 Nice to meet you. Host, will you please explain how public comments will be heard in today's meeting? Thank you, Chair Pitts. If you are attending in person, there are cards located at the entrance. Please complete the card and place it in the basket. You'll be called up by name when your item number has been discussed and is open to public comment. You'll be asked to approach the podium and state your name for the record. After an agenda item has been presented, the chair will ask the board members for their comments or questions and then immediately following the item will be open for public comments. If virtual hands are raised on Zoom prior to public comments, the host will lower all hands until the public comment is open to all. Once the chair is called for public comment, those in person may raise their hand and wait to be called to the podium. Those on Zoom may raise their virtual hand. Those joining by phone may start nying to raise their hand. The host will then call in those in person first than those who have raised their hands virtually in the order they appear on the screen. All public comments will be heard until there are no more hands raised in person or virtually. Each public comment is limited to three minutes and a courtesy timer will appear on the screen. Any email comments that were received by the deadline will have been included and uploaded to the agenda prior to the start of today's meeting and emails received are not read into the record. Thank you, host. With that, I call this March 22nd, 2023 meeting of the Board of Community Services to order at 4.08 p.m. Here we go. Brought my gavel made by Council Member Rodgers. Welcome back to our return to in-person meetings. And before we go forward, I just wanted to say a few words about that. We haven't been here in three years. I wasn't on this board the last time we met and we've all been through a lot. We all went through a pandemic together and we were probably all affected in one way or another. And it's still going on, but this is the phase that our public health experts said we would eventually get to, which is learning to live with the virus and live in this new state. And it was a dark time for a lot of people, but I think one of the brightest points was something that we do a lot here, which is that we deal with a lot here is parks. I think we should remember how much of a refuge parks were to people, that they could get outside, they could socialize and they could do that safely and stay healthy. So we learned how much more precious they are and how much more precious we all are to each other. So now we're gonna move forward. And I thank everyone for their patience, especially the staff, dealing with all of our virtual meetings that we did for three years. You did a great job into the board members. Thank you for that too. So again, welcome back to our return to in-person meetings. And this new format is integrated with members of the public via Zoom. It's a new way to do it. And members of the public who are using Zoom may view and listen to the meeting as noted on the city's website and on the agenda. Host, may we have a roll call, please? Thank you, Chair Pitts. Please respond when I call your name. Chair Pitts. Here. Board Member Boca Leone. Here. Board Member Castillo. Here. Board Member Cruz. Here. Board Member Lopez. Here. Board Member Spence. Here. Board Member Kwan. Here. Let the record reflect that all board members are present. Great. I'd like to open the floor now to item three. I'd like to open the floor now for public comments on non-aggressive matters. This is the time when any person may address the board on matters not listed on this agenda within the subject matter of the jurisdiction of our board. Host, do we have any public comments today? We have no hands raised at this time. All right. Thank you. We're going to go on to item four. That is the approval of minutes. I don't think I'm going to take it. Are there any edits or corrections to the minutes from February 22nd, 2023? All right. Seeing no hands raised, we will consider those minutes approved as submitted. And on to item five, Deputy Director Santos. Let's get us in here next to you. Please give your report on upcoming and accomplished events. Thank you, Chair Pitz. It is wonderful to be back in this room again after so many years away. So we all, you all should have a copy of the upcoming and accomplished events. I usually just highlight a few of these on here. I did want to highlight for the upcoming April 1st Spring Fest, a really fun event, 10 to 1 PM for anyone who's interested in breakfast, other games, like the Easter eggs and more. There's still 83 spots available as we're checking this one. It should be a fun time. And I don't usually do this, but I'll take a little plug for our Merit Awards. Merit Award nominations begin April 8th. And then for our accomplished events, I wanted to highlight the Harbor Day that we had on March 11th at Northwest Community Park. It was a really great day. We planted a bunch of trees and I got really proud of that event. And then my report. Yeah, thank you, John. And will you kindly provide the director updates? Thank you. But also on behalf of staff of Preparation Parks, welcome Omar to our team. We're so happy you completed our board. We have a full board now. So we're really excited to have you on board. And I just have a few little updates here. I wanted to acknowledge that Recreational Parks is participating in the Governor's California Clean Days. And we have one this Friday, March 24th between 10 AM and 1 PM in the downtown area. And Morgan and Davis streets downtown. You can park in parking lot 13, if you want to get there and you have to sign up early in advance to have a parking spot. If you show up, you can park in a, be careful where you park so you don't get ticketed, but you can help out with that event. We also have the Recreational Parks Sponsored Event at Martin Luther King Park on Saturday, March 25th from 90 AM to noon. I will be there at that one at 8 PM. Also, I just wanted to briefly mention that previously the parks team participated in the Prince Memorial Greenway Cleanup from 10 AM to noon last weekend on March 18th as part of the California Clean Volunteer Events from the Governor's office. And we, I also wanted to recognize that we received a proclamation from city council on March 14th honoring Arbor Week and all the hard work that Recreational Parks teams do to get the volunteer events together, plant and make trees throughout our city. And this also qualifies us for the Tree City USA, which the city has maintained for well over 40 years. Also, I wanted to mention we're going to have some art at Juilliard Park. It is going to be temporary art that is like a, I'm going to describe it as a sticker on the pathway in Juilliard Park. And it's part of a art surround by Creative Sonoma. It's, and the Santa Rosa Public Arts program is part of that Creative Santa Rosa, I mean Creative Sonoma, sorry. And it's to incorporate art into public spaces and enhance community with ability to public art. So the piece that's going to go into Juilliard Park is going to be, let's see, about activist Bill Orton. And it'll be a sticker somewhere on the path about that out there in the next month or so. So take a look for that. And of course, there is plenty of more information at creativesonoma.org. And last piece, we have been going through our city budget processes right now. And May 9th and 10th is the upcoming city council budget sessions. And this department will be asking for $1.1 million for a water storage system at Vendivelli Golf Course. $30,000 to complete the Luther Burbank home and garden roof remodel. 1.18 million for the remainder of the park's landscaping contract service. Also we'll be asking for some shifting of staffing and one additional park planner to be funded through park development impact fees. And then I do have one more small thing. It's on a happy note. We'll be back at the California Parks and Recreation Society in person in San Diego on the week of April 3rd through 7th. Myself and the park's maintenance superintendent will be down there this year. And that's in my report. Nice. Thank you, Jen. Are there any questions from the board for the deputy director? I have a question. Go ahead. When the city is doing arts, who decides what art it is? And if I may make a request, I mean, I know for me I see a lot of Charles Schultz art everywhere, which is awesome. But I would like to see Pomo art, Wappel art, art of the people that had originally been here because I don't see that. No, I appreciate that comment. I will share that we have an art and public places committee that makes final decisions for art throughout the city. And it's like this, it's a little bit like this board and that there's appointed officials for that. So the art process goes through that and there's a staff that supports that, but I will be happy to share that. Thank you. And I'll also share that when we restart the mayor's launches with all the board chairs and I'll bring that up with the chair of the art and public places. Appreciate it. Yeah. Any other questions for Jen? Go ahead. Jen, could you elaborate on the, not the specific items that you brought forth that you'll be asking city council and the budget for, but I assume that this is outside of the current budget. Could you just explain how that works and how you decide what to go for? Sure, absolutely yes. And so I probably forgot to mention this is outside of our normal budget. We're putting forth our normal budgets and these are outside of that. And so we make those decisions in concert with the city manager's office on what goes forward that should be funded, should be requested from the city council to be funded out of the general fund. And we also do that in concert with the chief financial officer. We bring forth those desperately needed items like the golf course. There's a little bit left on the roof and the landscape contract. Really high important major considerations that need to be brought forth and it's in concert with that group. Thank you. Any other questions for Jen? Go ahead. If you're looking at joining the, what was it, city cleaning days, I believe it was? Oh, California cleaning? Yeah. California cleaning days. Where would you sign up for that? I know you mentioned there was a sign up process. Volunteer hub. So if you go to a city's volunteer hub, you can sign up there for Friday and Saturday. Thank you. Any other questions? One question, Jen. Can you tell me the details? Tell us the details on the Juilliard Park? You know, up again? I just missed that. Oh yeah, it's not Juilliard Cleanup. That's an art project and the art and the details. So we don't know in the next couple of months exactly when it will be out there, but it could be as soon as three weeks. It sounds like it's moving forward pretty quickly. Can you let us know about that when we get more details? Absolutely. Yes, absolutely. So Coredom was a very famous local environmentalist. So we'll have to go out there and help with that. Great. We'll move on to item seven. Was that, that was everything? That was everything. We'll move on to item seven. So these are the board member reports and just to give you a sense on what this is, is it's just a brief report from you. You don't have to have an update. It's okay, especially it's your first meeting, but we're in a future meeting. I like to share the new park I went to for the month or if we went to a cleanup or anything related to parks and rec. So I'll just go down the line and if you don't have one, it's okay. No big deal. So we'll start with board member Castillo. Do you have a report for this month? Similar to last month, I once again visited Coffee Park. It's very nice and well maintained like you said, bud. Thank you. Board member Spence. I'm going to go one more time. You'll hear four more that you'll be getting something about the error rewards that will be coming up. They start in April. So there'll be a little ad campaign. So if you have somebody in your neighborhood that you would like to recommend, please do so or call me or I'll get the information to you at every you'd like. And