 Santa Rosa, out there in the middle of everything. Over 90 miles of creeks run through Santa Rosa. Run off from streets, roofs, and parking lots, end up in our creeks through the storm drain system. To help protect creeks, keep your street gutters and roadside ditches clear of trash and other pollutants. For more information on the benefits of our creeks and tips on how to enjoy them, visit the Stormwater and Creeks webpage. Have you ever seen a flashing yellow arrow on a traffic light? I'm Rob Sprinkel, Traffic Engineer for the City of Santa Rosa here today to talk to you about a new type of traffic signal. Beginning in 2013, flashing yellow left turn signals will be installed in some of the intersections in Santa Rosa. Studies show that drivers better understand the need to yield to oncoming traffic with a new flashing yellow arrow signal. These new flashing yellow arrow signals give drivers more chances to make left turns, but more importantly, they stress the need to use caution when turning left. Some drivers may be confused when they see a flashing yellow arrow because they're not exactly sure what to do. Let's run through how these signals operate. The green arrow means you have the right of way to make left turn signals. All incoming traffic and pedestrians are stopped. The solid yellow arrow is a warning telling you the light is about to turn red. The red arrow means stop and wait. Now for the new part, a flashing yellow arrow. The flashing yellow arrow means you can make a left turn if there's a safe gap from oncoming traffic. Check for oncoming bicycles and pedestrians attempting to cross the intersection. Always yield to the pedestrians as they have the right of way. If you don't see a gap in traffic, don't take a chance. Just wait until the next green arrow appears. The City of Santa Rosa will be evaluating the speed technology at locations throughout the city. It will be up to all of us to make sure we use them safely. In recreation and parks, the days begin when the sun rises. Most of our work spaces don't have four walls or a desk, but there's a lot to be done to get this place up and running. It takes a big team to cover so much ground. Each space is unique, requiring its own special method of care and service, and it's of utmost importance to see that it happens each day because our workspace is your leisure space and it includes 950 acres of Santa Rosa. It's the parks, the trees, the fields, the trails, special gathering places, community spaces, and it belongs to everyone. We work for our community, striving to improve quality of life. We provide family experiences, friendly competitions, leisurely evenings, and places to bond with man's best friend. We create space for celebration, relaxation, and artistic expression. You can learn to serve a ball or learn to serve a meal. Take a walk on a path or walk the plank. We've got beautiful settings, space to show off our history. We have room to roam, to roll, or to run. We allow for the silly, the serious, the cool. We offer countless ways to work on your health. We keep our youth safe and teach them to keep others safe. We challenge people to want to challenge themselves. We foster creativity, guide athletes, hone passions. We allow for little minds to dream. And we'll keep doing what we do each day, because we know that for our community, parks make life better. Santa Rosa, out there in the middle of everything. Over 90 miles of creeks run through Santa Rosa. We run off from streets, roofs, and parking lots, end up in our creeks through the storm drain system. To help protect creeks, keep your street gutters and roadside ditches clear of trash and other pollutants. For more information on the benefits of our creeks and tips on how to enjoy them, visit the Stormwater and Creeks webpage. Have you ever seen a flashing yellow arrow on a traffic light? I'm Rob Sprinkel, traffic engineer for the city of Santa Rosa, here today to talk to you about a new type of traffic signal. Beginning in 2013, flashing yellow left turn signals will be installed in some of the intersections in Santa Rosa. Studies show that drivers better understand the need to yield to oncoming traffic with a new flashing yellow arrow signal. These new flashing yellow arrow signals give drivers more chances to make left turns, but more importantly, they stress the need to use caution when turning left. Some drivers may be confused when they see a flashing yellow arrow, because they're not exactly sure what to do. Let's run through how these signals operate. The green arrow means you have the right of way to make a left turn. All oncoming traffic and pedestrians are stopped. The solid yellow arrow is a warning telling you the light is about to turn red. The red arrow means stop and wait. Now for the new part, a flashing yellow arrow. The flashing yellow arrow means you can make a left turn if there's a safe gap from oncoming traffic. Check for oncoming bicycles and pedestrians attempting to cross the intersection. Always yield to the pedestrians as they have the right of way. If you don't see a gap in traffic, don't take a chance. Just wait until the next green arrow appears. The city of Santa Rosa will be evaluating this new technology at locations throughout the city. It will be up to all of us to make sure we use them safely. Santa Rosa, out there in the middle of everything. In recreation and parks, the days begin when the sun rises. Most of our workspaces don't have four walls or a desk, but there's a lot to be done to get this place up and running. It takes a big team to cover so much ground. Each space is unique, requiring its own special method of care and service. And it's of utmost importance to see that it happens each day because our workspace is your leisure space. And it includes 950 acres of Santa Rosa. It's the parks, the trees, the fields, the trails, special gathering places, community spaces, and it belongs to everyone. We work for our community, striving to improve quality of life. We provide family experiences, friendly competitions, leisurely evenings, and places to bond with man's best friend. We create space for celebration, relaxation, and artistic expression. You can learn to serve a ball or learn to serve a meal. Take a walk on a path or walk the plank. We've got beautiful settings, space to show off our history. We have room to roam, to roll, or to run. We allow for the silly, the serious, the cool. We offer countless ways to work on your health. We keep our youth safe and teach them to keep others safe. We challenge people to want to challenge themselves. We foster creativity, guide athletes, hone passions. We allow for little minds to dream. And we'll keep doing what we do each day because we know that for our community, parks make life better. Santa Rosa, out there in the middle of everything. Over 90 miles of creeks run through Santa Rosa. Run off from streets, roofs, and parking lots. End up in our creeks through the storm drain system. To help protect creeks, keep your street gutters and roadside ditches clear of trash and other pollutants. For more information on the benefits of our creeks and tips on how to enjoy them, visit the Stormwater and Creeks webpage. Have you ever seen a flashing yellow arrow on a traffic light? I'm Rob Sprinkel, traffic engineer for the City of Santa Rosa, here today to talk to you about a new type of traffic signal. Beginning in 2013, flashing yellow left turn signals will be installed in some of the intersections in Santa Rosa. Studies show that drivers better understand the need to yield to oncoming traffic with a new flashing yellow arrow signal. These new flashing yellow arrow signals give drivers more chances to make left turns. But more importantly, they stress the need to use caution when turning left. Some drivers may be confused when they see a flashing yellow arrow because they're not exactly sure what to do. Let's run through how these signals operate. The green arrow means you have the right of way to make a left turn. All oncoming traffic and pedestrians are stopped. The solid yellow arrow is a warning telling you the light is about to turn red. The red arrow means stop and wait. Now for the new part, a flashing yellow arrow. The flashing yellow arrow means you can make a left turn if there's a safe gap from oncoming traffic. Check for oncoming bicycles and pedestrians attempting to cross the intersection. Always yield to the pedestrians as they have the right of way. If you don't see a gap in traffic, don't take a chance. Just wait until the next green arrow appears. The city of Santa Rosa will be evaluating the sneak technology at locations throughout the city. It will be up to all of us to make sure we use them safely. Santa Rosa, out there in the middle of everything. Santa Rosa, out there in the middle of everything. In recreation and parks, the days begin when the sun rises. Most of our workspaces don't have four walls or a desk, but there's a lot to be done to get this place up and running. It takes a big team to cover so much ground. Each space is unique, requiring its own special method of care and service. And it's of utmost importance to see that it happens each day because our workspace is your leisure space. And it includes 950 acres of Santa Rosa. It's the parks, the trees, the fields, the trails, special gathering places, community spaces, and it belongs to everyone. We work for our community, striving to improve quality of life. We provide family experiences, friendly competitions, leisurely evenings, and places to bond with man's best friend. We create space for celebration, relaxation, and artistic expression. You can learn to serve a ball or learn to serve a meal. Take a walk on a path or walk the plank. We've got beautiful settings, space to show off our history. We have room to roam, to roll, or to run. We allow for the silly, the serious, the cool. We offer countless ways to work on your health. We keep our youth safe and teach them to keep others safe. We challenge people to want to challenge themselves. We foster creativity, guide athletes, hone passions. We allow for little minds to dream. And we'll keep doing what we do each day because we know that for our community, our state life better. Over 90 miles of creeks run through Santa Rosa. Run off from streets, roofs, and parking lots, end up in our creeks through the storm drain system. To help protect creeks, keep your street gutters and roadside ditches clear of trash and other pollutants. For more information on the benefits of our creeks and tips on how to enjoy them, visit the Stormwater and Creeks webpage. Have you ever seen a flashing yellow arrow on a traffic light? I'm Rob Sprinkel, traffic engineer for the city of Santa Rosa, here today to talk to you about a new type of traffic signal. Beginning in 2013, flashing yellow left turn signals will be installed in some of the intersections in Santa Rosa. Studies show that drivers better understand the need to yield to oncoming traffic with a new flashing yellow arrow signal. These new flashing yellow arrow signals give drivers more chances to make left turns, but more importantly, they stress the need to use caution when turning left. Some drivers may be confused when they see a flashing yellow because they're not exactly sure what to do. Let's run through how these signals operate. The green arrow means you have the right of way to make a left turn. All oncoming traffic and pedestrians are stopped. The solid yellow arrow is a warning telling you the light is about to turn red. The red arrow means stop and wait. Now for the new part, a flashing yellow arrow. The flashing yellow arrow means you can make a left turn if there's a safe gap from oncoming traffic. Good afternoon. Welcome to the study session for our meeting of February 24th. May I have the roll call please? Let the record show that all council members are present with the exception of council member Vice Mayor Corsi and absent. Thank you very much. Mr. McGlynn, would you like to announce the study session please? Yes, item 5.1, capital improvement program transportation project update, farmers lane extension, Hearn Avenue improvements, and Stony Point Road widening. Colleen Ferguson presenting. Thank you. Mayor Sawyer and members of the council, we're here for an update on three transportation projects. This started out as a response to a question raised about the status of the farmers lane extension project during our last CIP quarterly staff briefing. There's so much going on right now with the Hearn Avenue interchange and Stony Point Road widening that we wanted to update you on those two transportation projects as well. So we have three different presenters for this study session. On this slide, you can see the location of the three different projects that we're gonna be talking about. Stony Point Road widening on the left, Hearn Avenue interchange in the middle, and Farmers Lane extension on the right. And we will have time at the end of the presentation for questions, but if you have questions as we go, we would welcome those at any time. We're gonna start with Stony Point Road widening. As we go through the presentation, some of the slides will have an indicator at the bottom of the status of the project through the different stages. And here you can see scoping on the left in blue, environmental and preliminary design in green, right away in yellow, design in red and construction on the far right in white. So just so you understand when you see that at the bottom of some of the slides through the presentation. And we'll get going on the presentation, starting with Clayt, that's on Stony Point Road widening. Good afternoon, Mayor Soar and members of the council. Today I will provide you with a brief update of the Stony Point Road widening phase two reconstruction project as a PG&E construction has been underway over the past year to clear the way for the upcoming road work. I provided a similar update to this back in April of 2014 as the PG&E construction was beginning. Stony Point Road is an alternative route to Highway 101 for those traveling between the cities of Petaluma, Runner Park and Santa Rosa, approximately 25,000 cars per day travel discordor. In June of 2010, phase one of the widening was completed from Highway 12 to Sebastopol Road in a commercial area. Phase two will extend the widening all the way down to Herne Avenue. So just a little bit about the current conditions. Currently, Stony Point Road between Sebastopol Road and Herne Avenue primarily consists of pockets of disconnected development with large gaps in the connectivity of both pedestrian and bicycle facilities. The availability of crossings for pedestrians is limited. The distance between crosswalks can be as much as a quarter mile. During commute hours, the traffic can become quite congested and lead to some lengthy backups. And also over the duration, the pavement has become highly deteriorated. Currently, the PG&E electrical, AT&T and Comcast wires are located overhead. So just a little bit about what the roadway will consist of when it's complete. When complete, the project will add travel lanes in both directions. We'll add safety elements such as a new traffic signal at Lasini Avenue, two pedestrian crossing flashers at Roseland Creek and at a Mesa Way. The project will add planted median, left turn pockets and a planter strip between the roadway and the sidewalk. Prior to enjoying the smooth pavement, additional travel lanes, bike lanes, sidewalk and a removal of the majority of overhead wires, we must continue to endure the impacts of the ongoing construction. Now I'll briefly just go over the major construction operations that have occurred and are scheduled to occur. So PG&E began in February and completed in mid-April the process of removing a transmission gas line that ran through the corridor. The gas line was no longer needed as it's paralleled by a more recently constructed line. Additionally, PG&E began in June. The relocation of overhead transmission lines to outside of the road widening improvements. As part of the relocation, PG&E installed 21 new poles with heights of approximately 100 feet. The overhead transmission lines, which are the higher voltage lines, will be the only overhead utilities remaining at the completion of the project. So kind of a unique feature of the project. In order to accommodate the city road widening, a home was required to be relocated. Relocation was a more cost-effective alternative than purchasing the home. The house relocation was completed in mid-July. The overhead to underground conversion construction also began in June of 2014 and is anticipated to be completed at the end of next month. Based on the council established underground district, the utility companies are completely funding the under grounding of their facilities. The city road widening and reconstruction is scheduled to begin in June and complete in May of 2017. At the project completion, Stony Point Road will consist of four lanes, two in each direction, medium, left turn pockets, bike lanes, planter strips, and sidewalk. It will be a new street similar in configuration to Fulton Road between Occidental and Third Street. So just a little bit on the funding. The city construction contract is estimated at $12.5 million with a total project cost at $16.8 million. The project's remaining $2.2 million of needed funding is being requested in the next year's budgets. The project does include some sewer and water components, but the majority of the project cost is the road widening. Currently to date, approximately $15.2 million have been spent on environmental requirements, right-of-way acquisition, and the phase one construction. Upon completion, construction of the total project, phase one and phase two, is estimated to have invested approximately $32 million in Southwest Santa Rosa. So expect Stony Point Road back in late April for award of the construction contract and the construction management contract. I'd like to pass it on to Dave Monague for some Hearn Avenue. Good afternoon, I'm Dave Monague. I'm here to give you an update on the Hearn Avenue interchange project. Gonna start out, I've got about five slides. I thought I'd start out with the need, the purpose, the scope, the status, and then the funding. As you can see, we have the status bar on the bottom of this slide and hard to see on the left side of that. The scoping document is complete and that's this document right here. We are now about halfway through the environmental and preliminary design of the project. The scoping document is the first step in the Caltrans process, so we've completed that. Okay, so the need, oh, back one, sorry. The need for the project, it's unable to accommodate existing and future traffic flows. The pedestrian and bicycle access is restricted. The ADA is non-standard. Vertical clearance is non-standard. That's the vertical clearance between 101 and the overpass. And the accident rate for similar ramps in the state, it's higher than the state average. So the purpose of the project is to improve local traffic circulation, regional circulation and operations, multimodal access, connectivity, and operations, and also overall safety of the facility. This is a slide that is similar to the first slide that was up. This shows the three phases of the Hearn project, Hearn Avenue widening, Santa Rosa Avenue widening, and the Hearn Avenue interchange are all interrelated and all part of one big project. And you can see the relationship between Farmers Lane and Yolanda Avenue projects, which the Farmers Lane will be covered by Steve Dittmer after I'm done. So then the current status of the project, we've completed phases one and two, and we are part way as we talked in the first slide with the project initiation document complete and into the environmental phase. So currently underway is the approval, project approval and environmental document which is on track to be completed by March of 2016, which will be followed by a right of way acquisition, final design and specifications. So sort of going back up to the part that's underway, the aerial photograph there shows the existing configuration of Hearn. I know you can't see that, I'm sorry, but there's the scoping that was done with the project initiation document, looked at alternatives, one being no project at all, the other being rebuild the bridge at its current location, and the third being a realignment to Yolanda. Our goal is to have the project show ready by 2019. Mr. Mayor. Would you rather that we wait for questions at the end or ask them as we go? I was just waiting. I think you should ask now. I just think you, I just like a little bit of clarification with respect to what you just said, the three different options that were considered has one been selected. This is my freeway exit, so I have a particular interest in how quickly this goes. The scoping is to look at viable alternatives with a team of experts and once it's narrowed down to three specifics, but there is a continuing process in the environmental and in the public meeting process where there's opportunity for input, and we're continuing to discuss the intersections for there's a lot of different lane configurations and how to terminate at each side. There's gonna be quite a bit more work on that. Just the bottom line is there will be no decision on an alternative until the environmental is completed. Thank you. That's what I wanted to hear. Only because I know that realigning it with Yolanda would be a fairly large undertaking, so I wanted to make sure we were gonna have that chance. Thanks. We're targeting mid-April for our first public meeting, so you will receive notification of that invitation. So now, talk about funding. Phase one is complete and for a cost of $8 million, phase two is complete for $2 million. Phase three, we've spent about $2 million or we've encumbered about $2 million to complete the environmental process. And then depending on the alternative selected, the construction estimates range from $13 to $22 million right now. We have some measure M funding, development fees, and we'll be completing a NEPA process in the environmental so we can compete for federal dollars. That's the end of my presentation on her. Turn it over to Steve Dittmer. Hold on one second, Mr. Dittmer. Council has questions on the first two projects. Let's go ahead and ask them now because the extension may take a little more time. Julie. Thank you very much for this information. You mentioned that it is above the state average for safety or below the state average for safety. And I'm wondering if in comparison with our other exit ramps as opposed to with a state average, is it one of our more dangerous exit ramps? Is it one of our least safe exit ramps? I don't know that. I can get back to you. They're Caltrans exit ramps, not a city ramp. Not ours. They're Caltrans exit ramp safety. Thank you for helping me make that clear. I appreciate that we're going forward with this one. But if we have another one that is more impacted in some way, it would be nice to know that. I think this is our worst one. The vertical clearance is non-standard, which is one of the Also a big factor. Yes. OK. Is that a factor in the accident rate? Not for the ramp. No, it doesn't affect the ramp. OK. So if we can know if it is, I guess I'm trying to find out how we plan which ones we work on and in what sequence. And it would make sense to me that safety was a high priority. Councilmember Combs, we can get back to you with that safety information for the different intersections of Highway 101 in Santa Rosa. OK, because we would certainly like Caltrans to help us make them safer. Thank you. Thanks, Ms. Combs. Ms. Carlson. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I want to go back up to the Stony Point Road project. And I'm just looking at the funding breakdown. And I understand and appreciate that we always build in contingencies. I just want to raise that policy as an issue I'd like the council to address. I just would like us to have a global conversation about the manner in which we respond to change orders from contractors. And I think it merits a discussion of how frequently it happens, which contractors are better or worse. Because I think that that will have an impact or it should have an impact on how we award projects. Colleen looks confused. Particularly if we have a low bidder who is regularly coming back for increases and that we're ending up paying the contingency. So if I'm understanding the concern, you are concerned about folks that may be in a chronic situation as regards change orders. Yeah, I'd like to know who they are. And I think it's important. If it happens to who they are. This is moving towards an announcement I had hoped to make later in the presentation about the new Transportation and Public Works Director when we get to my point. And obviously there are a series of charges that the new Transportation and Public Works Director will have to look at, including processes from top to bottom. But this is duly noted. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Mayor, that's it. You bet. Thank you, Mr. Waisaki. Thank you, Mr. Marin. Thank you for the presentation. Just to follow up on my colleague's concerns there, wouldn't construction management be concerned with change orders in terms of the project, whether there were two men? I mean, isn't that the function of the construction manager, which we see the $1.9 million? Yes. And that's to an outside party? For these projects, we would anticipate using an outside party, yes. Why can't we do those in house? They're very large projects. And it would divert too much of our staff to one project, and we couldn't get other projects done. And so having that focus from having a consultant do the construction management and inspection has been helpful for these large projects. So it's a question of staff capacity. Is that what I? Yes. OK. Thank you, Mr. Waisaki. Any other questions before we move to Farmers Land Extension? OK, thank you. Let's move on. Thank you. The approved project consists of a four lane arterial street carrying regional and local traffic with two travel lanes in each direction, with the exception of from Kiwana Springs Road to Petaluma Hill Road, where the roadway would consist of two eastbound lanes and one westbound lane. The new roadway would include bike lanes, a sidewalk, transit facilities, and planner strips for the entire length. And at this point, the environmental impact report is complete. The current project is a scaled down version, which will have one travel lane in each direction, with bike lanes, a planner strip, and sidewalk on the west side. The intersections and the bridge will be constructed to full width improvements. This slide shows the alignment of the Farmers Lane Extension. It extends from Bennett Valley Road to the north, skirting the existing residential areas, Sonoma Academy, and then Taylor Mountain Regional Park. There's access points from Yolanda, Aston, Bennett Valley Road, and Kiwana Springs. What the project will do is reduce cut through traffic through the southeast neighborhoods of Santa Rosa. And it'll also alleviate congestion on the Highway 101, Highway 12 interchange. At this point, plans are essentially complete. We have one more parcel yet to acquire. The environmental permits will initiate work on those once we're closer to construction because they have a shelf life and they expire after a few years. Our construction date is subject to funding availability. We need $37 million to fund construction of the project. And so we're exploring outside opportunities to obtain that funding. And that concludes our update on these three major transportation projects. And we'd be happy to answer any additional questions that Council may have. Thank you, Ms. Ferguson. And just one comment on Student Point Road widening is out to bid this week, so we're excited about that when going through the bidding process and towards construction. Student Point Roadway. Before you move to the Council on these questions, I have an umbrella question, if you will, on the Farmers Lane Extension Project. I think when we first started talking about this, I didn't need to wear glasses. And now I'm looking at the plans with glasses. And it speaks to a period of time where we move from a need. And then years later, I personally have started to want to hear about that need. To what is the reality of our growth patterns, our traffic patterns, does it still dictate the expenditure in a project of this size? And if so, does it rise to the level of importance that we want to continue at the current rate to develop this particular project? So I'm curious, how long we hold on to a project and still deem it valid, as opposed to questioning over a period of time whether conditions have changed, whether the need has changed, and whether we might want to put our resources toward other projects, or whether this one still is valid and pertinent and necessary to enhance the quality of life of Santa Rosa. So I'm curious, I know it's a very broad question, but it begs the question because it's been so long since this was first introduced as a concept and today. So I'm curious. So Mr. Mayor, I'm going to field this question. As I said earlier, we have just hired a new director of transportation and public works. And one of the charges the director will be to have under their first instruction is to start to review the entire catalog of our program and start to ask some of the very questions that you have just raised. Outstanding. I appreciate that. That's very valuable. Mr. Oliveris, you had a question. Thank you. I did. Related to the Farmers Lane extension, noticing a close proximity to Taylor Mountain Regional Park, I would just, the question was the impact of that. Because I know looking at the yellow line going across there, it goes across the actual property. So just. Yes, it does go through Taylor Mountain Regional Park. And we have coordinated closely with County Regional Park so that their layouts for the park include the road going through the park and the road would provide access to a parking area for the park. OK, so that would involve a new parking area. Because it looks like it goes through the parking area, the existing parking area now, correct? That's my question. So there's some reconfiguration of the park to accommodate parking. I believe the parking area that people have used was built as a temporary facility, anticipating the park development plan, and then a future longer term parking area. OK. And then secondly, it looks to me like these three projects are interconnected as far as the southern part of the city with the widening of Stony Point Road, as far as relieving congestion, the improvements on Herne, the overpass, and of course the extension of Farmers Lane over to the rest of it over at Bennett Valley. They're all important transportation projects for the Southwest partisan, or is that? Thank you. Mr. Schwedhelm, did you have a question? OK. Ms. Colms. Thank you. Following up with the two previous questions of my colleagues, again, looking at the route, I had probably misunderstood that we would be cooking up with Kawana instead of Yolanda. And just wondered if anyone had looked at that and why the decision was made to go Yolanda instead of Kawana for the end of the Farmers Lane extension. So the alternative selected by council went down, does go down to Yolanda. There is the possibility to phase the project and bring it in on an interim basis to Kawana Springs Road. But that would require considering reopening the environmental process. Any other questions, council, before I move to public comment? Mr. Weisaki. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. And thank you, Steve, for this presentation. And maybe this is to the city manager the question. When we do the analysis, when our new public works director does the analysis, can we have the level of service on Ashton Way because it was stated that this project is going to help with the diversion of traffic? I don't know how badly that road is operating because I would think that's the road you're talking about through southeast. So I don't know how well that operates or doesn't operate. And then I'd also like to know, or I think it'd be valuable, Highway 101, the improved flow, because the impact on the interchange with 12, has that been improved with the metering? And some of the other recent improvements. The community spent a lot of money on that. And this project has been on the books for 10 to 15 years prior to the expenditure of those funds that resulted in those improvements. So as the mayor said, is it still even a valid concern? Because I look at this first slide of the three projects, and it doesn't even look like the homes that it's not current with all the homes that have been filled in on the Farmers Land extension. I mean, we have a council member that lives there now, and I don't think her street's on there. So that tells me it's dated. And then if, lastly, on the specifics of the Yolanda plug-in, if that's where it ends, I was told by a property owner years ago that there's some right-of-way issues on Yolanda between Petaluma Hill and Santa Rosa Avenue, if that's a fact or not. I don't know, but that's what they said. And if that's the case, I would think that would drive the cost up. We do have Yolanda Avenue widening in the capital improvement program as a project to work on in the future. And we really haven't started to work on that project yet. Thank you. So is that there because this project is scheduled to terminate there? Is that one of the reasons why? And pending outcome of the current interchange alignment. Sure. So that's part of the cost, too, then, when we look at this. I would think. You don't just build a road to nowhere. I mean, it's easy for me to sit here and tell you that. I would like that to be part of the analysis of this particular project. Ms. Costa? Just if I may, I, in one of our previous SCTA meetings, raised the issue of the 12 and the 101 interchange. I drive it almost every day, and the metering has significantly contributed to congestion on the 12. And I can't believe there haven't been more devastating accidents because people are bombing along on the 12, and up they come with people slowly coming through the curve off the 101. So I asked our SCTA staff to relay that concern to Caltrans to improve or increase noticing. Warning, there's a merge ahead. People are going to be slowing, get into the left lane if you don't need to get onto the 12. But I don't know that they've gone out there to do it. So it's definitely a concern, and I see it a lot. And forgive me, I had thought Aston was a county road. Is that a city road? Question. I'm not sure if the entire alignment that we show there is all in the city. There may be portions of it in the county. A substantial portion of it is in the city. OK. Thank you. When Council Member Morisaki asked the question, it occurred to me. And just because I'm nitpicking on slide 20, the one we're looking at, well, on slide 19, the project is described as running from Bennett Valley to Petaluma Hill. But the yellow connects to the 12. You're right. That slide is not correct. And the yellow line should have ended at Bennett Valley Road. Okey-dokey. Thank you. Good. Thank you. And thanks for your comments on Highway 12. It is a surprise that we haven't had more trouble there. Council, any more questions before we move on to our regular meeting? Thank you all very much for your presentation. Appreciate it. Take about a five-minute break for re-adjustment. Oh, I'm sorry, Mr. Kanini. Yes, we have two cards for this staff. Please stay in place. I apologize for that omission. Followed by Anne Seaton. You're ready, Mr. Kanini? OK. Mayor, Council, a couple of points. I heard that alternatives will be considered after the environmental document is completed. Did I hear that correct? Because that's not the way I learned it. The environmental document is required to consider alternatives. And if elected official of this city has an alternative in mind, that certainly should be studied in great detail. Second, change orders. If you're getting a lot of change orders, it probably ain't the contractor. It's probably whosoever preparing PS&E, plan specifications, and estimates. This construction manager is only going to be as good as the PS&E he is provided with. Is this construction manager coming on board during the design, preliminary, initial, final? Because if you hand the construction manager an incomplete PS&E, you're going to have change orders. The problem, my dear friends, lies here, not there. And we just had an excellent example, the yellow line. We already have an error. And we haven't even precluded this proceedings. And you do have a terrible record of putting out PS&E. And even when changes neccesis brought to this council's attention, as I have over the years, you've ignored them. So I think if you want to look at precluding change orders, I think you all need to get a mirror. Thank you for your kind attention. Thank you, Anne Selie. Oh, I like the sign. I don't know how long it's been there. Please speak four to six inches from the microphone. Mayor and Council, Mayor, sorry. Thank you so much for bringing up the necessity, the logical nature of the farmer's lane extension. We have had this project on the books for so many years that it feels stale to me. It also represents a very violent breakthrough of a lovely hillside from farmer's lane going north onto where the extension is being built. It's going to be a terrible break in the lovely hillside there. This is in the intersection that I go through several times a day. And I just cringe when I think of cutting away that mountain for a roadbed that is maybe not necessary anymore, considering possibly changed conditions. I know money has been accumulated from developers of the properties that were built south of Bennett Valley Road. So we'd have to reconsider what do we do with that money. But if enough of you determined that you don't think this is a necessary project, I'm going to cheer. