of wildfire and is that part of your planning process i hope it is is the comment and the second question would be as your uh i'm very impressed by the slides or excuse me the footage of the re the clearing and it seems highly organized with i know friends in the epa who have been called in to help with the clearing and i'm highly impressed it's amazing and thank you very much and what i want to ask is uh or comment on is once that clearing is done the soil is mobilized and i'm wondering if they're going to wrap this up pretty quickly here's time is sorry so if there's any kind of replanting plan thank you very thank you loyte iverson followed by mara ventura i'm loyte iverson and i've taken this uh need for homes it personally because people i know were killed in this fire and friends and i've taken families into my home and people into my home but i want to talk about the biggest impediment to all this is prmd permit resource management department in sonoma county i went today to renew my permit that lapsed during this and it took me from 8 23 a.m to 3 30 p.m to renew my permit that i already had and now they want me to pay a whole another permit for something they pulled out of it so you're talking about waving fees for extra homes in the meantime people who are already doing the right thing i'm a contractor okay i have seven licenses i know how to do this i know how to fix my house so we can all live there and houses we already own but if you own a mobile home you're a second-class citizen in sonoma county you're automatically discriminated against when you go into prmd and they send you over to the assessor's office and if their records don't agree with prmd's records you're you're out of luck and the records at the assessor's office are are disgraceful and the records at prmd are disgraceful papers are missing files are mixed up you get cold told different information every time you go in so how are we going to ever solve this housing issue if we have such a dysfunctional building department down there it's the people are doing the best they can but the system is broken it's a broken system thank you mr. heverson maraventura followed by james harrietta i felt short before hi good evening council and board of supervisors my name is maraventura i'm the lead organizer with north bay jobs with justice oh i don't know if i can get closer to this okay across you might have to hold that mara i'm just gonna mariah carry this all right uh across race income immigration status and geography the fires revealed inequalities and injustices that have been here long before the fires ravaged santa rosa and this and this county of sonoma skis me the workers who will be doing much of this recovery and rebuilding will be low and moderate income communities with the least resources many of which will be immigrant and or undocumented and they must be at the center of any strategy that we have for rebuilding we will be worse off as a community if we only have a recovery strategy for the middle to upper class families and we will lose our most vulnerable if they're subjected to poverty wages or unsafe working conditions before the rebuild even finishes at north bay jobs of justice we are a coalition of 17 labor unions and community organizations and we are calling on you all to ensure that the structural issues of inequality climate crisis racial and environmental justice are central to the recovery and rebuilding process we need to develop a cleanup and rebuilding policies that include workers voices labor faith environmental and community organizations for immediate and long-term plans that are equitable just and sustainable we need to ensure the recovery and rebuilding process are transparent inclusive and create economic opportunity for low and moderate income communities and we want to focus on good jobs housing and sustainable energy and healthcare thank you mara james arietta followed by robert young hi so i'm james arietta a degree in finance and currently work with the former chair of the president's economic board in texas and i'm here to talk about the efi b thing i don't think you guys are really taking this seriously with uh with this thing i don't think people here really understand what this is and what it is is that you guys here paying taxes and these guys are going to take your tax revenue or borrow against the future tax revenue one of the two and they're going to give it to someone like a developer say gala her and santa rosa here and they're going to use that to develop that piece of property for example the the old hospital community hospital and then that's going to have a lower cost basis for him and he's going to make more money now that they're going to use the future tax revenue from that development to pay for that borrowing and or the revenue they use to begin with now as most of you know the current state of infrastructure is really bad it's my my street from adi and i'm paying $8,300 a year in property taxes so i mean that's not very good and i don't think you guys really fully comprehend of what you're doing or what you're signing up for the presentation that was provided was utter trash i don't know what to say about it i mean it didn't explain anything and it's really unfortunate and i'm rather disgruntled by that but going further i don't think you guys have a full concept of what's going on i understand these things were planned ahead of time but the half the community just burned down you guys have a a hole in your budget the size of china but you guys are talking about homelessness which has been a problem for 30 years and isn't going to wrap this up mr oria it's not going anywhere anytime soon and you're talking about borrowing money okay thank you for a developer that you guys are tired your time's up thank you robert young please folks uh be kind to the people behind you and respect your time limits robert young or a great great help me out mr rebuggily at d just like it's spelled sorry and you'll be followed by kevin mcdermott swanson yeah can you hear me as the price tag from the unprecedented super firestorms in sonoma county grows to billions of dollars over three billion so far we're struggling to find the funding for this unprecedented amount of money and pondering hard how that money is going to be spent in order to become a stronger more resilient healthier and more sustainable community for several years sonoma county have been a climate change aware county and that i know like last year approved the intentional document climate change action 2020 plan uh nevertheless like