then when it gets close enough there in September, I will keep inviting you to it. Please do. Board member Curtis, do you have an update? No. Okay, thank you. Board member Buckley, do you have an update this month? Nothing other than Southwest Community Park is sure a big going park. And again, I'm just stressing we need lights because there's people in there after dark. It doesn't have to be all night, but at least till nine o'clock or something, especially where the car parking area is. I think it would be a little safer if we had some lights there. Even if city bus goes in there and there's no light where it stops and lets people off and on. That's it. All right, thank you. Board member Lopez, do you have a report? Nothing yet. First meeting, I'm just very happy to be here. We're happy to have you. Board member Kwan. So I have many things. And just remember I'm retired. So I have more time to do stuff than people who work for a living, okay? I had the honor of attending the opening of Iron and Vine and saw you there and Jen and Paul. Oh, it's also in attendance, yes. I also had the, I don't know if it's a pleasure or not the experience of participating in the Arbor Day tree planting, which was a mudfest in my opinion. I actually like the one where the ground was so dry, the holes got dug ahead of time as opposed to this year, where you didn't even have to dig to hit water, but 25 plus trees were planted. My crew and I planted one. I had two 16 year old girls in their really previously cute boots, who had never used to shovel before. It was a learning experience and we were helped by part maintenance crew member, crew member, a woman by the name of Alexis, whose last name I cannot pronounce. Jen, can you help me with that one? Lovely young woman. I did not tell her I was on this board. She was engaging. She was happy to be part of the crew and she did the heavy lifting for us. After our one tree got planted, we shifted over to some plants, which were being installed by the Creeks department. Having the parks and Creeks departments working together was really a joy, seeing them working together. I also had the opportunity to participate in the third Saturday Creek cleanup at Prince Memorial Greenway, which is always a good time, which is a funny thing to say, but it was a good time. And I got to see Robert Ash in action again, which is like a one-man band who volunteers several mornings a week taking care of Prince Memorial Greenway and he's just a pip. I also was invited to pour beer at the 5K run in the rain. I was under canopy pouring rain and there was this funny tall man dressed all in green. The largest kid there, Jeff Tibbetts, just raining, just doing his thing as a huge leprechaun. So that was, and what I was told was of the 375 people who signed up, 300 plus were in. So those crazy runners. So that's me. Great, thank you, Carol. My report for this month went to the Iron and Vine opening at the Ben Valley Golf Course. Good to see some folks there. It's a good turnout. So glad to see them get up and running. Been there for a while, but I think more people learned about it. Helped council member Rogers do a cleanup on the Prince Memorial Greenway. We took some graffiti off the murals. So made those look a little better. And my two parks that I visited, I went and visited Rinconotta Park, which is where I grew up right next to it. Hadn't been there in about 20 years, so it's always nice to go back somewhere. And seen in a while, it's a lot smaller than I remember from my youth. And also went to Acacia Lane Park, which I just sort of kind of stumbled on, walking down the Santa Rosa Creek Trail. That might be one of our smaller parks in the back of the apartment complex there, but it was a nice little person tables and it's right along the creek. So that is my report for the month. Thank you everyone. We're gonna move on to item eight, scheduled item. So 8.1, this is our vice chair nomination and election. So the board will nominate, discuss and vote to elect a member of the board of community services to serve as vice chair. So this will be the person who serves as chair when I can't be there, or whenever the chair can't be there. You don't have really many duties beyond that, but it's good to just stay up on what's going on in case you have to step in. But it's not a big, it's not a big upgrade from what you do right now. So I don't want anyone to get scared to take that on. But now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna open the floor for nominations. So we'll have a nomination and then a second. And then if we have more than one, we can do a voting process. If it's just one, we can do it basically by acclimation. And so we'll see how that goes. So I'm opening the floor now to any board member who'd like to make a nomination for vice chair. Carolina. Yes. I'd like to nominate Paul Castillo. All right, Paul, do you accept the nomination? Accept. Okay, thank you. Do we have a second for Paul? Second. Great, thank you, Carol. Do we have any other nominations for vice chair? Go on once, go on twice. All right, we will consider Paul. Congratulations. Congratulations. Thank you. It's your easiest election ever, probably. Congratulations, thank you. Like I said, stay up on stuff in case I can't be there or anything. We really appreciate you stepping up to do that. Thank you. And we might have you sitting up here in the future. I don't know. We're not out of the seating yet, so. All right, I'm ready. I'm ready. Walk with that. We welcome you as vice chair. So thank you again. Moving on to our next item. It looks like we're gonna have item 8.2, the park permits and monitors. And Amy Rockowitz will be presenting on behalf of Kim Hatch. That's true. Amy Rockowitz, the recreation supervisor will present an overview on how staff provides the city of San Rosa with the highest quality park permits, monitors and volunteer program. Speaking of Amy. Well, again, welcome to everybody and good afternoon. I'm Amy Rockowitz. I'm one of the supervisors in the recreation division. And I do wanna make one correction on the agenda as I am presenting on permits that happen in the parks, but not on the volunteers. Volunteers is on your agenda in May. So you'll be getting an update on park volunteers then. Thank you. So last year we reorganized a little bit in recreation and created a permitting team. And that team now is residing over at the Steel Line Community Center. And part of the, in the presentation, we'll go a little bit into detail why we did that. But it basically to be more efficient to provide a better experience for our customers. But I did wanna introduce that team. Kim Hatch is kind of the leader of that team. She's the coordinator. She's not here today. Otherwise she'd be making that presentation or this presentation. But the other part of the team is sitting over here. I wanted to introduce Justin Smith. He is our specialist. Even though the team can cover all areas of the permitting process, he's focusing mostly on the park permits or special use type permits that happen in our parks. I also wanna introduce Christina Ayala. She is an activity specialist that oversees the picnic permits, kind of the back end of picnic permits, because also both of our front desk staff, it is a big team. Anybody at any of our front desks can put picnic permits, but the back end is, she checks them all to make sure they're abiding by the rules and if there's anything that jumps out, getting all the signatures and special approvals needed. So that's part of our, that is our team and they are working great together over at the Steel Line Community Center. Next slide. Oh, you already did. Thank you. So one of the reasons we did this was to bring this team together is originally, if you go on this slide, there's three different areas that we do permits for in the parks. And before that, it was supervised by three different areas with three different supervisors. So you can imagine that aligning those things didn't always match up. Communication sometimes got a little frazzled. So our goal is bringing these three areas together to make it more efficient and to provide a better experience for our customers. So kind of looking at these different areas, our sports permits, you can see here of all the different fields and courts and tennis and pickleball and volleyball. These are all the areas that we rent for the sports permits. The majority of sports permits are done twice a year as part of our league permits. So, and those are all the little league clubs, all the soccer clubs, softball groups, they book twice a year, they book out for the year. And the less there's some stragglers and there were sports permits that do, you know, a family, a company picnic that wants to have a softball game on a Saturday or something. So there's a few of those that go in there, but the majority of our sports fields are rented through our league permit process. I'm gonna jump over to the right under picnic permits. Those are all the areas that we rent picnics. Those are basically, you're just your general picnic, a family wanting to have a birthday party, rent a picnic site and a small type of event in our park. Anything that doesn't fall under that goes under the park permits, which is over in the middle here. Park permits, or if that picnic permit exceeds the group that's the size of a basic picnic permit or it's in a neighborhood park or they're gonna have amplified sound or it's a special event in a park and it's open to the public. All that falls under park permits, which is a little bit of more complicated process to go through. There's an application, there's insurance required. So that's what Justin gets to deal with on a daily basis is following up with all those people and their needs. They do pre-event meetings in the park. So those are kind of all the areas that we're now responsible for and making sure that they all are following the procedures. I did give you a handout. One of the first things we did as a new team is evaluate how the past season went and evaluated what we wanted to do for upcoming. So you'll see that handout. I thought that was interesting about all the picnics that were booked in 2022 and where they were. And you can see which parks have the most bookings. And that's, we also wanted to highlight where you see all the arrows going up. Why we think things have gone up, why we're doing so many more permits. One of it is our education. We are educating the public more about the need to get a permit to be in our parks to follow those rules. I think COVID, I think someone mentioned to you earlier about COVID brought more people out to the parks. And so more people are doing their picnics outdoors or their family gatherings. We're also doing a lot more in our neighborhood parks. Like Coffee Park, someone also mentioned they were at Coffee Park this weekend. That is rented during the season every weekend. And that is considered a neighborhood park. So that's kind of what our 2022 accomplishments you can read through the other details, how many we do and the areas we're responsible for. But that's what we wanted to highlight in that. Next slide. This slide is really that permits are one half of the process. The other half of the process is park maintenance. We couldn't do it without them. It is definitely a team effort. We do the front end booking the permit, making sure the customer knows the rules and the guidelines and has the information they need to show up to the park. But once they show up to the park, it's the park maintenance experience that they're getting. So you can see here the before and afters, sports fields before they get prepped. Park maintenance needs to make sure they're safe and playable for our user groups. And there's thousands of people using our fields and ports. Park permits is the second one. This was just showing an example of this. I think this was the amateur radio, especially that that was happening in Finley Park where the irrigation went down and the grass was dead. What it's supposed to look like on the right. So we ended up having to process several refunds for other people that had the park booked. They didn't want to hold it during that time. So