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Sealy. Dwayne DeWitt. Thank you, sir. Sure. Unlike myself, I'm usually warmed up right raw. All right. OK. Dwayne DeWitt from Roseland. Actually, a former member of the Project Area Committee for Southwest Santa Rosa Redevelopment, which entailed the Stony Point Road project, the widening. Our group was ended after four years when there were discussions ongoing about this. A number of people in the area would still like to know more about this. So I'd like for you folks, now that this study session is complete, to please make as much information available to the public as possible. Get it out there onto the website. And someone from the city perhaps come to the March 5th meeting on the Roseland Village redevelopment up on Sebastopol Road. Specifically, because these transportation projects actually drive what happens to Roseland. They've effectively boxed Roseland in. Stony Point Road to the west. And Sebastopol Road Highway 12 to the north. So that we're the redheaded stepchild, if you will, for Santa Rosa. You guys could change all that now, though. You get the chance to be those loving parents that come forward and say, yes, we want to help the Roseland folks even better by sharing the information that we have. There's no signs out there to tell you anything. There's nobody that really ever has had a community meeting in over a decade as to what is going on about that Sebastopol, excuse me, Stony Point Road redevelopment. And the real, I guess you'd say, heartbreaker of all this is we had a community group that was informed by the city when things were going on. They stopped sending us notices. They've basically taken us off the database and not letting us know what's happened. And now we're going to get a Popeyes, Louisiana chicken, as the entrance to Roseland on the west side. Now I don't know about you, but that just should not be the definition of a whole community of Roseland. The first thing you see coming in from the west on Sebastopol Road, you no longer have the great plans that we thought for the entrance from the west into Santa Rosa. Instead you have these little strip malls that the city put in, excuse me, you didn't put them in. Developers put them in with the approval of Santa Rosa city planners. So on the corners, you've got this situation that is almost, I guess you'd say, disrespectful to Roseland. And I don't think you guys wanted that, but this is what we're getting because we don't get the information we need until you happen to find out that there's a study session. Nobody sent out any knowledge that I know of to people about, hey, come down here and find out what's happening in your front yard. Except maybe to that guy with the big orange, reddish house, I'm sure he knew, but not the rest of us. And that's sad. You folks could be the ones to really lead us into the promised land. And I know we'll get there with you. So thank you so very much for your time. And I appreciate it. Thanks, Mr. DeWitt. You know, I do want to mention one thing. We have had, the council has had a fair amount of communication about the meeting in Roseland. And I would ask Wall, if you are intending on going to that event, to that public meeting, that you let the city clerk know in case we need to post that as a special meeting of the council. It is a community meeting, so I'm not sure. Ms. Valard, could that create a necessity as opposed to a special meeting? We could certainly post it. If it's a community meeting, we don't need to post an agenda, but the council should not confer amongst themselves regarding the subject matter at the community meeting. But you can certainly attend and listen without a special meeting notice. Great, thank you very much. Ms. Ferguson, could you comment, please, on the EIR process for the Herne Avenue Overpass? That's in response to Mr. Cunini's comments. Yes, thank you. The scoping process selected the alternatives to be considered in the environmental review at the conclusion of the environmental review, one of the options can be selected in consideration of the full knowledge of the environmental impacts of the different alternatives. All the alternatives would be considered. All the alternatives that were identified in the scoping process. Yes, OK, thank you very much. Well, I don't have any more cards on this item. We'll bring us to the close of our study session. And we'll take a five minute break to allow the change over to our standard four o'clock session. Thank you. It's a space to show off our history. We have room to roam, to roll, or to run. We allow for the silly, the serious, the cool. We offer countless ways to work on your health. We keep our youth safe and teach them to keep others safe. We challenge people to want to challenge themselves. We foster creativity, guide athletes, own passions. We allow for little minds to dream. And we'll keep doing what we do each day because we know that for our community, farce made life better. Over 90 miles of creeks run through Santa Rosa. Run off from streets, roofs, and parking lots, end up in our creeks through the storm drain system. To help protect creeks, keep your street gutters and roadside ditches clear of trash and other pollutants. For more information on the benefits of our creeks and tips on how to enjoy them, visit the Stormwater and Creeks web page. Have you ever seen a flashing yellow arrow on a traffic light? I'm Rob Sprinkel, traffic engineer for the city of Santa Rosa, here today to talk to you about a new type of traffic signal. Beginning in 2013, flashing yellow left-hand signals will be installed in some of the intersections in Santa Rosa. Studies show that drivers better understand the need to yield to oncoming traffic with a new flashing yellow arrow signal. These new flashing yellow arrow signals give drivers more chances to make left turns. But more importantly, they stress the need to use caution when turning left. Some drivers may be confused when they see a flashing yellow arrow because they're not exactly sure what to do. Let's run through how these signals operate. The green arrow means you have the right of way to make a left turn. All incoming traffic and pedestrians are stopped. The solid yellow arrow is a warning telling you the light is about to turn red. The red arrow means stop and wait. Now for the new part, a flashing yellow arrow. The flashing yellow arrow means you can make a left turn if there's a safe gap from oncoming traffic. Check for oncoming bicycles and pedestrians attempting to cross the intersection. Always yield to the pedestrians as they have the right of way. If you don't see a gap in traffic, don't take a chance. Just wait until the next green arrow appears. The city of Santa Rosa will be evaluating this new technology at locations throughout the city. It will be up to all of us to make sure we use them safely. Santa Rosa. In recreation and parks, the days begin when the sun rises. Most of our workspaces don't have four walls or a desk, but there's a lot to be done to get this place up and running. It takes a big team to cover so much ground. Each space is unique, requiring its own special method of care and service. And it's of utmost importance to see that it happens each day because our workspace is your leisure space. And it includes 950 acres of Santa Rosa. It's the parks, the trees, the fields, the trails, special gathering places, community spaces, and it belongs to everyone. We work for our community. Striving to improve quality of life. We provide family experiences, friendly competitions, leisurely evenings, and places to bond with man's best friend. We create space for celebration, relaxation, and artistic expression. You can learn to serve a ball or learn to serve a meal. Take a walk on a path or walk the plank. We've got beautiful settings, space to show off our history. We have room to roam, to roll, or to run. We allow for the silly, the serious, the cool. We offer countless ways to work on your health. We keep our youth safe and teach them to keep others safe. We challenge people to want to challenge themselves. We foster creativity, guide athletes, hone passions. We allow for little minds to dream. And we'll keep doing what we do each day because we know that for our community, our stay life better. Over 90 miles of creeks run through Santa Rosa. Run off from streets, roofs, and parking lots, end up in our creeks through the storm drain system. To help protect creeks, keep your street gutters and roadside ditches clear of trash and other pollutants. For more information on the benefits of our creeks and tips on how to enjoy them, visit the Stormwater and Creek's web page. Have you ever seen a flashing yellow arrow on a traffic light? I'm Rob Sprinkel, traffic engineer for the city of Santa Rosa, here today to talk to you about a new type of traffic signal. Beginning in 2013, flashing yellow left turn signals will be installed in some of the intersections in Santa Rosa. Studies show that drivers better understand the need to yield to oncoming traffic with a new flashing yellow arrow signal. These new flashing yellow arrow signals give drivers more chances to make left turns. But more importantly, they stress the need to use caution when turning left. Some drivers may be confused when they see a flashing yellow arrow because they're not exactly sure what to do. Let's run through how these signals operate. The green arrow means you have the right of way to make a left turn. All incoming traffic and pedestrians are stopped. The solid yellow arrow is a warning telling you the light is about to turn red. The red arrow means stop and wait. Now for the new part, a flashing yellow arrow. The flashing yellow arrow means you can make a left turn if there's a safe gap from oncoming traffic. Check for oncoming bicycles and pedestrians attempting to cross the intersection. Always yield to the pedestrians as they have the right of way. If you don't see a gap in traffic, don't take a chance. Just wait until the next green arrow appears. The city of Santa Rosa will be evaluating this new technology at locations throughout the city. It will be up to all of us to make sure we use them safely. OK, council. Good afternoon and welcome to the February 24th meeting of the Santa Rosa City Council. We have a report on our study sessions and closed sessions. Mr. McGlynn's report on our study session. Study session was regarding three major traffic projects. We have staff notes. And as we go through our process, we will incorporate those notes from the study session moving forward. Great, thank you very much. Ms. Fowler? With respect to closed sessions, the council met in closed session regarding the Sonoma County Waste Management Agency with just a joint powers agency of which the city is a member regarding appending litigation against that JPA. And there is no action to report. The council also conferred with legal council regarding anticipated litigation. And on a 6-0 vote with Vice Mayor Corsi being absent, the council authorized the filing of a quiet title action involving the Oakmont Treatment Plant property against the potential error successors or assigns of the original grantees. Thank you very much. We'll move into our proclamations and presentations. Our first and only proclamations this evening is to the Laguna de Santa Rosa Foundation. 25th anniversary in Dr. Smith will be the recipient. And I believe Council Member Carlstrom has this proclamation. Yes, I do. Good afternoon, Dr. Smith. Dr. Smith is the vice president of the Laguna de Santa Rosa Foundation Board. I'm very happy to read a proclamation from the city of Santa Rosa. Whereas the Laguna de Santa Rosa Foundation has been working to restore, enhance, and conserve the complex and sensitive ecosystem that is the Laguna de Santa Rosa for 25 years. And whereas the Laguna Foundation and City of Santa Rosa have worked in partnership on multiple projects, including riparian restoration, Laguna Keepers Volunteer Corps, a native plant propagation nursery, long-term wildlife studies, rare plant monitoring, and raising awareness of the importance of water and the watershed through education. And whereas the results of these collaborative efforts have been mutually beneficial to both organizations, the environment, and our community, now therefore be it resolved that John Sawyer, mayor of the city of Santa Rosa on behalf of the entire city council, acknowledges the continuation of mutually beneficial work between the city of Santa Rosa and the Laguna Foundation and congratulates the Laguna de Santa Rosa Foundation on its 25-year anniversary. Thank you. Thank you. If I may be allowed just a few short comments, we have had a fabulous partnership with the city of Santa Rosa. And rather than complaining about a single thing, I want to help you be proud of what you've achieved through the Laguna Foundation. You know, we're 22 miles long. We're not that spot by the Occidental Road Bridge. And we go all the way from Katadi, from Windsor, moving towards the channel, from Pepperwood, up in the hills, and from Oakmont. People throwing bad things down the sewers in Oakmont are affecting the water quality of the Laguna that flows into the sea. So we're a big event in the Santa Rosa and Sonoma County plan or environment. Our first 25 years, we took care of things going into the Laguna that shouldn't be there, chemicals, debris, and the like. And we built a cracker jack restoration and education program. The next 25 years, we want to expand our partnership with you. Through us, you link to the Coastal Commission. Through us, you link to Open Space District. To us, you have international friends that you may not be aware of. The Laguna Foundation and the Laguna de Santa Rosa is a Ramsar site of international importance. And a few years back, we were asked to join with thousands of global members. Not too many thousands. It's not that big of a membership. Because we are, some of my colleagues like to say, we're a gas station or roadside rest for thousands and thousands of bird and butterfly species that fly from Argentina and other parts of our south to the Arctic back and forth every year. We are also a rare site where endangered species and one-of-a-kind species are grown. And they think we're hot stuff. And we think you're hot stuff for our support. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Next, we have an introduction of Ms. Sonoma County. I'm Tony Giraldi and Ms. Sonoma County. If you please come forward and brighten our day. Good afternoon, Mayor Sorter. Members of the City Council. My name is Tony Giraldi. I'm the general operations manager of Sonoma County Airport Express, which happens to be the primary sponsor of the Ms. Sonoma County Scholarship Program. I'm also the secretary of this extraordinary program for young ladies here in Sonoma County. I'd like to personally invite all the members of the City Council to our 2015 pageant, where we will select our 69th Ms. Sonoma County. It's Saturday, March 7th. We're from the Saturday, 7 p.m. at the Spreckles Performing Arts Center in Runner Park. We, besides our Ms. Sonoma County, we'll also be selecting our Ms. Sonoma County Outstanding Teen, which is another division under the Miss California Umbrella, excuse me. Couple of factoids about the Ms. Sonoma County Scholarship Program. Again, this is our 69th Ms. Sonoma County that we'll be selecting. We have the longest running program in the Miss California Organization. The, our title holders, they make appearances all over Sonoma County, as well as representing our community in June every year at the Miss California pageant in Fresno. June and Fresno, lots of fun. So rather being in Sonoma County but we're there for the important cause. It's been quite some time since we've had a state title holder it's been since 1981. So we're kind of on a drive spell, we've got some great ladies who are gonna be competing a week from Saturday. But more importantly, it would be great to have a Miss California or Miss California's Outstanding Teen come from Sonoma County. But we look for a title holder who will truly connect with the community. Go out, make appearances, shine on appearances and really represent the residents of Sonoma County. We've, we're on a great run. We've had awesome title holders the last few years, even before our Miss Sonoma County who we'll be introducing to you momentarily. She's made over a hundred appearances. I believe she'll be finishing over 110 appearances by next, next Saturday, week from Saturday. Last year's Miss Sonoma County, she made 105 appearances. So we're, we keep the girls very busy. As elected officials, again, we'd love to have you at the pageant. You'll be introduced, you'll have an opportunity to wave, be recognized from the stage. And great news, we're very excited. It's been eight years since we've had Miss California attend our pageant. And Miss California, who is a resident of San Diego, will be here for three days starting week from Friday. She'll be spending time here in Sonoma County Friday and Saturday and also Sunday. She'll be at the pageant. And so we're extremely honored to have her. So at this time I'd like to introduce our 2014 Miss Sonoma County Scholar Palacios. Thank you. Thank you. Hello. Thank you. Hello, Council and Mayor. Before I get started, I'd like to thank former Mayor Scott Bartley because he was one of my judges who chose me as Miss Sonoma County. So over the, over my reign, I've gotten to meet most of you, but it's nice to see all of you in one place. So I'm just going to tell you a little bit about myself and about the program that I'm representing. I was born and raised in Sonoma County and for the past 12 years, I've been residing in Healdsburg through, because I was born and raised in Sonoma County, I've had an appreciation for Sonoma County for most of my life. But this program has absolutely lifted and enhanced my appreciation for the county so much more than I ever thought possible. I work at Fierce Cheer right in Santa Rosa. It's an elite cheer gym where I'd coach Tumbling and I also work at Shed in Healdsburg. So I have two jobs plus I do this, but I consider this my full-time job really because it's what I spend most of my time with and what I exert most of my energy with. Things that I do as Miss Sonoma County, I got to represent our lovely county at the Miss California program in Fresno, as Tony said, lovely Fresno. It was an amazing experience. I got to meet ladies from all over the county, future engineers, future teachers, future just overall professionals. It was an amazing experience being surrounded by so many wonderful women and it's truly, truly inspiring, excuse me. Some of my other jobs is Miss Sonoma County. I get to attend parades. I was in the Rose Parade in Santa Rosa and I get to wave and say hi to all of the constituents of Sonoma County. Thank you. Thanks, Erin. I also got to attend the Sonoma County Fair and I was there almost every day of the week, probably about every other day, which is a lot of fair time, but I really enjoyed it. The one stipulation I have about the fair is the food because Tony Geraldi is always like, I have to take pictures of you eating all this fair food and people cannot live. A body cannot be sustained on a bacon covered cinnamon rolls and fried alligator for three weeks, so it was a lot of fun. At the fair, I got to sing the national anthem and participate in different events like judging talent shows and things of that sort. Other parts of my job is attending community gatherings such as Chamber of Commerce events or city councils. This is my second to last city council that I'll be visiting. My last one is Cloverdale tomorrow, so I will have made appearances at all nine city councils in our county. I've also done some ribbon cuttings for the City of Santa Rosa through the Chamber of Commerce, which was a lot of fun, but one of the biggest parts of my job is volunteerism. The Miss America Organization, one of their four points of the crown is service, so they really have, they really consider volunteering and service as a huge part of the organization. So over my year of service, I have raised money for children's miracle network, Salvation Army, KRCB, and the local Raven Theater in Healdsburg through Dancing with the Stars. I actually volunteered with several members of the council for Salvation Army for the bell ringing, yeah, that was fun. And then a big, big part of my job is what I consider being a role model for young women. A lot of young ladies will come up to me running, smiling, and say, are you a real princess? And I say, well, kind of, but the difference is that I earned my crown through volunteering and through being a good student, so I try to have them embrace those traits as well. So this has been one of the best years of my life. Definitely, I consider it one of the best decisions of my life. Right up there with going to college, I've grown so much from this program. It's ridiculous. My confidence is much higher than it used to be, and I'm just more comfortable with myself as a person. I've also gained a family, not only through the people that volunteer through the Sonoma County program, through the Miss Sonoma County program, but also I've gained a little sister, Katherine Liang, who is our outstanding teen. She's like the little sister I never had. I love her so much. And then all of the sisters that I consider I have made through the Miss America Organization, all the other representatives throughout the state of California. It really is a sisterhood, and I am so honored to be a part of it. So I have used my scholarship to go to Sonoma State University where I am a student, I'm a senior there this year, so I'll be graduating shortly. My major is liberal studies, and I plan on becoming an elementary school teacher. Yeah, so thank you for this opportunity. Whenever possible, I'd love to take a photo with all of you, and then I will be singing for you shortly. And Scott, I thank you very much for your representing us so well during your reign. It's been a pleasure having here. And Council, if we could have a photograph. I forgot one important item. I've got some thank yous. Besides our former Mayor Scott Bartley, who was a judge last year, Council Member Erin Carlstrom, she's also served as judge two years ago, as well as working with our this year's contestants in a mock judging session, and helping them with their interview skills. And Mayor Sawyer, thank you very much for your service as a judge a week from this Saturday at our pageant. Very much appreciating the time of your busy schedule to be one of our local judges, so thank you. Thank you. Council, photo op down here to the left, and finally a bit of entertainment. Yeah, so this is called Crazy by Adele. Found myself today singing out loud your name. You said I'm crazy. If I am I'm crazy. Sometimes sitting in the dark, wishing you were here too. But it's you who makes me lose. And every time I'm meant to be, acting sensible, you drift into my head and turn me into a crumbling fool. Tell me to run and I race if you want me to step by freeze and if you only gonna leave. Just hold me closer, baby. Thank you. Great way to start. Thank you very much. Mr. Mayor, if I can just put a plug in for the council members who haven't maybe gone to the pageant. These women are so talented. I mean, I don't know, Scarlett just like knocked my socks off. And these women, the interviews, they're so smart. They're talented, they're engaged. I highly encourage you to go. Thank you for that. Appreciate it. Okay, council, we have no staff briefings like approval of the minutes for February 3rd. We did get a notice from our city clerk. You'll notice that in front of you that council member Schwedhelm's name was misspelled. It's hard enough to pronounce, but misspelling, I just, it's actually pretty easy, but it can fool a lot of people. But that correction has been made. So are there any of the corrections one would like to bring our attention to? Seeing none, they will stand as written. Thank you very much. Council, mayors and council members reports. Statements of abstention, any abstention reports or do you need to let us know about this evening? Seeing none, we'll move on. Subcommittee reports, subcommittee reports, council, Ms. Carlstrom. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. It wasn't actually a formal meeting, but in my role as one of our Water Advisory Committee representatives, I had the opportunity to take a tour with the Sonoma County Water Agency of several of our restoration and conservation projects along Dry Creek. This was last Friday, I think. And in addition to obviously the sites being beautiful pieces of property and excellent demonstration of ecologically sensitive and forward-thinking restoration works, it was a great demonstration of the Water Agency's partnership with private landowners because obviously much of the Dry Creek runs through people's private property. And so these projects are being implemented and completed as a result of the requirements set out in the biological opinion, which I know I am familiar with. I don't know that all the council members are. And I've suggested that it come to us in a study session just so that we can all come from the same place of understanding because it is very much informing a lot of the decision making that is going on at the Water Agency. Obviously it's a decision handed down to us from the federal government, basically saying here's what you will do as far as the Dry Creek goes. It's obviously often in what's the word I'm seeking, in conflict with water flows mandated by the Army Corps of Engineers. So there's a lot of interplay going on there. I wanna bring to the council's attention something to just be aware of, which is that we have until 2018 to have six of the 14 miles of the creek done at which point. And along the way, obviously the agency will be evaluating the effectiveness of the remediation projects. And if they are not effective or have not been as effective as we need them to be or as the biological opinion mandates that they be, we may be facing a situation of revisiting the conversation about the pipeline bypass. So just something to bear in mind. The Water Agency is fairly confident in their choice of contractors, their choice of projects, their ability to check in on the projects along the way so that we don't get to that 2018 point and have to change it up really quickly, but just something to be aware of. And also I wanna point out that we are getting a fairly high level of federal money to support these projects, but it was a great reminder of why we're a part of the Water Agency. Great, thank you very much. Could you remind us again on the timeline for the mitigation effort? Yes, we have until 2018 to have six of the 14 miles of Dry Creek completed. Now they are not supposed to be contiguous, so it's in combination. Well, I think, you know, I'm hoping that the mitigation efforts are successful. And I think at the end of the day, even if they deem them unsuccessful as far as releasing water from the dam, clearly Dry Creek will be a better environment at the end of the day or in many, many days, years. So thank you. Yes, Ms. Combs. I have a council member's report. That's okay. Yes, thank you. I had the good fortune of meeting with our staff and Senator Mike McGuire at the Jennings Crossing site and wanna compliment our staff on the fine job that they did presenting information to the senator and to his staff. Some additional folks came, staff for Shirley Zane's office and MTC rep, Jake McKenzie also attended. It was a very informal meeting just to sort of get a look at and feel for what that crossing is doing. While we stood there, a number of people carried their bikes across the tracks or walked across. And I wanted to make sure that we thank the senator for taking the time to meet with us. He is going to be a good ally, I think as we move forward on a number of items. But again, the staff did a remarkably good job in sort of managing what was going to be an informal impromptu meeting and handling it very effectively. Also, I think like many of us here, I attended the Loci and Luncheon, which had the counties, I'll be clear the counties, Citizens and Local Law Enforcement Task Force present 20 of their 21 draft recommendations. And I feel the need to honor the work of that body chaired by Caroline Banuelos with sub-chairs Judy Rice, Sylvia Lemus, Eric Conan-Chover and Vice Chair Robert Edmonds. It was a good introduction, I understand that may be coming back to us in the future as part of the, they will be making a presentation to us with some things we might want to learn from their experiences. Also attended a migrant workers meeting at the Unitarian Universalist Church on Mendocino. The other night it was an interesting discussion of the need for migration throughout our nation and how migration is driven economically, much to learn there. And because of our new council goal interests in child care, met with the Sonoma County Office of Education and Four Seas representatives on child care recently, and wanted to just say that they have a lot of interesting suggestions to bring forward to us. And I'm looking forward to working with them as we move forward with that objective. And had the good fortune to go to an artist's opening at the Spinster Sisters, where I passed around our Arts Master Plan for review and encouraged some comments during that meeting. We have such a wonderful arts environment in our community. It's always a pleasure to get to attend those meetings. And thank you very much. That was sort of a busy couple weeks. Thank you very much. Council, any other subcommittee or liaison reports? I do have one. I did attend the Sonoma County Waste Management Agency meeting to give you the highlights. We did move, voted to move forward with construction of a much needed additional holding pond to further contain runoff generated by the composting operations. There were also the waste agency voted to place an initial $750,000 from our organics reserve into an escrow account to indemnify county actions related to the agency's composting operations. This escrow account is to be funded up to $5 million through a wood waste and yard debris tipping fee adjustment, which will result in a small increase to our rate payers, ultimately. We asked agency staff to provide more analysis for the board's consideration regarding the amount of that increase. We also voted to approve the draft third amendment of the JPA, Joint Powers Authority Agreement. This amendment provides language, which would extend the JPA for another 25 years without changing any other existing language in that document. The extension of the JPA has not been voted on as yet and will not without extensive analysis and center was a city council action providing direction to me or my alternate council member, Waizaki, when the draft is finished, it will be scheduled for discussion before this body. So get any other reports, council? If not, we will move on. Oh, I'm sorry, Mr. Oliveris. Thank you, Mayor. You want to report out on the Redwood Empire Chinese Association's annual dinner last Sunday. They were here a couple weeks ago with their dragon, wonderful event, very, very well attended, sold out event as always. Also, and I know you were there to recognize the long history of Henry Trioni here in our community who passed away several weeks ago. We were at his memorial service at the Wells Fargo Center. Perhaps you could adjourn tonight's meeting in his honor and memory. Great idea. And with that, I would also like to do the same for an old salt, if you will, an old sergeant from the police department who recently passed away, Bud Winkler, people who are from the police department remember him as this pretty neat old school guy who was a great teacher, a great human being who passed away this past week in his services this Saturday. So it asks that you also adjourn tonight's meeting in the honor and memory of Bud Winkler. Thank you. Excellent idea. Real quick, and then we're done. Sure. Just like to announce that I have a new cab appointee at large, Chris Rogers. Thank you for continuing to serve. He happens to be in attendance here. Thank you, Chris. Real briefly, attended the Business Operation Committee of Sonoma Clean Power, an impressive group of folks that have volunteered led by our former BPU chair, Dick Dowd, and chair Briskie who's a very informative meeting. And then had the pleasure of attending Anacapella Woman's Choir from Santa Rosa High School, Maria Creole High School, and Montgomery High School hosted by Anley High School last Friday night. And if you missed it too bad, because it was very, very good. And rare chance to do a civic involvement while watching my daughter sing. So thank you much. Thank you very much, Ms. Carlson. Just a quick, interesting thing I got to do yesterday morning. Several months ago I was invited by the State Department to be a speaker in their speakers bureau, due in part to my position here on our council. And yesterday morning at around six in the morning, I went to the junior college where they established a live teleconference feed with the US Embassy in Khartoum, Sudan. And I got to speak for about two hours with young political leaders in Africa, talking about our shared experiences and shared concerns. And they ask questions on everything from what we're doing to address homelessness and affordable housing, to how are we engaging the next generation of young people and how are we dealing with poverty. And it was a very, very cool experience to be talking with people 11 hours ahead of us who are in extraordinarily different circumstances and yet they are concerned and engaged on very similar issues as we are here right in Santa Rosa. Outstanding. And how did the technology function? Oh, big kudos to the junior college's media lab. They did a great job. And I don't know if they're downstairs in the media down here. One of the gentlemen actually through C Media is also there at the junior college. So it was a nice tag right there. Outstanding. Well, that's gotta be pretty exciting. And the world's getting very small. And that's, in that way, that's a good thing. Thank you very much. Oh, right. So we have an election to the, or appointments to the personnel board and board of building regulation appeals. How do we wanna handle this, Ms. Clerk? So since there were an equal number of candidates for the personnel board as there are vacancies, actually I believe there were two candidates and three vacancies, council could simply move to appoint those two individuals if the council so desires. So moved. Second. Thank you and your votes, council. And I have six eyes with Vice Mayor Corsi absent. And I will not be announcing his absence again this evening. So just know that he will not be back this evening. Thank you very much. And for the record, can we just identify the two individuals? Yes, I'm sorry. We have five total of two for the, oh, right, thank you very much for talking. So for the personnel board, Alex Maloney and Karen Furukawa, for the Board of Public Regulation Appeals, we have David Carpenter, Greg Hurd, and wait a minute. That's that, no, we had three and it wasn't Mark. It was, there was, there was a- Doug. Dana Warke, thank you. Thank you very much. Was the motion for only one of those two? The motion was just on the personnel board, so that someone would like to make a motion. I'd like to move for the- I apologize. For the Board of Building Regulations. Second. And your votes, please, council. And I have six eyes to appoint Dana Warke and Greg Hurd and David Carpenter. Great, thank you. Okay, at this time in the council, any announcements to various boards, commissions, or committees they would like to make this evening? I have one announcement I'd like to reappoint Tanya Narath to the cab and also a pointer as chair. And that is, that's all I had for this evening. And so 10.4, 10.4.1. How do we, this is, this is a little bit, this is within our new process in discussing items, future items on the agenda. Perhaps Mr. Schwedhelm, if you'd kind of introduce this item to us and give us a chance to discuss it. Thank you, Mayor Sorry. And again, I would like to get some confirmation that we're doing this the right way. This was the first one from the city manager and city attorney. So the whole concept is to present the item to staff. This is the concept that I'm suggesting. And then in a later date, staff will come back saying this is the amount of time, energy and effort and resources needed to. I think this is a presentation to your, to the body. The, we need some clarity on what the assignment is. You would then direct staff, the majority of council, if you so desire would direct staff to do that. At that point, we will assess the workload involved if we believe that it requires some kind of rearrangement of our current task order. We'll come back with that. Otherwise, we'll just simply move forward with a disclosure of when it's coming back to council. But I think what we're looking for is understanding that there is a majority that wants the task taken up by staff and that it's, we have a clear understanding of what that task is. All right, thank you. So the concept on this idea is, it's about public safety. And to me, there's been a disconnect involving replica firearms. Whereas in order to purchase a replica firearm, you have to be 18. In other words, someone under the age of 18 could not walk into a business that sells replica firearms and purchase it. It has to be an adult. But yet there's no prohibition for someone under the age of 18 to possess that out in public. So I'm just suggesting, and I have an interest to make those compatible with each other. In other words, if you need to be 18 to purchase it, you need it, if you're gonna be in possession of that same exact replica firearm in public, you need to be in the company of a parent or a responsible adult. And I think my interest here is not a big enforcement issue. My thought is more along the lines of our smoking ordinance or our vulnerable user ordinance, where it's a public education. And I just think there's a gap or a loophole in what the law is. And again, I've had some brief conversations with the city attorney. I don't know if that you can't, you have to be 18 to purchase it, if that's a business decision, or if that's a legal thing. And so I would be asking staff for some clarity about is there existing law for this in Santa Rosa? I think that would be an important item to take up. Additionally, as we're probably all aware, the state legislature has looked at this and not the specific prospect of this topic and they have some legislation that'll I think become effective in 2016, but it does not address this gap or a loophole. And that's the concept about what I want to present to council. Thank you, Mr. Chair. So let's entertain a motion and then we can have some discussion. I'll need a motion first. So I would make a motion that we direct staff to further explore and develop a city ordinance related to the possession of replica firearms in public by juveniles. Second. And I have a second. And now discussion council, Ms. Cope. The one key that I've already talked to council member Schwethelm would be whether or not this would be precluded by preempted by state or federal law since there already are regulations and one which was passed last year, which Senator Noreen Evans co-sponsored, but that would be one of the critical issues we look at. Okay. The council desires to go forward. So what we're looking for without getting into an in depth discussion about the item because this is about whether to place it on the agenda is your considerations around placing it on the agenda for future discussion. I would like the council to make to hold that. We've already put it on the agenda. That's what this item is. So it would be whether you have an interest in directing staff to research whether you can adopt an ordinance. And if you have an interest in adopting such an ordinance if it were legally permissible. Okay. So this ensuing conversation now is about what is the limitation of our conversation next? Whether you wish to move forward with a proposal that council member Schwethelm has put forth. Okay. Thank you very much. Council, Mr. Oliver. Thank you, Mayor. This is I think a very important topic or discussion for us to explore because I would have an interest in, it's not just a matter of looking for an ordinance that would ensure that we have a parent or responsible adult with a minor in public in possession of these type of firearms, but also I would have an interest in what is occurring as far as education at point of sale are our merchants that are selling these replica firearms providing adequate information related to the safety and dangers associated with having something like this in public, for example. So, and I don't know what transpires now. What is the transaction right now when a parent is there if that's the case with a minor purchasing what one of these replicas, what kind of safety information is provided? Should there be a requirement that our retailers provide some sort of general safety information? And I don't know what that would look like. We would have to explore how we develop it, what we provide to have some consistency with that. But again, I think the interest is in the interest of safety but I think it would go beyond just having that piece of it but also the education piece and the education community wide about the importance of this. Thank you. Are there comments council, Ms. Combs? Thank you, Mayor. I would like to remind folks a little bit of the history of this and I, because it has come before us previously. On January 28th, we heard, on January 28th, I brought forward a request that this council support the legislation of Senator Kevin DeLeon and Senator Noreen Evans and Senator Louise Walk regarding imitation firearm safety and worked with them leading up to the successful passing of the imitation firearm safety act known as Senate Bill 199. And I have a copy of the letter which is a matter of public record signed by Mr. Bartley, our previous mayor, supporting the concept that we make it clear what a replica firearm looks like. It is often referred to as a toy should look like a toy legislation. And our council adopted that previously so we've already spent council time on that. I have included for each of you in your blue packet a copy of the Senate Bill 199, chapter 915 which makes clear that existing law already prohibits a person from furnishing a BB device to a minor without the permission of the minor's parent or guardian and prohibits sale of the device to a minor. So we already have some regulation with regard to you can't furnish it without the parent's permission, you can't sell it directly to a minor and the new law specifies coloration requirements. Basically it has to be like bright orange, bright yellow in order to prevent the confusion for police officers. Following Andy's death, there was a lot of conversation about children playing with guns in our community and playing with toys in our community. So I have some concern that what we're talking about is in some ways blaming a victim. Many of us as children played cops and robbers, played infields, played with replicas. So it really concerns me when we have a law on the books that clearly puts the manufacturer's coloration of the weapon of the toy in effect that we change it to make it clearly look like a toy. It's not clear to me that we need to go forward with this. I would like to suggest that if by chance we do go forward with this, that we include in it the changes that we've made in our police training so that we are informed about what changes we've made in our police training up to this time. So I don't think that we, it concerns me that on the Thursday prior to the Tuesday Council meeting where this came up, we had just gone through goal setting and that this was not included in our goal setting discussion. And we had many items which we had that were of critical importance to our community that we could not get enough votes to move forward. And now we have an item that came up the Tuesday following that that we had not discussed previously. And we are talking about redirecting staff time from critical need in our community for housing, homelessness, other programs that we have already on our plate in order to have a conversation about this. So I would oppose moving this forward. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Carlstrom. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I hadn't planned on speaking at length on this item. However, a number of issues have arisen. I think that at the root of my comments is the thought that we obviously continue to need to have a robust conversation about the role of weapons, the interactions between police and the public in our community. I think I echo Council Member Combs' sentiments to that extent. However, I will never sit behind this dais and vote against something that furthers that conversation. So I appreciate Council Member Schwedhelm for bringing this item forward. I think that we are attempting to tackle a large, a very large issue that cannot be distilled into one piece. And we're doing so in a logical way. Sure, the guns have to be bright orange or bright yellow when they're sold now. That doesn't mean they might not be modified later. And Council Member Oliveris' point about education at all levels, I firmly stand behind that. I have a small son, I'm sure at some point he will come home with some form of replica firearm that I had no control over him possessing. And I would like him to have the support of our community in educating him on the role and what that means that he is wielding a toy. So I think that this issue merits further discussion and that's what Council Member Schwedhelm is asking us to do. So that's where I stand. Thank you. Mr. Weisaki. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. As one who was pretty outspoken when the tragedy happened, this is more than just a passing interest. Indeed, it should be of interest to all of us. But I don't, I failed to see, I have a couple of problems here with it. I failed to see how a local effort in just our city can supersede the statewide effort on the bill we just talked about. It should be a statewide, it should be a regional effort. We've talked about in gang prevention, it's a solution for all of us. The city of Santa Rosa, just to mandate further restrictions on imitation weapons, I don't think that solves our problem if it's not a regional basis. And that sign that one of our citizens is holding up there, children are not the criminals. Something tells me this is putting the focus there. And I'm not saying that's not your intent, Mr. Schwedhelm, but I just, to me, that's not where it should be. That's what just comes right out at me. I don't know how much staff time will be required. I do have a problem with the process coming so quickly after our goal setting. We voted on where our staff should go and then now we're yanking their chain three or four days later. That was the whole point of goal setting. And to all of a sudden now to redirect, I don't know how we expect staff to be efficient and to respond. And I don't really hear a concrete proposal, I just hear thoughts. And so I don't know how they decipher that either. And absolutely I want us less violent, absolutely I want us to de-escalate between public safety, law enforcement and the public. I think we all do. But I don't see the specifics of this proposal. I need to hear more, that's what I'm saying right now. Thank you, Mr. Weisaki. I want to move to public comment at this point before we- Mr. Mayor, I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Oh, I'm sorry. Yes, we did have a lot of discussions at goal setting that's very important, but a goal setting is not the end of talking about priorities. There's a lot of things that we have done over the years that we've institutionalized. This falls under public safety. Public safety is something that we are committed to providing to our community. So it's not something that we would have an argument over. We should not have an argument over. During goal setting, that's to say that public safety will be one of our goals. It's always a goal. It's one of those things that I think we've talked about being institutionalized, that the safety of our community is important. So it doesn't warrant a lot of discussion during goal setting. But there are times when incidents or new ideas may come along that may warrant some further discussion. And I think it's also important to look at this as a way of, really it's about saving lives. We have an opportunity. It's not just about issues related to our interaction with the public as far as public safety, meaning police officers. Also citizens, citizens need to know, because there is a possibility for something bad happening with an interaction with a minor juvenile in possession of a replica firearm with a private citizen who doesn't know coming across your property perhaps and engaging somebody. So it's not just a police juvenile or citizen issue. It's a community issue that we need to look at. And yeah, maybe this is where it starts. We have an opportunity here to start something that maybe will catch fire statewide, say this is important enough for other communities or the state to take action on it. I don't believe that we should just sit and expect that somebody else is going to take this on. But I think if we talk about it, people will listen, say this is important. Maybe we do need to enact some further or tighten up some of our state laws to make this better. Maybe it would go national. That would be great too. But I think it's us taking that leadership role as a community to say we are going to protect our children or our youth. And if we can take an opportunity here to do that with minimal impact to us, then we should. Can I make a... Just Mr. White's talking a brief comment and then I'll move to you. What are the actual specifics of the proposal again? I was going to follow Mayor Soros lead and get the public comment rather than if I could just wait till the end and I'll be as specific as staff needs to be able to give the feedback to us. The public needs to comment on your comments. I'm looking towards the mayor yet. So let me hear from you with his combs and then I'll give me a chance to think about whether I'm going to further our conversation right here from the public. I was going to request that we change the... I'm asking the person who's made the motion. Council member, if you would consider expanding the conversation so that we had a discussion about both police procedures and safety of children as a more general or larger topic rather than this small specific one area of children playing with toys. Because I think, again, I personally think that the work to the toy should look like a toy legislation takes care of the safety of a child because the toy will look like a toy. But I think we may have a larger issue about police and children and safety together. So I'm asking if you would modify your motion. Thank you, Ms. Combs. So perhaps before we go into public comment, so the public knows exactly what we're talking about. Mr. Schwedheim, if you just again for the council and the public clarify your motion. So to clarify it, again, it's just the disconnect. It's my understanding, have to be 18 to purchase a replica firearm. There's nothing on the books because reading the law that comes in effect in 2016, I did not see that explicit saying that a person under 18 cannot be in possession in public of a replica firearm. What my interest would be is that it just seems like a disconnect. If you're gonna be in public with a replica firearm, you should be in the company of a responsible adult or a parent. Because if you look around the country where have tragic incidents occurred, those circumstances haven't been there. And again, for me, it's not about enforcement. It's about education. And as I looked at that, because I did talk with the senator's office when this legislation was proposed, but it was clear to me, and it might reference to council members, Wasaki's question about state versus local. It was clear they were just looking for an endorsement and not input. In other words, they had already made the decision and I totally understand at the state level certain things, you see what can pass. They were not asking for any input from a local level about what do you think about this legislation. I asked some of our lobbyists through Cal Chiefs. They said, bring it up. But that ship is very clear to me. They just want an endorsement, not input. So I think there is still that gap even with the law that will be taking effect in 2016. And for me, the reason that comes up with this forum, we decided as a group how we're gonna start making the priorities. For me, this is not a goal level issue and that's what I'll be anxious to hear from staff is that if I don't think this is hugely time consuming like some of the, as we call during council building, uber topics of solving homelessness, affordable housing downtown, those are uber topics. This, in my opinion, did not fall into that. During the council goal setting, we established a procedure to bring this forward. I'm enacting it, following the process that this group agreed to. And so that's what I'm interested in hearing if others are supportive to be able to have the work done by staff so that what would that ordinance look like. And just to be clear to the public, all you're voting on is whether staff should bring this forward. You're not committing that you would, in fact, if we're able to, that's one of the big questions. Support such an ordinance, you're just authorizing staff to spend the time to do that. And again, for me, I mean, no understand, this is a panacea for all ills associated with this, but it is something proactively that the city of Santa Rosa could take a leadership position on and that's why I'm bringing it forward. Great, thank you. So I'm gonna move to public comment now. I have a few cards on this item. Marni Roth, followed by Gail Simmons. Or maybe, sorry. Simmons. Marni Roth and I, my husband and I have raised six children, four sons and two daughters in this county. We've been lived here for over 30 years. So today we're gonna talk about guns. I guess you all wanna talk about guns. And we wish to isolate the toy gun issue from the larger issue. The capitalist who manufacture toy guns. Who buys toy guns? Who pushes kids to buy toy guns? And what do the words toy gun mean? Why have toy guns at all? Why do we all call guns that look like real guns replicas? Because if a child, those who like toy guns, you know, that's kids, walk down the street with their toy guns, they are seen as a threat by cops who are afraid, ill trained and not even interested in the issue of whether a gun is a replica or a real gun. So they shoot down a child with a toy gun and then blame that child and blame that child's parents for owning a toy gun. You know, you're all nuts, really. I just wanna say that. But you know, more than being nuts, you're hypocrites because you sit in the park on a sunny day and show real guns. I repeat, real guns to kids and we hold them and they stroke them and they pretend to shoot them and you know, kinda like they do with toy guns but then you tell all these innocent little folks how serious it is to own a gun. So after all the fun, they must never ever want a gun and if they do want a gun, go ahead, purchase a replica so they can almost feel like it's the real deal but keep in mind they might get the gun down buy a scared cop who mistook the gun for a real gun. You wanna put this ordinance in place so you can vindicate people like Eric Galhouse who gunned down a little boy named Andy Lopez and you don't wanna take any responsibility whatsoever in this whole scenario. You only want parents and kids to take the hit figuratively and literally for being so foolish to own a toy gun. I think you are trying to really hard especially those of you on this council who are ex-cops to ignore the need for civilian police oversight and to diminish it to take the heat off, so to speak of the real problem poorly trained cops. You know very well that there's been a task force in place for over a year and there have been many of the public trying to find a path to real civilian police oversight because we have such a problem in our county in our country with our out of control cops. Okay and I just wanna one more thing is that you're trying to deflect from the real problem by this ridiculous ordinance and let's prosecute kids and their parents. You know let's not and a real interest in safety, Mr. Schwindlhelm, real interest in safety would be the likes of getting people like Eric Gellhaus off our streets. He was the expert, he was the expert, okay? He was the guy that was supposed to know the difference between the real deal and not, okay? And he trained other cops. I mean where are we to go with that? Thank you. Gail Simmons. My name is Gail Simons. I'm sorry, thank you. That's okay, I'm a long time resident of Santa Rosa and I wanna say Tom and I'm Gail, Tom and Ernesto, I don't believe for a minute that you're interested in the safety of our children. I have seen what the police department does in the way of education of children around guns lately in the last few years in this community. I think that this is a ruse and is a ploy. I'm not gonna talk about the possible political implications of this. It is a red herring to take focus off of what is the real problem or a real problem in the last 15 years, nearly 70 people have died in police custody or been shot by police and he didn't kill anyone. I would like to propose another thought. If you have so much time that you wanna direct your staff away from the homeless issues and affordable housing issues that are so important. We have 4,000 people on the streets every day. If you wanna take away staff time from that, then propose an ordinance for a fine for the merchants in this community that continue to sell these replicas to our children. No one talks about that responsibility. So I don't believe you, I believe that you're good people but I think you better think about your motivations because it's kind of transparent what you're doing. Thank you everyone for listening. Susan, last the audience please. The next speaker's. Excuse me, I would respectfully request that if you agree with the previous speaker please raise your hands. They cannot hear me announce the next speaker if you're applauding and this is a council meeting not a theater. So I appreciate your willingness to show your support but I would appreciate if you would not applaud. Thank you very much. Susan Lamont and Susan is followed by Ellen Zabrowski. Sure, no problem, you can help me with that. I'm Susan Lamont, I'm representing the Peace and Justice Center of Sonoma County and obviously we're an organization that doesn't really support and encourage children playing with guns, we'd rather guns didn't exist but I want to quote Walt Whitman. A boy went out one day and all he beheld he became. The world we are showing children is very ugly and it is very violent and to think that they are not going to reflect this in any way is absolutely callous and to blame them for it is absolutely callous. Look at the children, tiny children touching guns at Martin Luther King Junior Park in 2011 something that was approved of by both Mr. Schwedhelm and Mr. Oliveris, they've had no problem with it and as a matter of fact, Mr. Schwedhelm who at the time was chief of police when asked about how young children should be to handle weapons said he wasn't an expert and he would leave the decision up to the adult in charge if they were feeling that it's an appropriate age, sure and here, here is Sonoma County Airport in 2014 that's an eight year old boy pretending to shoot a machine gun under the proving eye of adults. This comes up obviously because of Andy Lopez. Andy Lopez had the misfortune to be a child in a culture that glorifies guns, war and violence. Temps children with aisles of war toys and screens filled with gore and allows young children to play with real assault weapons in Martin Luther King Junior Park or at the Sonoma County Airport and when Andy picked up on all the messages sent his way the county used that to justify killing him and if they hadn't killed him under your ordinance they could have criminalized him instead. You say it's about safety but people have been killed holding cell phones, wallets, nothing, hands down and hands up. This is absurd. If you cared about safety on our streets you would join peace and justice organizations and work for that. Instead whenever we are out on the street with guns believe in what you say you believe in it is hypocrisy and totally, totally callous. Thank you. Ellen Zabrowski and Ellen is followed by Teleneggy. If this proposal had been brought by a different council member it might only seem misguided. To have it brought by the former chief of police it's very disturbing. There isn't a person in this room who doesn't know that this isn't about Andy Lopez. And about trying to turn the victim into the criminal and future victims into criminals including possibly council member Carlstrom's child. During this past year and a half since Andy's death I and others have watched the impunity with which the sheriff's deputies harassed the Moorland and Roseland neighborhoods. I hoped that the Santa Rosa police department would distance itself from this conduct. I hoped SRPD would want to show us that it had a greater sensitivity and partnership with the community. I even heard words to this effect in this chamber. Now when I hear this proposal it feels like the Santa Rosa cops want some kind of get out of this get-home-free card. The only purpose of a law that criminalizes people for holding toys is to further separate the community from its law-enforcing agencies. In fact, it might even appear to the public that this topic is being raised for the very purpose of running down the clock on side issues in order to evade the big ones. I strongly urge the council to reject and to waste no further time on this diversion. If Mr. Schwendhelm's intent is not to further alienate the people from the police then I encourage him to drop this bogus topic and to throw himself into the genuine issues facing our city. It's my hope that the entire council is ready to roll up their sleeves and tackle the big problems. And I can suggest three places to start. One, initiate a Santa Rosa community law enforcement oversight board with real powers that can actually improve relations between the community and the police. Two, take meaningful steps to address the housing crisis. And three, pursue the efforts begun last year by council members Coombs and Weisaki to seriously reform Measure O, thus providing adequate funds for the projects that are most important to the people of Santa Rosa. Thank you. Attila Negi and Attila is followed by Magic. Okay, well, there are still five council people here. My name's Attila Negi. I live in Santa Rosa. And what I see is a disconnect between, I guess, the administration of this city and the people of the city. And that includes also the staff of the city, the police, in that people who have a higher salary, you can afford childcare. You don't have to have possibly two people working. And so the children are well taken care of in that sense, they're giving rules, maybe, you're concerned about children being accompanied by adults. But that's not the case for a lot of people. I would say probably a majority of Santa Rosa, that's a guess, but I know a lot of people who are working two jobs. The kids go home after school and they play out in the street and they play with what, but we model for them. We model, what do we model for them? You know, adults model guns, violence, they see it on TV, it's everywhere. So, and I really appreciate what the state has done. And that's important, that's important law. Color the guns. First of all, I mean, I played with guns when I was a kid, but I learned because, well, I won't get into how I learned, but it's what kids do, unfortunately, because it's modeled for them. I would say, you know, don't pick on the families, don't pick on the kids, go to the manufacturers, as well as the retailers that sell them. And I don't think this was well thought out. And I'm gonna give you the benefit of the doubt that maybe it wasn't, you know, cynical or possibly, I don't know, you know? But think it through. And I would say, don't right now, right now don't use staff's time because as everybody else pointed out, there's a lot of big issues. And I'm glad that you're all talking about public safety because that's important, but how you approach it is important too. I don't agree with what you're doing right now. If you're magic, followed by Richard Canini. Hello, my name is Magic. I would be remiss as a woman if I didn't point out, Mayor, that you had originally called on Julie Combs and then you didn't let her speak first and then turn to Ernesto, so that didn't feel right or feminist to me. When Andy Lopez died, I wrote a poem and the first stanza is a child walked in daylight with promise in his heart, holding the symbol of power in his hands. Because why not? Why shouldn't he have power too? We have a culture that indoctrinates our children into the belief that violence equals power and the guns symbolize that power. They are sold video war games. They become addicted. We glorify war as a path to heroism and the simplistic idea that we are the good guys and whoever interferes with corporate exploitation of other countries is the enemy. That our young go off to war believing this propaganda and come back so damaged both physically and psychologically that 22 vets are committing suicide a day is a tragedy beyond words. Our businesses sell massive amounts of toy guns and war games. In fact, when I was on 4th Street a few years back, a young man had just purchased a bracelet with spikes on it from the mall. He walked out and a policeman said, you're under arrest for a weapon. I said, what are you doing? He just bought that at the mall. Is this fair to sell, to promote, to propagandize our youth and then to criminalize them for buying what we tell them to buy? Once again, this is thinly disguised attempt at demonizing Andy Lopez and his parents who are suffering a tragedy beyond words. While the killer is still on her streets without even rehabilitation or any form of restorative justice in which he could also be healed by apologizing without legal recrimination to the parents in a separate restorative place to apologize for killing their child. I am also, you know, feel it's very disingenuous that you brought this forward as the other council members said when you could have done it during the goal setting it must have been a political move to think it would work better now. I don't think that's a proper procedure to be used. And we do not need this ordinance or even any further discussion in this manner. Yes, the community needs discussion and a police oversight review board to make real the solutions to this problem. Thank you. Thank you. And for the benefit of the public here today, I am limited by the turning of my neck and at the right time to see who might be making suggestion to speak versus not amount about, excuse me, it's not about just being disrespectful. And if I make an error in calling it is not out of disrespect. It is merely a human error. And I apologize for that in advance. Mr. Canini. Mr. Mayor, you certainly are a human and you certainly are respectful, although we don't disagree. I mean, we do disagree politically. So yes, he's all right. What we're talking about here, and I think it's made clear by other people, what we're talking about right here is protecting our children from the police. That's the issue. And I think it is good if you go forward with this that we do review the police training, the police protocols. I've watched training film for police and basically what they teach the police is to fire. That's what they teach. And I'm told, and this could be get some clarification here. I'm told that the officers are taught to eliminate the threat, meaning to kill. They are told to empty their weapon into the body of the target, in this case, a child. Empty the weapon. When the target is down, the child, handcuff that person. Do not repeat. Do not render first aid. Do not allow anyone else to render first aid, except for when the EMTs and the paramedics are allowed on the scene and allowed by the police officer to render first aid. That's my understanding of what they're taught. It's my understanding of what they do and we've seen it reported in the press. Therefore, given that, I would ask that you're writing ordinances, I got one for you, that you require the Santa Rosa Police Department to treat persons within this city as prisoners of war. They're to be treated as POWs so that this would invoke Genève. For your English speakers, that's Geneva. The Geneva Conventions require our armed forces in a combat zone dealing with POWs to render first aid. It's international law, a violation of that makes them war criminals. Our troops in Afghanistan are told do not fire unless fired upon. When you're fired upon, you may fire. If you perceive a threat, you must get authorization from COC before firing. He's coming at you with a weapon, you're not authorized to fire. You must get on the horn, call COC, and for you draft dodgers, that's Combat Operations Center. And the member Schwenhelm, you spoke before this council. You mentioned officer safety a dozen times at one meeting. You never once mentioned public safety. Thank you. Ramon Cairo, and Mr. Cairo is followed by Bill, who's luck? May I request that we not make, that we ask the public to not make direct personal comments, negative personal comments toward any particular council members. I think we can make the points without making direct personal comments. If you don't mind if I request that, thank you. Thank you Ms. Combs. Thank you for allowing me the opportunity to speak to you guys today. If I may, I would just like to point out two things. I guess I'll start like this. Mrs. Carlstrom, thank you so much for starting your preamble with the term logic. That's a very good starting point because I feel that any measures that are voted upon or acted upon should be essentially rooted in common sense and logic, first and foremost. With that being said, I would have to agree with a lot of the public speakers when they use terms like ruse or one that I really like, blame shifting. If we utilize the term public safety, which I'm sure I'm positive is a term that you utilize, and we switch it around a little bit and remove public safety and instead put in criminal liability, then it is very clear that what you're attempting to do is you're trying to pass measures that in essence would allow individuals kind of like you that wore a badge and had a gun from indiscriminately continuing to kill people in our society, but at this point in time, here in Sonoma, Santa Rosa, the city of Santa Rosa, there would be no criminal liability to assume that justice would be served. This city and this county has seen very clearly how the individuals that have been put in power have no problem, qualms or compunctions with pretty much chucking the constitution to the trash and just doing what they feel like doing willy-nilly, I think is a term you guys use. The reason why I phrase it that way, it's because it's very clear that the public here who got to hear every story that Eric Galehouse could come up with, the public here was able to hear every story that Joe Ravich could possibly conjure up, but I think we all know very well that nobody was here to hear the side of Andy Lopez because Andy Lopez is dead. And the number one fear that I have is that by passing a measure such as yours, in essence what we're doing is we are providing law enforcement with all the tools necessary to indiscriminately kill with impunity and let them get away with it. I love that sign where they're saying children are not the criminals, because I wanna clearly say that probably when you became the chief of police, it's when we really started noticing that it was our children who are being criminalized at every joint adventure, whether it was, hey, that little 12 year old kid is wearing the wrong color at the wrong school, he's a gang member, let's start labeling him right there. That all happened when you were the chief of police. So if we take a look at your track record, it is very clear that everything that you have done has been in the service of law enforcement. Unfortunately, now you're in a position where you need to serve the public. And it is very clear and evident that this measure would not be in the interest of the public. It would merely be in the interest of law enforcement. Thank you for your time. Thank you, Bill Haluzak. Bill is followed by Kevin Conway. Bill Haluzak, San Jose, California, Rosendaria, near Moorland and those other areas in the Southwest. When I was a child, the only guns I had to my disposal or rather to my use were ones that I would made up of sticks, broom handles, rubber bands, and clothespins. I didn't have any fancy colored AR-47, STIN, whatever rifles that they're putting out now that the manufacturers make look like. What you see on these video games is what I could fabricate. My parents didn't glorify guns. In fact, they deglorified guns. Guns were something that law enforcement used, that people that were providing safety to our country used, not just everybody indiscriminately carrying them. So I think that a lot could go, you could go a long ways to deglorifying guns and they'd be trying to get away from these computer generated games that show that that's what you do. The other thing I did when our boys were young is we took them to a fire range, the 30-30, got them out there with the rifle, fired it. They didn't like the noise. They didn't like the recoil. They didn't like anything about it. It was totally demystified. It was something they used to kill something or put something down. It wasn't glorious at all. I don't see anybody suggesting that they put this in the curriculum of kids so that they understand what a weapon is, what it can do, and what it sounds like. Also, I think that the county should take a stance on not bringing toy guns or replicant guns into the community that aren't so far out of appearance that they don't even resemble a gun. They look like something you see in a cartoon where there's no way you could paint it to make it look like one. If they have to have it, they make it look like something that isn't even real. But it says it's a gun, but it doesn't look like anything. They are 15 or whatever. If they really need to have them, let's do that. Call it a gun, but make it so that you can't even resemble a gun or look like that. So nobody thinks that, uh-oh, there's a kid with a gun. I gotta put him down because he's a perceived threat. So those are my basic topics. De-glorify the gun. Give kids an exposure to what it really is or what it sounds like and what it can do. And let's see. Well, I guess that's about it. I can't speak any more eloquently than anybody else in this crowd. Beautiful. I mean, they said everything I wanted to say and I just hope I can highlight a few of the comments that I have about it. So I'd stamp it in and making it something that it isn't the right way to go. Let's let these kids find out or understand what a gun really is, what it sounds like, what it should look like, what it's for and not have it glorified. Thank you very much. Thank you. Kevin Conway, Kevin, followed by Tara Friedman. Good evening, Mayor Sawyer, council members. Thank you for this opportunity. I just wanna start by saying I think this kind of a measure is very ill-conceived and I don't assign motive to anybody, but let me put myself in the shoes, first of all, of a 13-year-old kid. I know how I was a 13. I don't know how your son's gonna be, Ms. Carlson, but I can just say if my uncle came home and said, here, Kevin, you got a yellow gun to play with. I'd say, thank you. And the first thing I'm gonna do is take some shoe polish to it, just like you suggested, make it look like a real gun. Now I wanna put myself in the shoes of a peace officer where knowing if this ordinance were to go forward, knowing that it's not legal for a person under 18 without a parent to have this real-looking weapon, my hair-trigger finger's gonna be ramped up because I'm gonna say the community knows this isn't legal, that must be a real gun. And I think their fear level is gonna be ramped up and the opportunity for them to make a horrible mistake is ramped up as well. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Conway. Tara Friedman and Ms. Friedman is followed by, I believe it's, well, Ms. Repetra, I'll try that. I wanna address the issue of public safety, which I've heard you all talk about tonight. And I wanna say that public safety is about one other issue that you haven't brought up, which is training law enforcement in this community on how to use the weapons, on how to detect a threat, on how to respond to children or adults who they deem a threat, in a way that is not going to escalate the situation. I would say if we wanna deal with public safety, let's start there. Why are we looking at toy guns and what color they are? Let's just start with who's got the real guns and where the problems are coming from. If you wanna move, we also could start with moving away the mass quantity of deadly weapons from the hands of law enforcement. We're getting more and more deadly weapons in your hands. What do you do when you have deadly weapons in your hands and you're trained to use them? Really easy to just pick it up and use it when you think you need it without thinking clearly. These are pretty obvious solutions to the problems that we have. And I don't know why we're getting these other suggestions. And one word that kept coming up to me, I thought that kept coming to me was about barbarism, the definition of barbarism. One of the things that was said earlier is that when law enforcement shoot a person down and they're injured, they are not allowed to provide any first aid. They're not allowed to let anyone else provide first aid. That is barbaric by any standards. I just can't believe you all could sit here and just know that that's true and that that is all right. You would never let that happen to a loved one of yours. You would realize that you don't block treatment of any injured person. I don't care if they just robbed somebody. Where's the humanity here? And I have to just say that I remember when the chief was here at the table a few years ago after the 2011 park display of weapons at the Martin Luther King event. I'm sorry, Martin Luther King Park. You did say that the reason they were there, and the children were there encouraged to pick them up was an educational purpose. I remember clearly that was your term and I would just urge you to educate with nonviolent alternatives as opposed to violent alternatives. It's not ever gonna get us where we wanna go. As Martin Luther King said, you can't cure hate with hate and that goes here. Not bringing out your weapons inventory or to bring a really much wiser thing to do. Thank you all. Thank you. Linda Picton. Good evening. I haven't been here in a while. The reality is that I live in unincorporated Sonoma County. I don't live in the city of Santa Rosa. But I came tonight to talk, well, I'll talk about the public comment issue. But you know what I think is that there's tremendous public confusion on the adult level about the role of firearms under our constitution. It seems like the Second Amendment takes priority over everything else. The right to carry and the concealed weapon issue and all that. A while ago I did a research project on the role of women in law enforcement and the military. And I actually did it at Sawyer's News looking through all the magazines and the gun magazines and NIA, whatever. NIA, whatever, and they blatantly said that they would sell weapons to either side to law enforcement and to the criminals. They didn't care. And at that time, I don't remember, I wish I had kept a copy of it, but actually I didn't buy it. But there was a drive to get more women. There was a woman who was elected to be the president of the NRA. And what I've noticed over time is that they're actually pink guns. I went to a local gun shop not long ago to check out this issue and they actually have rifles, small rifles, diminutive rifles, and they're painted pink so that women will be more encouraged to shoot. So that, to me, is really distressing. And I've seen programs by G. Gordon Liddy and they're campus-wide, nationwide, forums and recruitment operations, whatever, to encourage more people to carry guns. And that, to me, makes no sense. And I'll just close by saying we just finished the Oscars. And I don't remember what year it was. I wasn't really prepared for this to speak tonight, but it wasn't that long ago. And one of the main phrases for the Oscars was the boys of Hollywood really loved their guns. And they had whole segments about the role of guns, rifles, pistols, whatever, the cowboy genre, and whatever, and how that has really influenced our culture. And I just, as everyone has been talking about public safety, it's different carrying a cap gun and an AK-47. Thank you. Thank you, Linda. It's good to have you back. I will bring this back to the council now and I do have a question about process for the city manager and what we discussed during council goal setting and how this unfolds. So in our discussion about cost involved in doing an analysis on a particular item, could you, so if we were to move forward with this item, what is the next step? Well, the next step would be for the staff and I to get together and review the request as we understand it, understand whether that was something that could easily fold within existing work, our existing work detail, where this was gonna require substantial effort beyond what we're already capable of supporting. And at that point, if it were to require additional work, we would bring that back to council with a proposal of what we would be necessarily moving down to move up to address this pressing need. I think these were set up with the idea of keeping the council on task, but at the same time understanding that there may be immediate issues that you would want to address moving forward. So in this case, we would look at the item as we understand it. If we feel like it can exist within our existing workload, we will then bring, we will schedule a date and we'll notify the council of the date that that item will be coming back to council. If we feel like that this is gonna be in a substantial investment of time and resources that's gonna divert us from other activities that we're currently managing, we will then bring that back. I will schedule a council meeting to tell you what we're proposing. So it's open and honest and transparent, what we're proposing to move down in the priority to address this particular need. So a little bit will depend on sort of the scope of the project as it fits within our existing means. Thank you very much. Council, final comments? Go question, Mr. Wojcicki? I do have another question as I understand this proposal. The possession of a replica firearm, there must be an adult present or a parent present. What is being proposed here? So for me, that would be part of the recommendation because I've seen both, I'm familiar with, the first one that comes to my mind is if someone's been arrested for drunk driving, get cited out, that person can be released to a responsible adult or a parent. So again, that would be something I'd look for a staff recommendation. So we're not deciding on that, you're just gonna let staff, I'm just curious. So an adult or a parent can be with a minor with a replica and they're okay under this proposal. So now they have to be a juvenile because minor goes up to 21. So when you have a, there's all kind of parenting situations. So again, that's what I would look for if there's other similar ordinances, the intent is having a responsible adult there, a responsible adult or parent. A responsible adult with the children playing with the guns. Exactly my point. Mayor, if I could make one? Sure, and then? I would like to entertain Council Member Combs's suggestion, I'm not sure what that would add to it, but if we want to do add additional information to get additional information that would help support that type of an ordinance, I'd be supportive of that. Thank you. Mr. Oliver? No, I guess it's gonna come back. I'm because we use worse replica toy. There's a lot of differences with, you know, little squirt guns and stuff. You don't need an adult to buy that. I mean, so it's really, I know that staff would come back and clarify some of this terminology that we're using so that it's consistent. I think it's important that we use some common language so that we can better apply this if we move down that route. Thank you. So, any final comments? Ms. Coates? Just as a reminder, we already have a law coming into effect that asks for the device to be white, bright red, bright orange, bright yellow, bright green, bright blue, bright pink, bright purple, either singly or in combination with other colors in any pattern and constructed in a transparent or translucent material to permit unmistakable observation of the device's complete contents. So that I think we're trying to solve a problem that we will not have after 116, which is that folks can't recognize what the toy is. So it concerns me that kids who have, one of the concepts that was brought up was kids in some neighborhoods don't have access to the adult supervision kids in other neighborhoods have. I think it's 11 or 12 kids can be home alone legally. So we have a gap in time between parental availability of parental supervision for kids in certain areas. I appreciate that you have offered an expansion. I'm not clear what the expansion was, perhaps instead of bringing this forward. It was your expansion. No, he clarified my expansion in a way that made me uncertain. So let me, I'd rather not be interrupted by you, Ms. Carlstrom, thank you. If we brought this forward as part of the county law enforcement task force recommendations, which it is not one of them, but if we were adding it to that, I mean, are we talking about? I think that the county will be making a presentation requesting your input into their process. That's what we've been directing the county. So I'm not sure this fits in directly with that conversation in the way that you're phrasing it. I think they have a presentation that they're bringing to each municipality, and that presentation is under a specific guidance to seek input on their presentation from the councils as where they were directed by the board of supervisors to do. So my suggestion had been that instead of talking about this item, we talk about a larger discussion of how children and police public safety members can be safer as a bigger combination. Is that what you were agreeing to? I heard you say include police training with this issue. Yes. And focus on what training would officers receive and what type of police training is there related to this topic. And that was the scope of it to me. I think that does partner well with what my intent was. If I could just also respond with the state law that comes effect in 2016, one that's still quite a ways away, and two there's still, whether it's thousands or millions of replica firearms out there. And I don't believe once this law becomes into effect that everyone's gonna throw them away and dispose of them. So to me again, that concern is still out there. Would it be retroactive if a person has purchased one prior to the date when the color changes with this law? If we passed an ordinance, would it apply to those that had not been modified? So does it solve the problem? It would depend on how you define that in the ordinance. So in terms of process, what I would envision assuming as the city manager said it was something that staff could do within their existing capacity, we would bring it back as a study session to answer some of those questions that the key one being whether it's preempted by the existing state or federal law. And then you would talk about what the limitations might be on your authority if you were inclined to move forward. There is a definition in the state law for, I would just respond to Council Member Ollivaris's concern, they're in the state law. And my understanding is that the industry is very quick figuring out ways around definitions once they're put in so that a replica gets made that gets around whatever definition we put forward. When there was a six millimeter, they made an eight millimeter version. When it was six and eight, they make something else. So my understanding is that even with the definitions, it gets very difficult to have them stay stationary and keep up with what the manufacturers are doing. We really have a problem with the manufacturer of these. But anyway, thank you. Thank you, Ms. Combs. Well, from my final comment side, I think that for me, this is about reducing chances of tragedy in the future. We have been as a community nationally for the last decades. And when I was a kid and Bill Haluzik mentioned what it was like to play with guns or imitation guns, pieces of wood, whatever it might be, was far earlier kids weren't killing kids and our society has changed and in some ways very tragically. And I see this as an opportunity, perhaps some people would consider it folly. I think that painting guns pink and then if someone could paint them black again, could be considered folly. Bill's idea of making guns, not look at all like guns. I thought of that myself and I realized I don't know if the kids would use them if they don't look like something on television or something in some movie. So it's a little bit like struggling in the dark and not knowing exactly what direction to go in. But perhaps it's small steps like this that might be communities might realize that have not had a tragedy like ours that might prevent something in the future. And if the city manager is able to come forward with a recommendation for a time allotment that is reasonable and not onerous and the council agrees to go forward with that, then I would support that. So I'll be voting to support it coming back to us as an item on our agenda this evening. So we have a motion and a second on the table. Could we discuss comments? If it comes back to us, can we ensure that the rules for what happens with an actual firearm also come back? It would be interesting to compare what the regulation is for a gun and a toy. It would seem odd to have them be the same. So it would be interesting to have that regulation. When I'm guessing it's gonna come back because I can count. And I would again like it to come accompanied by the procedures that you agreed to. So thank you. Ms. Toyosaki. Thank you. I would also prefer that if, if this does come back, it should come back with the County Task Force presentation and let's be comprehensive about this so that we're not trying to solve it piecemeal. But my fear with this measure, as was said by one of our speakers, it's gonna further separate the public from law enforcement. And that's my big fear. There's already two to go golf. When I was a kid growing up, I knew my neighborhood beat cup. My friends that played in the street knew my neighborhood beat cup. I live in a fairly secure part of town and the kids there don't know their neighborhood beat cup. They don't want anything to do with them or her. And that's truly tragic. That's truly tragic. I think we have a state law coming into effect in less than a year that hopefully can start to solve the problem of these imitation firearms. So as has been said many times on this dais, we can't arrest our way out of this problem. And yet that's what we're trying to do here with this measure. And that's why I just have a problem with staff time if it's not in conjunction with some of these other measures. So I'm not inclined to support this at this time. Thank you, Mr. Waisaki. Council, we have a motion and a second. And may I have your votes, please? And I have four ayes. Council members Combs and Waisaki voting no. Thank you very much. This time we will move to 10.5 discussion regarding placement of public comment on city council agenda. As the council knows, we have had these conversations actually for quite some time. And even though it's a little bit before we have discussed the recommendations coming out of our open government task force, we are, when possible, trying to implement certain things that seem to be low-hanging fruit, if you will. And so what I'm going to do this evening is just offer an idea for changing actually what would be happening is we would be adding a second public comment period closer to the beginning of our meeting. And then there would be another one at the end. The one at the beginning would have to be limited. My idea, and we can discuss this, would be up to 10 speakers that would equate to about a half an hour of public comment. Again, this is a public comment time for items not on the agenda. There's always plenty of time to have public comment on those items that are contained within the agenda. But this is non-agenda, items not on the agenda. And then we would have that time and then once again at the end of the evening, we would have the time again. I'm looking at this in the beginning to be very simple and straightforward without a lot of parameters and rules and trying to keep it as simple. Like I said, my idea is that we do it just after consent. If we find that that's not working, we can always change that, but I would like it to be, I'm just as far as we can tell. So people coming in, they see where we are on the agenda and it would be after consent. And then we would move into public comment for as many people up to 10 as we would have cards for. So Mr. Waisaki. Thank you, Mayor. I'm generally supportive of your idea. I'd like to throw out for council consideration that we have some sort of requirement that if you've spoken to us in the previous meeting or in the last two or three meetings, you don't get to go to the front of the line. Because what will happen is we'll hear the same and they have a right to speak, the same five or six speakers, but they're gonna be here at 3.30 or at 4.30 or 5.00 or whatever the definite time is. And we want all the public involved. So I would like to have some sort of priority if you did not speak last meeting that you would have a priority or someone that has spoken the meeting before. Mind you that that individual that has spoken before would be able to speak a comment or at the end of the time if there was plenty of time. Right. That would be my suggestion. Ms. Carlstrom and then Mr. Olivares. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. And thank you for bringing this forward. This was one of the larger, more highly supported recommendations that came out of the open government task force. A lot of public support for this idea and I know that various iterations have been attempted in the past and previously there was some resistance to retrying it because well, we've tried that before but I think what we're acknowledging is, you know, we need to hear the public when they ask for a modification and accommodation to be heard. And I appreciate you putting this back in front of us. I wanted to just ask a tiny clarifying question which is that if there are fewer than 10 speakers, would the public comment period need to remain open for that half hour? Would we have the flexibility to move forward if not that many speakers had? So we would allow up to 10 speakers if there were 10 speakers and then we would have the public comment at the end of the meeting for people who either came late or did not have an opportunity to speak. So you wouldn't get two public comment periods. If you speak in the first period, you wouldn't get to speak on the second public comment. If you came late, you could speak at the second public comment or if there were more than 10 speakers at the beginning then you would have an opportunity to speak at the public comment at the end. So my question, thank you for that but my question was actually the reverse which is the mayor is proposing up to 10 speakers at first if for example, only five people submitted cards. Do we keep the public comment period open or do we then close it? Not at the beginning. So if there were only five vote once all the five people who were here spoke move on with your business and then if more people came and wished to make public comment on items not on the agenda, they would speak at the public comment period at the end of the meeting. Okay. The suggestion of who is eligible for this pre-speakers list. I have some first amendment concerns with that. I'm wondering if the city attorney might address that. There potentially could be and it's also challenging for staff to keep track and how far back you would go. I think when we discussed this with the mayor the idea was an order having staff randomly pick people which was discussed at the task force. Or the hat for example. To perhaps have the mayor shuffle the cards and then he would take the first 10 off the top if there happened to be more than 10 so that just because you're first here doesn't necessarily mean you'll be first to speak. I just think we might give it a go, see how it works and revisit it. But I really, really appreciate bringing this forward and I know there's some concern among the council about whether we've taken the task force report as a whole but I think this is one that we can knock off pretty quick and show some real dedication and commitment to actually opening up these chambers. I appreciate that. Mr. Oliver, some in Ms. Combs? Thank you, Mayor. I'd like to change the recommendations. I tend to like what Council Member Westlock is talking about making some fairness. I haven't thought this through but I was just thinking if at that first half hour if we would consider going to two minutes to allow more people to speak during that half hour just a thought, I haven't given it much thought but just trying to make, because I don't know how many people would actually show up to take advantage of that but I also like the idea of a test period to try it out for, I don't know, six months wherever we agree on and make whatever tweaks we think might be necessary to just make it accommodating for the public. Sure, thank you. Ms. Combs? Thank you for bringing this forward. I think it's a great move. I appreciate you're doing that. Can we clarify, which start of the meeting do you mean? Do you mean the start when we come for closed session or do you mean the start when we start at four o'clock after all the closed sessions or do you mean a time start at five 30 when people have gotten out of work and can get here? I didn't, I don't think I got which... The recommendation was after the conclusion of the consent calendar. That's about as close to time certain as we're... That's not as time certain. Well, we've struggled with that and it becomes a bit of a compromise because no matter what we do unless I stop the meeting in the middle of whatever might be being discussed and it could have happened tonight in the middle of our conversation about this item on the agenda where I would have to stop and say it's now five 30, we're gonna move to public comment. So it is, it's a problem and it's part of why we have and that's why I'm entertaining some ideas and why I'm trying to be as open as possible about these compromises, these various compromises because I know we're not gonna get to perfection. I'm just hoping that we can get a little closer to it than we are now. It concerns me that people who work, it's very hard to get here before five 30 and if there's any way we can say as close to five 30 as possible. May I? Say five o'clock, five 30 upon the conclusion of the matter being, item being discussed at that time that it becomes the next, people's uncertainty. It's either at five 30 or five 35 or five 45 if we're in the middle of an item. I don't think anyone here would be okay with, oh, let's defer the item for a half hour so we can talk about things on the agenda. We should finish what we're talking about and then we can go right to public comment that would give some certainty to the process because consent could be a while too. Yeah, and we struggle with that and I think that we probably, I like the idea and I think we might be able to move that inside the realm of the mayor being able to reorder the agenda. The part of the conversation that we had about consent was that at times and not unlike tonight, depending on the consent agenda, we can have a fair amount of staff members here waiting to make presentations. We can live with that. Okay, so let us, maybe what we can do is we'll come up with some, taking these concerns and these considerations and trying to strike a nice balance. I like the idea of as close to possible to a time and at the close of a particular item and then moving to the public comment. As far as the shuffling and whatever, that will fall on the mayor's responsibility. If there seems to be a pattern of people having perhaps an unfair advantage, then we'll just deal with that. I think the main thing is that we have more participation at the beginning of the meeting and we'll do that anyway we can and be as time-certain as possible as well. Mr. Olivares. Thank you, Mayor. I'd like to propose, I mean, it would be nice, it would be nice in the perfect world if everything we did in our meetings was time-certain. Because, you know, we go through that. We have consent items where staff is here but they're here throughout the night. The public is here on report items and public hearing items that go in late, late, late and it would be nice if those were time-certain. I think this is a good compromise to say that as soon as we can after consent that we do that, it's big, I mean, other than having to wait till late into the hour to have your public comment, I think this is the good compromise that we can try and again, come back to it and tweak it if we have. Yeah, we can be nimble, we have that flexibility and I appreciate your support tonight for moving forward with that and we'll do the best we can and we'll roll with the punches. Okay, Mr. Schweigel. Not to reiterate all of it. One of the other things I would just suggest, keep it simple so that everyone knows that I'd offer a set number once you get, you know, if it's gonna be 10 random search and it goes and it's an agenda item, just like everything else. Yeah, so. Thank you. Just so you know, Vice Mayor Corsi, what he first said when we were talking about this item as well, he said, just keep it in the beginning, especially keep it as simple as possible and then let it evolve. So you all are in agreement with that and I agree with that as well and I appreciate your comments that we will take it to heart and then we'll come up with a, it'll happen on our, we'll be discussing it at our gender review on Wednesday and it will happen next week. And I do actually do have Bill Haluzik on this item. Good evening. It's a pleasure to be able to talk about this item because it's been a sort of a thern underneath the saddle for me for some time. I've come to these meetings at four o'clock and I've been here as late as 1045 and not being able to speak my three minutes. It's a lot of time to spend in a council on something that I've never spoke about anything that wasn't specifically city related. So to address all these things you've talked about, I propose that you do, you have an hour set aside that would be between say six and seven o'clock for items that are not agenda items. This would give you a range to stop whatever you were working on previously. Give a whole hour. I don't mind sitting here an hour to wait for three minutes to speak to items which are specific to the city. I've been here and I've listened to people ramble on about conspiracy theories and about poetry that had nothing to do with the city. All right, we should stick strictly to the letter of things that are specific to the city. Not rambling on about, like I said, conspiracy theories or poetry or whatever else. So this would get you around, like I said, the situation of the number of people. 10 is there's probably not more than 10 people that would speak specifically about city items, be it park, public works, police department or whatever, whatever it is, but it has to be specifically city related. If someone starts talking about some of the things they should be dismissed. To be able to speak to the council about whatever it is they want to at the end of the council meeting. On anything they wish, which is, you know, they're right. But I think that initially it should be about city specific items. Stuck in a timeframe that's an hour, say between six and seven. So nobody minds waiting an hour to speak their three minutes. That's about it. I think that addresses all the things you were talking about, unless there's something I missed. Did I miss something about, you know, about what agenda and when to stop and addressing what and whatever? Okay, well, that would be, I think I've summed it up and pretty much nailed it on the head. I don't know, maybe I'm wrong, but this would satisfy me. I'd be happy with this. Thank you very much. Thank you, Bill. Kevin Conway. Kevin was followed by Magic. Good evening again, everybody. Kevin Conway. I just want to come and stand in favor of putting public comments, non-agenda comments in the beginning of the meeting. I think it will definitely increase community participation and promote open government and transparency. I waited until midnight last time to make my public comments. And I have a daughter and son-in-law who both teach high school here in Santa Rosa. And I know that from a teacher's perspective, as you alluded to, Aaron, to get the young people involved, for them to be able to come at 5.30 or between five and six o'clock is gonna be much more convenient for their schedules. But in order for this to work, and I hope it happens, it has to be publicized. So I hope that Kevin McCallum will write a good article on this, if it is adopted, and that everybody in the city knows that this is now their option, as opposed to passing it. And then nobody knows that that's the case. And they go, I'm not gonna go to the city con. I'm gonna wait until nine o'clock to make my comment. So I just would hope that would happen. Thank you very much. Thank you. Patrick. I wanna thank you very much, Mr. Mayor, for bringing this forward. I think it's very important. And I just wanted to mention that I appreciate the 5.30, because over and over again, people can't attend meetings. It's great that the city council will do that. I also think we need to stick to three minutes. We really, it's hard to develop ideas and have that shortened. Also, the prioritizing of people that come every time and speak, I don't think that would be that difficult to track. And I also wanted to know if the public comment is videotaped at these city council meetings. Thank you. The one other thing is the word audience, I hope is not used when this is written up. You may think that's frivolous, but it seems to be coming in an epidemic. It was used here tonight. And actually on the Board of Supervisors page, it says audience participation. I brought that to the attention of Susan Goran, and that will be changed. So if we can eliminate the use of audience for the public, it would be greatly appreciated. Thank you. Thank you. Well, thank you council and members of the public for your recommendations. Sorry. I don't have. Oh, I didn't see it, Linda. I'm sorry. Come on down. You may have added a number there that I didn't see. Well, no, that's my responsibility. Yeah, thank you. I'll just be really quick. This is also a real topic for me. I really appreciate it being able to come to the public comments at the council meetings quite a while ago and for a long time. So what I'm just gonna say is the importance for the marginalized population and people who ride buses, that having it at the front of the meeting as much as possible is really important. And so people who either don't have technology to get the news that also is, and I don't know how to deal with that to get the word out, but. So anyway, just that's all I wanted to say and thank you very much for putting that out. Thank you. You bet. Thank you, Linda. We'll do our best and to Bill's point about topic, I have discovered in my past experience in running a meeting here at the council and when I was mayor prior to this particular season, I spent more time when I tried to do that and keep people to subject matter that was pertinent to Santa Rosa or even to our council meetings. I spent more time fighting with them and trying to explain to them that your comments are not within our purview and I spent, so I decided just let people speak for three minutes and they would be finished and it was easier and less stressful on everyone and so I was using my gavel less often and the meetings were less stressful and I found that a place of least resistance and I think it's the best way to go. Though I understand Bill's frustration, we do get some comments that are not necessarily within our purview or our ability to change things and I've discovered that it's okay. Just let the three minutes elapsed and we'll just let it evolve and we'll do the best we can and try to be as time-certain as we possibly can and that's our intention, so thank you. I'm sorry to interrupt you, it's okay. One of our speakers asked whether public comment is videotaped and I'm wondering if our city, yes, I'm seeing an affirmative, yes it is. There was a brief period where the council had not televised it but it's not, it is now televised. Do you have it? Yeah, yeah. Okay, so we now will move to city manager and city attorney's reports. Yes, I just wanted to take a moment and make sure that the word got out that we have hired a new transportation and public works director, Mr. Jason Nutt. Mr. Nutt will start on March 16th. He was here for a while. He moved on to working in Marin County and most recently worked for the County of Sonoma before he's gonna be coming back and assisting us here and we're very excited that he's starting very soon. Thank you. Well, he was here first, so it's welcome. Good to have him back. Thanks, I will be out of town Thursday afternoon and Friday for a seminar in Orange County but I will be checking emails and voicemails in case you need anything. Thank you, Ms. Vowler. Moving to Consent, Mr. McGlade. Consent items, item 12.1, Resolution, Grant Application to the California Department of Water Resources Urban Streams Restoration Program for the Construction of Lower Colgan Creek Restoration Phase II. Item 12.2, Resolution, Grant Application to the California Department of Resources, Recycling and Recovery, Cal Recycle for Illegal Disposal Site Abatement Funding. Item 12.3, Resolution, Declaring Weeds and Rubbish in the City of Santa Rosa Apublic Nuisance. Item 12.4, Ordnance Adoption, Ordnance of the Council of the City of Santa Rosa Amending Section 1-04.020 of the City of Santa Rosa City Code regarding minor modifications to the city logo. Thank you, Mr. McGlade. And Council comment or questions. Mr. Waisake. I would like to comment on one of these items just because I feel strongly jumped right out at me when I was reading the staff report. And it's item 12.2 on the background. I just wanna read two points and I hope that people really get, I hope it impacts on the way it impact me, number two in the background. The accumulation of trash in human waste along the city creeks, parks and public lands negatively impact the community stormwater quality and pose a threat to public health. Then go to point five. Despite the city's strong creek stewardship program worked done by city staff, contract workers and volunteers. That includes cleanups to remove debris, trash and solid waste and recent coordination with social services providers. The level of staff and financial resources necessary to fully address these issues far exceed those available. Those are two very powerful statements. And I thank staff for bringing those to our attention. Thank you, Mr. Waisake. Yes, let's just wait on. Just on the same item 2.2, they meant there's reference of a police task force. Can I get a little bit more information? What is, you know, it's kind of a reference to what council member Waisake was talking about. I imagine they'd be maybe tasked with some of that, but. Excuse me, this item has like a PowerPoint, right? I mean, do we want to just pull it and let them present this item? Is there, well, we could go into that depth. I mean, it is a consent item. Mr. McGlynn? If the answer just from this perspective that there's a consent item. If council wants to pull it, that's council's prerogative. So we can either go for the answer of the question or we can go to, we can pull the item and bring it for further discussion. More in depth. That's the question. I think we're okay. Try the question first. I have a long answer. Good evening, members of council, mayor. I'm Hevin Moore, supervising engineer for stormwater in Greeks. So in answer to your question, this issue, as you can imagine, is multifaceted. So we've coordinated with police, public works, parks and code enforcement. And one of the needs identified was to have police support for enforcement and notification of people occupying these legal camps. So this task force and the funding requesting is to allow for funding of what we propose at this point to be an overtime task force for police support. Thank you. Did that answer the question, Valina? Okay, thank you, Ms. Combs. Will the newly formed host teams be working on this also? This application and the funding pursued is independent of the host program and would be applied along waterways throughout the city and public lands and parks. Would there be coordinating with any of the other helping agencies? We coordinate currently and would continue that effort through our stewardship program and through our interactions with the homeless community and support services. Okay, well, I saw SAY mentioned, but I didn't see Catholic Charities or any of the other hosts. Yeah, and I actually wanted to point out in the PowerPoint, there was an error, there was actually going to be the youth core. And SAY is one of the subcontractors to that. To youth core. Yes, so my apologies on that. Thank you. Great, thank you. Any other questions? Council for the consent items? Seeing none, I'll bring it back to the council. Mr. Oliveris, you have the consent calendar to see. Thank you, Mayor. Move consent items 12.1 through 12.4 and we're furthering the text. Second. Thank you. And your votes, please? Nice, thank you very much. Council, would you like to entertain a break for five minutes? All right, thank you. We will break. Let's keep it to five, please. Thank you. For little minds to dream. And we'll keep doing what we do each day because we know that for our community, farce made life better. Out there in the middle of everything. Over 90 miles of creeks run through Santa Rosa, run off from streets, roofs and parking lots, end up in our creeks through the storm drain system. To help protect creeks, keep your street gutters and roadside ditches clear of trash and other pollutants. For more information