a majority of american we have been acting with the illusion that climate change catastrophe we're not going to happen to us or at least not in the near future the dust fire and the other catastrophic fires in october 2017 have proven us wrong the climate change related conditions in the environment turn a probable seasonal event into something close to doomsday we ignored its likelihood and we didn't prepare enough if you want to succeed in transforming effectively sonoma county we must elevate climate change action to be the core organizing principle of the new sonoma county not doing that would be unconscionable the transformation to become a climate change ready county has two essential components climate climate restoration towards the more sustainable state of climate by becoming a carbon negative economy as far as that it is physically possible an adaptation to climate change to minimize its damage from future climate crisis related events that will come more often than in the past the sonoma county board of supervisors and the city council of sonoma county have the power to lead that transformation by using its executive powers to commit our county to be such a climate change ready county the commitment will be sealed with official public and detailed enough climate change major disaster declarations thank you very much kevin mcdermott swanson he'll be followed by jay schaefer today i listened to these two bodies get together and they offered three equivocating responses four placating statements two deflections of responsibility and four calls for the city to rise up from the action stand closer to that microphone please and four calls for this city to rise up stronger from the ashes of this fire than before amongst all that i got 12 counts for expedite expediency and three calls for responsibility i understand not wanting the redevelopment of the houses destroyed in this fire to be more dense for various reasons and that there are other places but my concern is how are these two bodies going to prevent that redevelopment from being less dense what are you going to do as our representatives prevent from to prevent those of us who have money from buying up multiple lots developing larger homes on top of neighborhoods that were once primarily residents of single families who desperately need low income housing we have a crisis in this county we've had it for a while and this could get much worse and we need you to protect us that's why we elected you thank you jay schaefer followed by judith sam i am sorry is jay schaefer i'm jay schaefer um thank you and i'm here to propose that please uh closer to the mic thank you i am here to propose that uh sonoma county took advantage of california's uh shelter crisis act that allows us to basically do whatever we want in terms of providing affordable housing in an emergency in order to essentially put a moratorium on all codes and zoning laws that have nothing to do with uh constitutional welfare clauses it's it sounds like it might be complicated but it's actually pretty straightforward there are a few codes that actually are created by the industry housing industry insurance industry and others uh in order to sell more product if we can just put a moratorium on those and enact the shelter crisis act we could actually uh provide a lot of good housing very quickly thank you thank you judith i am she'll be followed by miguel elliot i'd like to propose that the phrase disaster capitalism be very attentively watched and as um we were preceded by someone who mentioned that the public monies were not properly explained and we this should be explained because big monies are shifting and as we know following the money is critical this is a time for total shift in the materials we use the systems we use regarding energy water food and everything else the structures themselves in terms of the size the shape of them and the communities that they form because economically socially in every other way that's what makes this county the city and every part of what we live in healthy or not so this is a huge opportunity and i suggest that all of us who are citizens and live here be critical in the decision-making process and you have as many um meetings as possible and give us more than 90 seconds thank you thank you miguel elliot followed by debbie mckay my name is Miguel elliot i have a service called living earth structures based out of Sonoma county and i specialize in building earthen structures very durable fire resilient ecologically sound structures and i've done a lot of traveling around the world and i've seen uh villages being built um where there's nobody that's without a home everybody has a home because they use the materials that are readily available and i know that there are not a lot of these building practices are not allowed in current building code and i would like to request that if there's a an effort to try to consider more creative solutions to housing right now if we could if the the board could work with us to get some more testing done to test some alternative building practices so that we could actually update some of the code requirements to make it easier for us to build small structures on the ground not necessarily not on trailers but permanent foundations and so to consider these alternatives into the building code and to really work towards creating alternative solutions specializing in natural building that are nonflammable and very affordable to build thank you please observe the uh the waving hands rather than clapping so we can keep this going debbie mckay followed by gregory furan hi i want to say how much i appreciate you coming together and i know how difficult it must have been to do that with what you've just been through and it tells me that this really is a priority to you that you would devote this much time while you're in the middle of a crisis i hope you will continue to meet jointly periodically and i have three suggestions on things you might look at at those future meetings i think unfortunately a lot of people in this community are not going to be able to rebuild and they may not even know that yet so i would like you to brainstorm on what are you going to do with the property where people don't rebuild i don't have the answer to that i'm sure you don't either but i think it's going to be an issue for this community and i hope you can provide leadership on that the other thing is we don't have enough people to build the construction that we need so i hope you would partner with the north coast builders exchange and