again, that communication and cooperation with park maintenance is essential. And lastly, the picnic permits. If there's a picnic table that's broken and this was a birthday party area that we rent, then we end up having to give refunds as well. And so getting those fixed and maintained and usable helps us out on the park permit again, or we're giving refunds and things like that. Next slide. So with all the information we gave about 2022 and getting some surveys out to all of our picnic groups and got feedback and did evaluations, we came up with what our goals are for 2023. And these are kind of, we kind of lumped them into five different areas, our service goals for the year. One is to improve relationships with our neighbors. And that includes the schools. And I'll talk about that in a little bit. Aligning the permitting process across all permits. So as the three different areas I talked about making sure that we're consistent with our rules. Sports, we're doing things a little bit differently than park permits. We're doing things from picnic permits. So we're trying to make those all overlap now and be more consistent. Streamlining the process to improve our customer service. That means our forms are up to date. Our website is up to date. The staffing are trained in all areas when they're out doing park monitoring, improving that efficiency and experience. The other one is educating the public and our city staff on the permitting process. We do have park monitors we send out to check on those that have permits and to help educate the public about what that process looks like and if they need a permit. Working with our marketing team to educate the public about getting permits. Training of our staff. We just did a tour on Rosie last week with I think about 10 of our staff, 15 of our staff going to all the parks where we have most of our park permits and stuff to make sure that they're familiar with our parks before they're giving information over the phone to our customers and making sure they're really familiar with what we're doing out there. And then last is to improve that park rental experience, making sure the expectations are clear when they get there, what they can expect and the park maintenance and amenities and working on that with parks. So I'm gonna go over in a little detail of each of those areas. Next slide. Obviously improving relationship with our neighbors is important to us to be good neighbors to everybody. And so we do get quite a few complaints from neighbors. You know, if there's amplified sound and it's keeping a neighbor awake if the parking or the garbage, things like that. So we're working to improve that relationship with neighbors and where we get most of the complaints and trying to change some of our procedures to address some of those issues. I do wanna note that we have found wherever we have permits, the relationship improves. Where we have most of our problems is the rogue groups that just show up, especially sporting groups, if there's a field not rented, they usually tear up the fields, they're there late at night, they can be drinking, breaking, you know. So our goal is to try to get more people to rent and go through the permit process because then they understand what the rules of the park are. And then that helps us build that relationship with the neighbors. So one of the examples I want to talk about here was Northwest Community Park. We kind of consider that a sports complex over there. It's got the rugby field, it's got three softball fields, it has two soccer fields. It is heavily used by our sports community. Unfortunately, 75% of the parking for that park is school property. And so you can imagine the last few years there's been a little bit of back and forth with the school and the park usage. And so we're trying to work on improving that relationship with them. And we've been having several meetings, we're improving that. We've done some of the suggestions that's noted here to help alleviate some of the stress. Like removing tables that were over by the softball field that was causing a lot of stress for the school because it was congregating. A lot of people they didn't want hanging out and big crowds around those tables. And again, they weren't needed for the sports part of it. So that made them happy when we did that. We did move the adult soccer league out of Northwest Park. They played there on Sundays. We found another location for them. Again, there's a lot of family gathering that includes drinking happening on the weekends and school didn't appreciate having the alcohol so close to their school. So we're finding a new location for the adult soccer. We're limiting usage of their parking lots during tournaments. So when there's a softball tournament going on we're not gonna have soccer and rugby happening at the same time, which was what we had been doing in the past that just over impacted the school's parking lots and the neighbor's neighborhoods. So we're limiting that. We're definitely meeting and having preseason meetings with the principals over there to make sure we're communicating with them and improving that relationship. And so we're optimistic how that's going. Other things we're doing to improve relationships is modifying our amplified sound procedures, not allowing it in neighborhood parks for private events so that we're not keeping the neighbors awake or up or annoyed, directing. There's other things here, but musical concerts directed to Courthouse Square limiting sound from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. unless it has a special use permit. Other things we're in process with are identifying the neighborhood parks that need trash pickup on the weekend. So the park maintenance crews usually focus on community parks, but as I mentioned earlier, several of our neighborhood parks are intensely used as coffee park is and getting them on part of that trash pickup rotation on the weekends because neighbors calling it, you got garbage cans overflowing, it's not being picked up. And it's not normally necessary in a neighborhood park, but there are a handful of our neighborhood parks that are overly used or very popular, I should say. The other thing we're talking about doing is turning the Finlay gazebos into three small picnic sites. Our park monitors have identified that typically when we rented that as a large picnic site, they ended up only using one of the gazebos anyways. And then what happens is other people come sit in there and annoy the group that has the permit or get in the way or, and so, and there's also, there's no amplified sound allowed at Finlay Park because of the proximity to the neighbor. So we think it'll be better to have three small sites rented instead of ever renting it as one large site, even though we're open and we'll give that a try. So that's something we're talking about doing in the future. As Finlay is one of our most popular sites and if we could pick up a few extra areas to rent, that would also serve the public. So next slide. I'm gonna take a sip of water here. Aligning the permit process across all permits. We talked about the three areas of permits, but it's also including our city-wide special use permits like the courthouse square permits that happens downtown, making sure that the same rules they have for vendors or amplified sound are the same rules that we're using. And it also was in our facilities, making sure we're aligning our permitting process with our facility rentals like at the community centers. One of them came up about the food trucks. They have a process for having food trucks at the community centers. We don't have one or we didn't have one. We do now for having those in the parks for somebody's, you know, if they have a picnic, but wanna have a food truck come serve their picnic. So working on those procedures so that across the board. Kind of I wanted to show over at the right is the flow chart. You can see the three different areas that we have the main permit areas. It's now all flowing through Kim, the recreation coordinator so that the information's flowing through her and then she has the communication directly with parks over on the right and myself over on the left is the supervisors and information flowing up before it was several different supervisors all going up and around and crossing. And you can imagine there was some breakdown there. So we've already seen some great improvement in that communication. You can see some of the things we've completed having us all under one umbrella and one team. Steel Lane is now the permitting hub open nine to 530 over at Steel Lane. As I mentioned, we approved our food truck guidelines following facility protocol and doing that in parks now. Creating more efficiencies. One of our goals is to have a picnic permit to year round in the future. Right now we closed down for the winter months but we're finding this year with the rain, it throws off our, what we thought but all the drought years before people were renting all winter long. And so if the ground is dry and they can have a picnic they wanted to have it and if they couldn't get a picnic permit they were applying for it under the park permit process which like I mentioned earlier is a much more complicated process. So we wanna just be able to do that year round especially the areas that have gazebos or cupboards if there is rain and that people typically aren't gonna rent when we have a rainy season. So this has been a unique year but who knows maybe it's the sign of the times moving forward, I don't know. Let's see, I think everything else is pretty aligning our fees, we're working on a fee study to make those align and better line up together. Standardizing our court rentals that would be like pickleball and ball and tennis courts and lining that with our sports field process that they were done a little bit differently. And one of the big things we wanna just create a process for vendors in the park to be in the parks. It's happening anyways, our park parks are full of the food vendors out there. They definitely follow the sports clubs so if you go any of the sporting complexes you're gonna see the vendors are setting up. There's no process for getting them out of there. The police don't have time to do that so we're trying to figure out a way to follow the process they use downtown for vendors downtown and renting a space and having them again, we feel like we can manage them better if they have a permit with us. They have all the health department requirements and fire department requirements for propane tanks. And then they clean up after themselves and to keep their permit they're gonna have to follow the guidelines. So that is a big work in progress but that is one of our goals again. A lot of the sports clubs say they're there and they'd like them there. They help drinks for the kids or the families or a hot dog or whatever it is. So we're trying to work on a process to allow that in the future. Next slide. So streamlining the permit process and improving the customer service and turnaround time. A lot has been happening here. This is what we really worked on over the winter making stealing the permitting hub, updating our picnic site maps and our website for online booking. If you now go to the website it's much of we had received quite a few complaints that our website was hard to follow and read. So now if you go to the website there's a big button that says book now so it's not hard to figure out how to get that reservation. Merging our park and picnic permit guidelines. We worked with the police department so I should clarify the police department issues the amplified sound permits. They did not have an amplified sound permit in Spanish. So we worked with them and we now have an application that's in Spanish. So when people come in to book a picnic and they want to get an amplified sound permit we can give them the application and we have that available for them now. Doing survey monkeys. We've done them for picnics. We're going to start doing them for the park permits this year. We're better utilizing our park monitors to help paying all the reservations whether it's a sports reservation or a park permit reservation