 I'd like to ask the interpreter currently on the Spanish channel to commence translation of the meeting for those just joining the meeting live translation in Spanish is available and members of the public or staff wishing to listen in Spanish. Can join the Spanish channel by clicking on the interpretation icon in the zoom toolbar. It looks like a globe. Once you join the Spanish channel. We recommend you shut off the main audio so you only hear the Spanish translation. Pablo, will you please restate this in Spanish. Thank you. I'll put you in Spanish for those who just joined the meeting live interpretation in Spanish is available and members or staff wishing to listen in Spanish can join the channel. To join, click on the interpretation icon in the zoom toolbar. It looks like a globe. Once you join the Spanish channel. We recommend you shut off the main audio so you only hear the Spanish translation. Thank you. I'll put you in the Spanish channel now. And good afternoon, Madam City Clerk. Can you please call the roll? Yes. Thank you, Mayor. Council Member Schwedhelm. Here. Council Member Sawyer. Here. Council Member Rogers. Present. Council Member McDonald. Here. Council Member Fleming. Here. Vice Mayor Alvarez. Present. Mayor Rogers. Here. Let the record show that all council members are present. Thank you. We had no closed session today. We have no study sessions. We'll move straight into our staff briefings. Item number seven, Madam City Manager. Good evening, City. I was going to call you City Manager. Mayor Rogers and City Council. Our COVID-19 response update tonight is to prepare parents and children for return to school after summer vacation, the Sonoma County Department of Public Health Services and the Sonoma County Office of Education are hosting a live stream COVID-19 Back to School webinar to address safe practices for returning to school and non-COVID pediatric vaccine requirements for school. The public can join the COVID-19 Back to School live on Facebook at facebook.com forward slash county of Sonoma this Wednesday, August the 10th at 4 p.m. and in Spanish on Thursday, August the 11th at 4 p.m. Following each webinar, a recording of the webinar will be available on the county of Sonoma's Facebook page. As of today, Sonoma County has reported an average daily case rate of 23 per 100,000 residents, which is a decrease from the previous weeks with an elevated testing positivity rate of 13%. It's important to remember that vaccinations remain the most effective means to protect yourself from getting seriously ill and being hospitalized due to COVID-19. For more information about the status of COVID-19 in our community, testing locations and vaccine information for all ages, please go to socoemergency.org. Thank you. Good afternoon. Mayor Rogers, members of the council, my good day is here with the community empowerment plan update. I just wanted to let you all know that we will be holding our team has been invited by the arts and public spaces program to display a multi-cultural project exhibit at the Finlay Community Center during the month of August. We've collaborated with community partners to collect items to display in the exhibit, which are relevant to the multi-cultural roots project, and a reception is scheduled for August 11th from 5 to 7 p.m. We invite everyone to come by and check out the exhibit at the Finlay Community Center. We'd like to thank the community members who came out this last weekend and assisted in the OIR, participated in the OIR community listening sessions over the weekend, and we'd also like to thank our partners at Shepherd Accelerated Elementary School, Diya Maria Panaderia, Victory Outreach and Finlay Center for hosting us. Lastly, we are moving right along with the HIRM community hub community input process, and on August 20th, we would like to invite the community to join us in the first of a series of community input sessions. We'd love to hear what types of programs and services you would like to see at the HIRM community hub, and we will be at Rosen University Prep from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m. We have music, food, family activities, all which will lead to engaging the community and collecting information on what the community vision is on this hub, and we'll have the libraries at Bibliobus, which will bring books that are relevant or relate to the planning process, as well as the Children's Museum on the Go, which will have wonderful activities so that our youngest participants can have input as well. Please visit our Let's Connect sr.com slash HIRM hub project, where you can begin to ask questions and provide input. Thank you to those that have already started to ask questions. We are really looking forward to this process, and that is the end of my report. Thank you. Item 7.3, water supply update. Director Burke will be presenting. Thank you. Good afternoon, Mayor Rogers, members of Council. I wanted to come before you to give an update on where we are with our water supply conditions, in particular our drought response. Thank you. By way of background for the public, Santa Rosa water purchases approximately 93% of our water from Sonoma water. Sonoma water stores their water in two reservoirs, Lake Mendocino and Lake Sonoma, and currently Lake Mendocino is about 48,736 acre feet. You'll notice that Lake Mendocino has a larger water supply than Lake Mendocino. In comparison to last year, the current storage level is the black line on the graph in front of you. The reason that it is in better condition is because of the amount of flow that's been going through the Potter Valley project from the Eel River watershed into Lake Mendocino and also from Lake Mendocino. However, PG&E just applied and received permission from FERC to reduce the amount of supplies that are going to be going through the Potter Valley project, dropping down to only five cubic feet per second. So we're going to start to see Lake Mendocino drop significantly in the coming weeks. We're at about 50% of the water supply capacity in Lake Sonoma. Currently Lake Sonoma is at 122,752 acre feet. We are seeing about 1500 acre feet drop per week. And we're at about 50.1% of the water supply capacity in Lake Sonoma. If we go to the next slide, please. We're at about 50.1% of the water supply capacity in Lake Mendocino. They filed a temporary urgency change petition at the end of last year. In December of last year, they filed a new temporary urgency change petition in May of this year and the state water board issued a temporary urgency change order that's allowing them to preserve more water from the river. So we're seeing a 20% of the water supply capacity in Lake Sonoma. We're seeing a 20% of the water conversions by 20% from the months of July 1 through October 31 when compared to the same timeframe in 2020. Next slide, please. So because of Santa Rosa Waters and our community's long-standing commitment to water conservation and in terms of the amount of water that we have in the water. We also have water from hand hardening and past water conservation, as opposed to last year when we agreed to a 20% across the board reduction. So you can see in this comparison we're actually in much better shape in terms of our allocations from Sonoma water for 2021 compared to 2022. So that is good news. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. That was a really great job by being proactive. The council did enact stage three of our shortage plan last year, and our customers have now saved over a billion gallons to date thanks to their efforts. But we're also seeing that during the winter months it's much harder to save. So if we go to the next slide you can see that this graph shows back in 1990 we had a gross gallons per person per day which includes all residential commercial, industrial, institutional water usage of 177. And now we are down below last year we were at 90% of the water. So last year we were at 95% which is really amazing. Anything under 100% is considered to be extremely efficient. And then on the residential side, this is both single family and multi-family residential we've seen that drop by almost in half. We've had a 40% reduction in our gross GPCD and overall with a 53% increase in population we're back in the early 90s. So this is great in that we have that sustained savings. However, if you go to the next slide it does, as I mentioned, make it a little more difficult for us to reduce water use now. Currently we are in stage 3 requiring a 20% reduction in water use. We in last month in June we had a 17% reduction compared to 2020. And cumulative July through June 2021 through 2022 we saw a 17% reduction. Just five minutes ago I got the updated data for July and so great news to share for July of 2022 we saw a 30% reduction. So the efforts we're taking to get the word out and asking our community to redouble their efforts is working well and we are now at a cumulative 18% reduction in water use. Next slide please. So we're continuing to remind our community to do what they can to follow all of the requirements we have in relation to stage 3. And the most important reason why I'm here today next slide is I want to let the council know that we will be doing a regional event on Saturday, August 20th we can go to the community engagement event in Roseland and then come on out to our event at Freedmen's on August 20th from 10 to 2 we will be giving out free drop kits and we're very excited about the partnership with Freedmen's and very excited to be continuing to do these events they really are showing and getting the word out and having our customers help save water as we desperately need folks to do this for our community. And that is my presentation if you go to the next slide we have our resources available and happy to answer any questions if there are any. Thank you. Thank you so much Jennifer counselor there are any questions on any of our three staff reports. All right let's go to public comment and see if anybody has any questions or comments. And that's on zoom and we'll get the overhead taken care of. Dury Sayed sorry go ahead please. Yeah hi my name is Dury Sayed and I am calling just a second I'm sorry my can you hear me? Yes we can okay my thing got stuck just a second okay. So thank you for the invitation to join you today my name is Dury Sayed and I serve as an outreach analyst in the department of insurance community relations and outreach branch. I'm happy to be with you and with the community to give you an update on the work we have been doing on your behalf. I would like to start by giving an over I like to start by telling you about the public comment on the staff reports I'm so sorry I'm so sorry no it's not a problem we'll do a public comment for non-agenda items will be at 5 o'clock and so we'll call on you then if that works for you. Thank you so much I'm so sorry oh no it's all good we'll talk to you at 5 let's come back here to Mr. DeWitt 7.2 community empowerment plan and the report that was just given thank you for that report and thank you for the city's efforts to enhance its community engagement I've put up something here from 15 years ago when the city and the county were discussing how the city would end its county island that it made 25 years ago by surrounding the unincorporated area of Roseland and community engagement public engagement information community concerns were a part of that discussion that was so important and now that you have a community empowerment plan with a community empowerment department we would hope that you would follow up and do just as much as you're doing in the south of Hearn Avenue with this new project that you've come forward calling the Hearn Community Center you've put together a great looking meeting for the 20th it's going to be live and in person with lots of things going on apparently and that's a good thing you could have done the same thing for the 17th when you're going to have a scoping session for the Roseland park which many people in the community have worked for for decades to have a neighborhood park with a nature preserve based on the model of Pollen Creek Preserve up in the northeast section of Santa Rosa that was the model that the people in Roseland followed and hoped that the city would allow to occur but what's happened is through your efforts it's being turned into something quite different than what the community wants or needs at that space and actually cheats the larger Roseland community of close to 14 to 15,000 people out of more park land within the existing Roseland area a one acre green space was supposed to occur at the Roseland Village shopping center instead a hardscape food court has been put in not a lot of folks talked about that but the businessman from out of town he's doing well not the Roseland folks so I'm hoping that your team at the community empowerment department and Ms. Magali who just spoke will begin some real authentic community engagement reaching out to the center of Roseland to the people who live on West Avenue, Barham Avenue Dutton Avenue Dutton Avenue help Roseland first, thank you thank you Dwayne I don't see any other hands let's keep moving to our city manager and city attorney reports Madam city attorney do you want to start thank you Mr. Mayor pull this forward a little bit the only thing I have to report on this evening is our monthly report of settlements and active litigation and I just want to remind the council that this monthly report is required under our open government ordinance so that's why I'm here every month giving you all the numbers again and this month we do not have any settlements to report so we let me give you a kind of a summary of our pending cases we currently have about 32 pending cases and we have about 30 cases that are fairly stable over time with cases getting resolved in new cases being filed so around 30 but this time we have about 32 of those we have five receivership cases 10 general litigation cases the report that was provided to you online did not include two new cases that just have been filed in the last month and those two both concern homeless encampments that's the the cloud case that concerns the encampment on the Joe Radota trail and the kosher case that concerns the encampment the rv encampment on challenger way and we are defendants in both of those cases we then have 10 personal injury cases and four police cases one of those cases that concerns the encampment case that concerns the coastal resolution three mandate, rid of mandates we have trials set we have nine trials set two coming up this fall six in the early winter and spring and then one is scheduled for next fall which is the vanucci case which will be quite time consuming that's the original and as I often do remind you this is of course a snapshot in time it includes only these categories of actions that our litigators are working on does not include code enforcement cases of which there are many does not include vicious dog cases it doesn't include weapons proceedings it doesn't include pitches motions and others so we have a very busy team and happy to answer any questions thank you council any questions for the city attorney okay let's go to the city manager report thank you on august the 19th from 5 30 to 7 30 p.m. the city will be celebrating the completion of a mural on the 5th street parking garage the event will be held at the garage located at 7 35 5th street please come out and meet the artist and learn a little more about the Santa Rosa public art program thank you anything council let's go to public comment then for our city manager and city attorney reports you have a comment go ahead hit the raise hand feature on your zoom and I don't see any let's move on to item number nine do we have any statements of the city manager before we move on and I'm sorry to go back one but madam city manager could you repeat the date of the mural event sorry to take that out of line mayor august the 19th thank you very much I assume you are not abstaining from august 19th saying then we'll keep moving we have mayors and council council members thank you mr. mayor just a couple quick items I did attend the water advisory committee and the technical advisory committee and director Burke shared a lot of the information that I was going to share so thank you very much for that Jennifer you do a much more comprehensive job than I would have done and then on July 27th we had a continuum of care board meeting couple items I want to share services is providing up to $20 million to Sonoma county to deal with homelessness to be spent in the next two years so it came to our board based on some recommendations by the county how they want to use the funds the first year funding is going to be almost 900,000 811,000 of that will be going towards interim sheltering and we're also told this is very going very quickly but there will be some rfps as this further moves down the pipe same thing with what are we going to do with that remaining $18,000,000,000 so it's moving very quickly I shared with city staff some of the suggested investment areas by the county and I'm hoping those conversations will be continuing in the future because we don't have a lot more information but that's a lot of money coming to enhance what we're trying to do here so my goal is for all of us to be on the same page with the county with the county with the city coming forward additionally if there's any members of the community who happen to work for a service provider we do have on the board a vacant service provider seat and if you're interested you can go to the county the Sonoma County continuum of care website and apply for that on our meeting of October 24th we will be appointing and filling that vacant seat I was able to tour juvenile hall to think of some ways to collaborate especially looking at the violence prevention to keep our children out of juvenile hall in programs to help and assist them and also the OIR meetings I was able to attend all four of them along with Mayor Rogers and we did have some community members come but I would have hoped