possibly the Sonoma county office of education which has the regional occupation program to see if there is something we can do in our own community to get the skills we need provide the jobs we need so we have people out of our own community that can help with the rebuilding process and then finally i would urge you to especially with the county the county was doing an outreach program on solar power when this all hit and they were holding community meetings in the library i would hope that you would continue that process and maybe in particular for people who are rebuilding look at that as an opportunity it's much cheaper to do solar when it's part of a construction than a retrofit thank you gregory furan followed by mic johnson i'll be as quick as i can please keep your ears and your minds open to every suggestion that's offered to you especially from the community you're going to get a lot of ideas from other places but this community is going to have to solve this problem and we're here to give you every bit of advice we can and to work hard on projects that we believe might help house people it's the community that will solve this problem and we ask you to help us do that margaret used the reference earlier about inventing the plane while you fly it and a lot of us have used that when we felt we needed to take huge risks and we needed to be able to buy into the dream that we were going to get everybody there this is one of those opportunities where you need to make sure that you're taking risks with us that you're thinking as hard and as long as you can about what you can do to help us do that and that you're not closing ideas off none of us want people under the sixth street bridge none of us want people burn out of their houses frustrated not getting back in but we all need to work together to be able to get each of our needs met for a while this plane that we're building isn't going to look like anything we've ever had but it's going to get us there and we have hopefully the willpower to get all of us to the other side thank you thank you mike johnson followed by maddie hershfield is mike still here maddie hershfield she'll be followed by marty bennett a long walk um supervisors aen mayor corey supervisors council members thank you so much for providing this opportunity and for coming together and also for your leadership and ability and and uh visibility through this this crisis it's been noted and appreciated um there's so much going on with regard to oh first of all maddie hershfield north bay labor council so much going on with regard to rebuilding and most of us want to do the right thing we the north bay labor council are concerned as i know you are as well um about this work being done lice by licensed contractors in addition all workers performing cleanup must be paid the state prevailing wage for construction including both hourly wage and benefits in the aftermath uh to katrina then president bush suspended davis bacon act um in order to get construction happening faster i know uh you don't have control over what this president does i don't know that anybody does um that said we need to be vigilant making sure that locally we adhere to prevailing wage laws uh you can work with the state to make that happen and yes we want to build fast but we want to do it smart and fair second we strongly believe there should be a local hiring preference we've all heard about uh people choosing to leave rather than stay and rebuild both their homes and their lives local hire is always a good idea but if ever there was a compelling reason for local hire this is it um i've i've heard up to 8 000 people could be leaving our county as a result of the fires recently paul gullison wrote a very compelling piece about this issue in the press democrat he said to those can i'm almost done he said to those uh contemplating leaving that they uh need to hear from us this community needs you back well what says ready to value you like a good paying prevailing wage job we owe them that thank you matty it's the least that we can do thank you marty benet followed by sunny gallbraith good evening uh marty benet north bay jobs with justice jobs with justice believes that the new jobs created by the recovery and rebuilding must be good jobs and we can convert concur with the north bay labor council that workers engage in the cleanup and rebuilding should receive the prevailing wage for construction and 70 of these workers should be local furthermore both the labor council and north bay jobs with justice believe that private contractors participating in the cleaning and rebuilding must provide their employees with the proper health and safety protective gear and that contractors must require and pay for all workers to complete a 40-hour health and safety and hazardous materials training in addition private contractors and subcontractors participating in the cleanup and new construction must be licensed by the state of california the city and the county should create a comprehensive list of private licensed contractors readily available to the public finally we are particularly concerned that private contractors hire workers as employees and not as independent contractors and use certified payroll records to verify this practice city university of new york researchers have documented in their 2013 report day labor worker centers and disaster relief in the aftermath of hurricane sandy that there was widespread exploitation of day laborers and violation of federal and state law by private contractors during the cleanup and rebuilding after the 2012 hurricane this included wage theft unsafe working conditions and a lack training and protective care where do you need to wrap it up in the city and federal and state agencies providing oversight should ensure that such violation of labor rights thank you mr. better rights does not occur here thank you sonny galbraith followed by pauline allen sonny galbraith 350 sonoma i would like to start by acknowledging the heartbreak and hardship of so many in our community who lost homes and businesses in the fire and extend our deepest sympathies and commitments to help with the recovery we're here tonight with community groups that have come together to discuss how we can support an equitable and just cleanup and rebuild process that will result in an environmentally and economically sustainable and resilient future could the people who've come to support this please raise your hand we recognize that those experiencing the trauma of losing their homes or businesses are the primary stakeholders