on the benefits of our creeks and tips on how to enjoy them, visit the stormwater and creeks webpage. Have you ever seen a flashing yellow arrow on a traffic light? I'm Rob Sprinkel, traffic engineer for the city of Santa Rosa here today to talk to you about a new type of traffic signal. Beginning in 2013, flashing yellow left-hand signals will be installed in some of the intersections in Santa Rosa. Studies show that drivers better understand the need to yield to oncoming traffic with a new flashing yellow arrow signal. These new flashing yellow arrow signals give drivers more chances to make left turns, but more importantly, they stress the need to use caution when turning left. Some drivers may be confused when they see a flashing yellow arrow because they're not exactly sure what to do. Let's run through how these signals operate. The green arrow means you have the right of way to make a left turn. All incoming traffic and pedestrians are stopped. The solid yellow arrow is a warning telling you the light is about to turn red. The red arrow means stop and wait. Now for the new part, a flashing yellow arrow. The flashing yellow arrow means you can make a left turn if there's a safe gap from oncoming traffic. Check for oncoming bicycles and pedestrians attempting to cross the intersection. Always yield to the pedestrians as they have the right of way. If you don't see a gap in traffic, don't take a chance. Just wait until the next green arrow appears. The city of Santa Rosa will be evaluating the new technology at locations throughout the city. It will be up to all of us to make sure we use them safely. In recreation and parks, the days begin when the sun rises. Most of our workspaces don't have four walls or a desk, but there's a lot to be done to get this place up and running. It takes a big team to cover so much ground. Each space is unique, requiring its own special method of care and service. And it's of utmost importance to see that it happens each day because our workspace is your leisure space. And it includes 950 acres of Santa Rosa. It's the parks, the trees, the fields, the trails, special gathering places, community spaces, and it belongs to everyone. We work for our community. Striving to improve quality of life. We provide family experiences, friendly competitions, leisurely evenings, and places to bond with man's best friend. We create space for celebration, relaxation, and artistic expression. You can learn to serve a ball or learn to serve a meal. Take a walk on a path or walk the plank. We've got beautiful settings, space to show off our history. We have room to roam, to roll, or to run. We allow for the silly, the serious, the cool. We offer countless ways to work on your health. We keep our youth safe and teach them to keep others safe. We challenge people to want to challenge themselves. We foster creativity, guide athletes, hone passions. We allow for little minds to dream. And we'll keep doing what we do each day because we know that for our community, our state life better. It's run through Santa Rosa. Run off from streets, roofs, and parking lots, end up in our creeks through the storm drain system. Help protect creeks, keep your street gutters and roadside ditches clear of trash and other pollutants. For more information on the benefits of our creeks and tips on how to enjoy them, visit the Stormwater and Creeks webpage. Have you ever seen a flashing yellow arrow on a traffic light? I'm Rob Sprinkel, traffic engineer for the city of Santa Rosa here today to talk to you about a new type of traffic signal. Beginning in 2013, flashing yellow left turn signals will be installed in some of the intersections in Santa Rosa. Studies show that drivers better understand the need to yield to oncoming traffic with a new flashing yellow arrow signal. These new flashing yellow arrow signals give drivers more chances to make left turns. But more importantly, they stress the need to use caution when turning left. Some drivers may be confused when they see a flashing yellow arrow because they're not exactly sure what to do. Let's run through how these signals operate. The green arrow means you have the right of way to make a left turn. All oncoming traffic and pedestrians are stopped. The solid yellow arrow is a warning telling you the light is about to turn red. The red arrow means stop and wait. Now for the new part, a flashing yellow arrow. The flashing yellow arrow means you can make a left turn if there's a safe gap from oncoming traffic. Check for oncoming bicycles and pedestrians attempting to cross the intersection. Always yield to the pedestrians as they have the right of way. If you don't see a gap in traffic, don't take a chance. Just wait until the next green arrow appears. The city of Santa Rosa will be evaluating the new technology at locations throughout the city. It will be up to all of us to make sure we use them safely. In recreation and parks, the days begin when the sun rises. Most of our workspaces don't have four walls or a desk, but there's a lot to be done to get this place up and running. It takes a big team to cover so much ground. Each space is unique, requiring its own special method of care and service. And it's of utmost importance to see that it happens each day because our workspace is your leisure space. And it includes 950 acres of Santa Rosa. It's the parks, the trees, the fields, the trails, special gathering places, community spaces, and it belongs to everyone. We work for our community, striving to improve quality of life. We provide family experiences, friendly competitions, leisurely evenings, and places to bond with man's best friend. We create space for celebration, relaxation, and artistic expression. You can learn to serve a ball or learn to serve a meal. Take a walk on a path or walk the plank. We've got beautiful settings, space to show off our history. We have room to roam, to roll, or to run. We allow for the silly, the serious, the cool. We offer countless ways to work on your health. We keep our youth safe and teach them to keep others safe. We challenge people to want to challenge themselves. We foster creativity, guide athletes, hone passions. We allow for little minds to dream. And we'll keep doing what we do each day because we know. Okay, council, we're back. And what we're going to do is I'm going to reorder the agenda at this point and I'm gonna move directly to our public hearing and then move back to the agenda as written. So item 14.1, public hearing, Bennett Valley golf course green fee rates and player incentives. Nanette Schmeichel, director of recreation and parks, presenting. Welcome. Thank you, mayor and council. Nanette Schmeichel, recreation and parks department. I'd like to start this evening's brief presentation with just a little bit of background on the Bennett Valley golf course just to help put the green fee rate increase into some perspective. So first of all, our golf course was built in 1969, started in 1969 and it opened in 1970. It is on city owned land and city funds paid for the construction. Since its inception, it's been operated under third party contracts with operators. So in essence, city staff have never done the direct operation at the courses. We currently have two contracts and that's important to remember. The contract for the course itself, the 18 hall golf golf golf course and the pro shop is with Bennett Valley Golf Shop Incorporated and this contract was approved by the city council in April of 2014. So we're about 10 months into this, well, we're 10 months since approval and it started July 1st, effective with the fiscal year. The other contract is for the restaurant and we also refer to that as the clubhouse and that contract is with sports restaurants Incorporated and they are currently in the second five year option and they have another five option that is at their disposal and so basically that contract can go through 2022, I believe. So in each case with these third party operations contracts, a business plan is an integral part of it and so it helps to expand upon more of the, more immediate goals in the upcoming annual year and so we have their agreement that outlines what the contractor does, what the city does but then on top of it we have another document called the business plan and then it's refreshed every year. So in the case of the golf course which is really the topic this evening with the greens fees, their business plan includes all kinds of actions, goals, strategies that we think help improve services and help strengthen the fund, the financial health of the overall golf course and so I wanted to just list some of the things that the operator has already started to implement since July 1st and that includes a new website for promotions, online booking, adjusted tee time so that play can go faster, an e-newsletter so we're communicating more to our constituents and our customers and an electronic survey that was implemented this February. They've also been working to attract new leagues and tournaments, they've added forward tees so again just trying to make some modifications on the course that will appeal to different kinds of players, adding range balls and that's all been on the operator's side of the ledger. Part of the business plan requires that the city partner with the operator because it's in our interest to make it a very strong and viable facility with lots of great services as well. So we've partnered with the operator to add the fairway sanding project which is it's a three year project which basically allows the courts to drain quicker if it rains and so we have more playable days and then another of the strategies in the business plan was sort of a pro forma budget and revenue so we're trying to enhance revenues so one of those strategies was to bring forward a recommendation for increasing the greens fees and the rates so our budget was built with the idea in mind that we would come forward to the city council with recommendations for greens fees increases without the increase even a modest one we would probably have a $30,000 shortfall in our budgeted revenue estimate for this year. So the last time we were here visiting with you in December on the greens fees and the rates part of what the council asked us to do this evening was bring back more market information and so show a little bit more of the research so we pretty much compare ourselves as much as we can to the public courses open to the public Windsor Oakmont, Foxtail, Rooster Run, Adobe Creek those are the 18 whole courses. Our course is among the highest played courses that's been pretty traditional so the most rounds played in not only our local area but Northern California and then we also just want to mention that just as a national trend, golf usage and participation is down and so is the case with our course as well. We aren't hitting the goal that we wished we were hitting but it's still better than during the recession and we'll show some of that. Part of the other thing that we experience is it used to be that people would make reservations in advance and fill up those T sheets and pay top dollar the going rate and nowadays there's a lot of last minute bargain hunting and an example of that would be golf now and so we participate in golf now and this particular snapshot was a couple weeks ago so but at the time we said this is what it looks like when you go on golf now and you ask to see what's available and we had mentioned to you that in our operating agreement with the contractor he has the ability to offer discounts so again 24 hours in advance he can put something out and say on Facebook and say hey I've got some unfilled time 30% discounts. We allow that to happen because we want people to come fill up those T times and we participate on in golf now and so that is out there it's sort of an advertising and marketing strategy for us as well so Bennett Valley is out there but we're offering these super, super discounts as do the other courses in the area so just so you get an idea of what's really out there it's so it's not the rack rate the published fees these are fees that are below those rates and we participate. So here's some golfy comparisons that we conducted and these are individual green speeds rates and so we looked at the courses that we mentioned to you before and sort of showed how we're stacking up on the official the official rates and we also wanted to so Bennett Valley is third from the bottom row and you can see these are our current rates and we showed you we wanted to show what's the average of those courses that we're mentioning there as well as a median so half below and half above the median rate and then the average is the average and so you can see how the Bennett Valley rates currently stack up against everyone else. We also wanted to show you some of the use history and I mentioned that Bennett Valley is a very highly played golf course but it still isn't at the peak it was back in 2009 and we experienced 82,000 rounds. Then there was a deep dive with the recession we started climbing back up as the economy slowly improved a little bit. We had in 2013 just spectacular weather and so we hit the 75 almost 76,000 range and then in 2014 which we just finished we had some rain in December and so we just weren't really able to have a kind of play that we had experienced the prior year. Our business plan goal for the current year or for the current year 2015 is 74,000 and so that's a calendar year goal and then from a revenue standpoint just the green's fee piece of this we also wanted to show you a little bit of history since 2009 these are fiscal year figures but you can see that in nine again just with the high usage we had a high amount of revenue coming in and then a plunge and then slowly kind of climbing up and going down but basically we are seeing some increases over the last couple years and then the goal again for this year is the 1,379,000. Before we get into the different scenarios and options for green's fee rates we just wanted to go over the notes section which is applicable to any schedule that we would present to you so that what we mean by senior is 60 and older what we mean by junior is high school and younger the various midday twilight rates what the times are for those, et cetera. So the council also asked us to bring not just the one option that we gave you in December but to give you several different options and so this is an option with an across the board $1 increase and then what we're also doing is we're estimating the number of customers that we're going to get with that and so then it plays out to an estimated amount of revenue so with $1 across the board the estimated revenue is 1,386,515. The next scenario was a $2 across the board scenario with estimated players and a little bit of revenue. Option C, $3 across the board. This is where staff and our operator we started talking about well would we maybe lose a few customers in certain categories and so we think well maybe there'd be a little bit of some migration on that so we're factoring some of that in but as you can tell revenues increase and then we move to an option D which is $4 across the board and option E, $5. And we sort of just made an assumption that it's hard to project but at one and two probably about the same customers. At three we figured there'd be some reaction modest and then four and five we said we probably gonna estimate the customers at the same levels because once again it's sort of hard to project but we're presuming that there wouldn't be that big a difference between a four and a five. So the last slide in my presentation is what is kind of attached to the resolution and it gives you those ranges. So this is a public hearing it was noticed in the newspaper and what we published was the current rates that are still in effect and then a proposed rate range which is the one doing nothing is the first scenario. Keep them as the same and then up to a $5 increase in any of the categories. And that concludes my prepared PowerPoint. Thank you very much. Council questions for Ms. Michael. Yes, Ms. Carlstrom. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I'll start off with a easy one. What's super twilight? I'm gonna go back to oops. This is slide 10. Okay, going backwards. It's a terrible teen movie. Yes, I'm assuming not with respect to golf. So super twilight is between 5.30 p.m. during daylight savings and 3.45 p.m. standard time. So it's that late after it's like a late afternoon lag time. And so there's like a discounted rate for that. Thank you. Sorry, I didn't see that. Mr. Mayor, do you want us to go into all of our questions on this item or are we doing this piece meal? Well, I have asked the city clerk how many cards I have. Well, I just seem like- I have one card but it's at public hearing so I can open it up to the entire, to the- Okay. No, I just, it seemed like our director might have had other things she wanted to present because she said it was the way in which you said this is my prepared presentation. I didn't know if there was other things to come. I think she's anticipating questions. Yes, we know that the focus of our presentation and request to you tonight is for the Greens v. Rates but we also know that we sent you some different information just to provide the context. The agreements we sent that to you in case you wanted to familiarize yourselves more with the agreements, the business plan for the course. There were some questions regarding the golf fund itself which is an enterprise fund and hopefully you received those and we're able to, there are other questions. You know, we're just prepared to try to do our best and answer them. I'm prepared with questions. Why don't you go right ahead then? Okay, I will get right into it. I went through the business plan. Don't know who prepared it. And I wanna pull it up. Is that in this item? No, yes? At any rate, the business plan, there it is, PVGC course business plan references a number of times one of the deliverables in short order being a website including Better SEO, online booking, things like that. If I go to BennettMalleyGolf.com, currently online booking is available. So I'm just making sure that that wasn't a misprint in a deliverable for the future. No, it was this year. It was for this year and it's been implemented this year. Okay, okay. Do our local schools use the golf course for their golf teams? Do Montgomery High School use it as their home course? Okay, so none of the other schools, if they have golf teams? They have tournaments sometimes. They go to other courses. Sometimes have tournaments there. Okay, and I heard somebody else say they go other places. No, that was that you? I'd like to know why the schools aren't using our municipal golf course and how we can encourage them to do that. I'm Bob Borowitz. Hi, Bob. Hi, how are you? To answer your question, Montgomery High School uses Venom Valley as their home golf course, which they host the different schools in the district and outside for specific events. Herbert Slater, junior high school, uses it, Strawberry School comes out, the local schools basically. Each high school in the area has their own home golf course. Ah. Like Pioneer, I'm probably not gonna be real accurate as to whose home course that sort of thing, but I know Fountain Grove, Oakmont, Santa Rosa Country Club, Bodega Harbor, Foxtail Golf Courses, they all host at least one high school. Huh. Just as an area, I think we might consider pursuing is how do we get our schools aligned with our city-owned and co-maintained properties? Why not? Do we have somewhere the figures for revenue that has been previously generated from weddings or events that have been hosted? We do not have that this evening. Could we, at some point, see that? That'd be great, thank you. Um, what if anything, one of the items that stuck out at me were the projections, the costs, including utilities and water use, and I understand that the golf course is not hooked up to city water, but instead utilizes groundwater through wells. Have you done any outreach with our city staff to look at ways that conservation can be achieved and therefore a reduction in the fees associated with that water? And bearing in mind that I understand it's not city water and yet it does incur a cost. Right. The course itself is operated with or irrigated with wells, and so the real cost there, there's no cost for the water per se. The cost might be for electrical to run the pumps and that's fairly minor. We do a lot with conservation. I know Bob and his team are very conservation minded and although we aren't under the stage one drought, doesn't currently pertain to the groundwater, he and his team have gone through the course and they have identified certain sprinkler heads that could be turned off in the event that we wanted, maybe the groundwater rules were to change. And so they're very conscious about watering and the water window, but frankly the irrigation system is so old. It's 45 years old, original equipment. The thing that would do the most for conservation would be when we're able to upgrade that irrigation system and have it on automatic timers and scheduling and head to head coverage just patterned in a different way than it is currently configured. Okay. And I appreciate that there are limitations in place. I'm just always looking for places we can find savings instead of increasing the fees. I would like to see us explore, one of the challenges I always have when we talk about the golf course is that it is viewed as a community, benefited community asset. And yet I have a hard time envisioning young kid from Southwest Santa Rosa hopping on the bus with his golf clubs to go play at this course. And so what I would like to see us look into are city sponsored youth leagues at the golf course, freer or low charge. If we're, I just think we need to be doing everything we can to expand the use of the golf course. And that would tie in with some of the marketing plans of targeting junior players and getting them into the sport in general. And if I'm gonna subsidize it with public dollars, I'd like public kids to be able to go play there. There just were a couple of things on the business plan. A couple of things were repeated. I did have a question. Is Wolf communications present? Negative, Jack Wolf is the owner of the company. Okay, and nobody hear from them? No. Okay, but they've worked with local courses? He used to be involved, Jack used to be involved with the number of golf courses. I can't remember how many years ago Brandon Valley wasn't part of it, but there was a group five, six, seven years ago, maybe the four or five golf courses got together and formed some golf alliance. I can't remember the name, to be honest with you. He does have experience in the golf business. Oh, sure. I just met locally in the county, in the region. Has he worked on other courses? He, I think he's done some work with the Windsor golf course. And that's the only one I remember of. Thanks, I would have asked him. I want to look at, on page three, the business plan, market trend, the use of online booking and available promotions available. The use of online booking and available promotions available with such is a challenge for BVGS Inc. In reaching our optimal, I need somebody to unpackage that statement for me because it doesn't make any sense. It's basically with the online, like the golf now application, where you're getting the discounts available to you, that that it just creates a challenge as far as competition. Every golf course is pretty much now using something like Golf Now, where there's some discounts offered and they're also pretty much one of the reasons we gave the operator some flexibility in his contract to do the discounts, you know, 24 hours out and that kind of thing was because that is an industry standard where everyone's competing for folks to come those last minute bargain shoppers. And so that just, it creates a challenge because in a way we, every golf course is doing the same thing to discount and hopefully lure that player to their course. So I guess maybe I'm not understanding why it's being termed a challenge if everybody in the industry is doing it. Are you saying it's maybe not as effective as it might have once been? Well, what we're saying is that it's a challenge to make revenues. You know, we have the rack rate and that's great but everybody discounts their published rates and we're including our course. Okay, so this pull-up point is just meant to identify in general it is a challenge to the revenue projections for the golf course because everybody's making these online discounts available. And it's a challenge because the players are shopping. They're shopping for the best bargains sometimes and so we're out there among it saying, you know, maybe we have the best bargain, you know, 24 hours out, you know, but maybe we don't. And so the players who are looking for last minute discounts and bargains, they're gonna go where it suits them. And so that's what we mean by it provides a challenging, very fluid kind of environment for us. And an opportunity. Thank you for that. Page six identifies that Windsor golf course may have an advantage of their fairway conditions, but it seems as though previously the representation was that our greens were in the best condition. So Bob, can you just address that briefly? There's certain definitions, certain terms used to define the golf course. Greens and fairways are separate parts of the golf course. Greens are what you put on and fairways are what you play from to get to the greens, okay? So Windsors are better than ours? Fairways, yes. Fairways are when you tee off and you're trying to go to the wall, fairways are what you're gonna travel to get to the greens. I'm picking up what you're putting down. I'm concerned that Windsors are better than ours. They are better, yes. But Councilman McCrosk. But our greens are better. If I may, that's why we're doing the sanding program to improve those fairways. All right. There are just a couple more things that I found in the business plan. Okay. Page 14 of the business plan, infrastructure milestones year one to be completed by December 31st of last year. Accomplishment one, three new forward tees open and then in year two, December 31st of 2015, three new forward tees open. These three additional? Okay, that was my question. And then we're buying a lot of mowers. Do we not own mowers currently? We do own some mowers and they are old and at their end of their life cycle. And so that was one of the things when we put this business plan together, we said that the city would continue to capitalize equipment. And so part of the business plan would be to pick out certain key pieces of equipment to replace. Okay, seven mowers over the court. I just wanna make sure I read that right. The only final thing I wanted to point out or ask a question about is that the city used to have a website URL that links to the golf course and it's not operational anymore. Can't we just turn that back on? I mean, the whole point of this, right, is that we're sort of reasserting, this is a community asset, this is the Santa Rosa Municipal Golf Course, the city of Santa Rosa's website maybe ought to have the link to it. My understanding is we do have a link to it on our website. Can I ask Kelly? Yes, we do. But I, okay, we can talk about that offline, but I swear I just tried to look it up and the city's website pops up and says this is no longer. Okay, I'm done, thank you. Thank you, Ms. Carlson. And Mr. Sweider. And then Ms. Colms. Thank you, Mayor. Couple things that we discussed, the junior plays, is there some, does city, rec and park creation, recreation and parks offer any junior golf programs? And I'm not talking about high school, like middle school to kind of generate the interest in the wonderful sport of golf. We do not. We do not have any classes that involve golf at this time. I would just offer that might be helpful in the longer range plan for healthy communities and use of the golf course. And then there were some figures that I was a little confused on. So if you can go to slide eight and it's a total of rounds played. So before or after this one, they're not numbered. Okay, there we go, there they are. So total rounds, they're 74,500. And then when we go to the different price increases, the examples are 51,000. Right. And the reason for that on these financial, or I'm sorry, I'm going the wrong way. Slide 11 would be the. Right. We're culling out in these fee projections, we're needing to cull out the amount that we're attributing to the annual pass holders. So someone buys an annual pass and we say, you know, we're estimating the 75, 12, 40, whatever customers, they play and they're not paying that annual Greens fees. So we're kind of minusing that out of the equation. And so just for the single issue Greens fees, we're basing that on a historical projection of people just paying through the door. Okay. All right, that makes sense. And then the different options, one through $5. Was there ever, or did you do any supply demand analysis? You know, it's typically supplying demand where they intersect at your price point. Do we, I heard you make some reference till we talked about it, but was there any surveys to find out what the golfers at what point would you stop playing? There's gotta be some dollar figure there. We didn't conduct a formal survey. You know, we're projecting, again, one to $2 as before when we came in December. We don't really think that's gonna have a super negative effect on the players who are coming. Bob has his pulse pretty well on his regular customers and $1, $2, people kind of yawn about that. The $3 range is like, they start going, well, maybe I'll think about going somewhere else, you know, more frequently. And so we indicated sort of the blip there. And then when we got to four and five, you know, again, it's like, well, not a lot of difference between four and $5 at that point. We suspect there will be some downward participation, but I think the really important part of what we found out kind of or were reacquainted with since we met with you in December is when we look at averages of the other courses, when we look at the medians, we are pretty much priced below the other courses. And so there's room. We believe there's some room to increase our fees. We also know that we're currently enjoying, you know, high amounts of rounds. And so might we lose some of those rounds to other courses once we increase our fees? Possibly. But in every scenario, we feel like we will still have decent playership because of everything else that Bennett Valley Golf Course offers, the whole experience of the course. Okay. And then I also read one of the, it could have been the business plan, that $1.9 million figure where the city takes 18% up to that, over that it's 30%. Can you tell me the process that, we came to that $1.9 million? Negotiation. Negotiation. How long ago? A year ago this time when we were putting all the final touches on the agreement and working with Bob and trying to negotiate the contract and then we brought that to the council in April. Okay. And then I know council also received an email from, I think one of the golfers about the annual card having a rolling 12 months versus a year. Right. Thoughts about that? I'll try to respond as best I can to that. The first issue I believe was that the annual passes are considered a calendar year product, January through December. We will sell the annual pass any month. We sell them January, February, March, April, May, June but they're only good through the calendar year so it does not have a rolling date. The reason for that is several fold tradition which isn't the greatest reason but the golf, Bennett Valley has never had anything but a calendar annual pass. The second item there is this issue of the annual pass is like the frequent flyer and they're using, so they get really good discount if they use their pass a lot. And so it's really a discounted rate and the theory is that then to further discount that by, I guess, inhibiting our ability to every year consider increases and then have those take effect in the calendar year at the beginning of the year with the pro rata, that all comes into play with the discussion. Now could we institute that? We could but so far we just have not had a policy or a practice that has had a rolling membership. Now we did a little bit more research when we saw that email as well and Bob made the calls and I hope I don't fail with it too much but the courses that we chatted with they also have pretty much calendar years. They will allow someone to join at a new member, they will allow them to join say in June and perhaps do a pro rate. It's not an official policy however, so that's kind of tough for us to not have something in writing but then the following year that person is expected to join for the full year starting in January. So there was a little bit more to the background on that than I think what the email had in it. There was also a couple of other things there was also a question about payment plans I believe and some of the council members will recall that leading up to the new contract and the last time we had a fee rate discussion with you the golf course underwent a review by an outside consultant. I won't say it was an audit but it was a review of the golf course operations and we brought the findings of that review to the council in October of 2013 and among the findings there was first of all there was nothing earth shattering it was really actually a pretty good report but among the findings were that there were some practices occurring at the course that had not received council approval and so a payment plan had not in fact ever been approved by this city council. And so the recommendation was cease and desist. You know, don't do what you're not authorized to do and so we cease and desist. And so that is why in January of 2014 and January of this year as well the annual pass is offered as it is with payment due upon purchase. If the council were to enact a policy decision to allow a different kind of structure then we would be able to entertain that. I mean just for me if it would generate additional rounds and additional revenues I'd be very interested in exploring that versus I told you what you're saying we've always done it this way. Right. It's a new year. The other thing that we appreciated from the emails was although we sort of we had the annual pass fees set in December we really appreciated receiving some of the comparison information on that and it was really interesting that we're not talking with our rates we're talking a $900 increase on an annual basis. That's to be comparable with the other courses. $900 annual pass and then the courses that we touch base with and we ask them about their payment plans those are offered at a surcharge on top of the annual pass. So it's not a freebie it's 10% more in order to do a payment plan or I believe in one case it was $300 more to do a payment plan on top of your $2,500 fee. Thank you, Ms. Collins. Thank you, Mayor. And thank you for answering all of our questions. Do our best. I know, I know. So I just I want to make sure I understand one of the premises here is that if we continue as we are will be 30K down $30,000 down unless we increase the fees. So part of our motivation to increase the fees is to cover that. Yes, as part of the business plan implementation. Okay, and I'm interested in I understand we have a major irrigation system coming up an upgrade. Does the cost or any prorated cost of implementing the transition to the better irrigation system is that included in the 30K? In a manner of speaking, yes. One of the documents I believe I shared with the council was our current year budget. Yes. And so you saw in that appropriations for it was $230,000 for irrigation, right? And so much for this and so much for that and a revenue projection overall. And so yes, any dollar that we miss in the revenue projection affects our ability to implement the expenses as well. And in the case of the year. I'm going to interrupt you. We're saving up. We're saving. For that transition. Yes. And what's the timeframe of the saving up? The savings plan that we, this is the first year of it that we embarked upon with the business plan was a 10 year. 10 year. And is that a reasonable estimate for the particular terrible irrigation system we're currently in? We would love to be able to do it quicker than that. But when we look at the numbers again, it just, it felt like it would be difficult to accelerate it. But we would do our best to try to accelerate it. I understand that you will comply with council direction, but we want to be reasonable too. So in the range from $1 to $5, does that have any significant impact on the 10 year plan reducing it to a five year plan or reducing it to? I would say that what the range does is instead of us coming back to you like every year for a dollar or a dollar, it puts us like three years into the plan if you were to go to the higher level so that cumulatively we might be saving, we might be generating a little bit more revenue now rather than later. But it's still gonna take us eight to 10 years to fully save up the amount of money needed for that irrigation system. Okay. And I think I sent you a request for a history of the fee increases over time. And I was fairly vague about what I wanted. It was okay, for example, to tell me how long we've had the $40 rate for the adult 18 round. You know, has it been $40 forever? Has it was it $20 only two years ago? And I never got a back of response but I wonder, I got a different response back. I did not recall receiving that request from you, Julie, so I apologize. Okay, do we have a clue now? Can we guess, has it been $40 for 10 years? Was it $40 for 10 years? I think we just raised it in 2014. From... There've been two increases the last couple of years. Pretty sure it was in a report. One was not specific dollar-wise in the report but it was five percent and then a nine percent increase. We could get you that information. We would just take a little staff time to show you some of the history of the rates. But it's there. Is this coming back to us or is this it today? Is it? This is it. Okay, don't waste your time. Can I keep my hopes up? Yes. Don't waste your time unless it's coming back. I have two other questions. One of them is a follow-up on the annual pass. I found the letter