or picnic and the sports and having our permitting team able to cross train and covering for each other. So when someone's off they can pick up a slack with whatever area it's in. We also have on here this weekly park maintenance meeting. So Kim meets with the park maintenance supervisors every Tuesday, most Tuesdays. And that is about focusing on information and exchange of tasks and ideas and what's coming up in the parks that there's no surprises. And that's an effort to improve that communication. So we're all on the same page and we know what's happening. So in process are things that we're considering for the future. Removing bear park from the online booking. It sounds like that's a step backwards but it's not. Probably one of the number one complaints we received last year was about bear park and the lack of parking and the portable toilets. Even though that information's on their paperwork no one was reading it. And then we got the call on Monday really upset that you didn't say I had to use a portable. You didn't say there was some limited parking there. So we want to take that online booking option away so that they have to call and have a conversation with us and we can make sure they're aware of what the park amenities are. So they're not so surprised. Yeah, so those are some of our goals in that process. And mentioned also earlier about next slide. Sorry, forget that part. To continue to educate the public and the city staff on all our permits that we do. So we want to grow the park monitor program. Park monitors that we send out are temporary employees but they're checking on people's permits when they're out there. They're educating the public if they need a permit. It's a visibility having them in the park. A lot of people have questions for them. I did share with you a card. It's one of the cards we do pass out so that when they're like, oh, how do I report this maintenance issue or how do I get a hold of, do I book a permit? They have that and they hand that out to the public because they do get a lot of questions just being visible in the park. And I mentioned earlier also we took all our desk staff on a rosy tour of all the parks so that they can better help our customers when the calls come in or they show up. And then we're in the process again of that training. With that week, we send out every week, a report goes out about what's happening in the park for the week in the parks, all of the parks. And it does go to the police department and the fire department and all of our park maintenance crews. But we're realizing that a lot don't know how to read that report. And so in the upcoming months, we have some meetings scheduled with police and fire on how to better read that report. So if somebody calls the dispatch of the police department to report something, Southwest is having this going on. They can look and go, oh yeah, that's a permitted, they have a permit for that. They do have amplified sound approved from 10 to eight. Oh, it's 10 o'clock at night. No, they shouldn't have amplified sound. So there's been, there was a disconnect there that they'd with that information that was given to the police and information about the parks and permits. So again, that report goes out every week and we're gonna do some trainings with them on how to read that report and use it. Getting the trash and most schedules online. Another question we get a lot about is when is the trash picked up in the park? When is the park mode? And so we're gonna try to get that on the website so we can direct people there to see what the schedule is and work with parks on that. Creating handbooks and FAQs to answer those questions that come in. And again, that marketing campaign of and working with our marketing team on what is a park permit? Who needs a permit? How do you get that permit? Why do you need one? Cause a lot of times people aren't even aware that that's required in our parks and how to do it. So it is all a work in progress with educating not only our own staff but the public on that. Next slide. This slide I think again from our surveys that we sent out and doing some evaluation. I said potential future projects is probably more of a wish list. Some of them are just projects in the park that would make someone's event or activity or picnic a little easier. And the easiest one to show is this kiosk here. So you can see on the left the kiosk where in the process, parks is on the process of refurbishing those. You can see how much better that looks. So if you're renting that picnic area but also on the permitting side, getting that information clear, we do post our calendars in there who has the permits for the week for that particular site. It's information up there how to get a permit. If someone goes, oh, it's not rented. How do I get one for the future? So making those are more useful tool in the park. The rest of these items listed here again are just some wish list items that would make things easier, making it easier to identify which tables are included. It's part of your picnic site. Relocating some of them. So there's better access for unloading supplies and equipment when they're bringing them in. Some of the gazebos. And then down below, there was one about, again, wish list that got brought up some of the sports leagues. The softball fields don't meet current USA softball guidelines. Bases are at 60 feet. I actually don't hold me to that. 60 feet and they're supposed to be 65, something like that. They're off slightly. But it would be more if in the future we're ever gonna rebuild a softball field or do some renovation to a softball field to have it aligned with what the USA standards are. Also not listed here. And it's the number one thing we get in from all the sports leagues. We want some all-weather fields with lights to play year-round. Most of our sports are year-round now and we don't have a lot to offer them. They've, right now, they've supposed to have started soccer a month ago and baseball and softball. And they haven't been able to get on any of our fields for about a month. So it delays games. It throws off their schedules so you can imagine the frustration there. So it's one of the ongoing complaints we get. But I know everybody's aware of that. So with that next slide, this slide just again, it's on that contact card I sent you. It's just, again, access to the different areas if you need to request anything, email addresses and contacts. And then the last slide is just if there's any questions or if you have any thoughts on our goals or the items we're considering for the future. Thank you for your patience and listening. Thank you for the presentation. I'll be talking. Hang out for a sec because we might have some questions. Okay. So just to give our reminder to folks, this is the way we have to do is ask questions and then take public comments. And then we can offer our opinions or general comments after we hear from the public. So try to stick to that format. So we'll start with any questions from the board. Go ahead. I think that there are a lot of great goals and here I'm a big fan of them. My question is, how are you going to track your progress for these goals and meeting these goals? I'm sure some will be easier than others but I just want to know if you have anything on that. Well, part of, I think, similar to we'll have those service goals that we had listed there and we had already completed. And so then what our goals are for the next year. And so I would think next year we could come back and say, now we completed all those and now we have some new ones because there's always new things to add to improve and work on. So we'll definitely be tracking. Those are listed informal for us as our goals for the year. Go ahead. So you mentioned the food permits for people who just kind of pop up without that. Do you have staff that speak Spanish to help them? You do and then will that information be going out to them in Spanish? Yeah, again, we haven't finalized that process. We're hoping to work in tandem with the city manager's office already or downtown, the economic development. Yeah, economic development already has a process in place that they do for the vendors at courthouse square in downtown. So we're working with them if they will, we can just go through their process to allow them in a few key spots and parks mostly where there's sports fields. And we already have the vendors coming in wanting to do it right and saying, can I get a permit to be there when soccer is happening on these days? And right now we don't have a process to give them. Okay, and the people who wanna come in and do it, right? Are you keeping a list of them so you could follow up with them when you have that information? Okay, and I just, I don't know if you would be the person but I'm just gonna mention it anyway. I seen on Facebook somebody who had to go two towns out to use soccer just to practice themself to just do some conditioning. So, I mean, I would love that there was more fields for our people that live here because going that's just ridiculous. Yeah, it is very hard for us Kim. I've done the sports field permits for about five years now and I've just been training Kim on it. And I prepared her how we have all these clubs and there's not enough fields for them. So they all ask for 10 fields each and they maybe get two. I mean, they're putting about 200 kids on per field for their attendance in their groups. And with same with adults, I mean, we have adult leagues. We try to limit the adult leagues to Sundays only so that we're not taking them away from the youth with youth being our priority but there's clearly not enough for that. They all want more fields and we just don't have them to give them. There are some fields and I shouldn't say it. There are some fields that are not used and the clubs refuse to use them. MLK soccer field right now, nobody will take. Jacobs Park, I have one group right now that's doing a couple of days a week on the soccer field. It's a brand new soccer club. And I said, there's nowhere to go. All the fields are already taking so they were willing to try that out at Jacobs. And then Jennings soccer field is down because of maintenance. It's not safe and playable right now. So we have a couple of options but they're not available or not willing to be used. Why does no one want MLK? Safety. When the youth clubs like at Jacobs, the reason Jacobs probably five years ago all these clubs stopped using Jacobs because of the shooting that was there. There's been stabbings and shootings and the drug activity at MLK. Is there any way we could work with the police department on that to help secure the facilities or? Yeah, and we tried that for a little bit at Jacobs when it first happened and the clubs are just like, we're not even willing to chance it. Understood. And parents won't bring their kids there. If they just have this in their mind that it's on, you know, it's on for it takes time to heal and get people back to feeling safe. It's where complexes like a place to play are where at least they're all in one location and they do feel much safer because it's all that activity. So of course they all want place to play. Everybody wants place to play. And so we need more places to play. Well said. Thank you. Kara. Thank you, Amy. I've heard that there's a good lead turnover in the park monitor position. Are you doing anything to streamline either the handbook or the senior junior to get new staff up to speed quicker and not taking as much of management's time as traditional training might take? Yes, that's an ideal situation, but the turnover in recreation period is high. I mean, our desks have same thing. We hired six people and only ended up, we got them all trained, they run through the training and then four of the six quit before they get started. So it's an ongoing issue with temporary staff in recreation right now and the same things happen with the park monitor. So we have a couple of great people right now and I'm optimistic, but we're still hiring and getting them up to speed. Do we know why turnover is so high in this area? I'm going to defer any thoughts on that recreation team. It's a common trend across the