in all decisions related to the challenging recovery and rebuilding process and we want to emphasize that we are not trying to tell anybody how to rebuild their homes rather we are operating on the principles that any programs established are opt-in incentive based and affordable for both the rebuild and new developments moving forward we advocate using materials and methods that reflect best practices and sustainable design materials and systems in order to achieve reduced greenhouse gas emissions greater resilience to future climate impacts and lower electricity bills for homeowners specifically we would like to see it easier and more affordable to build with all electric homes and businesses powered by solar we are working together with government and business entities to bring down the cost streamline the permitting process and make it easier to access existing incentives so that homes and business owners who opt to rebuild this way can do so affordably and expediently we are also united with labor advocacy groups that you just heard from and making sure that the cleanup and rebuild efforts are equitable just and result in a slunger local economy we understand and support the need to expedite the building process under these conditions but we caution the council and board against moving so quickly that environmental and labor thank you miss galbraith our cast that environmental you need to wrap up thank you Pauline all you as a community are cast aside please folks this is you know if i let one person go do i have to let everybody go yes so i'm not going to let anybody go over the the limit i'm sorry um your name is alan hi Pauline and you'll be followed by Barbara molten yeah i'll be brief because um i'm with sonny and all the other folks wearing green shirts so i agree with what she said and to add on to that i'd like to provide one example of something that could be done there's a group called healthy buildings incorporated in napa and they make affordable prefab homes zero and they have the option of building zero net energy homes and also in addition to this option they um because they build their walls in a workshop off like instead of building on site um they have the opportunity to hire folks with like less higher skilled carpenters that means we can employ more folks and we can also they'd be happy to help set up a wall workshop in sonoma county in addition to their current one in napa or have others do a similar thing which will then help you know help have the option of green rebuilding be accessible and affordable for folks and you know have laborers to do this which is all we agree what is very important um and the benefits to homeowners in the long run are countless with green design so i ask you elected officials and i thank you for what you've already been doing but to encourage you to make it easier by you know limiting permits that are unnecessary and just do everything you can to help people choose the green option it was said earlier the initial startup cost is sometimes the barrier help us work together to eliminate that so that people can choose thank thank you barbara molten followed by mark krug thank you all for your service especially in this time um i'll just finish up what sonny was saying it's our hope that by working through this process in a way that upholds environmental labor and equity standards our county can be a model for how communities can best work together to address a major climate related disaster and that will emerge stronger than before rebuild green love is stronger than the smoke rebuild with love and let's do it right thank you thank you barbara mark krug followed by jenny close good evening council members and board members mark krug with burbank housing i want to talk in favor of financing districts which you talked about earlier before i do that i want to just take a quick second to thank you for this joint meeting the series of joint meetings this year i've been here 28 years i'm pretty confident the board and city governing boards have not met and enjoyed meeting during that time and maybe ever before that so thank you you deserve credit for that regarding financing districts um as they're not easy they're not simple they come with consequences as supervisor hopkins and others have pointed out but it's important um tool in your toolbox and so burbank is encouraging you to pursue the creation of financing districts most importantly it's an opportunity if should you establish some financing districts to regain the property tax that was once going to affordable housing through redevelopment we've lost that some five or six years ago it's an opportunity to regain that so we want to ask you to consider that if there's anything that burbank can do to help with that narrow question of financial districts let us know there's anything we can do at burbank for the broader redevelopment sorry the rebuilding effort to let us know we appreciate it and our mission is rooted here in snowman county and we want to help thank you thank you jenny close followed by june brashiers i i'm here tonight representing sonomi county rises um and first i want to start off by acknowledging all of your hard work during this extraordinary time and particularly acknowledging that of supervisor goren who's been doing this really challenging work after losing her home i also want to thank you for doing everything you can to address the needs of those directly affected by this disaster and expedite the rebuilding efforts sonomi county rises came together as a group to talk about ways to rebuild and recover better together and specifically to talk about how we can do so through a community driven vision that has equity at the center and and looks at not only rebuilding what we've lost specifically in these disasters but addressing the problems that existed this saturday before the fires what we're calling the saturday problems so to to collect this community input that we are trying to offer to you to help you with your daunting task we've created a robust online tool where you can provide community input right now and that input will be crunched by university partner and we're also starting to talk to design building professionals and university professors who deal with community strategic planning so that we can provide a independently developed community strategic plan to help you with your job again thank you very much for your efforts thank you june brashers followed by phyllis haig appreciate all the folks that have spoken and talked about the inequities in our community that