compelling from the gentleman who wrote about the annual pass and the rolling 12 months. Is the pass like an annual pass? You can play all you want for 12 months or does it have like tear off? You get... No, you play all you want during the calendar year for that fee. So there is a significant difference in benefit if you buy it halfway through the year than if you buy it in January? Yes, because you have six months instead of 12. Right. And do we prorate the... No, we do not. We do not. And you can come to us sometime in the future to talk about payment plans if we need to get there. That's correct. I'm hearing that there are bargain hunters among our golfers. Absolutely. And because we can drop the fee rate down, we've given the power to the operator to drop the fee down if the course isn't being used. We could go to the higher levels on the fees for the people who aren't caring what the fees are. Is that a misjudgment of what we're being told about how the fees work? Because it sounds like there's... People who don't care and they come when they want and they'll pay what it costs. And there's a bargain hunters who are gonna get a discounted rate anyway. I mean, one of them said $11 on that. Well, not everyone's gonna get a discount. Okay. So part of the flexibility in filling slow times, yes. But if we don't need to discount, we don't. If we have enough players, we don't offer the discounts. The idea behind the discounts is to pretty much meet industry standards and stay competitive with the other courses in the area and to recognize if there are those slow times that we need to incentivize. I guess I'm trying to understand if there really is an impact on players, if they can get a discount to below whatever the current rate is anyway. Yeah. And did you look at it in terms of seniors are less likely or more likely to use a discount or juniors are more likely or less likely to look at a discount? And so we could adjust the cost across the different categories or is it just across the board? Everybody pays a dollar more. No, again, we're offering you options and that range in every single category because we understood that the council really wanted flexibility. The way we're presenting it tonight is one, two, three, four, five, but you could absolutely pick and choose. If we knew how. Okay. And what I'm hearing is we don't have the data on young adults are the ones that are getting the coupons or seniors are the ones that are getting the coupons. So. Can you have adults on who? Generally speaking, it's, I'm not sure what your definition of young adults, but the 20 to 40 year old range, you know, the seniors are to receive a pretty good decent discount. So they're not generally, maybe on the weekends they might, where they're not eligible for a senior discount at Bennett Valley, but primarily it's the, I don't know what you, the terminology is, but 20 to 45 year old is where most of our discounts takers are coming from, I think that demographics. So adults. Adults and on the, and the discounts that people are really looking for are during prime time, you know, the prime time weekend. That's what people are hoping to, you know, either go to golf now and snag a $11 rate instead of. Because if we accidentally make it too high on times adults are using the coupons, since they're using the coupons, we haven't made it too high because they're getting the significant discount anyway. When the, when you go look and say, well, we have slots available, you can still fill them. You understand what I'm thinking? Is that, have I said it somewhat clearly? You'll be filling them anyway because you're using the discounts to fill the, to fill the course. Right. In a manner of speaking, yes. Okay, if we could figure it out, we could do it. And I have one other sort of comment and then I'm done. The bus goes to Bethards. It doesn't go to the course or to the park or to the soccer fields or to Galvin in any way. You have to walk from the bus stop to the course entrance and it's fenced off. So you have to go all the way down around and in and through and on the street. There actually isn't a sidewalk from the entrance to the, you have to go through the parking lot. Can somebody look at whether or not that's affecting the use of that park and whether or not we need to have the bus get there. I mean that, for me, that might affect junior players who aren't driving. So, thank you. Thank you, Ms. Jones. Mr. Baisaki. Good evening. I'll be brief. Dry, I didn't see any mention of driving range revenues. Are those significant at all? They're significant. We don't set the fees for those the operator sets the fees for the range per the contract. But they're part of the budget. And so in every case, we're hoping we hit those revenue targets in whether the city is setting the rate in the case of the greens fees or if the operator is setting the rates in the case of the range. Is it fair to say that those fees are similar to in comparison to the other courses in their driving ranges? I'll let Bob answer that. For the most part they are. When you consider any so-called range cards available, bonus word that Ben and Valerie offer four different cards where you'll spend $45 and to sort of player reward type thing and they get $50 in balls. They spend 80 bucks to get 100, 150 to get 200 and so on. Some of the price per ball does average out within about a penny or two per bucket for most of facilities. Okay, so it's relatively insignificant difference. I note in the contract that the minimal service levels and expectations for this golf course are comparable to Windsor Rooster Run and Oakmont. And that is, I would assume is because the courses are roughly similar. Yes. That's when I go and I appreciate that because that's what jumps out. And if I go to the presentation then and go to page seven and you'll have to back up maybe two or three or four and you have the golf fee comparison chart. If you look at those courses, we're quite a bit below the non-residents. So it just makes me wonder where we're gonna lose our players as a business consultant. That's what I would look at. So I'm skeptical of the loss. I know we'll probably lose some. But if that's our competition, Windsor for a non-resident on the weekend, $56. Rooster Run, non-resident weekend, $58. Oakmont, non-resident on the weekend, $54. We're still at least $9 under. So I know that was a comment, but I thank you for your time. Hopefully we can resolve this and move on. Thank you, Mr. Wesselski. Mr. Oliver. Thank you. And to your point, Councilman Wesselski, I haven't been there lately, but I also understand that Fox Hill South is not exactly a desirable place either. It's very low, but I think it's for a reason. Although it's supposed to be just the dog of the whole area. Right, exactly, yeah. So I almost kind of wanted to discount that as part of a comparison. Part of my question was answered. I think the last time we were here, we talked, there was three areas that we wanted covered. One was the options and you've covered that the comparisons and then the other was the outreach. So public hearing, we talked about notice to players what was done as far as outreach to notify players about tonight's public hearing. Yes, we were sure that we had that posted at the course. The fees posted prominently at the course and the notice, the public notice. Okay, and there was no other, I think somebody mentioned survey. There was no focus groups or any other efforts to get some feedback from players as far as the fee increases. We did not do a formal survey on, I guess, price sensitivity. Okay, thank you. Council, I'd like to open up the public hearing if I can now, if you're, okay, let's show some questions, burning questions. Ms. Carlson. Just one final, if we don't adopt any fee increases tonight, what happens? We continue with the existing greens rates. Earlier you referenced a $30,000 budget deficit. What, can you walk through for me what the consequences of that are? As far as this year's operating results would be, we are estimating that we won't meet the revenue projection by about $30,000. And so it affects the bottom line of our operation, less money into the golf fund. And I would suspect that it affects the savings plans primarily for the capital improvements which we want to implement at the course. So whereas we have, this year as an example, we said we would save $230,000 for the irrigation system and we'd spend $60,000 on the fairways and we would perhaps maintain the buildings. I think it was $80,000, those kinds of things. So we would anticipate that our savings goal is what would be affected. There's a possibility that we will have less expenses in other areas of the budget which could help us. But overall, it's really just as simple as just not meeting the revenue goal. Okay, thank you. Okay, council, I'm gonna open up the public hearing. Thank you for your questions at this point. You don't have to fill out a card to speak this evening during this public hearing, but I will recognize the card holders first and that would be Mr. Farron. Thank you, Mayor and members of the council. I'm Gregory Farron. I'm also a member of the Bennett Valley Golf Club and I'm treasurer of the Bennett Valley Golf Club. Though I'm not speaking for the club tonight, we did not have a large discussion of this, but several of us have been participating in the hearing process, the Board of Community Services recommendation and providing a lot of information. I wanna bring your attention to three specific things. One of the charts you saw showed a decrease over time in the 18 hole and an increase in the nine hole. I just wanna bring that to your attention. We are playing shorter, we are savvy shoppers, we are looking for the best deal that we can get. And the other thing I wanna point out is, all of those one, two, three, four, five dollar increases are across the board. And many of us believe that whatever you adopt, whether it's $1 or $2 or $3 or $4, we don't think three, four, or five are very useful because if you look at the dollars you're gonna be making at three, four, and five, it drops off. You're getting fewer people playing. One is 51,000 rounds, two is also 51, which we kinda doubt. Three goes to 49, four goes to 46, five goes to 46. You're dropping off, we're bailing out and we're not playing as much. That's not in anyone's interest. So the higher you raise the fees, you lose golfers, we lose rounds, everybody loses. We think you ought to come up with a strategy that is a fee raised for the 18, half of it for nine, none of it for juniors. I mean, if you're looking at this, you know, it is a business, but it's a life and we would like you to encourage people to play. So it makes sense to us that the weakest, least capable players, the ones you wanna encourage the most who are the youngest, why are you trying to ask more money from them? I'll give you an example, your $1 fee raises $38,000, covers your $30,000 deficit. Wipe out the juniors and you lose 2,500 bucks. It's not a big deal. Same thing with all the rest. Going to two, you raise $90,000. More than enough to do it. If you get to two, promise me it'll be two for the 18, one for the nine and zero for juniors. I mean, you can do that. You have the flexibility. It's not very hard to comprehend and you can give staff that direction. But don't do this across the board. Everybody pays the same. That's not fair. Fair golf is what we're asking you to help us get to and keep us there. So don't make it so hard. Those are not comparable courses. Everybody has their own favorite course. Everybody goes to what they care about. Everybody goes to the ones that have good benefits. And if you lose people, you lose money more than Greens fees. You lose lessons. You lose, you know, lots of things that we, we don't go to engines. If we don't show up there. So think of the whole of it. Thank you. Thanks, Mr. Byrne. Would anyone else like to approach the council on this item this evening? Seeing no one rise. Close public hearing. Bring it back to the council. So council, comments. Ms. Rolaveras. Quick question. He just referenced juniors, nine hole and twilight. Is that listed here as far as the increases, the options that we have? There's a schedule in response to council member Waisaki's request. They were given a range. So you don't have to do across the board on all of them. If you wanted to pick and choose which ones you wish to increase or increase them in different amounts, you have the discretion to do that. Right. Yeah. Because we have seniors listed on the comparison chart, but not juniors, nine hole and twilight. So I guess the question is, is that included in the five options, the increase? I'm not sure I'm understanding your question. There's the junior rate, 18 and nine hole. Okay. So it is on the proposed to go up as well. Okay. Good. So as far as comments, and I think there was some disappointed last time about the turnout. And I'm disappointed about the turnout tonight and even responses. I mean, we have very little correspondence from the users, disappointed that we didn't reach out to the users. I think there's plenty of opportunities there. Not necessarily a formal survey. It could be a simple focus group, spot checks, talking about it. At this point, I'm inclined to suggest the $3 increase. And, but I would also consider some leeway with a senior piece of it. Just looking at the figures here with some of the increases with the $3, it still keeps us competitive. And we're talking about a rack rate. We cannot fit this count rate. So it's a starting point. There's different variables as far as what causes I'm not an avid golfer or something, but I assume there's different variables that would cause somebody to choose a course. It's their preference. People have their favorites. It's the location, proximity to their residence. It's maybe looking for a different challenge down then and trying a different course out. The level of service, their loyalties to a certain golf course, the condition of the course. But the only one that is probably consistent would be the weather, which would impact whether or not you're gonna go out and play, whether they allow you to play. But it concerns me that it seems like we've made a lot of assumptions about what's gonna happen with the increases that people are gonna start dropping off based on what, based on, it sounds like a group discussion, but not including the actual players that say, what point are you gonna drop off? So that really concerns me. And if it was noticed properly, they know that the ranges that we're considering to raise it up to $5, I think if that was a really significant impact on somebody, they would be outraged and they would be here or they'd send in some correspondence, they'd look, five bucks is too much. I'll go to, I'll go a buck, whatever. But I'm missing that piece of it for me. So at this point, I mean, I'm throwing out there the $3 increase and I would consider some other options for some of the other groups, whether it's youth or seniors. Thank you. How about we just go down the line and this might make it easier, certainly easier for me. Thank you. Mr. Winsocki. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Thank you staff for the presentation. I do, I did look at all the individual options and one of the speakers noted that we start to drop off after $2. The total revenue on the $5 increase is the largest. So that, just to correct that statement. His point was well taken to this councilman about the juniors. I can see that you don't really wanna hit them, because they are an insignificant, very insignificant amount of increase. However, I'm a little reluctant to give them weekend time, because that's prime time. So certainly on the weekdays for the juniors, I can see keeping it where it's at to keep, to bring them along. Just going right to the bottom line, I see $42 brings in 1.439 million, $45 brings in 1.467 million. As was stated earlier, the general fund subsidizing this course for a variety of reasons, not necessarily the golfers fall, we've been through that many, many times. I would be in favor of an immediate $2 or $3 increase. This year, next year go to $45 and give an allowance for juniors during the week. Yeah, that's some to entice them to come back. That's a point very well taken. I just am very uncomfortable running deficits for this operation when the city has so many other needs. And especially when you compare it. And then to add on, just to finish my point, Windsor, Rooster, Run and Oakmont were way underpriced. We just are. That the slide shows it. So that's where I'm at. Thank you, Mr. Wiseauke. Before I move down the line any further, just wanted to double check with Mr. Oliveris. You mentioned three, at least at this point, also no junior increase. No, I'm open to having a discussion about some of the other considerations. Okay, thank you very much. Ms. Combs. Thank you. I appreciate the staff's work on this and giving us the flexibility. I too hear the statements from our person from making public comments and agree with council member Oliveris that three across the board is the reasonable one, except. I would suggest that on weekdays, we consider seniors, juniors and nine-holes with only the dollar. And I note that a number of the other courses had weekend non-resident 18-hole rates that were $910 higher than ours. So it would seem to me that for the weekend non-resident adult 18-hole rate, we could consider going to five. We do not have a non-resident rate. So we have a $40 rate for weekend adults. Correct. And we included that as the weekend non-resident rate when we were doing the comparison. Right, we, since we do not have a non-resident rate, it's this, our rate would be the same resident or non-resident and that's how we showed it on those charts. We still showed you where. I saw that there were. It was like 40 all the way across, but I didn't quite process that that meant no non-resident rates. Is there a difficulty in separating our residents and non-residents that made us not do non-resident rates? The council, we used to have that and the council changed that about, I think, two years ago. Okay, well I'd love to hear what other people say. To answer your question, we were told it was difficult to track, as my recollection, for residents and others. The other courses do it, but we have trouble doing it. Okay. Right, there was, there was a potential abuses of it. So it just made more sense just to have a flat rate on both. Okay. It just seems like weekend adults are probably either, if they're cost conscious, they're checking the coupons. And if they're not cost conscious, we should be charging closer to what other courses are charging. So before we move on, just so I can track this, could you encapsulate your recommendation so we can discuss it after I've gone down the line? Okay, and again, I'm feeling just really flexible. This is on the fly, just like everybody else's. I'm not married to this. Okay. Agreeing with council member Oliveris, $3 is a mark to hit because it helps us pay for the coming needs for the course. But I also have sympathy with seniors who are on fixed incomes. So would want senior, anything that says senior on here to go a dollar. Okay. Anything that said junior on here to go a dollar. Okay. And nine whole weekdays maybe go to a dollar. Okay. And then I was trying to figure out a way for weekend 18 whole adult players to pay a little extra, like five. So you'd moved to five for a weekend across the board other than- 18 adults. Okay. 18 whole. 18 holes and adults. Yeah. Because they're the ones who can find coupons. Okay. I got that. And we're already doing nine or $10 less anyway. Okay. Thank you. And again, I want to be clear that I'm motivated by making up the 30K shortfall and not taking additional funds from other programs that we're going to be seeing in the future and increasing the savings we have so that irrigation system can be fixed before it breaks. So thank you. Appreciate that. Thank you. Ms. Carlstrom. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I don't support any fee increase. Just like I didn't last time. I think we heard tonight that the target audience is changing their bargain hunting and I know the course needs to remain competitive. We need to maintain the infrastructure that's been built there. We need to maintain it as an asset. I am reluctant to diminish the value perceived or otherwise in our green speeds until I see more out of the box approaches to how to reach that revenue gap for youth golf leagues addressing the junior issue. Are we getting the schools on board? What's the revenue from other events? Weddings, how are we marketing that? And then I may be willing to consider, but right now nothing. Okay, thank you. And Mr. Schwadau. Thank you, Mayor. I too, it's a little frustrating. I'm a data kind of guy and there's not a whole lot of data. There's anecdotal data and no disrespect to you, Bob. I know you have your pulse on the local golf scene but I really wish I knew what that price point was. If we had some data and some analysis about supply and demand, that gives us some, cause I'm not sure what consequences three would be. And so for those reasons, and again I'm not 100% in concrete on this, but I agree, I don't think we should be increasing any junior fees, cause again across the board percentage why is that from a $6 to a $7 heck of a lot more from 22 to 23 and the rest a buck. And then what I would like to see is a five year plan about how we're gonna meet some of our revenue and operation expenses. And little check ins maybe on an annual basis if rounds go up to pre 2008 levels or whatever, then maybe it warrants automatic kick in for another buck. But let's have a longer term strategy because my biggest fear if we go too much, we're gonna lose the golfers and we're not gonna get them back. And we'll be having similar discussions about other impacts that these same golfers have about the other rounds and the other facilities out there. Okay, thank you. So just so I can recap, you're if you could increase, but now with lacking the data, you would be in favor of a three accept? No, it would be no increase to the junior fees and a $1 increase to the rest. To the rest, okay, across the board. Okay, except for the juniors, got it. Okay, well, I have to admit I'm also frustrated by the need for one reason or another to have as much guesswork. I do trust Bob's intuition about rates and fees. I've heard for years that we are undercharging. So I'd like to be able to address that piece by some increase in fees. Totally go with the no junior increase. I mean, showing what that increase gives, it looks like it's, let's cut them some slack. I'm less concerned about the seniors being able to absorb two. I was going for two actually, and because I saw this drop off in the numbers that were provided to us, it's very difficult for a municipal course to be as nimble as the private golf courses. And I understand that I would very much, as far as their fee structure, almost anything, they can change at a heartbeat and we have to go through a public hearing process. So I mean, they don't have to do that. They can say, well, change in the rates. Next week done, bingo. And we can't, and we know why. But I think that I would like to see after we go through this process, some more analysis about how creative we might be able to become. Whether that be, that's a technology issue, increase our technology. I mean, the original reason for not going for the residential rate partially was there was abuse. There were abuses and someone said, well, all you have to do is ask them for their driver's license. And how do you abuse that? If it doesn't say Santa Rosa, you don't get the rate. So I'm not, I don't know, and that decision was made a while ago and I'm sure it was the right thing to do at the time. But I would like to see, it would have been great to have more public input. I don't know, Mr. Farron mentioned the Board of Community Services. I'm not sure how much input was provided in that venue. Sounds like not all that much. So it is disappointing. We're shooting in the dark a little bit here. I would, I'm hearing, I'm not even sure how we're gonna go forward because we have, we're, you know, we actually, I would, like I said before, I was more moving toward the $3 rate or a $2, I'm sorry. But I'm not hearing anyone, Mr. Waisaki mentioned two to three. I'm hearing three as a more comfortable rate and no increase in the juniors. The dollar for the seniors and dollar on weekends or the $5 rate for 18 plus on the weekends, I think I get, I get concerned about confusion and difficulty in managing it and it sounds simple, but I would, I can go forward tonight and I'll try to cobble something together here so that you can get your rate increase or the fee increase and try to mitigate this $30,000 deficit which makes me very uncomfortable. But I would love to be able to find a vehicle to do some creative analysis of where we might, since we're, we know that we can change anything we want. We've just done it with the junior and it came from, you know, a recommendation from the public saying, look at this minimal impact by changing that, by keeping the juniors insulated from this rate increase. It's that kind of input I think that we need in the future to make adjustments as we move forward. But we do have a lot of work to do on the course and lots of things to pay for. We, and I know that we need to remain competitive but we don't wanna be giving it away. So I look forward to future conversations about this ability to set these rates. Mr. Waisaki. Ken. Oh. My mind, I was gonna go, you know, I originally was wanted to because I was concerned about this drop off given the data that we were provided. I would be willing to move to three without, with no junior increase, but keeping it simple at a $3 across the board increase except for juniors. May I craft a motion to see if it goes. Based on what I've heard, I'd like to move that we raise green fees $2 immediately with the exception of juniors on the weekday. Two for this year, then effective January 1, 2016. We raise another $3, Q1 through the five. Across the board. With still exempting juniors on weekdays. I think that's a very good point. It's minuscule. Your recommendation is March 1st. They would be implemented. Okay, that's fine. Thank you. To 45 or three more. Correct. And I will also exempt. Thank you seniors on weekdays from either of those. Reluctantly. And you've got the sheet open here. What is the senior effect? If you will. On weekdays? Just like the juniors where it was, it did not change things that much. What happens with the seniors? Weekday senior 18 whole. I have a, oh boy. It goes up. It's a $13,000 increase on $3. Would you consider, I mean, $13,000. Would you consider holding the seniors at a dollar? Or were you exempting seniors all together? I wasn't clear. I would hold this. I could go with that. I'm flexible with seniors, sure. Okay. I would hold seniors to a dollar. $2 starting March 1st. Exempting juniors. Seniors, a one starting March 1st. A senior increase in seniors of $1. Is this throughout no week, nothing changing on the weekends? Or is this? Okay. Is it weekends only? Weekdays only. Weekdays only. Weekends is, it would be for juniors and seniors, weekdays. The only exemptions, let me restate. Let me try it again. Effective March 1st, rates go up $2 across the board with the exceptions of juniors on weekdays who will have no increase. Seniors who will go up $1 on weekdays. Effective January 1st, $3 across the board with the exemption of juniors on weekdays. And seniors only another dollar increase. That would be my motion. Okay. Just to be clear, that's an additional $3, not going from $2 to $3. That is correct. That's correct. Thank you. Mr. Oliveris. Thank you. I would support starting someplace we have a deficit to deal with, but I have to agree with Councilmember Schoenhelm that if we need some real analysis of where we're heading with this, and yeah, I think we need to re-look at this again as far as an additional increase, but I think we're almost guessing here. I think we need to do something now, but take the time to do some proper analysis with the Councilmember Schoenhelm that was speaking to it's, it needs to mean something. We need to have it based on some really good data we can get the data. And I don't know how to do that. If I may respond, I understand the need for data, but throughout my careers as CPA businesses, they take risks and there's the unknown. To me, the best data appears the rate comparison with the other courses. We're a huge value right now and we have huge needs for this course. What scares me is the irrigation coming down the road. And we have to start building a preserve. So can I ask a clarifying question? I think one of the challenges I'm looking at is it was identified in the conversation that the private sector courses are nimble, fleet of foot, they can take risks, they can do experimentation to respond to the current market forces that are underway. One of the challenges I think we're wrestling with is a point of fact that we are not that nimble. We can't, responsiveness is subjective. You would sit down with a focus group and they might very well tell you, if you do any increase, I'm not coming back to the course. I'm not gonna say that that's what the valuation will be. What we could do is hire a third party consultant to do the review. I think one of the things is this is falling back into the lap of staff, which is not necessarily fully equipped all the time to do some of these discreet analysis compositions. But I will say that on the flip side of this is the fact that in the private sector when you're dealing with this to jump on council member Weisaki's page is the nimbleness and the ability to experiment in these environments to understand what's going on is one of the things that those courses would have in this conversation. So if it would help to get to a conversation, I could explore with staff what it would cost to bring in to help do some kind of third party analysis working with our contract holder to understand some of the variables that you're looking for more definition about. That would cost some resource, but I think we could then maybe bring back some data. I'm not promising that, but we maybe could bring back some data to do the next year forecast. Would that add some level of comfort to this process that we're underway with right now? Mr. City Manager, have you seen the third party analysis that were done by Ceres and there were two third party analysis already given for this course? Well, we would review that. But what I'm saying is an option is is that you could take an immediate stab. We could take a deeper dive on this front and look to see if there's a way to get some of the data sets that you seem to be asking us on about future projections, not necessarily what we're doing right now, but future projections. One other clarifying point too, and I appreciate that. The ability to discount, that's remaining unchanged here. So if these are way out of whack, correct what's gonna happen. Correct. Correct. It's leveled out by the discounting process. I don't wanna see staff, and Bob, how many times have you been here in the last 18 months? Probably too many. Exactly. I don't know the numbers way too many. But I'd rather see him concentrate on the golf course, quite frankly. And I just, to me, the data set is what's it cost for the comparable measures, levels of service, we have that. Let's go. That's what I would say. Can I second your motion? Okay. Can I just ask one question? What are you proposing to do about the weekend rates for seniors and juniors? Cause your previous motion was only for the weekday play. They don't get the exception to the increases. Okay, so those would be increased to the $2. Correct, I consider weekends prime time. For both, everybody. Okay, Ms. Carlstrom. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I wanna thank the city manager for trying to help us with the creative solution. The problem I'm encountering is we're attempting to run a business from a dais. I may be alone in this, but I vehemently oppose the expenditure of more city revenue on a consultant to study the golf course. I would suggest, though, that we have at least one representative of the affected constituency group in the person of Greg Feren, who frequently loves to get involved with city stuff and has a lot of good ideas. So if we can tap into the golf, what'd you call yourself? The golf club. So Greg, could you circulate a survey or send out a flyer, a doodle pole, something to figure out where people sense, I mean, there's resources. And, you know, Sean, I appreciate that as a solution, but I don't want any more money thrown at this. Thank you, Ms. Carlstrom. So I'm ready to move forward with what's been presented. I am a little uncomfortable with having an automatic increase without more discussion on January 1st. I can see the need, but it does concern me, we get more revenue, but that $5 number just makes me a little uncomfortable. I think we need to stay competitive, but that $5 just at the top of the range starts to make me squirm a little bit. Bob, did you have something you wanted to say? Yes. Thank you, Mayor. You said the keyword is revenue, and what I'm looking for is the same thing as the city is to maximize the overall revenue. The focus tonight is on the Greensfield revenue. As we go up in numbers, and we didn't do a formal written or mailed out survey, but we did speak with the golfers that came out the last three or four weeks since the last meeting or however long it's been, getting the pole as to what sort of increase they might handle without choosing to play elsewhere on occasion, which is how we came up with the numbers. And I do have another schedule, I guess you'd call it, which is similar to which a couple of members have suggested were a $2 increase for the 18-hole Greens fees, $2 increase for the midday in the twilight, and then a dollar for the nine holes, and the remainder of the fees. And that amounted to 1.439, well in excess of, let's see here. Bob, what were those numbers based on? Did you do a, did you say you did a survey, a pole in the 21-hole? Fertile, as our customers came through the door. We started asking people. I mean, I'm not there 24 hours a day, I'm here, but I asked our staff just to take an informal poll. I mean, how much would it take for them to start playing another golf course? So we do have some data. Exactly, I mean, yeah. We have people who said we would maybe go somewhere else if you, I mean, when you ask somebody, will you pay $2? They might not respond happily, but they might continue to come back. There's a difference between what somebody will tell you when you're thinking of raising a fee and what they will actually do. So I'm not sure what we have. If I could also add that we did increase this council in December, the annual passes by 10%. That's equivalent to a $4 increase for this rate. Can I add a couple more things, please? Mayor, you mentioned the key word is revenue and the city receives the same percentage, whether or not the revenue comes from greens fees, range balls, all rentals, and cart rentals, and equipment rentals, I should say. And you receive the same percentage, not that I pay you, but the same percentage from the hot dogs and the coax and the beer you sell. It's important, I mean, I'm in it for, I want to make as much money as I possibly can, and I want the city to make as much as they can. So what I'm suggesting, I mean, it's not like I picked these things out of the top of my head or top of my hat or whatever you want to call it. And I don't want to lose golfers to other facilities, because they're taking their money elsewhere, and they're harder to get back once they leave. I have about 33, 34% of our golfers ride a golf cart, they rent a golf cart. The city gets 18% of that fee. And so in our figure, if you're losing players, you're losing that additional revenue. And I just, you know, prior to this new agreement, yeah, I had no vested interest in how much the green's fees were. I wanted it, and I still do, I want as many people out there as possible so I can rent my carts, so I can sell range balls, so the restaurant can sell more hot dogs or whatever it is, okay? That hasn't changed. And I'm just afraid if you go to where, you know, the four or five dollar increase, that we're gonna lose players, and it's a projection, I don't care if you do a formal poll, that doesn't mean, and you mentioned it, a council member of Combs, that it doesn't mean that's what's gonna happen. You know, golfers, you do the poll, and you say how much is gonna, if I'm taking that poll, and they ask me how much is gonna take to, that caused me to move to the golf course. I'm gonna say a dollar. I'll say two dollars. I don't want an increase, you know? So I don't know if there's confusion. I know you're all very intelligent, way smarter than I am, but not in the golf business, you know, and you have to trust me. You've trusted me for 30 some years to be a part of the golf course, and I'm trying to do what I think is best for the golf course, which in terms of City Santa Rosa, and I'm trying to make a living and pay my employees. So what's your recommendation? My recommendation, okay, I have it here in writing. It was one of the initial recommendations we had that wasn't presented in this, because we didn't think you wanted that, was a combination. Was a two dollar increase on all the 18 whole fees, excluding the juniors, okay? A two dollar increase on the midday, and the twilight pricing. One dollar increase on the nine whole fees, okay? And then I think it was one dollar on the juniors, which is just because of one dollar. We could take that out. Your microphone, your microphone's gone. Did you do a calculation on what that resulted in? We have in our presentation, if we did a one dollar across the board, is there a calculation for? For the two dollars, like I said, on the 18 holes, two dollars on the twilight and the midday rates, a dollar on the nine whole greens fees, and a dollar on the juniors was going to, based on projections of not losing any players, which was real key for me, and for the city of Santa Rosa, for the golf course, to continue to make budget was 1.421 and $140. Bob, could you put that on the overhead so the public can see the numbers you're referencing? I give someone to show me how, sure. Thank you. Just to get the totals, there we go. It's kind of dark. 1.421, 1.40. 