to have more community members than what we had so when we continue to have meetings I am inviting and urging everyone to come out to say your piece and also I wanted to give a special thank you to Victory Outreach and their leadership for opening their doors and allowing us to have one of meetings there thank you thank you Council Member Fleming thank you Mayor on Monday August 15th at 11 o'clock as part of our Renewal Enterprise District Board Meeting we will be having a joint study session for the red and the red housing fund the red housing fund is the board that distributes makes recommendations and distributes the funds that the city and the county have placed in the Renewal Enterprise District this meeting will be to review the funds lending activity and discuss opportunities for future red and red housing fund collaboration it's the first joint meeting of the two boards and I'd like to invite anybody who's interested in learning how the two organizations work together to fulfill the many housing needs we have here in Sonoma County to go to RenewalEnterpriseDistrict.org for meeting details and then additionally in the last week Council Member Schwedhelm and I met with Claire Hartman and her team in planning about housing and homelessness ad hoc and we were presented with a number of very exciting data tools and infographic information that will be rolling out to the public and to the development community for both residents and developers alike and I think that we'll find this information to be informative and helpful and reduce any ambiguity and frustrations that we have in the community about where we are in meeting our housing goals so thank you very much to staff for making all of this happen thank you we'll go to Council Member McDonald thank you Mayor so I just have a few things to report on I'm going to go to Council Member McDonald and I'm going to meet with Chief Kraig and go down to the Santa Rosa Police Department and I just want to thank him for his time and for the tour around the police department and I was able to meet with a lot of the staff members that were there and I just want to commend City Manager Smith on the appointment of Chief Kraig and I know we've said it so many times but it's really inspiring to be around such great leadership and to see the dedication of the community so I'm looking forward to going on a ride along with them they've assured me that's going to be interesting and I'm very happy to go along and learn more about the job that they do I also would like to announce that I have appointed a community advisory committee member for the Santa Rosa Forward in the General Plan her name is Jennifer Quela and she'll be representing District 3 and I'm just going to share a little bit and she moved here in 2019 and spent 10 years working in the wine industry and after experiencing the glass fires in 2020 she's become an active community advocate for preserving open space and wildland urban interface she's also a certified yoga instructor and teaches classes at Montecito Heights Athletic Club and she holds a BA degree in business from UC Santa Barbara she resides in Skyhawk with her husband and cocker spaniel and she enjoys cooking, gardening, reading and spending time in the Annadale State Park but more than anything she's an incredible activist and so we are really lucky to have her join that team and I'd like to thank staff for helping us along that process tomorrow the Climate Action Committee meets at 4 o'clock and that's all I have to report okay Mr. Vice Mayor thank you Mayor first and foremost I was able to attend the Small Business Hardship Fund a business and community expo at the Luther Burbank Center on the 30th of July I believe it was where a lot of the community members gathered to, and community members in regards to entrepreneurs gather to share ideas collect the strategies of how to overcome obstacles especially in today's economic times and also to announce then on August 17th at the St. Rose Parish Hall between 2 and 5 they will be holding another event more focus on job fair so hopefully if you have an opportunity and if you're looking for a 9 to 5 you can hopefully find something there with some of our great community partners currently I'm also letting the community know that I am looking for a new cab representative for the southeast area as my prior appointee had some family issues to attend and I do thank her for her service to the community and if you're interested in serving the City of Santa Rosa please reach out to my email address alvarez at srcity.org thank you thank you Mr. Vice Mayor a couple of thank yous to start and that's to the OIR group for spending time in our community to really get to know the issues that we have and to talk with community members who have concerns to talk about what they do in terms of oversight to hear from them on what issues that they're currently concerned about and it was for good meetings that I thought were arranged for community members to come in to be able to hear about that and to have that one-on-one personal time with different settings and different feels to each of the settings and in particular was really grateful that their multilingual team was able to interface with folks in their communities and to be able to communicate with the community if they chose to do so I thought that was really impactful for folks who have concerns we had an economic development subcommittee meeting this morning where in which we looked at ways that the city can expedite our tenant improvements for new businesses that are coming into Santa Rosa it was a particularly interesting opportunity for business owners as they're trying to open their doors here particularly in downtown Santa Rosa but really across the city a couple of ribbon cuttings first if you were able to drive faster without hitting too much traffic going southbound SCTA and RCPA did cut the ribbon on the new carpool lane for highway 101 just last week that's a project that I think has been 22 years in the making and it finally has come to fruition congratulations to our water team who did a nice ribbon cutting on July 27 for the shenate north trunk sewer replacement project the logistics of which are just astounding to me doing such a significant project in an area of the community that has traffic concerns has neighbors close by we heard literally one complaint for the entire project that it was somebody who got dust on their car and wanted a car wash and so I can't commend the team enough for the logistics and the planning to achieve that it's a significant project in and of its own right but also the way that they did that really was spot on so I want to say thank you to Jennifer and her whole team and Jason the whole public works team for their work on that let's go ahead and go to public comment on mayors and council member reports if anybody has a comment or a question we'll keep making our way through our agenda Madam City Manager can you please read the consent calendar item 12.1 is a motion approval of amendment to project work order with AECOM for additional design services associated with Hearn Avenue interchange project at highway 101 item 12.2 is a resolution cooperative agreement between the state of California and the city of Santa Rosa for the right-of-way phase of the highway 101 bicycle and pedestrian over-crossing item 12.3 a resolution amendment number 2 to measure cooperative funding agreement number M70106-05 with the Sonoma County Transportation Authority SCTA for the Santa Rosa Creek Trail project item 12.4 is a resolution trusted system contract with ECS imaging ink item 12.5 is a resolution amendment to agreement F001470 with packet fusion ink item 12.6 a resolution approval for the fire department to purchase two type 5 skeeter brush trucks item 12.7 is a resolution amendment to the professional services agreement Jones Lang LaSalle America's Inc. for the real estate brokerage services item 12.8 is a resolution making the required monthly findings and authorizing the continued use of teleconferencing for public meetings of the city council and all of the city's boards commissions and committees pursuant to assembly bill 361 item 12.9 ordinance adoption second reading ordinance of the city ordinance of the council of the city of Santa Rosa adding chapter 2-38 to the Santa Rosa municipal code regarding police acquisition and the use of military equipment item 12.10 is a resolution adoption of the city council and executive team setting team goal setting final report item 12.11 is a motion direct staff to prepare required documents to place to place a measure on November the 5th 2024 ballot to amend the city charter to increase council compensation continued from the July the 26th 2022 regular meeting and that is the end of our consent agenda. Thank you Madam City Manager City Attorney did you want to explain what we're trying to do with item 12.11? Yes happy to do so Mr. Mayor at your last meeting the council considered whether to put on the ballot for 2022 for this November measure to amend the city charter to increase council compensation the at a prior meeting the council had already determined that if the measure was approved by the voters it would not go into effect until January 1, 2025 so at your last meeting council considered the potential to place instead of placing that measure on the ballot for 2022 postponing it to the November 2024 election in order to give the council and the community additional time to run the financial analysis to get more community input and so to postpone it the council informally discussed it came to an informal consensus that yes there was an interest in moving it to 2024 provided that staff could confirm that it was legally possible for this council in 2022 to place something on the ballot to call the special election for this ballot measure for November 2024 we did the required research did confirm that it is possible for you to do that so this measure simply closes the loop confirms that your desire from 2022 to 2024 and that you are directing us to go ahead and prepare those materials and bring them back to council at a later date not too far in the distance not too far in the future I should say thank you thank you so much Madam City Attorney Councillor are there any questions on the consent calendar Council Member Sawyer thank you Mayor I'm just requesting that we pull 12.11 what are the purposes of voting separately okay we can go ahead and accommodate that Council Member thank you let's go ahead and go to public comment Mr. DeWitt I'm from Roseland Item 12.3 it has a discussion about Dutton Avenue access at Santa Rosa Creek I don't know how many of you use Dutton Avenue but that section has become a basic raceway since the growth of the city and widening of that road to allow for more traffic people just speed along there all the time it's quite dangerous recently we had deaths along roadways for pedestrians and bicyclists I hope that you folks will make sure that safety and the project zero approach is the number one thing along with that you have 12.1 and 12.2 you mentioned 22 years ago 22 years ago the Southwest Santa Rosa redevelopment project area committee had pointed out that it would be really nice to get her an avenue fixed and to do good things so here we are 22 years down the road but I look at this and think you're actually adding far more money that might be needed but I might not help the project Stony Point Road when it began ended up taking 10 years to be completed once it actually began it also ruined that neighborhood along Stony Point Road because it built this wide thoroughfare knocked out 17 housing units just total disrespect for the neighborhood hoping as I always do that you folks will help her an avenue and that project not mess things up down there at that corner then last but not least on 12.2 this is a Cadillac project and you don't need to spend this much money on this you could have a better bridge for that highway 101 overpass for bicycle and pedestrians by using available technologies that are utilized in countries all over the world to get your project done quicker less expensively with less burden upon the taxpayers and a longer use life this is what's really important because here in California we have a system of legal greed in which things well I'll have to call it legal graph not just greed in which things are built and then not given a really long life and then torn down and redone again you know when you go on vacation a lot of people go over to countries just so they can look at bridges 150 years old so they can see houses 200 years old we can even do that in America out of Philadelphia places like that so please make sure that these projects are built for the 100 years that we will be putting them to use and make sure that you're watching out for the taxpayers first and foremost not the campaign contributions not the bureaucrats thank you Mr. DeWitt let's go ahead and go to Pam followed by Gregory good evening Mayor and Council Pamela Granger chair of Tobacco Free Sonoma County Community Coalition I wanted to speak this evening to 12.10 that was the goal setting report a great report I was a little confused about Attachment 2 which seems to highlight many activities that are being considered for moving towards four of the six goal areas what seems to be missing at least the way presented our goals number two that's to reduce homelessness and its impacts although it could be that just the category heading is missing and number three ensuring a healthy and safe community for all I'm pretty sure that you would be in agreement that police and fire aren't the only contributions to safety especially with the emphasis on the healthy part so I was wanting to make sure that we didn't lose track with somebody who chairs a tobacco control coalition wants to make sure doesn't get left out why it's that number three that we didn't lose track of the recommendation to consider a tobacco retail license the recent portrait of Sonoma County calls attention to health disparities that it haven't changed if anything COVID has widened the gap that report calls on us to redouble our tobacco control efforts in addition to tobacco related disease and death smoking and vaping also increase the risk for COVID with one in 14 using at least one tobacco products we know that the best way to reduce the number of people killed by the use of tobacco is to keep kids from starting in the first place a tobacco retail license which prohibits the sale of flavored tobacco products and some other prohibitive aspects would be an excellent way to work towards health equity and we know that you're all concerned about that the portrait of Sonoma pointed out nothing new about the health disparities in our community so I just wanted to again make sure that item number three the healthy and safe community is left out if you move forward on your goals thank you so much thank you Pam we will go ahead and ask staff to address that question after we finish the rest of our public comments and bring it back let's move on to Gregory thank you my name is Gregory Farron I'd like to just say what Pam said in a slightly different way which is I believe and my friends believe that a healthy and strong neighborhood organizational system in Santa Rosa will contribute to the health of the city and we'd like to see a little more specificity as to how the city will embrace and support and partner with neighborhoods that isn't clear in the goals but we'd like to make sure that it is thanks very much so I just got off the phone with Barbara thank you so much Gregory I don't see any other hands I'll go ahead and bring it back Madam City Manager would you mind addressing those two questions my apologies go ahead I'm not exactly sure what happened in the process there that had happened before and it is disturbing if that happens so forgive me particularly about this issue it's regarding 12.9 and the consent calendar and I know it's the second reading of this but it bears witness that there are military vehicles that the city has obtained or I saw it entering the police yard and I don't know if it was an examination of a sheriff's vehicle was hey look at what you can get look what the items are you can get this is a list of the stuff you can look at the nice cool stuff you can get but it was about 10 or 12 feet tall it was about 30 feet long an armored vehicle that I have pictures of entering the police department okay this is horrendous the thought of that it's just mind boggling do forgive me if I point out a significant issue in Ukraine was that they directed their own as of battalion so it's not their own military they can't even claim that it's their own military that was directed at their own people and they used drones you can buy drones in the city so the city could buy drones from the military and have military drones there's all kinds of drones there's all kinds of drones but military drones have a military purpose they're really these are you know terminator type items from the movie you know and here we are now we're only 30 years later it's not 2025 excuse me it's not 25 25 we're not talking about hundreds of years out these are items that communities are buying now that we don't need more war we don't need a war in Ukraine we don't need a war with China we don't need a war in Sonoma County we don't need military items of any kind so I would just please pull that item and vote it down it's a second reading I know you can still pull it and you can vote it down but I would hope that you would not give authorization to anyone to buy them without your approval because that's insane thank you thank you Thomas are you looking to comment on the consent calendar? how about Michael? right I think perhaps that was for the SCR item I don't see any other comments for public comment on our consent calendar let's go ahead Mr. Vice Mayor and put a motion on the table thank you Mayor I do have a question can I ask it? thank you City Manager it's already too interrupt I see you're busy it is in regards to item 12.9 