we've been dealing with for a long time i i want to appreciate the folks that have already spoke to the inequities that we've been dealing with in our community and the folks have talked about uh the need for our standards for our labor community and jobs with justice and the folks that have talked about rebuilding green and meeting those um measures as we go forward the ways of the past clearly haven't served our whole community haven't provided for everybody and haven't protected us and haven't protected our basic safety so going forward we want to be sure we're moving forward in a way that's appropriate for this time we're living in we've been hit really hard and we need to go forward with the awareness that we're living in a time of climate crisis and we need to be meeting people's basic needs and there's not room for profiteering in this and we've got a lot of expertise here to help us going forward and i think a lot of us grew up with some of us with destroyed the three little pigs and there's a lot of folks talking about building with sticks and hay and well even bricks in earthquake california isn't good but we've got a lot of expertise of what we want and we want to make sure that everything we're talking about facilitating with our public funds and public resources and easing the way permits that those align only for equity affordable housing rebuilding green what we want to promote and we're not subsidizing the building of just whatever that we're subsidizing and we're giving our support where we mainly need it because we don't have the resources for folks to profit here at this does my main comments thank you phyllis hag followed by shelly browning i'm phyllis hag am i close enough okay um i want to create a new bracelet that says wwpg what would portland do because portland has a more progressive uh city planning process right and one of the ideas that they have is these turbines inside of the water delivery pipes that actually create uh electricity i mean we could be doing that kind of stuff as well as solar and wind and and um you know like jazzing it up around here because we're kind of provincial in in our history um i i've had a lot of experience with prmd lately and i've never seen a person leave their happy not one person and uh last time i was in the lobby i actually said that to all the guys that are sitting there waiting for their turn i said is anybody happy in here and uh they were like no we're not happy you know there was one guy that was trying to get an apple press building permit and he'd been in there for two and a half years he said i talked to another developer behind me and he said that uh these houses that are going to be rebuilt the building fees will be 75 to 100 thousand per house where is that money going come on you know and then when i have my inspector come out look at my red tag granny unit that's been rented for 15 years without any problems you know it got red tag because it was unpermitted and i bought the house knowing that it was unpermitted but then i thought i got grandfathered in so i thought i was cool but somebody turned me in so i have to tear it out and it's crazy because there's never been a problem i need you to wrap up please thank you shelly browning followed by cox thanks hi hi i just want to wish all you well and thank you so much for all the work you've been doing i know you guys have been front lining at breathing in the smoke and thank you for that i appreciate it so today the state of new jersey held a gubernatorial race the democratic candidate for governor ran on a public banking platform and won results are in he stated that new jerseys billions in tax dollars should be kept in the state's own bank where it can leverage its capital to fund local infrastructure small businesses affordable housing student loans and other state needs in california the city of oakland in the month of september approved a feasibility study for a public bank of oakland in july uh the city of los angeles president of the council herb wesson put forth a motion to establish a public bank of los angeles seven council members have signed on to it in their underway in their research for a public bank of los angeles so it's not just a state idea it's a city uh first santa rosa short of financial financial relief efforts from the state or federal government to rebuild this region will be forced to resort to the five typical means of funding increased taxes got the budget raid future budgets that have been previously set aside sell public assets and issue bonds there is a sixth option it is a public bank of santa rosa santa rosa is a charter city which means under article six section five of the california constitution ordinances of charter city supersedes state law with respect to municipal affairs this means that charter cities may provide credit and depository services to their residents much like they can provide water electricity and other utilities thank you is this kourtney cox is kourtney here uh debora followed by saunia teffasian debora saunia should be followed by sorry thank you for this way and twang sorry go ahead thank you for this forum everybody that's here and um i might be the one person that left the prmd happy because it's really easy to permit a tiny house like this this is my house i've lived in my house for two and a half years in sonoma county unincorporated area i'm hooked up to water electric and sewer i live on the lower acre of a two acre property with the main house on the upper part of the property it's five hundred dollars to get a permit to do this and you do have to submit drawings but um it's really easy to get through the prmd to do one of these the thing is that you have to be disabled or a caregiver or now currently just now we have a farm worker we allow for farm workers to permit these yearly along with disabled persons and caregivers this is a safe unit to live in this happens to be uh certified as a recreational vehicle but the international housing code just six months ago um past zoning or building code that allows these to be done on foundations sonoma county can adopt that that zoning and building code sonoma county can open this thank you i need you to wrap that up to everyone thank you thank you yn trung followed by christa albury uh i'm going to read a couple of quotes from articles according to the wall street journal the bank of north dakota a public bank run by the state of north dakota is more profitable than goldman sacks or jp morgan chase this public bank has been uh seen record profits for almost 15 years a