221. Council? Here's the recommendation from the man who does it every day. Mayor, I mean, I'm supportive of this, and I'm guessing this is just for one year? Yes, it is. And one of the recommendations from Sirius, the review that was done a little over a year ago, a couple year and a half ago, I guess it was, was that they understood the position that we're in, as far as having to go through what we do to set rates, but they, I think the words were, he said it was ridiculous to set the rates six months out, let alone a year ahead. I don't think you can set a schedule now for next year until you get well into this year and see what you're gonna need or not need. I think that's part of it also. So. Yes, we just this year, and then next year review, which is very typical in the golf businesses, you review annually based upon what you've done and what you need to do, and you go from there. It's not necessarily set for one year period. Those fees would remain until you change them. But if the staff came back on an annual basis, obviously they'd change if you elected to change. Would this be, would this be part of the proposal that you would be coming back on an annual basis then for fees? Does that. Then I'm not sure of the only reason we've come back in the past, though, than the issues we've dealt with a couple years ago, was when we're looking, if we're looking for an increase. I mean, it may not be next year. Right, you know, anytime that we have modified the fees, we've come back to council and it's been, I think we had in the staff report in 2013 they were raised, in 2014 they were raised. So it's been sort of an annual pattern. And so it's the intent to review with this business plan, every year we look at our milestones, we see if we've met our goals and then do we need, and we could evaluate how many players are coming or not. I'm in agreement with Bob that it, and you know, you've experienced this tonight. It's really hard to predict the future. It's very hard to predict the future. Our customers are loyal, but they're also gonna look for a good deal and a good rate. And so I'm with Bob, we wanna keep them there because it's not just the greens fees that they might spend money on and enhance our revenue. There's the restaurant, all those other things. So participation is important to us. Thank you for that, Ms. Combs. So I'm just trying to understand the impact of the general fund because for me, that's really where we are. And we have, if we do the plan just presented to us, I think we're okay with the 30,000 shortfall. Is that correct? Yes, we believe that the adjustment in greens fees give us the ability to meet our budgeted revenue for this year. Okay, but we're still subsidizing the golf course. That is correct. And we subsidize the golf course to the tune of what? I'm remembering 400,000. 471,000, and that is debt. Right. So the general fund subsidy is directed towards the repayment of the bonds. Right. And the repayment of the park development loan. Okay. And neither of those include the savings account. Well, they include a little bit of the savings account for the new irrigation system that's coming. The debt payments. No, the debt payments don't have anything to do with it. I'm just adding things up in my head. We've got a 30,000. We've got saving up for irrigation system. And we have with the golf course, 400,000. So I'm very sympathetic, but I'm having trouble looking at a $2 increase because it doesn't help us offset much of the costs. If I may follow, because I am while you're pondering. Don't we, I'm sorry, don't you Bob, don't you have the ability to discount now if you've got plenty of open play? Yes. So what we're giving you really is a ceiling. We're not giving you an absolute. If it turns out that play really falls off, sharp businessman that you are, you've been out there, you're gonna say, well, I'll give you back to the other rate because you would retain that customer. If you'd like to give me that or continue to give me that, I mean, I personally, as a businessman, I want to keep everybody there that we have. And I'm also looking out for the golfers a little bit, to be honest with you. I mean, as you increase in green fees, you look at our agreement, I mean, I'm getting 82% of that. And the city's getting 18%. So yeah, I'd say, you know, raising 10 bucks. But no, but that's what my point was. Yeah, we can get it down to sure. If you want me to, that's how our approach is in the past because Bennett Valley, the number one, not the number one reason, but a big part of why we are the number one played golf course or amongst the highest played in Northern California is we're the best value. It doesn't mean the cheapest, but the best value. And as our prices go up, our value is reduced a little bit because golfers are gonna go, as we get closer and closer to Windsor prices or specifically Windsor, our rooster run is that, you know, for somebody and they're both very good golf courses, he comparable, if not, maybe depends on who you talk to, maybe a little better golf course, but, and they might want to play a little faster around and we've done a good job in managing our pace of play. We're now, I mean, it's under five hours regularly. Greg Farnold testified, or testified, whatever you want to call it to the other, our Benz Club events on the weekends are now at four and a half to 445 and four and a half is a very nice pace of play. Yet some people consider that slow and they'll choose to pay a few, maybe a couple more dollars as we get closer and closer to the other facilities rate and go play Windsor. So, what I'm reading here is that Windsor weekend, non-residential is $56 and ours is 40. So we're talking about $16. We're not talking about one or two here, but we're only talking about whether we're raising $2 or $3 when there's 16 more and you can still provide discounts. So we're talking about a ceiling, not this. They're also providing discounts. That's their public rate. Yeah, if you approve, the council wants me to run the business similar to the other golf courses where we're having, we're putting ourselves in a position where we're having to offer discounts or in the past we never used to. And if that's what you want me to do, that's... So what you're saying is we, because of the way we function and our inability to be nimble to maintain the ridership, if you will, of our golf course, we need to be more, we need to be competitive plus. Not just competitive, but competitive plus. Otherwise, we will start to lose our edge and as we move closer to those published rates, it could be harder and harder to retain the customers that are players that because we're convenient and for all the reasons we know, they still come to Ben and Valley. But as we get closer to the other rates, we may be competitively price wise, but we also start to lose our, we could start to lose our edge. So being careful with these increases like have been presented tonight and I think these are very, what would appear to many to be conservative increases actually help us maintain our edge. Mr. Oliveris. Thanks, thank you, Mayor. I'm hoping we can move us along here. Pursuit. I don't know how it works, but I would make a motion supporting Bob's current proposal. There's already a motion on the floor. I understand we're procedural, right? So. Mr. Oliveris. So we need to, so we're, the first motion was Mr. Waisaki. Would you be willing to withdraw your motion? No, I want to call for the question. So you would vote on the first motion. If you want to make a second motion, you could put that out there, but you would vote on the first motion first. Right, so I made my motion then, so I guess I would ask for a second on my motion. Would you consider amending, I understand the desire to have a one year rather than a, I mean to have a now rather than a multi-year, would you consider? Well, I'm hearing that the rates that we set are set until we change them. It's not, there's not a deadline on it, but it sounds like there's more work that we would want to do. And it sounds like some of you are even inclined to include the club and having some discussions as well. Well, we need to start someplace. Would you consider a $3 increase on the 18 hole instead of two, and then accepting the two midday twilight and the one nine hole with nothing for the juniors because he's proposed a dollar for juniors? Okay, so you want to offset the. Well, I'll set the dollar for juniors by putting $3 on the 18 hole. Yes. Thank you. Okay, I would like to withdraw my second from the first motion. Okay. Do I hear second for Council Member Oliveris' motion? Mr. Mayor, I think I heard Council Member Waisaki call the question on the first motion before Council Member Cromes withdrew her second. He did indeed. So that vote needs to be taken. So we need to take that vote. So, oh, there is. I think you're too withdraw the second because he already called the question. Yeah, that's right. I can count. I'll just withdraw the motion. Thank you, Mr. Waisaki. So we have a motion on the floor and a second was the second. Mr. Schwedhelm, do we have a second? So my second was with what was presented by Mr. Borowitz. So I would second it as amended. Okay, and now we can have that discussion on that piece of it. On the amendment. Okay, so we have a second. So the details to figure out or to finalize these details. So let's be just clear. What the last thing that I heard that Council Member Olivares agreed to amend his motion in response to Council Member Cromes, $3 increase for 18 holes and $2 for Midway and Twilight, which is what Mr. Borow recommended, $1. And exempting any increase for juniors or increase? I'm not in favor of going up on the juniors. Okay, so no increase for juniors. Yes, yes. Right. Weekends as well. Weekends as well. That's Mr. Borowitz's recommendation. Ms. Yes. That was doing with the juniors, correct? Yes. Right. Yes. Ms. Morrell-Strum first. Mr. Mayer, thank you. Could we provide direction to our operator who has adroitly pointed out that he has been doing this for 30 years and I've only barely been alive for 30 years. Could we not provide direction that establish a new fee schedule up to $3 additional with no increase to juniors being given consideration and let him figure out the details? No, because in the agreement, the city council sets the green's fees. And by law, the city has to set those. Down to the dollar. Yes. Ergo, our lack of nimbleness. However, we do allow him to discount. Yes. So he has to discount. So I have a motion and a second on the floor. Is everyone clear on the motion? Yeah, and I don't know if there was a comment on that or discussion, but yes. I think that... I ask a real quick question of the gentleman representing Benavelli Golf Club. Are you okay with what we have? Do you have? Okay. Okay, thank you. I just wanted to confirm we were still okay with the representative of the club who's here. Thank you. And I'm willing to go for that three. Yeah, can I call the question? That's it. Thank you. Your votes, please. And I have four yeses and two noes. Council members, Carlstrom and Waisake voting no. Thank you, Council. Thank you, staff. We need, I'm sorry, we need a vote on the play card, if you would, please. Can you clarify that? Yes. The play card was a new product, which we proposed gives people 10 plays and the range was between $330 and $370. It's a product that does not exist currently. And if memory serves, the Board of Community Services came back with a recommendation of $330? That's correct. And what would that make our single, how would that make a single round fit into the, if we divide that number by 10, we get 33? Right. And that, that's a significant difference. Can you use it at the $40 time? Right, exactly. So they're paying for 10 plays and it equates to $33. In advance. In advance, we get the money in advance. We get the money in advance. And Bob, does this sound, does this, I mean. And what was the range again? $330 to $370. It was a $50, I mean, excuse me, a $40. Yeah, and that was based upon the highest rate we had, which is the weekend rate of $40 and a very close, almost exactly a 20% discount. So as the, that rate went up to 43, and they have a calculator council member, why soccer configured this head, whatever, you know, an $8. So I'd have to go up to $350 or $360. It wouldn't be a $330 based upon that $43 green fee. Would it be, thank you for the plug. I appreciate that, but would it be a fair something to say this is another discount that will increase the reliance on the general fund? Yes. Player loyalty. So the 20%, excuse me, the 20% discount, what is the, so we can set this, if that's what you were going for, the 20% discount. Right. Yeah, so that's how it's figured. So it did $43, what's that, $8 off. They're about, so it'd be a $350 for 10 plays. I'd move $35 per player. I'd move $350 on that. Okay. And just to be clear, we're moving the resolution with the proposed fees as outlined. Yes. Do I hear a second? Okay. The motion fails at this point for a second. So we needed some discussion, but before we discuss, we need a motion. Well, just for, go ahead, Madam City Attorney. Council Member Schwedhelm had seconded. Did you second? Originally, was I incorrect about that? Not on this one, no. Okay. So, I need, is this gonna fail? Are we not gonna, these cards are not gonna go forward unless we hold those three? Someone throw another number out, because I'm happy to hear other numbers. This was a new product that was offered in response to the business plan and new and creative ideas of offering play, and products, someone who maybe wants to commit and get some discounts, but not at the annual pass level. And so the idea behind this was a 10-play card that people could purchase in our low seasons. I move offering the new 10-play card at $330. Was that the, that's three and 330. Do I hear a second? Mr. Waisaki. My comment is we're already offering discounts every day. Looking at the rates. So I'm not inclined to support the play card at all. Can I just ask, to this, I understand that the genesis of this, of the play card, in the scheme of things, and Bob, thanks for being here to help illuminate us on some of these questions. How important is the play card? It's brand new. I mean, it's just not a, well, not that it matters. It's not a deal breaker, as far as all this. I don't know. It's all projections or conjecture, whatever you want to call it, how much additional revenue. But it is an additional method of keeping players at Bennett Valley. You know, golf courses have not just play cards. Some of the facilities have what's called a player loyalty program, where you spend 150 bucks upfront and that entails you to discounts throughout the year. So this would be our version of a discount. And we might look into that player card down the road if this is successful. Okay, thank you. I just would really like to suggest the play card because it gives people an option for multiple play purchase when they can't buy the annual. So it makes it much more user friendly to folks who can't fork out a lot of money for the annual upfront. But I'm, since 330 failed and 350 failed, I'm willing to try the 370. So I would try the 370. Clarifying question. When you proposed the 330 to 370, what was your process to come up with that figure? It was based upon a high rate of a weekend rate of $40 and a 20%, reflecting a 20% per round discount. If you bought that card. So my answer, what would the figure be if you did the same methodology with the new figures but only gave it 10% discount? What would that figure be? 430 dollars minus 43, so 390 something. Yeah. So I would propose 390 given a 10% discount for the 10. So published. We published the 330 to the 370 rate, so you can't go above. You can certainly go below. 370. You can't go above 370. 370 was the highest I could offer. I could offer 370 then. Was that the motion? So motion is 370. I hear. I'll do a second. Second from Mr. Schwedhelm. Your votes, please. And I have five ayes and one no. Council member Waissaki voting no. Thank you, Council. I've never anticipated this time on the call, especially with one card. Staff, I want to thank you for your patience with us through the process and look forward to a more data-driven decision the next time. Okay. I need to find out where I'm on the agenda. It's gonna, we're just gonna follow along now with the rest of the agenda as it's written for the concept. We're gonna move to report items at this point. Mr. McLean. Item 13.1, report open data initiative. Eric McHenry, Chief Technology Officer presenting. Good morning, Mr. McHenry. Yes, thanks. Well, Mayor and members of the council, thank you for this chance to talk to you tonight about our open data initiative. We're pretty excited about it. I'm gonna go through it relatively quickly in the interest of time. We have a lot of topics behind this, but I wanna make sure that we have time for questions. So I'm gonna cover about six topics. First of all, what is open data? Why does it matter to the city? And more importantly, why does it matter to the public? We'll talk about the approach we're taking. Who else is involved? I'll give a little bit of a demo, although I'll probably just show some screenshots. And I wanna close on the issue of how do we link to other city information? You know, if you're a person with my job, we deal with information. And one of our jobs in IT information services is how do we make information available, not just to city staff internally, but also to our public. And information drives success of an organization. This started long time ago. Back six or so years ago, President Obama launched an open data initiative at the federal government level. You can read his words up there, but essentially he says that we're gonna work together with the federal government to ensure public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation and collaboration. It's all about openness. For the city of Santa Rosa, our goals when we started looking at this around two and a half years ago was how do we develop and promote a single data heavy web portal, right? Not the information that necessarily is on our current portal, SRCity.org, but a lot of information about data, employee data, crime data, Public Records Act request results, a lot of really rich and heavy data the public is starting to ask for now. So we decided to go down this path. And so paired with SRCity.org, we think we're gonna have a sort of a very rich and deep data set available, set of solutions for our residents who are focused on government data. And there's a lot of them. There's studies that show that the younger people in our community really want their data. They say, don't package it for me, give it to me and let me look at it and turn it and twist it and visualize it and make decisions and ask questions on my own. The last one I'm gonna talk about a little bit more and I've asked one of my counterparts here at the county, Mike Leibensmarger. He is the Systems and Programming Division Director at the county of Sonoma. We've been working more with the county of Sonoma to try to figure out, look, if we're gonna present solutions to the public, many of the public, they either live in the county, they may live in our city, they may live in our city borders, but they probably have interest in both the county government data and city data. And so we said, hey, can we do this in a way that we present a portal that's the same type of a portal the county is using and that potentially other cities in our region are using as well so that a resident, the public, doesn't have to learn two systems. And in fact, when the county launches, you'll be able to see that from one system, you'll be able to see city data and then right below it, you'll be able to see what we call federated or county data. I'll talk a little bit more about that. The timeline though, as I mentioned, it started a little over a year and a half ago in the winter of 2013. I was working with the existing CFO at the time. We were considering using open data concepts to better publicize our budget 2014, 2015. If you look at our budget book, we have an award winning budget book, but it's about an inch and a half thick. And our belief was that most of the residents would probably not spend the time to dive into the pages as much as we like. So we decided not to go forward with it in 2013. Starting in mid 2014, we started to talk with other cities. One of the leading cities, as some of you know, is the city of Palo Alto. I talked to my counterpart down there. They were moving ahead with their data initiative. But I think a real turning point came in the fall of 2014 when my counterpart at the county, John Hartwig, their CIO and I started talking and Mike, who's on his team, started talking with us and we said, look, let's do something together. And in fact, we've actually are trying to use some of the similar language. Their board of supervisors has been brief. They'll be going to the board shortly, shortly to launch their portal as well. And that really got a lot of steam going for us. And then of course, right now, you notice that we launched the open budget component, which is the first part of this just before the holidays. It was called budget.srcity.org and it was a way for people to easily and interactively navigate our city budget. And of course, now we're launching the big deal. Just stepping back a little bit, looking at where we came from. When I talked to some other cities about a year and a half ago, they said, you know, our city of Santa Rosa is actually in pretty good shape. We were much further ahead than most cities. We had over 20 data sets already. We didn't call them data sets at the time. We called them bits of data. They're on srcity.org. If you know where to look, you can find roughly 20 or more sets of information from salary information to salary plans to financial information. But the problem was it spread across srcity.org and I challenged anyone to find half of those data sets. And so we realized, look, let's figure out a way to get this together in one place. Let's make awareness of it once it's there. And also we wanna make sure that it's available for what we call visualization. I'll talk a little bit more about that. Basically data without visualization is useless in my opinion. So we decided to go toward this one, highly branded, highly visible portal. In fact, if you start to learn and pick up on open data platforms, most of them, the URL is data. Like data.sf.gov, data.alamitacounty.org, gov, data.srcity.org, and it's a variant of that for the county as well. And so we picked a name that people are starting to recognize as well. So I mentioned that the site is rich in data. There's a lot of, I call it wonky data on that site. And we plan to put more on there. It is completely accessible for offline analysis. And I mentioned the regional matter with the county. And the last part, when I spoke with the city clerk about it, we said, you know, look, there's a lot of public records act. I think the latest information is about 150 to 200 a year we get coming into the city. And one of the best practices of other cities who have opened data portals is that they realize that for some of that data, if one person wants it, it's very likely five or 10 people, other people want it as well. So just take that public records act data, or at least some of it, put on your data portal and say, okay, it's out there, go look at it. And that not only makes it easier for our staff and the public, but it really reinforces this concept of just open by default. You know, we're putting it out there, take a look at it, it's data, use it, share it, massage it. And not to get too far deep into the weeds on this, but there's a big difference between traditional data, which I call hard to use, and open data platforms. For example, there's data on our platform about our salaries, the top salaries, or sorry, wages for city of Santa Rosa employees. And two years ago, if you tried to get that data, it'd be really hard to get. And if you got it, it might be in a PDF file. In a PDF file, as you know, it's really hard to pull the data out of it and sort by department, by length of service, by job classification, you just can't do it. But one of the basic tenets of open data platforms is that everything that's up there, you can pull it down, you can massage it, twist it around and visualize it, you can drop it into an Excel spreadsheet, compare it to other municipalities. In fact, our salary data, our wage data, comes from the state of California's controller office. They actually have an open data portal. We also provide sort of canned visualizations, because we know not every public is gonna wanna do a custom visualization or custom graph, so we have some sample data of what it would look like. But if you wanna dig into some more, download it or flip it and turn it in and do a different type of a plot. Now talk to the city manager about this. I was really happy to say that we are among the leaders. If you look on this chart of the people that are involved in open data, you see most of the large cities in California. In fact, this actually is a list that's probably six months old. You see a lot of the counties, I guess there's probably twice as many other by now that have launched down this path. In fact, Mr. Leibens-Bartler was sharing with me from the county that there's a Senate bill that's being discussed right now, SB 272, I believe it is from Hartzwig, that may encourage local government seeking to encourage local governments that open data platforms. Well, fortunately, we're ahead of that. So here's some examples of some other data portals. This is the city of San Francisco's and probably no surprise, they have a rich one. I looked right now, they have about 600, actually not about, they have 606 data sets published on their website, their data portal. And at last count, 11.2 million page views. There's a lot of people who want access to this data. This is data from AlamedaCounty.gov. They were one of the sites we looked at a lot when we started about a year and a half ago. They actually have now 185 data sets, they had 146 months ago with high usage. This is a plot like you can see in our site right now that shows the Sheriff violent crime reports. And this is what's called a heat map. And this is what I mean by visualizations. I could send you the 12,000 records in this file or look at this plot, right? And which one is more easier for the public to understand and make decisions to dive into. On the budget side, I think all of you have probably seen our budget app. And we didn't talk much about it at the time, but the budget app was a first step on our open data platform. It allowed us to take a fairly complicated budget like we have 299 million and actually carve it up and show it into different departments and stuff. And CIP projects, the county also of course is launching their open, their budget portal as well. And the convention for that, the naming convention is budget.somethingsomething. So we're budget.srcity.org. So, oh, in fact, here it is right here. So, and we launched it in January, 2015. I didn't pull the number of hits, but it's been fairly widely regarded. And if you watch people use it, it's actually really interesting. They look at it and they click on something and then they keep clicking. And they click it that way, they look at this department, they look at the last year, and they look, huh, that's interesting. And it's a really interactive experience. It's really enjoyable for me as a data person to watch compared to someone flipping through our award-winning budget book. Same information, but it's not nearly as interactive or I would say intuitive to use. Our initial, whoops. Okay, so here's our portal. And I'm not gonna give you a live demo. I think most technology people are afraid of giving live demos as I am as well because one never knows what's gonna happen. But I did do some screenshots for you. And the site is live, you can go to it on your own. If you're trying to present a very clean portal, if you look at 10 data portals, they all kinda look a little bit like this. They're grouped into areas, city government, recreation and parks, businesses, economy, community, transportation, public safety, housing and development, city finances, and underneath it, we often show data sets we wanna highlight. So in our case, we're highlighting the My Santa Rosa app, which is our 311 reporting app. We're highlighting our budget and we're also in a later screenshot, highlighting our public safety incident reports. This in front of you now is a very small subset. I think we have 23 or so data sets right now. And the ones we started with were ones that we heard from other cities that their public cared about. We heard that people really wanna take a look at police information, fire department information, 311, public servant information, financial data, permitting data, business tax data, CIP projects, and wages and salary. Those are the big ones that people really wanted to see first and our departments got together and published those. So here's a view, I think you've actually seen this data before in My Santa Rosa presentation. I didn't mention it came from our open data portal. But if you clicked on our open data portal today and you went to community and you clicked on My Santa Rosa, this is the, it's a heat map that shows where the request came from. And probably no surprise, we got a lot of them coming from the downtown core area, but it's pretty spread across the city. We're really pleased to see this. And from these charts, you can infer that, hey, you know, this thing is actually being pretty heavily used, which is kind of interesting for us to know. This is a screenshot of the police crime incidents. We're still haven't finalized the title yet. We're trying to get a title of the county uses for the sheriff report as well as we can use that a sheriff incidents. But if you clicked on this, and by the way, before I tell this, as a city, we had crime reports before most other cities had them. I, Council Member Schwedhelm knows, we put it up in your tenor. We've had it up for a very long time. This just puts it in a way that's actually a little bit easier to use. And it's consistent. If you clicked on the county's version of this, it looks just like this, right? And if you were to click on one of these little dots, it'll pick up and show you the crime occurred right here. Here is the type of crime. Here is the date it happened. This is an example of a data set of building permits. And our CD director, Mr. Rogeli and I were talking about this and it was fascinating. This is, I think, is our overall business permits over the last couple of years. I think this is probably three years' worth. We actually did a slice, looked at it for last year and two years ago versus this year. And you could see the data moving around. You could see there was less building permits three years ago than there are now. You could see it moving around the city, right? So really interesting data about where is the business growth in the city. We took a look at the downtown core. We took a look at our major business core. We took a look at the housing versus commercial developments. And people can take this data and download it and do it themselves. This one is business tax data. Our revenue manager, Manny Severo, helped me do this one. He put this one up that shows these are where our business tax data is coming from. And interesting enough, if you were to span out to show the US, when we first looked at the data, we were surprised to see business license data coming from other states. And it's simply because we have businesses that are operating here that are home located in other states, in other cities. So when you zoom into Santa Rosa, you see where the locally owned businesses are registered for their business tax data. And by the way, this is all public information. We have an ordinance on file that says we have to share DBA, business location, things like that. But we never had it available to the public before. If you're a real estate person, if you're trying to start a business, it's really interesting information. This is I think one of the latter ones we put up. This came from the state controller's office. We said, hey, just show us the top wages and benefits for city of Santa Rosa employees. Two years ago, five years ago, this data would have been incredibly difficult for the public to get. Now it's a click of a button away on the state controller's site and now on our open data site. You can short it by job classification, by salaries, by benefits, or by whatever. These are the exact type of things that when our public asks for it, we'll put them up on our open data portal for the public to grab themselves. The last two things I want to talk about, these are staff efficiencies. So if you're a department, in this case, this is a city page that shows where our facilities are. A year ago, this page, actually looks different now even, this page was a list of addresses, where our city facilities are. And we get this asked this question of lot. Where do I do this, where do I do that? Well now, because that data is actually in our open data portal, and we can present it in a map, you can actually can click on one of these icons and it shows you the address and what goes on there. So, but the beauty is that the data is actually hosted on our open data portal, but presented dynamically into our website. The Parks Recreation, Parks has done this for their parks. They told me a story where a staff person took actually a fairly long time a couple years ago to develop a parks map, which showed what's at what facility. And if you look at what they've done now with open data, they took the Excel spreadsheet of all their park assets. So this is a village green park, it's a neighborhood park, it's in the Southwest quadrant, it's got 1.84 acres, and it's got XYZ in it. You can actually click on it some more, you'd see if it has a swimming pool, you'd see if it has a playground, you'd see if it has play structures, and you see the address. And because this is in our open data portal, it's available, but it also makes a nice representation, a graphical representation on the map, and you can actually zoom in and zoom out and move around and stuff. So I think that was it. That was a quick tour of open data. And as I said, you can tell we're really excited about it. We think our public, perhaps a certain percentage of our public will really enjoy it. And I think it really sets a tone for where we as departments feel we really want this data to be available and be responsive to our public. Thank you, Mr. McKinnery. Appreciate it. Council questions? Yeah, it's exciting. Mr. Schwedhofer. Thank you for that presentation. I know one of my frustrations with the current SRCity.org site is the search feature. Is this going to be a little bit more user-friendly than that? Yes, exactly. So let's say you picked a data set, like you picked a crime one, for example. If you typed in, well, my home address or my area, you would get the list of things that happened there. If you typed in the business tax data set, if you typed in, I want to find out pizza. Actually, we did a thing, we're looking at solar installations. How many solar installations happened or installers in the last year? It all pops up right there. It's quite nice. I think that that will address that part within the open data framework. It's very searchable, yeah. Great, thank you. I think it was a great effort. Looking forward to being real robust. Thank you. I want to thank you also. I had a neighborhood advocate who is very excited about using data and having it be easier. And I know that she met with interim chief in the police department and I think with you also. Yes. And has reported back to me that she's very happy with what she's getting. I guess she was allowed to beta test some of the materials. So I want to thank you very much for listening to the concerns of some of the neighborhoods and implementing a program that makes the data much more useful to them. Thank you very much for this. It's a fun project. And one thing you'll also notice as part of open data platforms is always, always a button that says suggest a data set. So the public can suggest, I'm going to see this. I'm going to see that. And that's sort of this whole spirit of what open data is all about. Good job. Thank you. Any other questions or comments? Thank you, sir. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Mr. McGlynn, 13.2. 