the military item being presented before us for clarification and it's something that I've definitely received a lot of inquiries about if you could clarify what the purpose of 12.9 is is it to require a yearly report from the Santa Rosa Police Department to seek authorization from the City Council to purchase equipment or is this item a request that is coming forth by the Santa Rosa Police Department to purchase any of this equipment at this time now I will let Chief Cregan come on but this actually has to do with AB 481 and the compliance that we have to meet as it relates to military equipment so Chief Cregan if you're on you want to expand on that please Council Member can you repeat that question I also have Dan Morinzik on here too that was helpful from our AB 41 stuff not a problem sir the question was if there could be clarification in regards to the purpose of item 12.9 if the purpose was that the Santa Rosa Police Department was submitting a request or permission to purchase the equipment listed in this policy or if this was the understanding that Santa Rosa Police Department would be approaching City Council for permission to purchase this equipment or in fact a yearly report from the Santa Rosa Police Department and it has to do a little bit of context sir I'm receiving a lot of inquiries about are the Santa Rosa Police Department looking to purchase the equipment listed or is this simply organizing the way that Santa Rosa Police Department would ask City Council or required by AB 481 to ask the City Council to purchase that's a great question so when Captain Morinzik had presented to Council several weeks ago we talked about it's outlining the things that we already have in our possession the only new item that we're going to be purchasing and Dan Morinzik joining us now is the interior drone and this is for when you're going into like a drone flying inside of a residence they can do things with like mapping a crime scene but it could also be used as a tactical of going in and checking like in lieu of sending in a canine but looming in to be able to check a residence to see so that was the only new purchase and then each year we would be going to Council so if we were to make additional purchases we would be going to Council and representing them about saying hey these are new items that fall within the guidelines of AB 481 and we would be going before Council to ask for those things but that was the only new item for this time that we didn't currently have in our possession Thank you sir and for the good of the community if I could read a section of the policy requirement that's being presented it's actually on page 4 of 7 under section B and it states if the police department seeks to continue the use of any military equipment that was required prior to January 1st 2022 the police department shall commence a city council approval process in accordance with this section and what's important for our community to understand is if the city council does not approve the continuing use of military equipment including the adoption pursuant to military equipment use policy submitted pursuant to this code within 180 days of submission of the proposed military equipment use policy to the city council or use policy to the city council at a regularly scheduled city council meeting the Santa Rosa police department shall cease its use of the military equipment until it receives approval of the city council so that's just to reinforce the statement that we are not approving the use of all the equipment listed but there's definitely a process being set up so there is better conversation and more transparency in the items that the police department are using. Thank you for clarifying chief and city manager as well. Thank you. Absolutely. I think that's one of the benefits we'll see of this law is a lot more transparency in our community understanding all the tools that we have in our possession and a better understanding of under what circumstances those could be utilized in the field. Indeed sir. Mayor if I can proceed I would like to make a motion to approve items 12.1 through item 12.10 with the exception of item 12.11 at the request of council member Sawyer and way further reading of the text. Second. We have a motion from the vice mayor and a second from council member McDonald before we go to the vote I did want to circle back madam city manager there were the two questions from public comment regarding the tobacco retail license and then also neighborhood partnerships. Thank you for the question Mayor it looks like some of the document was inadvertently cut off so when I look at the original document to the document that was uploaded looks like there are a couple of fields that are missing and in the field that is missing is the tobacco the tobacco ordinance that we had proposed to look at the ordinance on so we can either bring this back it is a working document so it is subject to change but it is it's at your discretion whether or not you want us to bring this back or not I'm happy with this proceeding tonight let's just get the non cut off version accessible Pam just know that it's on there and we'll talk to you about it as we continue to move forward and if I may the council is accepting the goal setting report we've also attached the council goal priorities the chart that you were just looking at but the actual action that the council is taking is acceptance of the goal setting report and the the work plan is really for your information and as the city manager mentioned it is a work in progress I shouldn't say a work in progress it is a live document that will evolve so thank you thank you council any other questions all right we have a motion we have a second let's go ahead and call the vote thank you mayor councilmember schwaitham councilmember soyer councilmember rogers councilmember mcdonald councilmember fleming vice mayor alvarez mayor rogers that motion passes with seven eyes vice mayor thank you mayor I would like to put forth item 12.11 and we have further reading of the text second that's a motion from the vice mayor and a second from councilmember schwaitham let's call the vote councilmember schwaitham councilmember soyer no councilmember rogers oh no councilmember mcdonald I'm going to ask you a question about the clarification mayor were we going to be able to discuss it or because it's on consent we aren't going to discuss the item and you're just looking for a vote you can make comments if you would like to the appropriate time was about 30 seconds to go but feel free thank you for the clarification I'll just go ahead and vote no councilmember fleming I'm sorry 11. Can you come back to me in just a moment or hold on a second? Sure. Vice Mayor Alvarez? Aye. Mayor Rogers? Aye. Councilmember Fleming? Aye. Thank you. Okay that motion passes with four ayes and the record shows that council members McDonald, Rogers, and Sawyer voted no. Okay. Okay. Now we are at an awkward two minutes before five o'clock. For folks in the audience, we will come back. We're going to take a two-minute break. Come back at five o'clock for our public comment for non-agenda items. That's for items that are within the city's jurisdiction but aren't on tonight's agenda. Once that's done, we'll move into our discussion about item 15.1. That's the short-term rental ordinance. So we'll be back in just a couple of minutes. All right, Madam City Clerk, let's go ahead and bring us back. If you could please call the roll to re-establish our quorum. Thank you, Mayor. Councilmember Schwedhelm? Here. Councilmember Sawyer? Here. Councilmember Rogers? Councilmember McDonald? Here. Councilmember Fleming? Councilmember Fleming? I can see her. She must be having sound issues. Okay. Vice Mayor Alvarez? Present. Mayor Rogers? Here. Okay, let me circle back. Councilmember Rogers, have you joined us? Councilmember Fleming? Have you joined us? Councilmember Fleming? It looks like she's having sound issues but I do see her on the screen so I'm going to mark her present. So I'm going to let the record show that all councilmembers are present with the exception of councilmember Rogers. Okay. Let's go to public comment for non-agenda items. If you would like to provide comment, hit the raise hand feature on your Zoom. Or Mr. DeWitt, if you want to kick us off in the chambers. Head projector please. I could begin talking while she's working with technology. My name is Duane DeWitt. I'm from Roseland. On Dutton Avenue next to the exchange bank at Sebastopol Road sits a large parking lot that has been underutilized for over 20 years. And it's the time that you folks have just set your goals and I applaud those city council goals. I believe now's the time for you folks to step up and walk your talk. For decades I've been listening to smart growth, city-centered growth, this whole idea of transit-oriented development. Here's where you could do it at that parking lot. A project is proposed and is about to go through design review that's only four stories tall. You could have a 12-story building there as tall as the Bethlehem Towers just over here to the south of city hall or silver crest just to the east of city hall. You could have Roseland Senior Towers at this site. It could be housing for seniors and veterans in extended stay. It's near bus stops. You could limit parking. You could get the things that you've been saying you want. It's directly across the street from the downtown specific plan that was just acted upon and basically reaches out to the corner of Sebastopol Road at Dutton Kitty Corner to this site. So these goals have not come in to focus here on your overhead today. But for me the goals have always been in focus because I've been coming to your meetings for decades listening to you say these are the things you want to do. So I'm asking you folks to begin to tell your board commission appointees to act upon it. When it gets to design reviews say hey listen you guys don't have to just stop at four stories. You can go 12 stories. You have that limit in the city of Santa Rosa. Right over there Bethlehem Towers proves it. It's grandfathered in the same with silver crest. So let's get that in Roseland and have a place for our seniors to live in our town instead of having to move out because they might not have the funding in the future as we gentrify. I intend to stay many of the people I know in Roseland want to stay but these are difficult times. The only way we can get this is if we can get our public policy decision makers to walk their talk. Planning is politics. You've been elected. You're here. Stand up and say yes. We want these tall buildings just down the street on 4th Street. That guy wanted to put in a taller building. It ended up just about six or seven stories instead of the nine or ten originally discussed. Give us 12 stories on the corner of Dutton and Sebastopol Road. We'll stand behind you. Thank you. Anybody else in the chambers? All right. Let's go to our Zoom. We'll start with Daria followed by Jamie. Did you hear me? There we go. Okay. Good evening Mayor and Council members. My name is Daria Sayed and I'm an outreach analyst for the Department of Insurance with the Community Relations and Outreach Branch. I'm happy to be with you to give you an update on the work we have been doing on your behalf. This is a wildfire season. So I want to touch bases on safer from wildfires framework and inter-agency partnership between Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara and the Emergency Response and Readiness Agencies in Governor Gavin Newsom's administration. It is purpose is to protect lives, homes, and businesses by reducing wildfire risk. We are working with Cal Fire, Cal OES, the Governor's Office of Planning and Research, and the California Public Utilities Commission. With California experiencing devastating wildfires intensified by climate change homes and businesses need insurance, they can rely on. Commissioner Lara is using every tool available to improve insurance for our community. Based on our direct experience of first responders and the latest research on wildfires, the partnership created a consistent approach to reducing risk with a list of achievable, certifiable, and effective actions to help make existing homes and businesses safer from the wildfires. This ground-up approach from wildfire resilience has three layers of protection. We call it the SFW123 plan. Number one, protect the structure, such as making sure your roof and vents are up to code. Number two, the immediate surroundings, such as a brush to close to your home, or there are flammable items stored under your deck. And finally, number three, the community. Involve your entire community to prevent wildfires from catching and spreading to other homes and businesses in their neighborhood. This includes enhanced infrastructure and programs like wildfire, like fire-wise councils. So once it's finalized, the California department is working on the hearing that we had on April 13th and legal branches researching and reviewing the findings. Once finalized, the California Department of Insurance will submit the new regulations to the insurance industry, and a press release will notify the public. Each insurance company will then need to submit their plans to implement, and once they are approved by the department, they will then be in place. We expect this whole process to be done by January 2023. But I just want to remind you that we are here to help you with any of your insurance questions. Our website is insurance.ca.gov or call our hotline at 800-927-4357. We have a dedicated staff of expert. They can answer your specific question, and if they don't pick up, our call back time is two minutes. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, and we appreciate our partnership with the Insurance Commissioner's office. Jamie, your hand went down. Let's give you a second to see if it'll go back up. Okay. We'll go ahead and move on then. Madam City Manager, let's move to Item 15.1. Item 15.1 is a public hearing, short-term rental zoning code, text amendments, urgency ordinance, and fee adoption resolution. Senior planner Sherry Meads will present. Thank you. Good afternoon, Mayor Rogers, Vice Mayor Alvarez, and Council members. As City Manager just eloquently stated, we're going to be talking about short-term rental zoning amendments, urgency ordinance, and a renewal fee adoption. Next slide, please. One moment, please. There we go. Thank you so much. So there are two proposed actions tonight. First is the second urgency ordinance related to short-term rentals that the Council will hear. The first was passed in October of last year, as you are probably quite aware. This ordinance, and what's before each night, is very narrowly focused. We aren't talking about the full breadth of the short-term rentals program. We're looking at adding two distinct things to the existing regulations based on economic development, subcommittee recommendation. The second action is a fee resolution. It is not an urgency ordinance item. However, fee-related things do not go to Planning Commission because they're not a land-use thing. So that's why we're bundling the two together tonight. It does not require Planning Commission recommendation or approval. So next slide, please. So we're going to go back in time to when maybe some folks didn't know, and possibly some folks still don't know, what is a short-term rental? And a short-term rental is commonly known as an Airbnb or a vacation rental. It's the rental of a private residence or part of a private residence for 30 days or less. And the City distinguishes two different types of short-term rentals. There's hosted short-term rentals where it's the rental of a bedroom or bedrooms within the primary dwelling, where the property owner remains in residence either in the house or in another legal unit on the parcel during the entire short-term rental period. Non-hosted short-term rental is also known as whole-house rental. It's where the property owner is not in residence while the home is being rented out for a short-term rental purpose. So next slide, please. And prior to October of 2021, we didn't have any regulations for short-term rentals other than the fact that our ADU ordinance, accessory dwelling units ordinance, said that ADUs could not be used for short-term rentals of less than 30 days. So based on research that had gone on for months and an increasing amount complaints and inquiries about short-term rentals, staff went to the Economic Development Subcommittee two times to talk about, you know, what do we want to do? What does the City want to do? Should we develop a program like most other jurisdictions in Sonoma County and really throughout California and the United States kind of jumped on the bagwam bandwagon a little late with this one to what we were going to do. So we did, even though we were bringing an urgency ordinance, we did quite a bit of community outreach. We did a huge survey with over 2,000 responses. We did an industry-specific webinar. We did as much outreach as we could through the short-term rentals website, through the City Connections newsletter. There were a couple of press Democrat articles about what we had planned. And then on October 12th, started on the 12th, which was a Tuesday, staff brought the ordinance, urgency ordinance to add Chapter 2048 short-term rentals to the zoning code. It ended up going till the next day. So the actual adoption date of that ordinance is October 13th, 2021. So if we could go to the next slide, I'll just give a little bit more background as to how we got to where we are today. So since October, there have been a lot of permit applications submitted. We've had some delays in getting those permits processed and issued, had some issues getting the code enforcement geared up. This is all relatively common for jurisdictions when they're taking on such a new program the size of something like this. So we asked that we be given more time, because originally we said, we'll come back with more comprehensive ordinance amendments once we get this