country. Last summer, what state was it? One of the warm states down south had less than half their pools open during the summer because of the shortage of lifeguards. So it's a very common trend in part-time recreational positions right now. One minute is high. It's like this all across the state. Yeah, we're part of California Park and Recreation, our national park and recreation and you see that constantly about what is everybody doing about the shortage of staff and temporary employees? And so it is definitely happening everywhere. Just for a quick following up on the vendors process of the permitting. Is it possible to do onsite permitting? Is that being considered at all? Is to have them register there and then? I think it's a small vendor. I don't know, is there anything? That would mean staff would have to be onsite. We don't have, I mean, like I said, we have two park monitors right now that are out on the weekends and they're roaming and the paperwork is pretty cumbersome, especially for a vending type permit because they have to get their health department permit, they've got to get fire department. So there's a lot of paperwork that has to come in before we can actually issue that permit. And that's the process we're still learning and figuring out how we're gonna do that. Do you have any questions from the board? I have one. We don't, go ahead. Things that I'm originally from Petaluma. My grandfather was the champion botchy ball player and I didn't realize we had a botchy ball court and he taught me that years ago and I haven't done it now, I wanna know where it's at because I'm gonna. Several, Juilliard Park. Julie, really? Juilliard Park has three, four, five courts, I'm gonna. And then DeMail Park has two courts. I'm looking to for their validation. Yeah, the Juilliard has six. Six, yeah. Really? I forgot exactly how many there are. It's pretty busy on the weekends over there too. There is a botchy club, actually, at Juilliard. So they've got a whole club with games and leagues. They rent the courts again for league play. They also keep up, upkeep the. Yes, yeah. I'm gonna have to go down there before I get any older. Yeah, yeah. It used to be pretty good. I bet you're still doing that. Any other questions from the board? I've got a few questions, Amy. Yeah, building on what Madonna was asking, are our applications in Spanish, all of them? Yes. Okay. So like for Bayer Park, when someone calls, do we have a Spanish speaker available to speak with them? Actually, both our front desk staff right now. Okay. Our Spanish speaking. Okay, great. Do they, do they get paid more by being bilingual? Is that something that we offer and our pay schedule? We do for permanent employees that has not come up for temporary employees. Okay. I'll come on that real quick because we actually just looked into it. So it's not from the non union representative staff which the temp staff are not. Okay. So I am currently looking into what our options might be to address that with temp staff because it certainly is a great value for us to have that at the desk and I think it should be compensated for. So we're looking into see what we could do internally for that since it's not covered by the city's general policy. Great. Thanks, Jeff. It's definitely actual work. So I'm glad you're looking into that. And then when you have a noise complaint, is it possible? Why are we sending the police? Cause I can feel like they would find that to be kind of an annoying job calling to tell people to turn it down. Why isn't it your staff doing that? Well, one sound permits are issued by the police department. Okay. So they're not issued by our department. And that was one of actually, touch on that, I must have skipped over it. One of our goals is we're working with the police department to give us permission to issue the sound permit for basic sound permits from 10 to six. Because basically someone comes in and wants to get a rental, picnic rental or a park rental from us and then they want sound. And then we're like, all right, here's the application and you're gonna have to take the police department to get that. They have put their application with police. Police call us and say, is it okay with you? We go, yeah, it's okay with us. So then they issue it, then they have to bring it back to us. It's not very customer service friendly. So it's one of the goals we're working on in the police department. I think city charter or something right now designates the police chief to the only one that can sign the sound permits for parks or for sound permits period. So that there was have to be some new designation for us to have the permission to be able to issue those basic sound permits. But again, because they issue those sound permits there the ones that have to do any enforcement. Okay, great. Thanks for that explanation. All right. Do we have any other questions from the board? Okay. Then we will go to any public comments host. Do we have any comments for this item? Oh, my screen just moved. We have no hands raised at this time. Okay. Any in-person comments? Anyone else? Okay. Great. Dan, we can go back to a discussion if anyone has any other points they want to make. Hey Amy. What's up girl? I was going to ask, how do I know if I can have a picnic at this table or not? And when we got to the future having the tables two different colors I think that would make a world of difference so that I know I can go to this green table and have my picnic. Also, I know that the kiosks have the posted permits for tables which are reserved. If a table is not reserved can I go to a table of the other potential color and have my picnic? Yes. So their first come first serve if it's not a permit has priority. And if it's someone that doesn't have a permit then it's first come first serve. I think the idea of having two different colors would be a friendly way of letting people know especially when someone comes in with all their stuff and there's other people already at their reserved table no look, this is our color and we have a permit to get people some type of identification and we're working with Jen. That would be great. On what that would look like. Great. Any other comments? Sorry, one final comment. And I'll take to continue to harping on it but the idea of the vendors permitting and trying to streamline this process because I understand it is difficult for a lot of these individuals, they're just out there. So it's essentially a small business, a small enterprise. So saying, we need food handlers permits in the fire department needs inspectors, little cart and things of that nature that is a barrier to entry. So in looking at streamlining the process and happy to assist in any way I can as well. The idea of perhaps some sort of on-site authorization. I understand staffing is limited and things of that nature but nonetheless, it's simply an ice cream cart or something of that nature and we know that they don't have propane tanks or something like that. They could get some sort of limited pass or something of that nature. And then additional resources. That's how you obtain your food handlers permit. This is what you need to go through here. The center is you can get licensed and whatnot. Perhaps a small packet you can hand them. Something of that nature I think would be helpful for these individuals. Just kind of spitballing here. Just because I know that is an issue and those guys are very welcome to those events and we would hate to be seen as a department. It's just kind of shooing them away, right? So just throwing that out there and happy to assist in any way that I can as well. I appreciate that. Thank you. Great. Any other comments? Carol, go ahead. I'm suddenly reminded of jumpy tents. And several years ago, we talked about only certified, insured vendors of jumpy tents would be able to place them in certain parks. This is something that happened several years ago. Is it a predecessor of what's being done with other vendors and maybe talk about how it's going with the jumpy tent licensing process? It definitely is a little cumbersome process. And there's definitely people still showing up that don't have a permit, but if they apply for a picnic permit or a park permit and say they're gonna have a jump house, there's an extra step that they have to have insurance on file with the city, that company, to set up in a city park. And that, again, came from legal when that was all set up. So I think there's probably more steps that for any vendors allowing them in a city park. Currently, the city ordinance is no businesses in a city park without a permit. So we gotta figure out a way to get to yes so they can get permits. And yeah, it's working. It definitely adds more time to the process. So what were that? Am I hearing you say that the jumpy tents are only showing up when they are permitted, that you don't have rogue jumpy tents? Yeah, we have rogue jumpy tents still. But with our park monitors, we can at least try to go address them and give them the information and how they can get their insurance on file with us for the future. That's part of our education. Oh, I'm just gonna say about the jumpy tents. I'm usually the person who gets a lot of those requests with park permits. Say it's not too hard, generally when it comes to people who want to do it the right way, they will just say what company they're going with. Several companies have their insurance on file with us like Jump and Jax and a few others. And people generally go through those because they have big names. So once they have this, oh, I'm bringing in Jump and Jax, okay, we already have their stuff on file. Cool, you're good. As long as it's a certain size and in certain parks, they're allowed, we tell them that they're only allowed within 100 feet of a house and 50 feet of a playground, except there's a little map that we send to the potential folks that has a little zone they can be in, try to push them toward parks that are better suited for things like that, et cetera, when they call in. We have an approved vendors list, just so they know who's the licensed jumpy guy. That's another thing that's been done when people call in. We don't want to have like approved vendors. We just have people that are, because we don't want to be seen as promoting any particular business. So there's just the ones that have given us the stuff we said, oh, well, we have their insurance on file, we don't recommend them. And any other vendor, if they say, well, I want to use this group, I'll have them get their insurance on file with us and we can. Or they can also get their own insurance that covers them. If they say, bring in a private jumpy or something. Got it. Any other comments or questions from the board? All right. One more. Yes. Back to the vendors. I mean, I'm just thinking, you know, how to make it easier. Some of them are farm workers. So they've already been screwed out on a lot of money anyways. One thing we at Yaqemah Indian Education Board, we have a waiver. So if somebody wants to come, they want to do Indian tacos, boom, sign the waiver, release a liability. You're here at the event. You want to come sell your beadwork or turquoise earring, release a liability waiver. We're not making it hard. Phone number, name, you know, sell your stuff. You know, it's at your own risk. I don't know. That would be our goal. Yeah. Our goal has to go through the city's processes and attorney's offices and all that. I don't know if Jeff's going to comment. I'll just come on real quick. Most of those hurdles are not our permitting process. I mean, we have nothing to do with Sonoma County County Health and what the process is to get that. We have nothing to do with, I mean, obviously the city has to do it, but Recreation Parks has nothing to do with the propane permit processes for a fire department or so. Most of the stuff that we're hung up on is that collaborating that we're trying to do with other permits and then why we're trying to work with economic development because they have an interest in reducing some of those barriers. So if we can work with them and the process they're doing to try to remove some of those barriers and then adopt that into our process. So