public bank is able to lend at a lower rate than um because the its costs are very low public banks save millions that are usually paid to in fees to wall street banks these savings can be used to fund projects such as infrastructure and housing the bank of north dakota is able to make two percent loans to local communities for infrastructure half or less the rate paid by local governments and other states since uh 50 of the cost of infrastructure is financing the state can cut out uh infrastructure costs but in half by financing through its own bank and can which can return the interest to the state okay so that's the end of the quotes um the profits and potential uh local benefits are so high and the need for funding is uh for for rebuilding is so acute it's not a question of if santa rosa starts a public bank it's but when if another city such as oakland starts a public bank first then the city of santa rosa stands to lose all that profit that would uh it would make by running its own public bank thank you christa albury followed by peter churnoff followed by kalia museter hello thank you i just want to bring some awareness oh representative hopkins don't leave this is for you sorry um i think she has to use the bathroom sorry sorry just hang out for a second yeah uh how um this homeless public problem is affecting my little corner of the world out in forestville so as of this morning we have multiple dilapidated rvs people living in broken down cars on my street if you go in between steelhead beach and maribel road and we have human feces on the side of my street along with trash and just this morning four houses mine included had tampered mailboxes i don't know how many more so um just a few suggestions right off the top of my head and please tell me if um they've already been done or if people have more suggestions i'd love to hear about it at the end of the meeting but um if there could be subsidization for landowners that have open space that could house people in tents or their rvs another suggestion is to provide vouchers for people with rvs and their cars to use um at established campground so maybe that's already happening but um those are just two ideas off the top of my head but we need something done right now to get us through the winter um we need a plan right now so please after the meeting if anybody has any ideas please let me know and let's put a plan together thank you thank you peter turdiff i think he left um calia museter museter one of those hopefully and she'll be followed by kathryn uh mereto regout so first of all thank you all for all your hard work for our community um i wanted to talk about a small piece um in terms of the homelessness issue and that piece is stigma because it animates everything at our priorities and the way that we um fund and plan i had the great privilege of serving at the annally shelter during the fire disaster and the immediate outpouring of generosity and support was astonishing um and after the year we've all had in america it was so heartening to see that all that goodness right in our humanity um but the response to our neighbors that were homeless previous to the fire was very different um just one example at annally there were um early in the morning two homeless women that showed up at the shelter who did not even feel safe to enter um they didn't feel entitled to be safe and i think it's hard for those of us that are housed to realize that our previously homeless neighbors were profoundly impacted by the fire as well and i want to um just offer this framing for our shared language and thinking and that is that it was so natural and effortless for us to express our compassion for people who lost their homes in this dreadful fire but people who are homeless and trapped outside have lost their housing in a different kind of fire it is also a fire um and it is primarily composed of significant mental health challenge but in our new global economy and particularly since the crash of 08 that our county didn't hit the trough of till 13 it's caused by job loss and medical crisis often so i just want us to think together about that thank you kathryn rigout is kathryn here calling for nald she'll be followed by dd bridges hey y'all what does highly evolved community and development look like government getting the notion that working together effectively sharing resources gives you more power and you can do it more effectively efficiently affordably okay i don't hear anyone talking about the displaced wildlife lost their homes lost their food source could it be if you work really hard to get the land trust type people open space go buy up those parcels everywhere you can try to find a way to get a good deal maybe if it's just parcel by parcel in those hillsides you weren't supposed to develop in okay some people here like migal and j shaffer and i were already i put out the challenge time green tiny house building guild labor people can you help with that now i learned that redwood credit union and exchange bank the only two places really to put your money around here don't have tiny home loan programs can you help can public-private partnership look like highly evolved community development now i could have had a half a million dollar property paid off by now had i not given it all away to rent i don't have the big down payment but i have consistent monthly payment i don't have great credit but what if you help all of you create this partnership you on the land maybe it's park land for people don't want to be in high density areas you got the hookups a new kind of village model kind of coming you know right and eventually i'm paying off my tiny home loan i can drive away to my own property to go by right thank you mr. no lots of models glad to see you together thank you didi will be followed by victoria yanez victoria yanez followed by bonnie petty hello thank you very much i don't know if you can hear me okay well i came in and i said i had a question right away and it was because of a presentation that some of the first presenters were given giving where they had stated the numbers of people displaced my question is were the homeless were the people who did not have roofs that were burnt out are those numbers among the displaced uh because from my reports and i'm representing homeless action sort of i'm in homeless action but i'm representing the homeless people usurp the union of santa rosa houseless persons and pets so um we're we're interested in what was the treatment of the homeless evacuees because don't forget we have been under a homeless