urgency ordinance that was passed in October of last year in place. Well, we need more time. We haven't had the program up and running to the degree that we would like it to. So staff went back to the Economic Development Subcommittee in May of this year, discussed where we were at with the program, and came up with a plan that we need to do something to improve the code enforcement situation. And there had been questions about whether the penalties that were adopted in October could be applied to operators in good standing, which the ordinance defines specifically as folks who had registered for TOT, transient occupancy tax and business improvement area, BIA assessments prior to October 27th, 2021, and who submitted a short term rental permit by December 3rd, 2021. There were questions about, well, they don't have a permit yet. So do these enforcement penalties apply? So we decided to bring that forward tonight. And because of the fact that there have been so many complaints since the ordinance was originally adopted in October, we want to take a pause here and take a look at how non-hosted short term rental operations are affecting the city housing stock, the public safety welfare, and all that goes with that. So we are requesting tonight recommending that the council approve a maximum number of short non-hosted short term rental permits to be issued citywide. That will give us more time to assess what's going on and get a handle on everything and just get the program running like we wanted from day one. So this data is actually kind of old, but as most of you probably know, when you prepare a council packet, you have to have it several weeks in advance. So as of July 1st, a total of 273 short term rental applications have been submitted to the city. And there's some additional numbers there. As you can see, primarily they're non-hosted short term rentals. Again, as of the 1st of July, this is the number of short term rental complaints that had been received, resulting in the 73 open code enforcement and 42 cases that were closed. I do want to clarify on the complaints that it's possible that since these are not parcel related complaints, there could be some duplication. So if there are more questions about that, Jesse Oswald is on the call and can address that a bit later. So if we could go to the next slide, please. Let's talk a little bit more about non-hosted short term rentals. So non-hosted short term rentals, as we described, are when the owner is not on site during the short term rental. And so one of the things that the original ordinance allowed for these operators in good standing, again, all that that meant, all that that is defined in the ordinance as having met certain time frames for when you register for TOT and VIA and when you submitted your short term rental permit. So these operators in good standing are not subject to the 1000 foot separation setback that's required for new operators, which are anyone that don't qualify as an operator in good standing. So we wanted to create some tech tools that would give people a chance to see where these are happening. This is a screen grab from the city's permit search tool. I highly recommend folks go on there. You can see how many different permits are in process. And then this also shows the status. So I want to clarify also that the proposed cap would only apply to non-hosted short term rentals. It would not eliminate the 1000 foot separation setback required for new operators. So since the adoption of the short term rental urgency ordinance, the city has been accepting applications for sites throughout the city and they're processing them as they come in. No area of the city has been prioritized for processing timing of actions, whether something is issued or or that type of thing has been dependent on a number of factors, including the date of applications submittal, the completeness of the application and the compliance of the application to the new ordinance. And we tried to really get we tried to put out tools that would help the community with their applications by including ordinance requirements and application assistance materials on the city's website, which is srcity.org forward slash str. We try to have that be a good resource for folks. So as I mentioned, the ordinance as adopted did include incentives for the operators in good standing. And those folks are allowed to advertise and rent the short term rental while awaiting city approvals. So we got a huge rush of applications to fit into that that category of operator and good standing. As a matter of fact, we received 194 short terminal applications by December 3rd, 2021. And so some of those initial applications have required more revisions more back and forth with the applicants and therefore it's it may look like we're approving out of turn if you will, but we really will we the the applications that are the most complete, the most compliant are the ones that get approved first. And how quickly outstanding issues can be resolved also plays a role if someone has to confer ownership from an LLC to a different type of ownership, that's going to take a little bit longer than if somebody needs to update a floor plan, that type of thing. So applicants just want to make it very clear. Applicants are always, always encouraged and welcome to reach out to staff for assistance with developing a compliant application. So if we could go to the next slide, please we'll get into the meat of what these two proposed actions are. So as we as I mentioned before, we're looking at adding a maximum number of nonhosted short terminal permits that can be issued citywide. And we've found through code enforcement records and research that these are the the properties that tend to generate the most code enforcement requirement, police fire requirement, because as mentioned, there's no there's not an owner on site during the during the rental. So you may be wondering how the heck did you come up with 215, which is what the ordinance at this point is is stated to limit as the cap. So 215 was chosen because as I mentioned, the council packet had to be prepared pretty far in advance. So what we did was we looked at the number of nonhosted short terminal permit applications in the queue. We assumed all of those will be approved. That may not be the case, but we had to allow for that just in case they are. Then we built in a small buffer looking back on the past few months and saying, okay, so between now and then we'll probably get XYZ more permits. So that's how we got to the 215, accommodating accommodating everyone in the queue and a built in cushion. So we ended up over estimating the cushion that would be required. As of today, there are a total of 198 nonhosted short terminal permit applications. So that's the total number as of this moment that could be permitted if we were to stop accepting applications at this moment. Note that the cap of 215 can be adjusted both tonight and with any future amendments and council action. So we defer to council to what they want to set that cap at if it is an action that they choose to move forward with. So next slide please. So the other thing, as I mentioned a little bit before, was that there were some questions about how enforcement penalties applied to these operators in good standing who are allowed to continue renting and advertising as if they had a permit while they're waiting for city approvals. So the ordinance set the what you see in gray there set those penalties in place, but there's been some confusion. So this amendment would clarify that the enforcement penalties apply to folks with the permits and those who are operators in good standing are waiting city approvals. And what you can see by the proposed amendment is that if an operator in good standing gets to that third violation, verified violation within one year, they lose that operator in good standing status. So that means that they would have to wait 24, I'm sorry 12 months before reapplying and they would reapply as a new operator, which means they would be subject to that 1000 foot separation setback from another non-hosted short-term rental if it's non-hosted and they could not advertise or operate while awaiting city approvals. So these are the narrowly focused changes that we are requesting tonight and recommending. We are planning future zoning amendments that will evaluate the entire short-term rental program and what we have learned throughout. And I just want to say it's not unusual for a jurisdiction, again, undertaking a program of the size to require periodic or even annual amendments to keep up with industry needs and enforcement. And it's also important for me to note that future amendments, which we're going to get started on right after this action, will include community outreach and vetting through the planning commission. Next slide, please. So in order to pass this urgency ordinance tonight, adopt this urgency ordinance, it requires a five, seven council vote for adoption. And as you can see in the slide, there are government codes and the Santa Rosa City Charter authorized urgency ordinances if necessary to preserve the public peace, health or safety of the community. So next slide, please. So the second action that's before you tonight is a proposed renewal fee resolution. And the reason we're bringing this forward because as the ordinance is written, it includes some information about what's required every year. You know, it says a new permit application is required each year. You have to submit TOT and BIA receipts and any information about notices of violations or penalties that from the prior year. But what we didn't do is add a renewal fee, which would mean that each year, everyone would be responsible for the same fee as what the initial short terminal permit application fee is. And the original short terminal permit application fee is equal. We looked into the fee schedule and compared how much review was required, that type of thing, to our standard temporary conditional use permit. And we didn't want to have to do that every year. It didn't seem right because hopefully annually what we're going to be looking at is much fewer things that need revision. It will still require, you know, planning review for checking to make sure that ownership hasn't changed, that you know, the TOT and BIA are up to date, that type of thing. So we modeled the exact same application fee as the over the counter temporary conditional use permit fee. And so that is a fee that is going to hopefully reflect staff time to review the request. Now, if re noticing is required, because our enforcement requires folks to call the local contact first, we wanted to avoid code enforcement cases and frankly having to have, you know, a lot of violations to people if we like to assume that people are doing their best. So by having this 24 seven contact, if somebody is having an issue with the short terminal, they reach out to that 24 seven contact first, that you know, has certain regulations to follow, but that can hopefully address the complaint. How that makes the local contact information pretty important. We send that out as a courtesy notice after a permit has been issued, we send it to neighbors and tenants within a 600 mile radius like other noticing. So if we find through the renewal process that re noticing is required, the applicant will be responsible for the cost of re noticing and that staff time, the postcards themselves and postage. So next slide, please. So this urgency adopt urgency ordinance adoption is not subject to CEQA. It is it is exempt. It is it will not result in a director reasonably for stable indirect physical change in the environment. And as you can see, it's it's we cite three different sections that that establish the same thing. So next slide, please. So now we're talking about next steps. We've talked about the little bitty amendments that we're looking for tonight and the adoption of a fee resolution. Next, we're going to process all existing if things are passed as proposed. We'll continue to process all the existing short terminal permit applications that's hosted and non hosted, and we'll process existing and new hosted short terminal permit applications will continue to evaluate code complaints will resolve open code enforcement cases. And we're going to kick into some community engagement and and see what if any additional amendments are necessary as we learn through this process of getting the program up to date and hearing what the community would like to see. So next slide, please. We did receive three late correspondence since what was uploaded to your packet. One was a very in depth discussion about ways to improve fire safety for short terminals and really any any community. Another was in opposition to well it wasn't a specific opposition. The the writer wanted to express how their family does operate a short term rental because they were fire victims, not directly, but they had been evacuated. And and so it's too stressful for them to live here year round. But they like to be able to use the short term rental for either people that have been evacuated or other families that can visit the city. And then another person was was just opposed to short term rentals. So with that, it is recommended by the planning and economic development department that the council adopt an urgency ordinance to amend title 20 of the zoning code chapter 2048 short term rentals to set a maximum number of 215 non hosted short term rental permits to be issued citywide. And to clarify that enforcement penalties apply to permit holders and operators in good standing and adopt by resolution a short term rental permit annual renewal fee. And that is the end of my presentation. We can go to the next slide. We've got a a very deep bench here in case you have questions that that I can't answer. So I'm here and pretty much every other department in the city is represented as well. All right. Well, thank you so much, Sherry. We'll start with questions from council members. We'll go then to public comment and then we'll come back for discussion and direction from council. So who wants to start with questions? Councilmember Sawyer. Thank you, Mayor. I have three questions at this point. You you covered the area around the how you came up with the 215 Ms Meads and I appreciate that explanation. You had to start someplace. So I appreciate your effort in trying to come up with something that seems reasonable and adding a buffer in there as well. What is the status of our research into entering into a contract with a firm that would manage our STR program in the future? I did attend a meeting in with the League of California cities and learned that there were a number of firms that do different things. Some of them do every part of a program. Some of them do specific things, specific elements of it. But what is the status of our research into the concept of having a firm actually run our program? Hi, through the mayor, should we answer these questions as they come through? Or do you want councilmember Sawyer to list all of his questions and then we answer them? No, let's go ahead and take them one at a time. Okay, I'm going to defer that question to actually Alan Alton was going to address that. I know he's been doing the lion's share of research into potential third party companies to help us. Right, thank you. And thank you councilmember Sawyer for that question. So, we have received proposals from a couple of different firms. We have also reached out to other cities as part of the reference check process. I think it's important to to note that there's really two different elements that come into the administration of a program like this. So, on the one hand, you have the tax administration side, and that's pretty much in my shop. And in that, we would look to have the firm not only manage the registration and renewal of people's registering their properties as TOT to collect and remit TOT to the city, but also do discovery audits to try to determine or find those operators that are currently in business but not paying the TOT. That actually makes sense for a third party to do it. To be honest, the cost of doing that from the different operators are all over the place and it really depends on whether it's a platform that the city is still doing most of the work or if it is a or if they're literally going to do the work for us. And if that's the case, then it may be worth that higher cost to be able to reallocate those resources to other areas. So, from the tax standpoint, we're trying to evaluate what would make sense to do that type of administration. Then the other part of it would be more of the enforcement side. And I don't want to stray too far out of my lane, but that's more in the planning and economic development and that's where code enforcement comes involved. And this is typically where we find that the third party companies are not the same as having our own code enforcement folks go out and do that work. The enforcement that is done by a lot of those platforms is really sending a letter and that can only go so far. So, at some point, you have city staff that needs to come in and really kick that enforcement into the beer. And at that point, you're left wondering why are we paying the extra cost for a firm to just send a letter when ultimately we're going to need to go out and perform that enforcement anyway. So, where we are is we're still in the evaluation stage. I think that the administration part of it from a tax standpoint makes sense. And that's something that we can enter into a contract rather quickly once we finish our records checking process. And then I think internally we're still looking at the from the enforcement standpoint, but it looks like those firms don't really match up for that. Thank you for that. I appreciate it. And so, regardless of the menu of services that a particular firm may offer, there would still be a role for our, for the city of Santa Rosa in the development and the process of dealing with our programs. So, we would not be stepping out entirely