right now I would say most of the things that we're caught up on, unfortunately I need to get answers, that finger pointing answer, but most of the things that we're hung up on right now and we're trying to do everything we can to get us ready for the process to be smoother, but our things that are out of our staff's control at this point. Thank you. Go ahead. One more thing about vendors, cause I say I have people call in for park permits for say like I want to just set up my taco cart in the park and sell tacos. So generally what we want to try to do with things like this is something that Kim has told me is that we want to encourage for going to have people selling things in the park. We want to encourage it as a community focused event. So say for example, there is an event coming up. I think in June, it's like a Japanese cultural festival and they have like a ton of vendors that come through and there's music, there's food, there's all things like that and that's a community event. So tons of people can sell. I think we just don't want to encourage just single vendors popping up in random places. You want to make it more of a community focused thing as opposed to just folks coming in and out selling things. That event sounds nice. Yes, for example, like with soccer teams, they can sign up with the soccer league and be one of the vendors on that permit holders list. Then they can be a part of the best. Another thing is that's one of the opportunities we're looking at is can we do it through the soccer clubs? Yeah, so sometimes I told people would want to sell say at Southwest Park during the soccer tournament. It's like, oh, here's the name of the person who's or I'm not going to tell the permit holder, there's this guy here who wants to sell food at your event. You guys can collaborate together, put it on your vendor list and then your insurance covers it, et cetera. I love that. Thank you. Yeah, thank you. And so I'll echo those comments. I think we definitely should find that balance between health and safety and encouraging people to come provide a service and have a business. Often that's how restaurants start is at that level and then they move on. And so I think we should be finding a way to make that easier for them. That's still, you know, safe. And I think just generally, we're hearing a lot of kind of structural issues. And I think that's what we can take back to our city council members. So having the things like lack of sports fields, permitting stuff, but maybe if it's getting caught up in the city attorney's office, maybe they can speak with the city manager. So go through, talk to your council members. If you're hearing these issues popping up more and more, they might be able to play their role at that level. So. Absolutely, thank you. Yeah, that is also helpful. Yeah. Cause we're all, we're all at the same goal. It's just how we get there. So any other comments or questions? No, thank you for listening. Thank you. Yeah, thank you. All right. So we are on to item 8.3, which is the parks and rec capital improvements. So we're gonna have our first planner, Scott Wilkinson. He will provide a brief update of planned fiscal year, 2324 capital project budgets and an overview of ongoing project budgets. Take it away, Scott. Thank you. Chair Pitts. Vice chair Castillo. Will you point it? Congratulations. Thank you, sir. Members of the public, those joining us here in person and also from the comfort of their own living rooms. Glad to have you here. My name is Scott Wilkinson. I'm a park planner here with the city parks and rec department. This is my first time presenting to the board. So go easy on me. But it is very good to be here. As chair Pitts said, I will be giving you a brief overview of the, an update on this year's capital improvement projects running through some projects we have in the queue for bidding and construction in 2324, as well as a couple of ongoing planning and design projects and some exciting upcoming projects we have as well. Also include a brief overview regarding future parks that are a part of the general plan and how we use that to forecast and plan for where we would like to see future parks happen in the city and then look at how the park development fees are allocated throughout the city, throughout the four districts or zones of the city. So next slide please, Julie. First, South Davis Park, which is a small sliver of a park that is located immediately west of Highway 101 and just south of Highway 12. It's a very small neighborhood park. We conducted a public outreach project there, a master planning process for the park to re-envision and revisit the amenities that we have at that park. Staff, along with the help of an experienced consultant, developed a master plan for that park, which was approved in February of this year. The project is funded, but in part by the State of California's per capita grant program through Proposition 68. Currently we're moving into the active design phase of that project and focusing on an initial phase that will be a significant renovation to that playground at that park. Next slide. Next, we have an exciting project for this facility in the backyard here, Finley Aquatic Center. We'll be replacing the kiddie pool there, part of the lawn area that is back in the perimeter of the project with a brand new spray ground project and with adjacent picnic areas as part of that, those improvements and also improving the existing concrete pool decks at the two pools that will be remaining in the facility. We are anticipating that project for construction this spring and beginning construction in the fall of this year after the summer programming, that the popular summer programming that we have at that facility there. The goal is to complete that project by May of next year in time to reopen and offer the programming there in the summer of 2024. Next slide. Next up, we have the first phase of a large new community park project that is planned for the southeastern part of the zone of the city. Juana Springs Community Park, which will eventually be a 20 acre park. This first phase that we're currently wrapping up the design on is for a community garden project which will provide about three quarters of an acre of community garden space, up to maybe a hundred plots depending on how we ultimately kind of divide the plots and how big they are. And it also includes a small drop off area placed to deliver materials, garden sheds, a picnic area and a space for fruit trees as well. It also includes a pathway that will connect to the corner of Mida and Juana Terrace Road which will eventually connect to the larger main part of the community park project which will happen across the street there. Next slide, please. Fremont Park is a project that we are actively master planning. We, it's located on the edge of downtown on 4th Street. We had a series of meetings last week to kind of re-envision this park. It's one of the older parks in town and it's sort of in need of kind of an update to better serve the current and future community that's obviously changed quite a bit in the last hundred years ago. So we had a lot of participation in that process. We had online meetings. We had surveys that went out and we got a lot of great, great feedback and developed three alternatives for that park that really transformed it into a new space, a more active space for the community. And out of that, there was a great discussion around the historic nature of that park and what aspects should we or should we not preserve while at the same time really creating and providing a more active and welcoming space for the community. So currently as a part of that discussion we put the process a bit on hold and are conducting a historic evaluation. We hired a consultant that specializes in historic landscapes to really do a deep dive and give us a report on the significance of that project in terms of the historical context that will hopefully inform our process going forward and hope to re-engage the public in the fall on that master plan project. Next slide. Next we have a project that I know the board is familiar with, the Parks Prioritation Prioritization Report that really gives us a good in-depth look at the condition, an assessment of the condition of all the facilities in our park system. Staff is currently working with the consultant who helped us author the study and incorporating this board's great comments into a final draft of that report. In addition, coming out of that discussion and internal review, we're also asking the consultant to help us develop a funding strategy to help bring all of the parks up to a standard rating of four which is according to a scale that is developed in this report that's available online as well for the public to take a look at and then going forward how to strategize to have an ongoing system that will allow those parks to remain at a level four in terms of their maintenance and condition. Next slide. Some of you mentioned the grand opening of the Restaurant Benefactor Golf Course. In July of last year, parks finalized an operation and maintenance agreement with a professional golf course management company, Touchstone, to operate and maintain the golf course, that restaurant facility and banquet facility and restaurant and the driving range at Benchard. Next slide. A couple smaller projects that were accomplished last year. We developed and installed a small picnic area at the Detroit Round Bar neighborhood park adjacent to the dog park there on Boy Street. That's kind of a plan sketch of it in the upper left. And then we were also able to replace all the tables of Bear Park under the main pavilion there in the central part of the park that as Amy mentioned is highly used. So there are steel tables that we hope will stand the test of time out there or at least the next period of time. So next slide, please, Julie. And then lastly, just a couple of upcoming park projects that we have in terms of planning, both construction and planning and design. We have plans to replace the roof that both the structures at Luther Burbank Home and Garden, the cottage and the carriage house. There we are working with a historic architectural firm to make sure that that is done in a really sensitive way around those projects or around those structures, which are a couple of the crown jewels of the city in terms of historic properties that we operate and maintain, I would say the Dutch floor neighborhood park. We're also finishing up a design package for that that will result in a significant renovation of that park and a replacement of the playground as well at that neighborhood park. Some bigger projects that we are gearing up to plan are Howard Park and Galvin Park cork renovations. We'll also be looking into making sure we have the appropriate mix between tennis and doing some outreach to make sure we have the appropriate mix between tennis and pickleball courts out there and we're providing the needs of both of those groups as part of that project. MLK Park, which was mentioned earlier in the field out there and really we're really super excited about this one. We received a grant last month, $5 million grant to which should go a really long way in terms of transforming that park, hopefully improving the fields, the play area, the rest of the whole facility and really activating the park and hopefully, you know, bridging a lot more positive use that will outshine some of the negative aspects that we were seeing out there in terms of the perception of safety. So we're excited about that. Also, Lower Colgan Creek, which is a new neighborhood park that will be master planning along Colgan Creek, southwest part of town. A place to play, which was also mentioned, getting a master plan for that, to provide more sports fields as well as other amenities that will better serve the community currently and going into the future. And lastly, studying longer term project, the style and way project, which is gonna be a real great thing for the city. It's over 40 acres currently in the acquisition phase right now. And once that is ironed out, we will be initiating a significant publicly outreach plan and master plan to see what