emergency for almost a year and what has happened nothing we had ian did john last january telling us homeless housing first well all we've gotten was jails first and nobody has mentioned the policy of the city in in um bulldozing homeless encampments rather than providing for the homeless so we i wanted to read scriptures and all this stuff you know but we don't have time for those nice cities um thank you miss yanez you need to wrap up i'm okay all i want to say is we should not be responding by giving people prison bars rather than house keys thank you very much bonnie petty followed by steve burlbow hi my name is bonnie petty and um i'm with north bay jobs with justice um i live in the santa rosa junior college district and um thank you to all of you um i have all these friendly faces i'd love seeing all of you guys here together working together this is great so as you heard from um other of my colleagues on north bay jobs with justice we're very concerned about the workers who are going to be involved in both the um the debris cleanup as well as the rebuild and recovery um north bay jobs with justice strongly urges the board of supervisors and the center was a city council to please help provide some kind of oversight and to collaborate with the appropriate federal and state agencies such as fema and the army corps of engineers the department of industrial relations cal osha to ensure that the compliance with labor health and safety and environmental standards are adhered to we're very concerned that there is no one agency or one place where this is being taken care of where there's enforcement and there's no one place for those of us who are kind of trying to monitor and watch for us to report um when we see possible violations and we would like to see some some uh additional public publicity to tell people that they need to be working with contractors who are going to hire people and that people are taken care of and given proper safety equipment and that they're not going out and victimizing people who have already lost jobs here and hiring them dragging them out to these sites dragging them through and having them clean up and then refusing to pay them and turning them over to ice if they're immigrants so you know that we just need um some reporting agency thank you Steve vertebo tom sells thank you uh supervisor put that up closer to you Steve thank you that better better it's nice to see you all here together and it's nice to see you on the two issues of rebuilding and homelessness and i think they are related and i think we can use the income that we get from insurance to rebuild as a way of hiring able-bodied members of the homeless community we're going to need to train them and i would urge that you start tomorrow to make sure that they're capable of doing the work that needs to be done to rebuild it's always struck me as very strange that when there's a hurricane or a firestorm the cost of rebuilding all that shows up on the profit side of gross national product but here i am today saying okay we've gotten lemons let's make some lemonade the last word that i would say is that you've formed a committee of ed hawk to deal with the issue of rebuild and homeless let's remember that there are several other cities that are involved in homeless issues and that they need to be part of the approach to homeless pedaluma particularly has a very good system we can learn from thank you thank you tom sells he'll be followed by kimberley car i want to thank everyone who spoke previously hopefully you can hear me with for their eloquence i'm going to speak to some of the the details because of the primacy of protecting the environment and to prevent climate change as well as to protect the urban lands it's necessary to look at the fire mitigation element of the general plan and it must address community-wide fire prevention measures of developed water and not further urbanization in those areas of of the county particularly but also in the city larkfield wiki up needs funded fire and transit with development targeted away from one on one quarter new zoning and planning efforts need to be made across the entire city and county together please the collective impact model or action model is an economic model of game theory used to disenfranchise the majority i'd recommend that you not use that title of collective action or collective model please consider those i want to thank everybody the the people talk about public banking it's very important shelter crisis all that's included in the planning a state planning code we need to look at that and use that we can we don't have to comply with all the specific codes and tiny homes and foundations is a really great idea thank you thank you thomas kimberley car should be followed by kathleen finnegan hi kimberley car tips from survivors in our views without borders i haven't met the folks here in the city of san arosa but i look forward to doing so in the near future i've been very impressed with the professionalism and leadership at the county level and even occasionally humor i wanted to bring up some out of the box thinking which is that financing our future based on increasing property values is wrong speculation on real estate increases our housing costs and homelessness we are all on this bus and headed for a cliff the chart shown by the cdc is showing how dysfunctional our housing market is by the number of participants that are unsatisfied with the solutions there is another way to pay for infrastructure and city services i lived in europe for several years and they have transaction taxes on their housing so there is less speculation and a 12 tax on housing this creates a more stable economy you want out of the box thinking i haven't heard anyone speak of that here today so i'm offering you this as a possibility to consider control housing prices reduce homelessness create transaction taxes please think about it thank you about borders dot org thank you kathleen finnegan followed by anita elafelet i am kathleen finnegan i live in santa rosa we've long had an elephant in the room in the form of three thousand human beings who have no home in this beautiful county really nothing has been done and it's time we have a crisis that's been expanded exponentially now but i suggest that we all want to see our public spaces respected and clean and our private properties respected and clean but homeless people who have no other recourse to carry out life sustaining activities have no place to go and so i would like to make a couple of respectful demands immediate demands