from the workings of this program, regardless of the menu that they may provide. So, I appreciate that, Alan. Thank you very much. Next to my last question, in tracking the number of complaints, and we touched on this, Ms. Meads touched on this, how many were repeat complaints? How comfortable are we with the tracking of that so that we have a true sense of how many bad actors we have in the city and how many original complaints and not multiple complaints against the same property owner? I'm going to throw that one to my bench too and have the all answer. Good evening. Thank you, Council Member Sawyer for the question. We did discuss this at length earlier today. And there is the instance and potential that some of the complaints that we receive are overlapping. In other words, they're duplicates. And reason being is we track all of our actions independently, because regardless of a repeat or not, it does still take staff engagement to work through that complaint. Although the number may be significantly lower, that is nowhere near half of them are overlapping. It's significantly less. Some are likely overlapping just due to the effort from staff. And we track that along with some of the efforts that we're going to undertake due to Mr. Halton's suggestion and tracking time and dollars spent in this initiative as well. Thank you for that. And my last question I had to do with the flexibility of the 215 limit and Ms. Meads, you addressed that. So those are my only questions at this point. Thank you very much. Thank you, Council Member. Other questions? Council Member McDonald? Thank you, Mayor. Okay, so I have a couple different questions. I understand that you had a 215 cap. Was that based on applicants that were in the queue at the time? And that's how we came up with that number? It's still not super clear to me on how you got the data to support that that's the correct number for the City of Santa Rosa. And that's some of my concern around that number and setting a cap at it, because we're not really sure how we came up with that. The other thing is how we came up with the amount of the fees or fines. And that's something that during discussion I'm going to bring back, because one, I just don't think they're steep enough. But how did we come up with the 500, 1,000, 2,000? Was that from other cities? Or where did that specific amount come from? And then the cost of the business license to be able to run one of these, or if it's a permit, how much is that? And could that potentially be increased as well? And then also around how many enforcement officers do we have right now tracking all this information? Let's go ahead and let the staff jump in and answer some of the questions because I'm just going to list all my questions right now. And everybody has to remember them all. Sorry about that. Thanks. I apologize. I didn't start writing until I heard the word business license. Can we do them one at a time? Sure. Okay. So the first one is around the 215. Was that based on the number of applicants that were in a queue to apply for these licenses? Or was that based on a number that you have received data from so that we know that that's the proper number of short terminals we should have in the city? So the 215 encompasses all of the non-hosted short terminal permit applications that are in-house, in process today, which is 198. So if we were to stop at that number, it would be 198. The 215 came from us trying to anticipate how many applications would come into the city by today, given how many had been coming in in previous months and the lead time between when we had to prepare the item and it being heard tonight. So 215 took into consideration as if all of the non-hosted short terminal permits in the queue would be approved and provided a buffer, which we overestimated because the Economic Development Subcommittee at the meeting we had with them, they wanted to stop at where we were at as of tonight, which would technically then be adjusting the cap to 198 if you wanted to. The number is not set in stone. We don't know. We can't say what is the the right number of non-hosted short terminals. I mean the folks that are saying that it affects housing stock would say zero is the right number and the folks that want to operate them would say a much larger number. So we defer to council in terms of making that that decision. Okay, thank you. For question number two, I had around the fees and fines the 500-1000-2000 based on the violations. Can you tell me where you you got that number from? Was it what other cities do or how did you come about that amount? So we did look at what other cities do and we came in on the the stronger side of things. However, while we were in the process of adopting this urgency ordinance, the state of California came out with some steeper fines that would be acceptable and you just saw that possibly saw that the county has has increased their fines to that amount. I also will defer to Jesse who worked with our assistant city attorney on coming up with those fees. Great. And then the cost of the permit or is it a business license? I believe it's a permit as of right now. How much is that? And could you share that with me? Yeah, so we cannot at this point do it as a business license because we don't have a business license. We have what's called a business tax certificate. And if you want details, I'd probably turn that over to Alan. But in order to run this program through a business tax certificate would require going out to the voters and having them approve that designation that we would be allowed to do it through a business tax certificate or add a business tax certificate requirement. Currently unless somebody operates four or more, they don't need a business tax certificate. So what we did was we created what's called a short term rental permit. And it we designed the fee based on how long we thought it would take to to review these things. And as the backlog indicates, it takes a long time. We've uncovered, you know, illegal housing or I shouldn't say illegal. That sounds like people were doing on purpose, but unpermitted housing, a lot of stuff like that. So anyways, we came up with using the existing fee for a standard temporary use permit, which is usually required every year. And at the time it was $1,129. Now that fee has changed since July 1st. I think it's closer to like $1,189 now. And that's why we said, okay, we don't need that much for the renewal because we've done the legwork. Now we've seen how many bedrooms there are. We verified with the county assessor's office. We've made sure that there's enough parking. We've made sure that there's smoke detectors and fire extinguishers and carbon monoxide detectors are where they say they are, you know, are where they need to be that type of thing. So now the annual renewal fee would be the same as an over the counter temporary use permit fee, which is somewhere, I think around $256. I'm not exactly sure. I could double check. It just changed on July 1st. Does that answer your question? Yes. And does the permit fee cover enforcement officers or does it cover just the services of the department processing the paperwork? I believe it just goes into the general fund and we aren't able to designate, but I will defer to Claire or whoever else would know that specific answer. Thank you. Claire, you're muted. Good afternoon. Claire Hartman, director of planning and economic development. Yeah, the fee is based on cost of service. So the cost of service that we evaluated for this does not include the code enforcement process that that could be in part supported by the collection of penalties, but the cost of the permit doesn't include enforcement. And can you tell me how many enforcement officers we currently have working on this? I'm going to defer to Jesse Oswald. Yes. Good evening. Thank you, council member. We currently have one code enforcement officer working on short term rentals at three quarters or so time. Thank you. And then can you tell me the fee that we give to somebody who's operating without a permit? There is no ordinance penalty for operating without a permit. We do have the three tier penalties that we do show currently on the ordinance. So there isn't any fee that's in local law for penalty for operating without the STR. Okay. That's all my questions. Thanks. Mr. Vice Mayor. Thank you, Mayor. My question is more directed at the people wishing to speak today. If there's a compromise, if any, if you could share that with us. Thank you. All right. We'll go to council member Fleming. Thank you. And thank you so much, Ms. Meads and director Hartman and Mr. Oswald. You know, this is a very complex and difficult task. And I really appreciate all of the effort that's gone into it. Many of my questions have been touched on by previous council members, but there's a couple of details that I don't expect you to necessarily know the answer to. So no pressure if you don't. One is since the cost of the temporary use permit or the annual renewal is the cost of the planning services, but not the enforcement services. Do we have an estimation of what an annual fee would actually be if it were intended to cover the cost of enforcement in the community? I don't have an answer for the city of Santa Rosa, but I will say that Berkeley imposes a 2% automatic charge to cover code enforcement. And do we know if that's effective in recouping their expenses associated with enforcement? I'm not sure, but I can check. Okay. That's really helpful information. Do we know if somebody, if they're issued, if they're either an operator against a good standing or if they're issued a permit for an unhosted or nonhosted short-term rental or actually, excuse me, if they're issued a permit for a hosted short-term rental, if there's any prohibition from them switching to being an unhosted rental? Are we talking about after the permit's been issued or during processing? Yes. You can go from nonhosted to hosted, but you can't go from hosted to nonhosted because that would then make you a new operator. You would then be subject to the 1,000-foot separation setback. That's how the ordinance is written now. Obviously, that's something that we could change, but we specifically include language that if you plan to do nonhosted and hosted to apply as nonhosted, because that saves your spot, if you will. Thank you. And has staff considered a lower number of strikes, if you will, for either individuals who are operating without a permit, essentially egregiously flouting the rules and or for persons who are deliberately breaking rules that are really dangerous? And specific, what I mean is it's one thing to have a noise violation, but it's another thing to, let's say, up in Montecito Heights, have cars parked in inappropriate places, where in the flats that might not be a life safety issue, but in certain neighborhoods, people can and have died as a result of egress issues. So I'm wondering if you've considered having some discretion at your at your ready in those types of situations? I'll defer to Claire for that one. Yeah, so we're taking a comprehensive approach and enforcement. So one avenue is code enforcement, which means you're in violation of zoning code of the land use rules. But that's just one piece of it, right? So we're also working with the police department, the fire department, they work under life and safety codes. We've got building code violations. So there's a variety of different avenues. And we're still exploring even outside of the city, what are some other enforcement tools that we can work with and leverage? Because this team that's collected here, even within the city, it's comprehensive approach. We're working together to have good communication and really to address the bad actors and as specifically as we can from our different perspectives and the different tools that we have to work with. And I think that's the key. Not any one of us is going to be able to enforce a bad operator just because of the nature of this is beyond noise. Like you said, it's parking. It could be impacting a right of way or evacuation route. So a lot of different things that we're concerned about with short term rentals. And then also in addition, there are things that perhaps are even outside of the city jurisdiction that we can work with for leveraging enforcement. Okay. Thank you, Director Hartman. And then the last question that I have at this point in time, although I may have more later, but I'll try to be brief is have we reached out to VRBO or Airbnb and asked them to do what they do for other jurisdictions, which is to require a posting of a permit along with the advertisement on their platform? I reached out to Airbnb. And I have not heard back. So that's definitely something that I'll follow up on. I did hear from one constituent that she wasn't able to include her advertisement on Airbnb and she was frustrated because she hadn't applied for a permit yet. So it's possible. Maybe they just did what I asked them to do. I haven't gone on the website to check. But if there's a contractual requirement for that to happen, it has not. Okay. Thank you for your information. Thank you, Council Member. I wanted to echo the comments from Council Member Fleming about folks operating without a permit. To me, it's perhaps a two-strike, not a three-strike. Strike one, we can give the benefit of the doubt that the person didn't understand what the rules were, particularly if they're new. But second strike, if somebody still continues to operate without a permit, to me that shows ill intent. And I'd be perfectly happy with a two-strike rule in that situation. And I think that that was where Council Member McDonald was going as well. At what point, I think this is a question for Jesse, at what point does a complaint become an infraction? Thank you, Mayor. The investigation, the results of the investigation are really the key when it's validated and verified. And that's really some of the difficulties we've faced is we know that the actions occur after hours and on weekends, and we have been allocating some resources to address that. So verification, and we're working with other entities, including the Police Department and the Fire Department, to get that actual validation when we aren't able to respond, say, at the weekend or whatever. But we are working with several departments to address that matter, to have that response as well. So validation is the key. So taking it out of the conversation around complaints where there may or may not be overlap, how many infractions have actually been issued? How many of those complaints have been sustained? I apologize. We don't have that information, but we can certainly get it for you. Okay. I'd like to see that particularly for our conversation around sort of the comprehensive changes to the ordinance outside of the urgency process. And then just to confirm, Sherry, with the total number of permits that folks have applied for, this really doesn't apply to any that are in the pipeline currently, because we have enough, if we did the 215, that accommodates the amount that we have, so we wouldn't run into legal non-conforming use issues for some of those operators, correct? That's correct. And as it stands, as of right now, we would be able to accept 16, 17, 18 more to get up to that 215 cap if we left it at that number. Okay. 17 more. And then last question, and it's for the city manager, do we have sort of an updated timeline on when, obviously we're talking about two very narrow issues here today as amendments to the urgency ordinance. Do we have a timeline for when we'll have more comprehensive discussions, not just an urgency ordinance, but sort of a permanent framework for the city? Mayor, can you clarify your question? Yeah. So if council members were interested in having discussions about aspects of the ordinance outside of the two recommendations from staff, what does that timeline look like to have that conversation with the public? I know, Sherry, you mentioned community engagement after this, but there is significant other issues that I know. The operators, the council, the neighbors, folks are interested in having a more comprehensive relook at the ordinance. So I don't have an answer for you at this time. That's something I would need to get back to staff and have a discussion on what that timeline looks like. Okay. Any other questions, council? Mayor Rogers, may I interrupt for a moment? Were you asking for a study session or more interaction with the community? I don't think it's particularly a study session. I think that what you'll hear in comments are other aspects of the ordinance that also need to change and comprehensively around mostly enforcement, right? Those are the big ones that we keep hearing. So understanding that tonight is about those two narrow issues, I'm looking for the timeline for the community to be involved in a more holistic conversation absent the urgency ordinance we put in place, but changes to it. Claire, did you want to respond? Well, yeah, thank you. As Ms. Meads presented in her presentation, we are looking at, after tonight, entering into an engagement process that will run through the fall so that we'll have experience with this ordinance as amended, we'll engage with the community, and we're looking at early next year into spring to bring back any amendments, like she had said, if there are amendments that are needed, and that would be holistic so that could address enforcement, it could address permitting, and we'll revisit some of those issues. We're going to work with the Economic Development Subcommittee. They've been great all along to help shape just the scope of where we're headed with this. And to also Ms. Meads' point, it's not unusual for jurisdictions to check in at least annually on how these regulations are going, whether they're state changes and regulations, or just based on our own experience of what fits Santa Rosa. So I guess if that helps answer your timeline, we don't have date specifics, but that's sort of where we're moving into. No, I appreciate that, and