13.2, report, public art master plan, Tara Thompson, Arts Coordinator, reporting. Okay, Council, I'm leaving the day as no one else leave. Otherwise, we have to close the meeting. So stay here. And I'm sorry so many of our art supporters had to leave because I saw quite a few in the, in the members of the public arts community here. Yes, there were. Okay, so thank you, Mayor Sawyer and the Council. I am Tara Thompson, I'm the Arts Coordinator in the Recreation and Parks Department. I am here to present the public art master plan developed over the last year and a half in collaboration with the Art and Public Places Committee, the city various city departments, the arts community and arts organizations. And I would like to acknowledge, even though most of them had to leave that there were about 15 or so members of the arts community and others who have been involved with this process here today, including the Art and Public Places Committee Chair, Nina Bonos, who had prepared some comments but she had to leave. But thank you to the two holdouts who have stayed with me this evening. So I am going to start off with some background and oops, background and process that this has entailed. First of all, the City of Santa Rosa actually has had an arts program for approximately 20 years. The Art and Public Places Committee was formed in 1996 by the public art policy. And this process for the master plan started over two years ago when the city successfully secured grant funds from the National Endowment for the Arts in 2012, that was a $50,000 grant through their art town program. The grant funds enabled the city to hire consultant Todd Bressy based in Philadelphia. And he was very generous with his time and made five visits to Santa Rosa over the last year and a half. He has worked very closely with staff and the Art and Public Places Committee to develop plan recommendations and components that are now incorporated into the final document. One of the first steps of the team was to form an advisory group made up of Art and Public Places Committee members, artists, stakeholders and partners. The advisory group reviewed the work at various stages of development and met regularly with the committee to provide input. Those who helped with this process included Diane Evans with the Sonoma County Museum, Steve Rabinowitz, who's past Art and Public Places Committee Chair, Nina Bonos, the current Committee Chair, Mario Uribe, a local artist, Karen Demerist with the Sonoma County Community Foundation and Raisa Dela Rosa who works with our Economic Development Department. Next, Todd and his team began the legislative research phase of the project which involved extensive research into the city's policies, ordinances and other planning documents that relate to art and culture. And we worked very hard to reach out to the community to receive public input. This included numerous one-on-one meetings with key city staff, creative and civic leaders as well as several roundtable discussions with arts community members and business community members. There was a place making workshop with a guest urban planner from San Francisco who led us through some brainstorming and some lectures on public art as well. In total, there were 23 public meetings that provided opportunities for the community to get involved and voice their opinion about this process and about public art. A draft of the plan came shortly after that and then that was followed by many months of reviewing and editing. We made presentations to various city boards and commissions and we also held a study session with city council last November. The last step of this background is that the Art and Public Places Committee did approve the plan that you have before you at their January 2015 meeting. So they are now forwarding it to you for consideration. So let's start with the vision of public art in Santa Rosa that has been generated out of this master plan process. This vision has come out of many community discussions, Art and Public Places Committee meetings and workshops and the key question we were asking was what impact will public art have in Santa Rosa? So what we've come up with is the public art program will enrich civic life, give voice to Santa Rosa's unique creative spirit and galvanize Santa Rosa's reputation as an arts destination. One of the most important things in a public art master plan, and this was something Todd really helped focus for us, is to focus on tangible projects. The people in Santa Rosa want to see progress and they want to see this plan give direction to the activities of the public art program. The plan then moves on to the idea of what the public art program will do. So this is really the mission behind the program. What role should the city have in all of these areas? So the plan expands on this list. I'll just mention a couple of things here. Collaborative projects with other public agencies and nonprofit groups or curators not only expand the capacity of the programs that we do ourselves, but also draw on local creative energy that we have. And one really exciting partnership we hope to really expand on is the newly formed Creative Sonoma organization that's part of the county's efforts. And in fact, they just hired their new, they announced they hired a new permanent director, Kirsten Madsen, so we're excited to start working with her. The art program currently is active in all of the areas listed here, but the plan really provides focus and purpose in these areas. A big chunk of the plan is dedicated to something that our consultant Todd talks about as being a creative zone. A creative zone are places, areas in the city and general topics that should be a priority for consideration for public art. These zones have evolved over many years, sorry, excuse me, over what feels like many years, have evolved from many community discussions about the kinds of public art projects that would complement Santa Rosa, as well as an assessment of what locations and strategies would have the most impact. One of the key things with creative zones are that they are open-ended enough to allow for projects in all geographical areas of the city and to allow for things to be added over time and to grow a project over time as well. So I'm going to go through the creative zones quickly but point out a few things as we go along. The downtown and arts district are the focus of two creative zones and then there are kind of sub zones within those identified or sub focus areas identified. The first one, downtown arts district streetscapes really focuses on downtown connectivity, how art projects temporary or permanent might help connect the different parts of downtown, meaning courthouse square, railroad square, sofa, neighborhood, et cetera. The second one, downtown arts district precincts and focal points has three different distinct areas of focus within that. One is courthouse square activation, meaning projects that we could start doing in courthouse square on a temporary basis to activate the space and give people an idea about what possibilities might lie there once reunification efforts start. Second one is focused on projects that could be a part of the reunification efforts or come after reunification happens. And then the third one is the Sonoma County Museum and the Seventh Street area, which is kind of a emerging new part of downtown, especially with the museum's new contemporary art museum opening soon on the corner of B Street and Seventh Street. Smart stations is another zone. We imagined art opportunities at and near stations and also along the track corridor so they're not just focused on the two station areas in Santa Rosa. And then the Prince Memorial Greenway is another area and our focus there, it's been recommended to be on the maintenance of existing work since there are maintenance issues in that area specifically. Parking garages, including wayfinding within garages and as you exit a parking garage. And then downtown gateways, which are mostly downtown underpasses, and there are seven leading into the downtown or exiting. And then there's also another gateway that has been identified, that is kind of an Eastern gateway to downtown. It's where Fourth Street and College Avenue split. There's a little triangular park space there. Creeks and trails are another zone and there are a couple focus areas within that. Stream corridor crossing markers is one area as well as Creeks symbolism, which by that we mean marking underground or hidden creeks that maybe you don't see or don't realize is a creek. And then parks, the survey revealed that the community is very interested in public art and parks, specifically functional elements like benches, survey, sorry, shade or play structures. And then more specifically, Juilliard and Olive Park, there are some recommendations in the plan for those current sculptures that are in those parks. Santa Rosa High School, the ArtQuest program, was another area identified and possibilities there include collaboration with the staff and students at the ArtQuest program, specifically targeting the location of the campus near Ridgway and Mendocino avenues. And bicycling infrastructure can range from artist designed bike racks to large scale sculptures to way finding elements for cyclists. And a final note on creative zones. The Southeast Greenway and Rosalind were both possible creative zone areas that were discussed in a lot of our conversations and are both very possibly future areas where we might consider projects. And to point out again that just because they maybe aren't listed as a creative zone currently, the creative zones can provide projects in all areas of the city as they are. So we feel like there's flexibility there, but they definitely came up in our discussions and because neither of them are quite a part of the city yet, we thought we would leave them out, but we're very interested in discovering what can happen with both of those. Okay, so how do we start doing these fun things? That's about implementation. And the team developed some really excellent tools for how we can implement these types of projects. These are really organizational tools that will help us not only manage the Art and Public Places Committee annual focus, but also facilitate projects happening. One is the annual work plan, which outlines which creative zone the program will focus on in a year and which projects will be initiated and would include budgets and proposed locations. And this would be developed collaboratively by the arts coordinator and relevant city departments as well as the Art and Public Places Committee. And then for each public art project that is a part of that annual work plan, the individual project plan would include much more specific details that would plan and help execute the project, including the goals for the project, the location, the budget, funding, timeline, the artist selection process and those types of details. And I should mention that both of these areas, these tools would include maintenance considerations and budget for maintenance for new projects as well as for our existing collection. So public art guidelines are also part of the plan. They are developed to provide clarity and decision-making for the following areas. City-funded projects, public art and private development, gifts and loans, de-accessioning and relocating public art and de-accessioning really just means the process of determining when a piece needs to be taken out and returned to the artist or moved or something like that. But basically it's taking the piece down. And then murals, city-funded or on city property. The public art and private development program has a few, there's a few recommendations for this program specifically to improve information available to developers earlier in the stage, earlier in the process. So providing information upfront during the planning stage versus the permit stage is something that's recommended so that the development has as many opportunities to incorporate public art into their proposals possible. And then we've just clarified some processing with implementing this requirement in terms of earlier contact with the developer during an intake phase when they're deciding whether or not they're going to place artwork on site or pay the in-loofy and other things that really will help with the processing of the program. No changes are being proposed for the city code that deals with this program. So no changes are being proposed for chapter 21-08. These are all just process improvements that will help the program run smoother. The plan also includes administrative recommendations regarding funding, staffing, the Art and Public Places committee and a few other areas. For funding, for staffing, the goal is to have the arts coordinator position focused full-time on public art and public art responsibilities and duties. The recommendation is that the current funding levels that we receive from 1% of capital improvement projects, 1% of park development fees and 1% private development in-loofies is adequate to pursue the projects that are outlined in the creative zones for the next few years. But the public art fund also has a reserve that will help us achieve those projects as well. The recommendations for the Art and Public Places committee are to focus the roles and responsibilities for the committee to be focused on advising on the general direction of the public art program and on selecting specific public art projects. We went through many discussions with the Art and Public Places committee and with the arts community and came up with recommendations for creating an all-at-large member committee made up of five members with professional experience in the field of visual or public art, four members with experience including environmental design, place-making, economic development, tourism, or have a background in general interest in the arts. We wanna be inclusive of the general community as well. The selection process would remain the same that we currently use for at-large members. And that is that the applicant would apply to recreation and parks, answer special art-related questionnaire that we would develop. And then the applicants are reviewed by the Art and Public Places committee and the candidates then would be recommended to city council for appointment. While residency requirements don't apply for the Art and Public Places committee, it was decided that the goal is to have no more than three non-residents. We wanna keep the committee focused on Santa Rosa. And then the public policy is the document that really governs the public art program. Most of the components and recommendations that are in this plan will need to be implemented through changes to that public art policy. This will happen after this plan has been adopted and recommended revisions would be brought back to council at a future date for consideration. Our next steps, once this plan is adopted, we will start implementing the plan. We have some exciting ideas for kickoff projects focusing on downtown connectivity. The Art and Public Places committee selected this area to focus on first. Public art policy revisions would begin. Most, like I said, most recommendations in the plan require those revisions in order to be effective. And then of course, those revised policy recommendations would be brought back to city council for approval. We will be updating our informational materials including the public art and private development packet as well as the civic art art walk brochure and map which we are looking into doing something with an app, a phone app for a tour to facilitate an easier way to get information about our public art collection. And we will also be doing a really comprehensive inventory and assessment of our whole collection which has not been completed for many years. And as recommended in the plan, we will be reviewing the plan in three years to see how everything's going. So the recommendation in front of you today is that you adopt this plan. I would be happy to answer any of your questions. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Thompson. Questions, council? Ms. Carlstrom. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I just have a couple of questions. You answered it in part at the end when you said we'll come back in three years and we'll review this. Specifically with respect to the possibility of creative zones in Roseland. And I know the greenway is another issue, but I want to talk about Roseland. As part of that annexation process, are we going to be identifying potential art development sites? I don't know the answer to that question. I don't know what the annexation entails necessarily. We'll explore what options we have with us. I mean, I think right now it was looking at the city as it exists right now as part of the plan. That's obviously a process that's unfolding and we will be getting the teams together to work on this, the annexation process. So I don't see why it's not part of our ongoing strategy, so. Yeah, I'd like to request that it be. Thank you. And then with respect to not the board, but when a development comes forward and they're making the decision with the input from this plan on what and to what extent art needs to be placed. If, for example, there are business owners or local neighbors that are being impacted by this, will they have the opportunity to provide input on what they'd like to see? Definitely, yes. In some cases, we will be forming selection panels, specifically for a project versus having the committee select the artwork. And in that case, we try to reach out to local business owners and residents to have a representation on that selection panel. That's one way. Another way is to invite those people to an open house to talk about possibilities for the projects we're considering that year so they can give their input and they can always attend the committee meetings and speak during public comments as well. Okay, great. Thank you for that. With respect to the parking garages, I really appreciate attention to that because I think the aesthetics of our parking garages are a big deterrent. So taking a stab at fixing that. There's gonna be themes. Is that what I understood from floor to floor? Is that what's envisioned? That was one idea that came forward in our conversations. When we start developing the annual plan and decide that that's the creative zone we would be working on that year, I think we would have an initial brainstorming meeting with relevant city departments and community members to talk about what they're interested in. What do they feel would help a parking garage? What do they want a theme? Could we hire multiple artists to work on one garage? We want one artist per garage. There's a lot of possibilities that we would be discussing before we started doing a call for artists or things. Okay. I just had one member of the public suggest that we consider themes that would carry over from one garage to another. So, but I appreciate the complexity and detail of the plan and especially things like taking into account the unseen elements like when you can't see the creek. I leaned over and said, hey, Tom, that's a creek. But I think I really appreciate the foresight of this plan. Thank you. Thank you. It was just right. I just had a process question. I really appreciated all the outreach that was done. But I know ultimately X number of creative zones were selected. Can you share with me a little bit about how that process occurred? So, because I imagine once this becomes more public and I'm anticipating being very successful, I want one of those in my neighborhood. So can you share with us the actual process that ended up with what we have in this plan? Sure. It was really comprehensive and long lasting and it probably will continue. These are recommended creative zones for right now for the next three years. And they can be added to and changed when we review the plan. But Todd, our consultant, did an excellent job of coming to Santa Rosa, finding out what neighborhoods were what, who he needed to meet in each of them, organizations or arts organizations, business groups, the local merchant community, the art museum, and really finding out from each and every person that he talked to what was important to them and what art, how could public art help what they're interested in. So we had several, like I said, roundtable discussions with arts community, the business community, the brainstorming workshop that we did with a guest urban planner from San Francisco, John Baylor was really exciting because we had a really dynamic group of people who he really helped facilitate a conversation about, you know, we put all these ideas up on a board and we started distilling them down into areas that could be kind of manageable and grouping like things together. And so it was a combination of all of those things, really, distilled down to these 10 creative zones with the idea that this is a fluid document and will be added to and changed. Council, other questions or comments? Ms. Compton. Well, let me just say a couple things then. Thank you very much for this. You know, it would be willing to say probably without hesitation that many, if not all, successful cities have a very robust art program. It's very, very important. I love the idea of the dealing with our parking garages. I mean, whimsy in parking garages, I think, is always appreciated at one level or another. It's surprising. It suggests a city is willing to take what is kind of a, at times, a sows ear and create that silk purse that we can enjoy at a much higher level, just the parking garages and not all of them. They, some of them have their notoriety. Usually it's not because of their artwork. And also, not unlike what I would like to see with our economic development department in bringing forward new businesses that come to Santa Rosa and having our economic development come to us as a council and give us an update on the new businesses which have come and perhaps even those businesses which have left. And why? When there are installations of note in this city in one of these zones or elsewhere, I would love to have a report back to the council and a little update on this date. There will be an installation and welcome the council members and invite them in addition to whatever email, of course, is necessary. But I think that's showing that kind of support. And that's, plus it's really fun and get to meet the artist, hopefully. And artists are fun people. So every opportunity we can to support in that way by advertising these installations or even a de-installation or de-accession, de-accession. Yeah, it's kind of a hard word. It is, it just would be helpful. So we know why things go away sometimes and what happened to them. So I thank you for that. So Ms. Combs, you have this item. I get to make a few comments and then I'll introduce it. So it's been a wonderful year for me as a council representative to our public places. This has really been an exciting process to take part in. I'm so excited about the things that the committee and the groups have been directing as toward the unseen creeks, the creative zones, the increasing downtown energy, just generally watching our community put energy into the arts, into our arts industry has just been fabulous. I think the special events leading up to this have also been invigorating. I know I've seen some things moveable downtown furniture in locations that were really remarkable. Ideas brought to us from the consultant and from the speakers. So I really appreciate how you have worked on this. I also very much appreciate the concept that we have a dedicated staff member for arts in this proposal and I hope we can find our way there. And I also think that I'm hearing from the community a lot of interest in having the committee have the makeup of special skills, people with special skills in the arts, having that composition for the committee has really invigorated some folks. I seem to be using invigorated a lot, but that's what I'm hearing coming from this plan is hope, excitement, enthusiasm. I personally have a couple of concerns about the appointment process. One example is that typically our mayor selects the chair of committees and that's not what's in our fine details. So I would like to ask clarification about when we're adopting versus implementing what's being brought forward. If we adopt this, which is what the motion says, what we're doing is accepting the report but other details regarding implementation will still come forward to us. Is, do I have that correct? That's correct, yes. The future policy revisions that would include any changes to the committee would be brought back to the council. Okay, and I wanna be clear, I'm excited to have the committee have artists. Great. I think that's very important. With that said, and with really great pleasure to do this, I bring the resolution of the council of the city of Santa Rosa to adopt the Santa Rosa Public Art Master Plan and wait for the reading of the text. Second. And your votes please. And we have six ayes. Thank you council. Thank you. Thank you for all your hard work. Thank you for the whole committee for their hard work. Thank you for waiting this long. Yes. Mr. McGlynn, 13.3. Item report, park development fund loan to Gulf operations fund interest rate, to fund interest rate reduction. Nenette Schmeichel, director, recreation and parks presenting. That's it I guess. There it is. Thank you. Thank you Terry. Nenette Schmeichel, recreation and parks once again. So this evening we have presented a proposal to the council related to an interest rate that was established back in 2005. So quick presentation. So in 2005 we were contemplating and designing the improvements to the golf course which includes the clubhouse and the pro shop primarily. And in addition to bonds which were sold, we anticipated a need for additional funding and the idea came to do an inter fund transfer or an inter fund loan from the park development fee funds. And so the amount of the loan is on the screen there for you, I won't read everything but in zone one, $315,000. Zone four, which is Southeast 482,000. And the council had the discretion to set the interest rate for that loan and it was set at 4.5% which was at the time market. So now we jet forward to present day 2015. And we're all about looking at the golf fund and ensuring the health of the fund which means the health of the facility and those services that occur there. And so there's a number of actions that we have contemplated to say where can we raise revenue? Where can we reduce expenses? And so this was one of the ideas that came forward is that we noticed that the interest rate 4.5% was above market and has been for many, many years. And it's like, wow, if we could cut some expenses maybe revenue wouldn't be the only thing that we have to worry about. So we looked at several options of what was occurring and the majority of our research happened in November. And so we know that interest rates change daily but at the time in November we looked at the three year bond rate it was at 0.97% and then there was a projection to 2017 with a three year at 2.8%. And so we figured kind of a maybe a happy medium was 2% because interest rates are projected to increase over 0.97% but would they ever be back to 4.5? Well, it's anyone's guess whether that will happen but we just know they're lower right now. And so like any good business owner, homeowner if you're able to refinance your mortgage and get a lower interest rate you probably want to do that. So at the recommendation of a 2% that would save us on an annual basis with a combined principle and interest repayment of the loan that would save $13,000 in expense annually. And so this review was taken in tandem with our finance department with CFO Debbie Lochner and her staff looking and relying on the help of their consultant as well. The proposed change would take effect in the next fiscal year. We've already made the payment for current fiscal year so we're looking ahead a year. And the thing that I also wanted to underscore is that the original loan came from park development fees and what do we use those for? Well, to build parks and improve parks. And so the loan was made and when the principle and interest rate is repaid of course that money is going back into those zones. And so yes, it would mean a little less money going back to the zones. That is absolutely true, reduced interest rate but the principle remains the same. So the principle going back, the principle which was originally loaned 100% of the principle goes back. So the question is the interest rate to that. And what we do with those park development funds and zones is every year we look in conjunction with the finance department how much money has come in and then through the budget process we appropriate it. So every year if there's money coming in we are budgeting it for those park zones. So bottom line we believe that a lower interest rate will reduce those expenses which the city has and pays for through the fund. And overall the health of the golf course might improve from that. And that's $13,000 less in revenue we need to try to find every year. Questions? Council, questions? Mr. Schwadhelm. To thank you for the presentation. The term interest rate and bond rate is that interchangeable? I mean the same thing. The term of interest rate and bond rate? It's used differently on different slides and making reference 2005. This is the interest rate was 4.5. Recommended interest rate is 2% and then you throw the slide throws in the figure of the bond rate. Are those figures, are we talking apples to apples? Yeah, it was the three year treasury yield. That's what that was looking at. Three year treasury interest rates. And so maybe the word bond isn't correct there. But when we were looking at interest rate comparisons they looked at the three year treasury. So now I'm going to get a little bit more confused. What was the going rate of the treasury? I'm trying to compare what council used to base their decision on the 4.5. In the slide it says interest rate. Here we're recommending a 2% interest rate but the comparison is the three year bond rate and the projected 2017 three year bond rate. Are we comparing apples to apples with that comparison? I'm a little unclear. My understanding is that we are but I can get a clarification outside of this meeting. I can't, Debbie's not here right now. So we might need to do a little research to make sure it was exact. Okay, thank you. And then just the other issue. You talk there is an impact to the park zones. Financial, what is the impact? What does that look like? If we go in this direction? Let's see if I have that. I have it in the staff report. So essentially on an annual basis we're repaying the park zones and so the difference is the zone and so on an annual basis zone one gets $5,559 less and zone four gets $8,515 less and that equates to the $13,000 expense reduction. So I get that, I got the figure, but what does that mean? What does zone one getting $5,000 less what would the community, what impact to the community would that be? Right, well it's, what we do is when we get funds into the zone we try to budget them and we're basically aggregating funds each year. At the rate that park development fees are collected in the normal way with developers paying in it's small and it's slow. So the $5,000 repayment is small and slow and so until we aggregate $100, $200, $4 million worth of zone fees we don't really have much of a project and so it's a slower aggregation of money back to the park development fund. Council, other questions? Yes, Ms. Carlson. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Council member Schwedhelm introduced the issue. So it's a relatively nominal amount of money each year that's not going into each zone but over how many years are we talking about this small sum not being paid to the funds? The suggestion here is 15 year. So we have 15 years remaining on the repayment and we kept the amortization schedule that all this is underlying this stays with the 15 years. The interest rate is reduced from 4.5 to 2%. And so the difference in the repayment is not the principal, it's the interest. And so over the life of the repayment the next 15 years it's some $211,000 less interest and it divides up between, yeah, I don't have it divide. I do have it divided by zones. So based on what you said earlier it's about 120,000 to zone four. It's 83,000 to zone one and 127,000 to zone four less in interest. And so what can we do with 83,000, 127,000? It's a small project but every penny counts for sure. Okay, thank you. Thank you. Yes, Ms. Carlson. Just to be, so that I understand the process that happened before this. Do we have any other existing loans among zones? For example, the golf course is in the Southeast though I understand it is a full city service. It provides service to the whole city. But I'm interested that we've borrowed money from the Northwest. And so are there, have we loaned money to the Northwest for some other project or has this kind of a loan package served any other zone? This is the only inter fund loan that I'm aware of within the Wreck and Park sphere. And so the golf fund being a standalone enterprise fund and the park development fee funds are sort of they're each standalone. This is the only loan that we have within that. Whether other city funds are making loans that I do not, I don't know the answer to that question. I just meant for parks within these zones. So I have a little concern about paying Northwest which I'm guessing is not as parked as some other parts of our city because it's West. Paying them back at a slower rate in a way that might impact their ability to our ability to develop better parks or maintain parks in that area. I can remember only a couple of years ago where $150,000 for watering by Centennial Park was hard to come by. And so this 83,000 looks like something to me because of the instance at Bicentennial Park that happened not too long ago. Has anyone done any calculation about what the interest rate would be if we only slowed the repayment back to the Southeast and I should have asked this sooner but I didn't really process for me to ask you in advance. We didn't do that calculation. Okay, because it just concerns me when we had the difficult time watering the parks in the Northwest. This type of money would not go towards a maintenance activity. The park development fees are for improvements not for ongoing up and maintenance. Thank you, Ms. Collins. Other questions, Council? Okay. So Mr. Waisaki, you have this. I can do. My spot. Just, I do see that this is reflective of the lower cost of money and that does make sense. And we're also trying to fix a bad deal done many years ago. So with that, I'm pleased to introduce resolution of the Council of the City of Santa Rosa authorizing the reduction of the interest rate to 2% for repayment of the park development funds from the benefit like golf course and way further reading. Second. Thank you. And you both, please, Council. And we have four eyes and two nos. Council members Carlstrom and Combs voting no. Thank you. Now move to public comment unless we have any correspondence that needs addressing which I don't believe I remember seeing no. So Mr. Conway. Hello again. Can I just say from the bottom of my heart, God bless you all. I seriously, I mean that. I've become sensitized to the amount of work you do, the meetings you attend, the community functions that you attend. And then you're attentive listening to everybody that spoke before you and the insightful questions you asked. I'm very, very impressed and proud. I want to give congratulations to an employee of the city named Laurie Ann Barber. She received a $50 gift card from the city for her green commute effort. The city apparently gives $50, has a drawing, $50 a month for people that logged their efforts at being green and she won. But also congratulations to you for having that available to people. I've been very impressed with this municipality as far as climate action. But the problem is you're only 2% of the whole issue. So on top of everything you do and all the way you're played is so full, excuse me, we know that Alaska is becoming unrecognizable. World scientists are telling us that if not checked, many of our current practices may so alter the living world that it will be unable to sustain life in the manner that we know. We only have to read very recent articles in our own press democrat to know how serious this problem is and how seriously it is affecting our state and our own community. And your actions regarding climate change carry profound long lasting consequences. There's no other body or agency in our city that has more impact than you seven people do on how our city responds to this crisis and there's no other issue that's more important than this issue. Now I'm not gonna marginalize myself by coming up all the time and presenting these, my case, this will probably be the last time you'll hear me present this issue to you. But I am here now to ask you to please give this crisis proper priority, demonstrate creative leadership. I'm asking that you put sufficient funds aside to implement the climate action plan. It's a great plan, hold city departments accountable for the role that they're supposed to be playing with its implementation. Why not ask Mr. McGlynn to appoint someone from each department or have each department have a representative that looks into chapter four of the climate action plan and that becomes familiar with what their department is supposed to be doing to implement it. I'm sorry, there would be no money involved with that and yet some accountability would take place and you would be demonstrating as a council your commitment to addressing the crisis. So please make every effort you can to put some real teeth into that plan and do everything you can to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and protect our future. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mr. Conway, for your kind words and for your passion. Yes, Ms. Combs? Can I just ask our city manager, will we be getting a status update on the progress of our climate action plan in the next year? I will have, I would assume we are. I would honestly say that I have to sit with staff and sort of understand better where we are and how we regularly report out on the climate action plan. Okay, a status update on the achievables in that plan would be something I look forward to hearing. Sure, thank you. So that being said, I have two gentlemen to close this meeting in honor of this evening. I know that if Henry were here, he would ask that our police sergeant, Bud Winkler, go first. So thank you, Bud, for all of your great service and our heart goes out to your family. And to Henry Trioni, whose name will last long beyond you know, certainly will be in the hearts of so many people who were touched by his life and his contributions to this community, even though at least at present, there are no bronze plaques anywhere that bear his name per his request. So in the name of these two fine gentlemen, I adjourn this meeting. Out there in the middle of everything. Over 90 miles of creeks run through Santa Rosa, run off from streets, roofs, and parking lots, end up in our creeks through the storm drain system. To help protect creeks, keep your street gutters and roadside ditches clear of trash and other pollutants. For more information on the benefits of our creeks and tips on how to enjoy them, visit the Stormwater and Creeks webpage. Have you ever seen a flashing yellow arrow on a traffic light? I'm Rob Sprinkel, traffic engineer for the city of Santa Rosa, here today to talk to you about a new type of traffic signal. Beginning in 2013, flashing yellow left-hand signals will be installed in some of the intersections in Santa Rosa. Studies show that drivers better understand the need to yield to oncoming traffic with a new flashing yellow arrow signal. These new flashing yellow arrow signals give drivers more chances to make left turns, but more importantly, they stress the need to use caution when turning left. Some drivers may be confused when they see a flashing yellow arrow because there are a lot of traffic.