type of amenities folks are interested in there, whether it's fields, play areas, other things, as well as a multi-use play that will connect all the way from Farmer's Lane, all the way to Spring Lake Regional Park. Next slide, please. Excuse me. So quickly, this is a map from the current 2035 general plan. The icons, the red tree icons represent future parks. Many of these have already been developed and many are still on the list to develop in the future. The larger trees are the proposed community parks and the smaller trees are proposed neighborhood parks. Our two main sort of categories of parks that we operate and maintain the system. Currently, the city is updating this plan to as part of their 2050 general plan update. We staff has been involved with planning and economic development to help provide information that will help better and ensure that we have an equitable distribution of neighborhood and community parks throughout the four zones to best serve the community. And that would be based on geography and population. So next slide. This slide shows kind of an overlay of the four quadrants just for those of you who are not familiar with how the park development impact fees are both collected and then distributed. It happens via these four zones that are defined by the highways, basically Highway 101 running by South and 12 to the East and West. The funds, the park development impact funds are collected by the building division when building has come in for new residential units. So the idea being that we're providing parks where new folks are being housed and living so they have a place to play. And those funds are then submitted to finance to distribute to lump sum to the department to allocate to each zone back to that zone. And then if you go to the next slide, I'll touch on this year, the funds that did come in by each zone and the projects that we've allocated them to the projects that we've allocated them to. So in zone one, an amount of 3,192,463 is going to be allocated to the Dutch floor neighborhood park project that I mentioned earlier. Any remainder from that money of that money will go towards a place to play community park in that park process. Not to interrupt you, but exactly where is that park? Street. Which one? Dutch floor. Sorry, Dutch floor. What street is Dutch floor on? Down the street, college. And you just got the Peterson, I think. Peterson Lane, yeah. It's true in the middle of the neighborhood. Yeah. It's tucked in the middle of the neighborhood. I don't know the name of the neighborhood. Must have a name, but okay. It's in the Northwest part of town, not far from here. Thank you. I can certainly provide more detail. I'm gonna, I got some more questions. Okay. Let me get, I'm almost done. So, and then we could have time for questions. I got one of those brains, you know, that got me. Next slide, please, Julie. And zone two, we have an allocation of $3,205,691 that will be going towards the Lower Colgan Creek neighborhood project. And in zone three on the next slide, $493,770 for the Fremont Community Park renovation project that I spoke of earlier. And zone four, an allocation of $687,715 towards the Kiwana Springs Community Park and Community Garden Project. So with that, that concludes my update and overview of the Capital Improvement Parks Plan. And we certainly open to any feedback and questions regarding these allocations or anything else that's on your mind. Thanks, Scott. So just a reminder folks, we'll do questions then public comments and then try to offer your comments. So let's start off with questions from the board. No more? I have two questions. If you don't mind. We touched on MLK and how we're doing our master plan and we touched on an earlier regarding safety perceptions on that park. So my question was, and that's not super in our control but do we have any plans on how we can bring in the community and help alleviate that uncertainty around that park? Yeah, my general answer to that is as I kind of tried to explain maybe a little plumsily is that when we create, well, first of all we bring in the community early in the design process, right? And we want to understand what the issues are, what they would like to see developed in the park or changed about the park, whether it's particular new amenities or they have ideas about locations of things or how things are, I mean, folks who live in the area and know the park know it better than us. So we try to learn from them and then create a space that is activated, has features that people want to go to and use in a positive way. They want to bring their families to, they want to bring their children to and by virtue of that positive activity the hope is that there's less negative activity now. Is that which we're thinking maybe to a slight degree but it does happen. You can imagine parks that are really well used and you don't see a lot of nefarious things going on because that's not where those folks want to do things necessarily. So I guess that's what I would say to that if that. So we'll work with our partner groups, like our sports groups and we have a few community neighborhood folks down there, really fantastic, really engaged community. So we'd also work with that group as well as our city partners, please. Thanks. Paul, go ahead. Yeah, sorry. I'm sorry. You had two questions. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm just very egregious. Yeah, no worries. I'll be right back. Second question was about the general plan. Do we have a direct involvement in that process or is it going to be something we kind of just get handed and work around with? And by we, you mean? The same right, yeah. No, we are definitely involved in collaborating with planning and economic development on that who are leading the process. They've had a number of meetings, how reach, you know, a long outreach program. We've been working with them since their last round of outreach on doing mapping and trying to really drill down on, you know, that map and understanding where the needs are for new parks and things and we're feeding them information. We're also talking about making sure we have the classifications, the definitions of the different park types correct and are making some updates to those as well as some of the policy in policies in the plan that relate to parks. So yeah, we are pretty involved with that. Jen, is there anything you want to add? I would just add there's still time to participate on a community basis for those of you who are in the community at SantaRosaForward.com and it's a great way to provide your feedback. We'll be coming out again and bringing it to council as well. There you go. Oh, just following up on the MLK park and the master plan. I think it's a five million that's allocated to the renovation of the park. Yeah, I don't have the number right in front of me, but that is actually the grant amount. We're like set the grant approximately. Can any of that funding be used towards like increased safety or monitoring or does it all have to be towards redeveloping? Like, could any of that be budgeted towards the ongoing monitoring? Those particular funds are really, really dedicated for the capital improvement part of things rather than operational or kind of, yeah, but oh well. Next grant. And I'll add when we go to that design process, we, you know, MLK is an older park. We wouldn't design it that way. It can improve the safety features through the design process as well. And we'll work with the police to have a really good relationship with police when you look at designs, especially parks that have notoriously been dangerous to be part of. And so we're hopeful that that process will bring about a safer park in that way as well. Unfortunately, a lot of grants don't allow you to spend them on operations. They always just want you to build cool new stuff. Got it, yeah. Any other questions, Rinal? We'll go down the line here. We'll go to Carol first and we'll go down. Hi, Scott. First one is a generic question. The second one's a specific question. The generic question is, I know that both Dutch floor and Corona Springs have been with us for several years. The money that is budgeted in fiscal year 23, 24 is that carryover money from previous years? I know the funds continue to build. Is this fiscal budget 23, 24 carried over from 21, 22? Is it, was that money used for something else? Can you just clarify that in my mind a little bit? Yeah, I'll explain. Can you just explain to the general public how that 23, 24, so that's July one to July one? This cool. Okay, sorry to interrupt. Yeah, yeah, right. Yeah, thanks Carol. This is new money that we are allocating from the park development impact fee process. So it is new money. There is additional money there. As you say, this project has had a bit of a history. And so that money is going towards that project along with the existing money that was in the fund for the project. I don't know if I understood that. Was Dutch floor the play structure that went through the whole master plan? Was that not funded in 22? The planning of it was. Okay. Now this, we're talking about the actual construction of the renovations themselves. I did not know that. Thank you for the explanation. Yeah. The second question relates to Fremont Park, which is a park very close to my heart and where I live, the meetings that happened recently? Never heard anything about them. Can you tell me how you did the outreach and who was contacted, how it was advertised on social media or whatever? Yeah. Totally outside my radar. Well, I'm surprised to hear that. And thank you for letting us know. That was very early on in my tenure. So Jen might have a little more background to add, but we did, I believe go through the full process of sending out. I thought I heard you say that in the last month or so, there was an update. I must have been convinced. Oh no, sorry. I think I said, I meant to say last year, if it was last summer, so you did hear about those? Very much so. Okay. Woo! Good. We've just been having internal meetings and historical architects that were getting on board to get them out there too. So I think that's what you were touching on. Okay. Yeah, it caught my ear as well. I look forward to those updates as a member of the community. Great. Thank you, Kyle. Thank you. Weed up. Do you have questions? Yes, Scott. Fremont Park, that's the one down on 4th Street. Across the street, just up the street a little bit. Did they just build a five story big apartment complex? Yeah. They're gonna be kids living in that park, in that park. Then are you taking into consideration Fremont Park for kids to go play in so they're not playing out in the street? Absolutely. I mean, I just hate these places that are going up and I look and I go, where are the kids gonna go play? You know, I look okay there. No, that's great. We absolutely are, and like I said, creating a place that has more active features, a play area, at a minimum, other things. We are planning a direct crosswalk across 4th Street there to be part of the off-site improvements that will allow a better pedestrian connection across from that. I forget how many units are going in there, but it's significant. So we do imagine that there will be families and kids. Okay, my other concern is it's a big 500 unit complex going up on Santa Rosa Avenue, just south of smart and final. 