that did answer the question that for folks who are interested in changes outside these two proposed amendments, be a part of the community engagement process, and then in spring is when we anticipate having a more broad conversation around STRs as well. With that, let's go to public comment. So for folks who are interested in providing comment, I'll start in the chamber, and so if you have not had a chance to turn in a card, please do so and get it up to Julie Guzzi, who's waving up there at the top. I will go off of that list first, and then we'll come back and do our Zoom participants after. So let's start with Andrew Smith, followed by Peter Birdsall. Thank you. Just a few comments. And Andrew, you can go ahead and lift that up. And for folks, go ahead and get close to the microphone. It'll make it easier for everyone to hear you online. There you go. Okay. Just a few comments. One for me, this is a housing issue. While the city of Santa Rosa is proposing a 215 number cap for non-hosted STR permits, that's just today. What about the future? Could the cap be increased to 1,000 within five years? A few hundred houses not being rented by families or individuals on a traditional yearly rental may be insignificant for the thousands we have in the city, but we have a housing shortage, not a surplus. And remember after the Tubbs fire, the need to rent housing was a big issue for those losing their homes. I have a couple of these non-hosted STRs, about four houses from where I live, ironically right across from each other. One was a long-term resident who died in 2019, the children sold it. Second was a house that was rented for many years to traditional rentals, including one person who had lost their home in the Tubbs fire needed a short-term rental. On the issue of enforcement seems to be unresolved. Just allow residents to take videos, photos submitted to the city website to help out, because there's only one enforcement officer, and every people do that all the time, so why not allow residents to do this? On the issue of issuing a permit for a property and a homeowner association where they may be restricted or prohibited, we can't expect the city to track all homeowner's associations and legal requirements, but just add two questions to the permit form. Is the property in a homeowner association? If yes, go to question two. If no, ignore it. Question two, if it is in a homeowner association, do they have written permission from the association? If yes, submit a copy with your permit. If no, suspend the permit till they have it. And if they answer no, and they do have, if they are in this homeowner association, let the homeowner associations have a legal right to submit a written notice to the city and ask the permit be revoked and include these two questions on existing STRs when they renew their permits. Thank you. Thank you, Andrew. And this is a public hearing, so we've opened the public hearing, and everyone is welcome to speak on the item. Next, we have Peter Burdsaw, followed by Marcia Shotwell. Thank you. Thank you for the opportunity to speak on this item. My name is Peter Burdsaw. I live in on Rutherford Way in the Fountain Grove area of Santa Rosa. I lived in Santa Rosa for 20 years to get a sense of the significance this issue to me and my family. This is the first time in 20 years I've come to the City Council in Santa Rosa. I think you're going to find a lot of people in the community feel really strongly about this. I appreciate the discussion with the staff because it helped clarify what you can actually act on tonight, so I'll start with that. If there are only 198 in the queue, then please reduce the cap to 198. And if you can reduce it further than that, then please do that. You know, the crisis in this community is a lack of housing and housing affordability and the more units we can make available for people to work and live here, the better. But I hope at least you'll drop it to 198 more lower. On the violations, the, seems like the fees have been increased by the county and the state. Please increase the fees, the penalty for violation. And two strikes seems like enough, as I understood the presentation, it's the number of violations of a year. It seems like if there are two in a year, that's enough. Long term, reading about this issue and talking to other people has led me to get involved with Save Our Santa Rosa. I do support their recommendation that non-hosted short term rentals should not be allowed in residential areas. And long term we should be moving everything we can. I was noticing the signs here about saving water. I mean, realize we're only talking about 200 units, but you know, I have a bucket in my shower to collect water. I realize that doesn't stop the drought, but we're all trying to help, right? So we should take everything we can to make units available for people to live and work in this community. I do a lot of work in education, teachers, classified employees, lots of families just simply can't afford to live here and urge the city council to do everything you can to work on that crisis. Thank you very much. Thank you, Peter. Let's go to Marcia, followed by Rick Abbott. Dear city council, just like my previous, I've never done this before. This is a first. Okay. We're the third generation that's been in Santa Rosa for years. My husband built this house 1978, 44 years ago, and it's been a wonderful place to live. Kids in the neighborhood, the schools, the people next door were elderly. They passed away, and a corporation bought it. So now we live with beer pong, cornhole. They're drinking, they're partying. We go over there to ask them to calm down, and they just want to fight with you. I've been yelled at and screamed at for doing yard work. We live in hell. It's just horrible. And the other thing is the fire hazard. I mean, every weekend I call the VRBO and complain to him about the fire that I text the neighbors, and they'll call. And then we've had to call the fire department once at the city's expense. They won't put the fire out, and they don't follow the rules. They've done all their work without permits. They were orange tagged, and then they continued to work out of the back of the house, so nobody would see them. I have photos of eight cars parked in the backyard. So when you drive in the front, it looks like there's two cars, but in the back, there's a whole boatload of cars. And it looks legitimate from the street. They've also reconfigured the outside where water goes into my neighbor's pool. I will commend Jesse Oswald has been wonderful. He is the one person that gets back to us. He has great response. I did ask him when a fire breaks out in our neighborhood because of their fire pit. While they're not paying attention drunk in the hot tub, you know, the wind could come up, the leaves could blow it, and here we go. We live on Manzanita. So what does that tell you? It's heavily wooded. It will burn right up the hill. So I asked him who was responsible, and he didn't know. So then I contacted our city attorney who has never responded. So my question is, who is responsible when our neighborhood burns up? My aunt and uncle who live, maybe less than a mile from us burned up in the last fire. Our neighborhood is heavily wooded, trees come down, and you can't get out. So this is a huge problem that still hasn't been resolved. So we went from living into a wonderful neighborhood into living hell. No, no host rentals. If somebody was living there, they would pay attention to what's going on. And when I call, I have to argue with these people for over an hour. Thank you. Thank you so much, Marsha. We'll go to Rick Abbott, followed by Russ. And make sure you get really close to that microphone. Okay. Hi, my name is Rick Abbott. My wife, Sharon, and I have lived in Santa Rosa since 1976. We raise both our children in wonderful residential neighborhoods. I'd like to thank you for the opportunity to share our thoughts on short-term rentals. Last year, the city conducted a survey to solicit citizen input on short-term rentals. You may recall that over 2,200 citizens responded to that survey, the second largest response of any city survey. I'd like to highlight two of the questions on that survey and the responses received. The question, where should short-term rentals be allowed, elicited the following responses. Not allowed anywhere, 17%. Allowed in commercial districts, 49%. Allowed in residential districts, 42%. Less than half of the respondents approved of short-term rentals in residential districts. I'm sorry, less than half of the respondents did not approve of short-term rentals in residential districts, and an overwhelming 66% wanted them confined to commercial districts are not allowed at all. By passing an urgency ordinance that allows short-term rentals in most residential districts, the city disregarded the desires of an overwhelming majority of the voters here in Santa Rosa. To the question, how should the city enforce ordinance violations, 72% favored fines? The urgency ordinance does in fact establish fines. However, the process set up to levy those fines has proven totally ineffective. You have asked the city department that works only weekdays to invest in levy fines for violations that occur mainly on the weekends. How you expect that to be effective is a mystery. The current process has not and will not provide effective enforcement. Those short-term rental operators who choose to ignore the law will continue to operate with impunity. Our fervent hope when you consider a permanent ordinance next year is that you align the ordinance with the express desires of the voters by confining these commercial non-hosted short-term rentals to areas where they won't disrupt our neighborhoods. Thank you. Thank you, Rick. Let's go to Russ. Russ has departed. He's not here any longer. Okay. Let's move on to Eric Deese, followed by Marie Piazza. Do we have Eric here? Yeah, that's me right here. All right. Well, members of the council, thank you very much for the opportunity to speak with you this afternoon. I live in the Montecito Meadows neighborhood, and I think many of you may be familiar with a problematic short-term rental that exists there. It's owned by a Santa Rosa dentist named Harry Albers. He lives in Larkspur, but he has a dental practice here, so it's a non-hosted rental. And I think members of the planning department and certainly many of you will be aware of the many problems we've experienced there. So this includes loud drunken behavior going on until one or two in the morning, large parties. Last year, there were a couple of wedding receptions with 50 to 70 people there. This owner also tried rebuilding his deck without a permit, and I think code enforcement did catch him on that. So two weeks ago, I placed some signs just like the ones you see all around here, and I discovered on Sunday that they had been defaced. So let me just show you what the owner did. These signs were on my property, on my side of the fence. So here's this one. The owner may not have liked the message, but he's felt empowered to spray, spray paint through the wire fence onto these signs on my property. So that was pretty shocking that somebody would do that, but again, he felt empowered. So I've notified the police. I spoke with Chief Cregan this morning along with the patrol officers, so they've been notified. What I'd like to do though, I didn't come here to complain about somebody spray painting my signs. What I'd like to do is ask you all to vote in favor of this amendment to the ordinance. I think capping the number of non-hosted rentals is really critical. In fact, I would urge you to pick the number that we have today, which is 198 applications. Cut it off as of today. I think the other issue that's really important is to talk about code enforcement. As you heard from Jesse Oswald, we have one code enforcement officer, and maybe they operate during regular business hours, Monday through Friday, but the problems happen on nights and weekends. So we need more code enforcement capability. So I would propose that you look at ways to fund that because I know that costs money. You need to have the people available nights and weekends. So maybe increasing the annual permit fees, having that 2% tax like the city of Berkeley did. You know, these are all really good ideas of how we can fund adequate code enforcement. All right. Thank you. Thank you, Eric. Let's go to Marie, followed by Jose. Hi there. My name is Marie Piazza, and we have lived in Northwest Siena Rosa District 6 for 35 years. Based on what I've heard tonight, I hope you do cap it, and I hope we go a few steps further than that. A few years ago, the house next to us became an unhosted short-term rental on Facebook Marketplace. So we don't even have any of the coverage that you might get from VRBO or Airbnb for about 350 a night. Since then, we've had parties, noise, and parking congestion. Since that time, there have been the short-term renters having large-scale parties that affect our neighborhood. Recently, I sent in video documentation of a party with 19 people on the patio. I don't even know how many were in the house. Where do you think all these people parked? Okay. They're all over the neighborhood. The house is permitted. Thankfully, there's that process, but it is permitted for six people with three visitors. As all of us neighbors sat out in the front yard talking about it, there's nothing really that we could do about it. I was able to send that video documentation into the city, and our homes are only 8 feet from the fence. They're 16 feet separating the homes. That's it. The case still is pending. It's been two months, and I just would love to see some follow-up on that. So now, the city is limiting the number of short-term rentals, and I personally think that you should limit the number of unhosted short-term rentals to zero. We are now living next door to a mini motel. It's an unsupervised mini-hotel. Even the smallest motel has a front desk clerk. So why is the city allowing an unmanned commercial business in a residential neighborhood? It's just totally unacceptable, and it doesn't allow us to enjoy our house on the weekends, because that's usually when this all happens. We never know who's going to roll in on Friday afternoon. We dread Friday afternoons. We do not know who's going to show up. Please take your steps tonight. Let's continue this conversation. Make it bigger. Accelerate it. I don't want to wait till next spring. Okay? Let's talk about this sooner, because this is a blight in our neighborhoods. We need to stop these unhosted short-term rentals within the city limits of Santa Rosa. They are unsupervised commercial operations in residential neighborhoods, and the people that rent them seem to know that they can do whatever they want with no consequences. So please give us back our neighborhoods. Thank you, Marie. We'll go to Jose, followed by Will. Good afternoon, Senator Rosa Council members, and thank you for allowing me the opportunity to speak today. I urge you to adopt an updated short-term rental ordinance that reigns in non-hosted short-term rentals, which are being run in neighborhoods throughout our city, like small hotels. Non-hosted short-term rentals are commercial operations that should be operated on commercially designated land and not in our residential neighborhoods. These non-hosted short-term rentals continue to be a nuisance, threatening public police, welfare, health, as well as our safety. For example, a gentleman who purchased and moved into a home up the street from me a little over a year ago rents his home out through Airbnb and BRBO in clear violation of our neighborhood CCNRs, and he is well aware of this violation. That said, his guests often speed through my neighborhood party throughout the night and seem to have no clue about the fire dangers we face in Sonoma County. I'm sure you can imagine how annoying this is for me and my neighbors, most of whom are retired and have lived in our city for decades. While I'm not asking you to enforce my neighborhood CCNRs, I'm asking you to enact common-sense regulations that would reduce or prohibit commercial operation of non-hosted short-term rentals. Once again, thank you so much for this opportunity to speak. Thank you, Jose. We'll go to Will, followed by Mary Ann. Good afternoon, City Council members, Mr. Mayor and City staff. My name is Will Beatty. I'm a long-term resident of Santa Rosa over 35 years. I live in the third district and I'm here to speak on behalf of the proposed ordinance on short-term rentals. Our neighborhood, the Castle Rock neighborhood, has recently had to deal with the negative impacts of a non-hosted short-term rental. Within the first two weeks of operation, the neighbors have had to call the police, deal with loud partying, underage drinking, and far too many cars for the parking allotted. I'm sure that this is not unique based on the conversations I've had and I'm sure what you've been hearing tonight. Our concerns relate to the following. We're zoned an R1 residential neighborhood that now has a commercial SDR that is hosting large number of renters. This has negatively impacted our property rights to enjoy our homes and has impacted the residential character of our neighborhood. These non-hosted SDRs should only be allowed in appropriately zoned commercial neighborhoods. The impact on our critical housing shortage is also exacerbated by SDRs. The Robert Eiler study from Sonoma State clearly makes this connection and the primary motivation for these SDRs, the non-hosted ones, is a profit motive. I'm not opposed to that in any way but I just think that we need some common sense controls over that. Finally, the enforcement of violations as it is currently constructed is inadequate. Police no longer respond to calls, city code enforcement office hours of operation render it pretty ineffective, particularly on weekends. So the possibility unfortunately of a confrontation occurring between neighbors and one of the SDRs is something that we in our neighborhood are concerned about and