number one stop criminalizing the homeless for for behavior that they have no help to carry out provide immediately trash collection portable toilets and hand washing facilities to these people for god's sakes let us not wait until we get an outbreak of hepatitis has been seen in other cities in this in this state for heaven's sakes do this now it will make a big difference thank you thank you anita elafelet good evening thanks for hearing me and having this forum i want to let you know i um left the fairgrounds the other day i was helping out and the i ran into an old lady on the corner she was in a wheelchair 87 years old they just let her out of the fairgrounds her husband was gone to get her something to eat for dinner they're homeless right now out there and uh they probably found a tree somewhere to lay under or something 87 years old so i want to put a plug out for people who are homeless and it's always um what i heard last night 69 percent are mental health issues and those are the ones that have a hard time paying the rent right so that's why they're out there i guess you know that so i want to propose that you take this money however much you can get and send it to a ps because i'm putting reports for all these people who are sick and elderly and they should get the homes first because i can't imagine a 87 year old woman i hope it's not myself god forbid out in this weather without a home without shelter is bad enough but without a home you have no place to go to and thanks for hearing me thank you elaine holts elaine and that's the last card i have my name is elaine holt i'm a 40 year resident of sonoma county and i was not going to speak but i listened and listened and listened and felt compelled to say something stay close to that microphone elaine pardon oh there we go barefoot poor fortune go you or i and one of you my dear friend susan goren lost her home and my heart goes out to her believe me also there are ramblings that this whole fire could have been prevented you know it's very interesting some of the things that i've been reading it's kind of scary to me i think it's important it's important that we listen to the public number one we listened to the environmentalist i went to a meeting uh that uh the uh climate organization put on and i heard so many good ideas i couldn't believe it listen to the environmentalist don't listen to the suits i'm a retired corporate sales manager i know what they're like their bottom line is money money you know you guys i have to say did one of the best jobs i listened to that radio i heard julie i heard chris i heard all of you i felt so confident and so proud of my community that we came together the way we came together i was 2.5 miles from coffee park and i i was lucky i didn't lose my home but i know i have friends personally now i know how it feels so my suggestion is listen to the public listen to the environmentalist please quit wasting our time give the public more than one and a half minutes to speak thank you you got more than one and a half uh that is all the cards i have um chairwoman zane would you like to ask your board if they have any final comments yeah any final comments from the board um they're shaking their heads yes the hour is late i appreciate meeting with the council and i appreciate all of you from the public who stayed this late to comment we are working together so here here i i have here here here she said she appreciates everybody who stayed here late um and we are working together i just have three things i want to leave us with um first of all it's been wonderful to sit here at the table with all of you it really has been delightful um and hopeful and i hope that we as leaders be able to do three things as we move forward and the first is that we remain hopeful because these are challenging times and we're leaders and we've got to be hopeful for our constituents and then the second that we continue to work united that we be united in our vision that we be united in our cause to recover and rebuild our community and then thirdly the last thing uh we have to hold a long-term vision for the community that's our moral responsibility as leaders to paint and hold that long-term vision it's more than just getting to get i'm getting together tonight or one day or one week or planning for the next three months as we remove our debris from the community it is really a long-term vision much farther into that future and i'm looking forward to doing that with all of you as as as team members because none of us can do it by ourselves and i want to thank the mayor for his leadership too and thank our incredible staff who make us look good every day if you don't you'll hear about it thanks council any final comments miss combs thank you and i also want to thank the board of supervisors for joining us here uh to thank the public for coming forward and speaking with us um i do want to assure you that i believe we are all very interested in listening to you in fact i think listening is an important factor going forward now as people are hitting the sort of hard part of rebuilding um i learned the origin of the word conspire recently conspire means to breathe together conspire and i'm hoping that as a group we all in the room can conspire to recover together as a city and as a county and i really want to thank everyone for the energy that they're bringing to that breath of being together let's conspire to do this right thank you thank you um i think we first talked about this meeting um about six months ago it took a long time to get this together uh i'm i know that we we had a million reasons we could have come up with not to have this meeting tonight but i think it's really important important for us to all be co-conspirators and and for the public to help us along the way we are listening and uh it's good for all of us to be here listening together i just want to ask all of you to make sure that this is not a one-off meeting it's it's not easy we're all out of our comfort zone in this format but it's valuable and uh we have a couple of of ad hocs now that are going to be meeting but we need to meet as two complete boards and council as well so tonight we talked about the three most important issues in my mind and i think probably in all of our minds that face the city and the county right now these aren't going to go away uh i'm not going to go away and we're not going to go away so with that uh well i don't expect that you will so with that um we're going to go away for the night and we'll see you all soon good night and good luck