500 units. You imagine how many kids are gonna be in there. I don't think there's even enough place to park cars for people that have cars in that spot. But where is, I wish I had the exact address there, but where is there a park nearby there? And if there isn't, I think those things should be considered with the developer of the facility that, okay, we're gonna need, for that many, we're gonna need some land for parks. So we need to develop this and have that ready when that building is complete, which is pretty close to be completed, probably another maybe six months or so. But where are the kids gonna play, besides in the shopping centers? That's the only, it's only in the parking lot. Yeah, no, it's a great question. And I would say, and again, Jen can add to this, but the developers of those projects do pay into this, these funds, the park development impact funds. Sometimes they're dedicating land if it works out that we can negotiate with them in that way. Other times they're just paying the fee into our other park projects that will be in that area. So for instance, the Kiwana Springs Community Park that I mentioned is gonna be a new 20 acre park that is relatively close there, although it's not adjacent, it should be walkable and or bikeable by the kids in that development. And I know not only is there that development, but there are other housing developments going in that area as well. So it is something that we're looking at and something that we're looking at as part of that general plan update, updating that general plan map as well, to make sure that we are identifying locations in the areas that are developing with new residential units. Right, because some of those areas, Kiwana Springs and what's the other one there, where you come off of Herne Avenue or Target and so on, I mean, there's so many apartments going in there and we've got to make it safer, kids, to be able to bike. You can't even hardly drive. I drive it every day and it's a pain because you wait to go through three traffic lights sometimes before you can finally get up to make a turn. You know, it's just, the traffic is terrible and I just hate to see kids start getting on their bikes and getting hit and so on. It's just, I just think things are getting too congested down there. And not just that we need more parks, but I mean, it's just getting unbearable. It really is and it's, somebody's not planning right somewhere. Thanks, Guido. Okay. Any other questions? Yes, please. So the community park garden, you talked about plots. Do you know how many plots will be there? We believe that there will be, there could be up to a hundred plots depending on how the plots are ultimately sort of divided up. So we're planning to build the facility, how gardens work, they rely on gardeners and people to become part of the group or association that really begins to have some ownership over it and we leave that kind of final carving up of the spaces to that evolution of group. Will that be like a lottery system? Like with section eight housing? How do I get a plot? Not sure yet. We aren't there yet, but we'll have a process for signing up for plots for sure. And then what I would like to see is if you had just two plots that were lifted, like if I'm in a wheelchair, I could come and sit. I would like to see at least two of those, please. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. They are included in the plan. We have two of them, at least one of them in the plan, a large one that is accessible. Yeah, it's enough for at least four folks with mobility to use it up, standing up in the room. Okay, perfect. Okay, another question for the general plan with parks for future parks. How are you coming up with the names of those parks? The names of the future parks. Yes. Yeah, that's a good, that's a very good question. Okay. We aren't naming them as part of the general fund or general plan process itself. We're just identifying what type of park they're going to be. The naming process will happen. I would like to present one of them being named after a local native tribe. Okay. Homo Park, Homo Community Park, something like that. And then as my colleague here was talking about, we have a shortage of housings. We're short still thousands of houses, apartments because of our first fire. So the housing's not really going to stop, right? In bigger cities, they have like rooftop fields. Is that something that you've heard of that may be happening? If not, can you tell them to do that? And then, you know, I drive by the mall a lot. So the old Sears parking lot, like there's like four cars in there. I mean, if it was my choice, I would tear that parking structure down and build multiple like fields. I mean, I don't know, it's right downtown. So that's all I have. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks, Madonna. Any questions from the board? I had a few questions for you, Scott. Yeah, Guido brought up one reach plea. I was wondering if you're going to reach out to the residents of that new apartment complex across from Fremont. I brought that up before. So I appreciate you saying that. For back to the conditions assessment, are people going to know what condition a park is in? Like, is there going to be something on the sign that they can look up? Or I suggest in the past, like a QR code or something easy like that, that they can know? Yeah, no, I think that's a great... It's going to be like on some website, some wires at all. Well, it's certainly going to be on a website. Yeah, but that's an interesting idea to actually have it in the park where you could kind of, you know, understand, oh, here I'm in a level three. This one... We have them for restaurants. Why can't we just have a, hey, this one's good to go. Yeah. Okay. Or on Luther Burbank, is it going to be closed when you're replacing the roof? You know? Yes, it's going to be a significant project. I just like going there. Many people are going there. I think it will be done within the season. I mean, it's a roof, so we got to get it done when it's dry. So, which also happens to be the gardening season, the hour and blooming season, right? So that will be, it will have an impact for sure. So that's starting soon. Ben, ideally? Yeah, we're hopeful to have it start this, be done this year. Okay. And we're still reading on council to appropriate the additional funds needed before we get started. So if we don't receive the funds, it will go back on hold. And we can work with the future contractor to minimize the impact. There will be impacts to getting into the buildings, but touring the garden and stuff, we hope to minimize those people who can still go. Okay. And then, are you going to come back to us before a year from now? Are we going to hear, can we hear like a mid-year update from you? I think so. Okay. Absolutely. And I should add too that we are planning to come back, I am planning to come back next month even. Right. Chair Pitts with some information about how we're going to be allocating money through the measure end funds as well. So a host of other projects that we were identifying to use those funds for. Okay. I have one more question. Okay, hold on one second. And one of our requests, I know you had a lot of different timelines, but if you could give any sort of estimate, like on a future slide, and I know sometimes it's hard to figure that out, but you know, like this is nine months out, this one's six months out, that'd be helpful. I like that. Okay. We'll definitely take that into consideration. Thank you. And some of the slides that you brought up, they were great, but you know, is there any chance of getting on a piece of paper so we can look at it while you're. They're all right here. We don't think you're in this package. Oh, okay. There's a lot to look at. I didn't, I wasn't aware of that. Thank you. It's good. But if there's something you don't see, certainly reach out to. If I may make one more request when you're talking to the people with the parks, you talked about like people that with historic knowledge of, you know, stuff. I would like to see like stuff that my people used, you know, before all these roads and cement was here, you know, I would like that. But a medicine garden is what we call it. Stuff that we use still. Other ideas of things that we could create or develop in parks. Yeah, yeah, I would love to, I would love to see that. I like that too. Yeah, thank you. Carol, do you have a question? The prioritization report, which is obviously still a work in progress. We are now in phase two, which is the establishment of the base conditions level. I should think with this hard winter, everything's shifting around. Is this something that's being worked on forever? Will this be completed at some point? Is there a timeframe for the prioritization report being complete and will it ever be complete? I would say yes. We're looking to complete it this calendar year in terms of, you know, incorporating, like I said, you're the board's input as well as the funding strategy. But I think that beyond that, it will be something that is sort of, you know, ongoing in a living document that we reference as a tool and update over time as well. Thank you. Any other questions from the board for Scott? Thank you, Scott. Thank you, Scott. We'll go now to public comments. Do we have any public comments on item 8.3? We have no hands raised at this time. Okay. One last comment I wanted to make, Scott, and anyone else can make any last comments. The question about park naming, I would, and this is to Jen, I'd appreciate if we could get some sort of update because I think we talked about that a while ago that that was gonna be some sort of effort in city equity and inclusion training to talk about the naming. And we sort of ran into that with the marriage reversal and the park is, how are these named? What's the criteria? I think that was a good point raised about how they get named. And possibly at the risk of opening up a huge kind of worms like Fremont Park is named after a controversial historical figure to say the least. You know, renaming, how did we name them in the first place? So if you could get us an update in the future I wouldn't have to be appreciated, Jen or Scott. Yeah, absolutely. We will, thanks. Okay, thank you very much for the presentation. Welcome, thank you. Yeah. Next month. Thank you, yeah, we came forward to it. Thanks. Welcome to. Okay, coming up next is our item nine, our committee reports, 9.1, the update from the mayor's lunch, no update. I still have not had a lunch with the mayor, unfortunately, so hopefully that restarts. It used to be something we did at city hall on a monthly basis and previous mayor Rogers got to do it once before he left. So hopefully the new mayor Rogers is restarting. So with that, board member Klein, do you have an update from the waterways committee? There was no meeting last night. All right, also an easy update on to item 10, Deputy Director Santas, so we have any written or whatsoever communications? You have no written or electronic information. Great, thank you, Jen. Moving on to 11, future items for us to consider. So you can suggest anything that you want to see. Any other board members? I guess I kind of jumped ahead and did that with the renaming, but I would love to see that on a future agenda, the naming policy and where that's at. Does anyone else have any other suggestions? Chair Pitts, if I may. I would like to, I mean, I don't speak for the local tribes, but I would like to be on the agenda for future Native American events. Okay. If that's okay. Do you want to, you mean like be included? Like if I know of an event coming up, I could have just announced that. Oh, yeah, absolutely. And you can always do that in your report too. Let's try to stick to parks correct, but if you have something that you think is really important for us to hear, that's your report. So you can say what you like. Thank you. Yeah. Anyone else have any future agenda items they'd like to see? No, all right. Well, with that, we will, sorry, I want to get my time right here so that we can get that. So the next regular scheduled meeting of the board will be held on Wednesday, April 26th at 4 p.m. right here. And on that, we are still looking in the ordinance update changing the time. So I just wanted to remind folks that we were asking people to think about that. We had a suggestion from the ordinance subcommittee to change it to 5 p.m. We had a discussion last month on that. So I think we're going to talk about that again next month and try to come to a final decision. So just keep that in mind. We don't have to change it right away. That's just what the subcommittee said, but please think about that is for good. Do you want 5 p.m.? We are a suggestion for 6 p.m. So anyways, just come back with that. So with that, the next board meeting is Wednesday, April 26th at 4 p.m. With that, I adjourn this meeting of the board of committee services at 5.56 p.m. Thank you everyone. Thank you. Thank you. Great meeting.