we've talked about on email. I urge you to pass this ordinance and then direct city staff to carefully consider how to strengthen the ordinance based on other municipalities' effective ordinance. Thank you for your time. I know it's a difficult issue but I appreciate your efforts. Thank you, Will. We'll go to Mary Ann. Mary Ann followed by Ann Fenlund. Okay, thank you. Hi, my name is Mary Ann Rovay. I live in the Woodside Hills neighborhood. I grew up in Santa Rosa in the 1950s in a close-knit neighborhood in Montgomery Village. We made many friends there, including two people who offered me employment. Our next-door neighbor owned the hardware store in the village where I worked during high school and another neighbor was an officer at Summit Savings and Loan who offered me my first really grown-up job as a teller. Fast forward many years of career driven moves away from Santa Rosa. In retirement Santa Rosa was the place that felt like home. So we moved into a wonderful neighborhood where we have made many friends. To me a neighborhood has always been a place where people enjoy the company of neighbors who care about each other and do their best to be considered of each other. We feel that the presence of two non-hosted short-term rentals in our neighborhood threatens that close-knit feeling and if left unchallenged may lead to more of them in the future. People who use short-term rentals have no intention of becoming part of the neighborhood nor do they feel obligated to be considerate of the neighbors. They are on vacation prepared to have a good time. Also the people who own these rentals don't have a loyalty to the neighbors. They are in business to make money. Many of them own multiple short-term rentals. I realized non-hosted short-term rentals may be regarded as a good thing to the council as it brings in some revenue through assessments and taxes. But is the council considered the quality of life for the residents of our city? Believe me my neighbors would not say having short-term rentals near them has done anything but threaten that quality of life. It also creates a burden on city resources. We don't have enough law enforcement officers to keep our city safe from criminals and also respond to complaints about short-term renters who don't abide by the rules. It is heartening to hear that you're considering a two-strike policy for loss of permit. I read about the lack of homes for people who would like to live in Santa Rosa. How do non-hosted short-term rentals help that problem? Surely it would be better to place families in these homes. The Santa Rosa I grew up in was the city designed for living. My neighbors and I are having a hard time seeing it as that when the council doesn't do their job by keeping neighborhoods as they should be not places for boutique hotels. Please do your job. Consider the citizens of Santa Rosa. Consider the fabric of our neighborhoods. Do not tear that fabric apart. Lastly, should you decide to continue to allow non-hosted short-term rentals in Santa Rosa neighborhoods? How many would you like on your block? Thank you for your time. Thank you Ann. We have Eric followed by Keith. Good evening. First of all, I'd like to thank that speaker. I felt she was very eloquent and touched on a number of the points that I myself feel living in a residential neighborhood. My name is Ann Fenlon and I live at 2335 Humboldt Street in the fourth district and I've lived there for 37 years. We have a very close neighborhood until in June 1, 2020, right in the height of the COVID epidemic, our neighbor opened up, excuse me, I called her a neighbor, but actually she's a woman who came in in January 2020, bought the house, they did extensive repairs, put in extra bathrooms. None of this was done with permits according to the Santa Rosa permit search and the first clients they had in there, they had 13 people in a two-bedroom house. Needless to say this certainly impacted our neighborhood and brought a lot of concerns around the issue of strangers in your neighborhood during COVID. So this house at 2347 Humboldt Street was purchased by a local realtor. An extensive remodel began prior to her moving in. A new full bath and extensive electrical and plumbing upgrades occurred. No permits were applied for or granted. On February 11, 2020, after I had spoken here on October 12th at that meeting for the emergency ordinance, I received the courtesy notice that the permit was granted to her and she was permit number 93. Now this is someone who had been operating it for two years, had all this illegal work done, and I was very concerned the local contact person actually is the contractor who did the non-permitted work. We've made numerous complaints to code enforcement and public health, especially when the overstressed three-bathroom house started leaking raw sewerage down the driveway and getting fecal matter and paper into our yard. There was no response. This brings me to the August 5th letter that the Santa Rosa City. Number five on that letter said that I read through the online requirements and was unable to find the requirement that the property meet the current building code standards. Was this an oversight? But in this meeting I just heard that there's actually only one enforcement, excuse me, enforcement officer, so I can understand there's just no way one person can do this. But this is a house that was extensively remodeled and when you're supposed to have all the safety issues taken care of a phone, thank you very much. Thank you so much, Ann. Eric, followed by Keith. Yes, thank you very much, Mayor Rogers. I hope you can hear me okay. Yeah, go ahead and lift it up just a little bit, there you go. Thank you, thank you very much. Yes, I appreciate you taking time out today to comment on this, and I'm glad to see that there's quite an assemblage of my neighbors here with their signs. As you know, I extensively researched the STR issue not only in this jurisdiction but in jurisdictions throughout this area and throughout the state. I am concerned about the information that's being used to make decisions. I don't think you have enough data to actually set a cap on non-hosted STRs. I'm also concerned about the complaint and code enforcement files not actually representing what's going on out there in the community. I'm very frustrated to hear that my neighbors have issues that appear to be unresolved but I do wonder why they're not showing up in the actual code enforcement files or complaint manifest that we get through our public domain request. So I'm a little bit confused about the basis for CABS or all the histrionics about short-term rentals when there doesn't seem to be much of a fact basis. I will say as a civil rights researcher I'm also alarmed actually by what I'm seeing. Neighbors waving signs doesn't stop there actually because what we've seen is that there's been some sort of cuddling of people that have consistent complaints that are unfounded by people in the city whether it's city staff or some elected officials not all. We want people to approach this issue with an open mind but I've definitely heard complaints from people that are STR owners and managers and guests about being harassed by people in the neighborhoods. It's actually occurring quite a bit. Our research also shows where this harassment seems to be based on fear I get it. People are fearful but without a fact basis for those fears which I just feel like we're cuddling fears but it also leads to extreme cases of racial profiling and exclusion for people that come as gas so the fear might be something that is a little bit deeper than just a fear of fires or something like that that truly is mitigated both by the current ordinances and good practice and common sense. So there's just a lot of argument here that seems to be really quite off the hook. We know that we're going to have a robust public process going forward. I guarantee it actually. People know that I'm good at researching and my outreach to people. I do want people to come together and really understand the issues waving flags and intimidating people. Not the answer. It's pretty juvenile. Thank you. Thank you Eric. We'll go to Keith. Hello. My name is Keith McCloskey. I'm a resident of Council District 4 and a resident of Council District 4 and just wanted to say thank you for being here tonight and hearing all the public comment. I personally am an architect and I work on a lot of affordable housing projects and we're working on some here in Santa Rosa and that's what brought me here is work but I don't work here all the time and so in my particular case I'm a part-time resident and I live in Los Angeles part-time where our headquarters is located and for me the reason why I bought in Santa Rosa was because it was a very STR friendly city and at the time I felt like during the pandemic when I was working remotely if I needed to go and work in LA I could look into this as an opportunity to investigate short-term rentals as an option to rent our house when we weren't there. And so we closed shortly after the emergency ordinance was adopted and so we didn't know anything about it and recently you know learned about it after being in town for a couple months but really like what I have heard tonight is a lot of stories about complaints about the noise, the parties and things like that and I would say that as an owner of a home who has done vacation rentals before we're people that we're the first people that are concerned about what's happening in our home and I think that a lot of the issues that are out there that are being discussed tonight can be resolved through the rules and the ordinances that are adopted and so I think a lot of the discussions around limitations on size events all those things they're all smart they make a lot of sense in my particular case you know our house is within a thousand feet of another and so we are not allowed to have a permit because of that and I just feel like the city you know is you know such a diverse group of collections of neighborhoods that to come up with a arbitrary number of a specific distance is tough I mean we have neighbors that we talked to that we're super friendly with that support short-term rentals and you know we have a good rapport with them for me to go buy another home that's eight doors down because it meets the distance requirements to me just doesn't make sense I mean I don't mind you know the discussion of a cap I think that could make sense but you know when we look at other cities nearby you know I think there's a range of places like Healdsburg that have three percent short-term rentals other jurisdictions in Sonoma County up to 25 percent and what's on the table tonight is 0.3 percent to me you know the number just isn't the right number it's just extremely low there is probably a number that makes sense maybe that's one percent maybe a half of one percent but I think it's something that just needs more research and I look forward to continued research to really find out what that right number is thank you very much thank you Keith we'll go to Michael Bryant followed by Bernadette thank you my name is Michael Bryant and I live in District 4 now for 36 years and I am a wire link fence one way out just maybe 25 feet in from another short-term rental that is non-hosted and it's caused a lot of angst on weekends and never knowing who's going to show up and what kind of alcohol might be served and what kind of raucous laughter these folks are paying over a thousand dollars a night to have a party and they come in expecting a non-residential area and it's a residential home and we don't want to have a discussion with them I've never called the police but often I have to go inside and when I did approach the owner at one point he suggested I buy some heavier drapes and get some earplugs and I don't think there is any place for a non-hosted str in a residential area he's making a lot of money and it's causing a lot of issues in the neighborhood that we never had before and I do appreciate you spending the time here talking about what can be done these two amendments are good but I believe the cap ought to be zero non-hosted strs in a residential area it just doesn't make any sense to have somebody make a profit at our expense and I appreciate again the time you've taken to listen to our comments thank you thank you Michael we'll go to Bernadette followed by Gary Lentz members of city council I've been a resident of Sonoma county for 33 years and a resident of san rosa for 13 and have lived in my current home for that amount of time I've been a business owner in Sonoma county for 33 years the house next to me is a non-hosted short-term rental before and during the time period of emergency ordinance this house was advertised as sleep 16 we watched in horror as people started to fill this party house day after day week after week they are in a four bedroom septic system from 1968 and according to the assessor's office they are four bedroom home they added two bedrooms and bathroom illegally this was brought to coden ford's attention and his planning department over nine months ago however they are still permitted to operate I brought this to the attention of the management company but they continued to advertise it on air bnb, vrbo, hotels.com, avante and multiple other sites this house still is a six bedroom hotel how can these operators be considered operators in good standing when they not only violate building codes they also violated the short term rental emergency ordinance over and over as they knew this was only a four bedroom house Jesse Oswald has told me that this house is over 30 calls into the owners and management company but yet they're still in line to receive a permit and operate as a short term rental this is an egregious abuse of not only the short term rental ordinance building code violations and environmental health violation operators like this should not be considered operators in good standing for the sole reason of paying tot money they are out-of-town investors with no connection to Santa Rosa or the neighborhood or the community around this commercial enterprise when I moved into my neighborhood I moved into a residential area zoned r2 single family homes should not be turned into boutique hotels I asked you to eliminate non-hosted short term rentals and residential zoning they are a nuisance to the residents that live around them as they are non-conforming use in a residential zone proponents of short term rentals will tell you that an added benefit they are for the hospitality industry being in the hospitality industry for over 33 years in Sonoma County I can tell you that what restaurants wineries etc count on are regular customers regular customers are people that live work and raise their families in Santa Rosa no to non-hosted strs and residentially zoned neighborhoods thank you for your time thank you Bernadette we'll go to Gary followed by Jessica Gary Lentz I must be very tall hi my name is Gary Lentz I've been a short term rental owner for seven years over seven years now and I the urgency ordinance tonight I have some real problems with only because we're talking about limiting to either 198 or 215 when the number of applications that the city got back in December was at 191 which means in the intervening seven months we've gotten exactly one application per month so that's the first thing the second thing is exactly 0.3 percent of our housing stock is in short term rentals right now Sebastopol has six times that percentage uh Healdsburg is 12 times that percentage Sonoma is at 5 percent we're at 0.3 percent um I'm not sure I get that there's a lot of hysteria about this issue from some people but the ordinance you passed back in I think it was October and started enforcing in December has had a real impact this issue can be solved collaboratively collaboratively the people who have been doing this for a long time like me know how to make this a peaceful relationship between neighbors and their their guests we're a community that hosts people from outside the area so that we can get them out to our restaurants and our shops and our wineries and to enjoy our our city when I hear stories about people harassing people who are in short term rentals thank God that hasn't happened in my neighborhood because I keep peace with my neighbors but when I hear that Dr. Albers guests have been subject to this I feel like what the council has done unfortunately and I think unwittingly not on purpose has created a lot of animosity between neighbors we're all Santa Rosans I've lived in this I was born in this town was born 58 years ago Memorial Hospital I care about this city I wouldn't do anything to destroy the fabric of this community so I hear all this this hue and cry about this but this actually can be solved by the people who do this successfully the vast majority of the people who do this are able to to keep get the message out you guys actually helped your messaging was real clear after nine o'clock it's quiet hours no amplified music no parties are big gatherings we make that really clear to people I notify people four times about this so I don't have any issues so if there are people that are that are somehow not abiding by this at this point they really don't get it and we'd like to educate them if there are a few bad actors out there I'd like to see the data about who they are we can help you with this problem you guys have a tiger by the tail one of the things you've said is a certain number of people allowed in the house a maximum of 10 I've had my doors knocked on twice by neighbors who have asked how many people are in this house this along with the harassment that Dr. Albers and others maybe have have experienced their guests have experienced this gives us a bad name this is going to give Sonoma County and Santa Rosa a bad name and I think we we ought to watch what we're doing here we can solve the problem come together with us we're happy to meet with city staff there are independent ways electronic ways to monitor sound that don't infringe on people's rights thank you very much thank you Gary we'll go to Jessica followed by Harry hi I just wanted to share how Airbnb has had a positive impact on my family my mom is an immigrant from a communist country and there is no way for her to have a future there so she came to America and because being able to clean Airbnb's she's been able to provide a comfortable lifestyle for me and my family and as a college student this is how I can pay for my college classes so I can have a better future as well and I just wanted to share that Airbnb's and have not just had a positive impact on me and my family and have a made a livelihood for us but it also has had a positive impact on Sonoma County families because the rest the people who stay at these rentals they are shopping at local businesses like boutiques restaurants that's all I have to say thank you for listening to me thank you Jessica we'll go to Harry followed by Thomas my name is Harry Albers I'm a my name is Harry Albers I'm a dental professor at UCSF and I've had a practice in Santa Rosa for 40 years um I have a daughter in medical school that's costing me about $280,000 a year and on the weekends I rent my home out to help pay that enormous tuition so last year next year and I basically have been renting for four years the issue I have is that I have had no complaints about my property in over a year yet I'm told that there are many complaints being filed to the city and complaints to the neighbors in my property there are dogs that bark when you come up the neighbors basically keep their dogs right near my fence they put signs up against my fence facing my front door basically harassing people I have a neighbor that when guests are in their dining room in my dining room having dinner with the sliding door open about two feet and talking there's a guest there's a neighbor of 50 yards away that sits on a deck when he can hear anybody he gets out a bullhorn and he tells them go home you're not welcome here please leave and then they also come over to my property and interfere with my guests while they're having dinner outside asking them to place a bad review because they don't want this rental there other neighbors have a hose they when the guests are outside they take their garden hose and they spray water back and forth and wet them so they can't enjoy the outdoor space their harassment has been enormous and they don't even call me they just rest I find out in the reviews I call the the the guest up after they have left the review and it's appalling I have stayed in vacation rentals in other parts of the country in the world in nice areas and I can't imagine people coming to cinema county being treated this badly if a neighbor does not let me know there's a problem with someone having a dining room door open two feet while someone's talking I would think that they would be kind enough to call me my I'm available 24 7 the issue we have here is that the information given to the council is not facts it's exaggerated here say I have 12 video cameras on my property and when I do get a complaint I check the video it's grossly exaggerated and it's almost like a witch hunt for some they think that you know I am hurting the community I'm on a full acre you can't see if anyone's on or off the property from the street I only render on weekends usually a Friday Saturday night rarely during the week and I ran it about nine ten months a year on Friday and Saturday night and the guests signed before they sign up I give them a 40 page brochure that has listed on it with the rules are and they sign off on that thank you sir thank you next we'll have Thomas followed by K thank you for the opportunity to speak on of course I'm a civil and environmental engineer just to let people know and an anthropologist community design is a really difficult challenge and I just wanted to point out I mean everyone here is is very concerned about housing I think and about their housing and and that makes sense we've gone through a lot of economic challenges and I don't know if everybody recognizes that there are across the country there is a seven percent vacancy rate where there's owned housing owned housing that is vacant which is owned by the banks it's very similar in Sonoma County that we have about a seven percent vacancy rate of buildings that are homes that are owned by the banks and remain empty so comparing that to point two percent is miniscule please be advocates for housing get those houses converted and make the banks sell those houses they're not because they can hold them without depreciating their capital at this point so the entire accounting systems of the of the country are completely messed up all right but particularly with regard to banking but whatever housing is critical please stay involved please stay involved with the development of housing please don't be nimby about housing but it seems like these problems that that you're talking about are are addressed by the code and and and this ordinance which I would I would agree that you should you should move forward on the orders and prevent people it sounded like you know nine o'clock they shouldn't be creating noises and and that's pretty reasonable and and if one person is using a bullhorn against somebody who is talking inside of the dining room one of them is creating a nuisance and and disturbing the peace and I'm pretty sure it's the guy with the bullhorn uh you know which you just heard that there there could be a bullhorn but but when somebody has 19 people on their on their patio uh that might be okay well you know I mean realistically somebody owns their house and they want to have a a um a celebration of one type or another have a number of people inside no problem I mean even if they rented it and had a number of people but if you're having that at 10 o'clock at night or one o'clock in the morning that's a really serious problem especially you know even if it is Friday could people do work on the weekend so I'm sure I kind of agree with the other guy who said there's a way to accommodate it but remember point two or point three percent is a very small number compared to seven percent thank you thank you Thomas we have Kay followed by Jeff good evening my name is Kay Ward and I've lived in Santa Rosa for 86 years other people saying 30 and 20 but anyway I have the house I live in the house I was raised in I did move away for 30 years and we lived in Sunnyvale raising five kids and then came back here for retirement and it is the city designed for living as someone has stated I have an Airbnb and I've been having it for six years or seven years and I love it dearly I've met the nicest people they are people who have helped me do improvements to my 1880 barn I live in and it's just been wonderful now I've been reading all the things that you're putting through and thinking of putting through and it seems to me that the hosted Airbnb's are okay they're trying to get more but why are they trying to get more unhosted when that seems to be the biggest problem I just don't understand that and I know it's not an easy task and I also have heard complaints that there have been I've heard questions that there have been complaints but no follow-through and if there's not going to be a follow-through to the owners then it's not worth it I've been lucky and as I say I've met the nicest people from all over the world thank you thank you and Kay did you say you've been in Santa Rosa for 83 years no 86 excuse me 86 I love it thank you for being here next we have Jeff followed by Nancy my father was a past mayor we have Jeff all right let's go to Nancy thank you good evening mayor city council city managers city attorney and city staff I wasn't going to speak tonight I just want to be observed giving fair chance I'm 45 years resident in Santa Rosa I think not 86 I think I'm the second one 45 years also I want to share with everybody these unhosted Airbnb I'm shocking I volunteer myself for 12 years on the city council advisor board I think a few city council know me how hard you guys want to meet go out to reach out the community the neighborhood everybody has to know each other because of disaster coming government maybe not coming to rescue you you only can count it's your neighbors we have no one neighbors because these are turned to the short-term rental every weekend different people coming just for the party the people this is the investment company I just can't stand it they did a lot of broadcast coming to Santa Rosa 19 I mean 95 404 this is the best place you can invest me your money because that most has a big house so you can turn into the unhosted party home I was really hurting my deep deep my heart 45 years resident here raised my three growing up children here and working under 12 years for the city council for city advisor board wants me go out to reach out the no we don't have any more neighborhood you're chasing the people away we have no more the school enrollments down because they're moving out because I can't shock to listen today 198 we issued now you're going to increase to 215 can we stop somewhere please I begging the city council member please I really please you know we need to bring our city back I don't want the room our city we need to bring our city back thank you thank you so much Nancy is there anyone else in the chambers who would like to provide comment okay we'll go to our public comment via zoom as we make the transition over I will say we're a little over an hour in on public comment folks on zoom you'll get the same amount of time as folks in the chamber but I'll also say if you agree with things that have been said it's perfectly okay this is just say I agree let's go to Barbara followed by Charles thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak my name is Barbara toman and I've lived in my home on Ronnie drive for 48 years so I think I'm number two as far as living here the longest so far the property next to me was recently sold and there three homes on it and I then after that learned that they have applied for a non-hosted short-term rental which had interesting reactions I felt extremely safe in this neighborhood all these years raised my daughter here um and all of a sudden even though they have gotten a permit and they're just kind of doing landscaping I started feeling really really unsafe and after listening to the meeting tonight I thought well maybe I shouldn't have come and listen because it really frightened me more the idea that someone would be right next door and have up to 10 people sleeping there because there are three homes and um five more guests and I think the city is giving permits to people but the burden of monitoring seems to be on the neighbors and somehow that feels like a really heavy burden and feels honestly inappropriate if no one's there hosting who but the neighbors are responsible for what's going on or to say what's going on I definitely feel it is not a positive addition to the neighborhood and I'm not sure if you wanted to satisfy the people that were already in queue why you wouldn't stop it there and why you would make room for more who maybe want to be when apparently the non-hosted ones are ones causing a problem so I don't want to repeat what everyone else says but it gave me a real unsafe feeling after 48 years of feeling really comfortable and safe in my neighborhood and it hasn't even happened yet so maybe that's my issue too anyway thank you thank you Barbara we'll go to Charles followed by Caroline hi my name is Charles and I would like to make a comment on the staff report statement that there should be a cap on the number of vacation rentals and I quote minimize the adverse impacts non-hosted short-term rentals and certain operators and good standing may have on surrounding residential properties these adverse impacts specifically deal with public health and safety issues related to wildfires and dense social gatherings and non-hosted at non-hosted short-term rentals I'd like to bring to your attention that in 2021 when we first opened up after lockdown non-hosted vacation rentals were among the first transient establishments to open up in California and the rest of the United States because the family could isolate themselves from people around them currently in Santa Rosa the maximum number of daytime guests if a case rental can have is equal to half the number of nighttime guests so a three-bedroom vacation rental can only have three extra daytime guests I'm certain there are a lot of full-time residents in in Santa Rosa that have more than three people visiting their home at any one time and the city doesn't seem to think that this is a burden but you're trying to make it an issue and create caps on vacation rentals also if the city is concerned about some vacation rentals and hazardous areas do what the county is looking at and require vacation rental guests we evacuate during voluntary orders then the guest will already be gone during a mandatory evacuation their home-based businesses in these areas that have visitors clients that are even more transient are they going to be banned you have people staying in hotels and motels year around like the flaminga hotel in hillside in that are at the base of monocidal heights are you going to prohibit these establishments from operating why single out vacation rentals when they have a manual to instruct guests in the event of emergency don't disallow them by placing a cap instead require vacation rental guests to evacuate during voluntary orders if an output an adequate roads is the issue currently a vacation rental can only have one on-street parking if it's allowable if there is a space on the street everything else has to be on premises under the current regulations the city has in place vacation rentals are already held to a higher standard they're not a health risk north state safety risk and such claims should not be used to support account the city just needs to enforce the current regulations so some of the neighbors like we heard today are not disturbed thank you thank you charles we'll go to carolin followed by lola i'm sorry mayor did you call carolin thank you hi i'm carolin and i've been a 32 resident your resident of santa rosa i want to thank everybody for this participation i'm an unusual air bb host because i am considered non-hosted even though i am hosted and live on the premises 48 weeks of the year however my husband who's an educator and i travel for two weeks in summer and then again another two weeks thus we had to apply for non-hosted status we live in our main host house and host from our in-law unit with a separate entrance you might think well what is four weeks income well to me i'm semi-retired i raised my now 31 year old daughter who was born with a disability for 20 years i earned half of the income because i chose to be at home with her every day after school to tutor her and would be preschool run an intensive behavioral program she's now a senior about to graduate it's no mistake i don't think you can put a cost on this however i did have to give up half of my income so um in 2018 i had a health condition that i received treatment for could not yet apply for social security so i decided to retire from my professional career due to the stress it would cause me and increase my risk of reoccurrence my average gross income is about $2,000 i'm hardly going to be rich from my airbnb however we host many people visiting family and for work purposes in fact i'm going to host one of my daughter's friends from the neighborhood and her little baby and her husband in a couple months so i would like to dispel the the belief that all non-hosted rentals are large homes they are not i have data i would like to request that the city recorder slash secretary record the street address of the people who have submitted complaints about troublesome rentals many of them i know about because i am retired from data analysis i've tracked all the enforcement cases on the city website in excel and paired them with existing applications i have a question for miss need or mr oswald how are enforcement complaints recorded because 72 of 113 have already applied for permits and we're actually input into the database without even checking your active str database isn't that amazing i just want to close with something that some of you might know in the 1800s the u.s census tracked people who were considered borders in many homes this has been going on for nearly 200 years in our country and i say why should we not be allowed to do what all americans have done historically simply because of a few bad apples thank you for letting me speak and i can offer my data anyone in the city upon request thank you caroline we'll go to lola followed by dan hi hi hello there um hi thank you so much um i sat through all of that which is very interesting and i'm so glad i did because it just confirmed um the need to speak up and um i am a sonoma county native i um live in the neighborhoods of monosito heights low salivos um altavista so i'm in one of the neighborhoods that has gotten a lot of attention for these short-term rentals and just to be clear i do not rent my homes but i live in the neighborhood and i am friends with all of the residents here and i'm here on behalf of many of them who um have a lot of frustrations but also a lot of really great ideas um on how this can work and after all of the commentary that we've all heard it sounds like um what is at the heart of this which i know the majority of our community and all of the council members feel the same is um we're trying to preserve our neighborhoods we're trying to look out for the people who live here and um what's happened it seems is that a lot of these mom and pop operators have fallen through the cracks in the effort to um simplify and create and design a permitting process which is complicated very much needed um and difficult and and i have only recently started following it as it became quite apparent that there was some issues with these short-term rentals so what's happened now is a lot of these long time what you call legacy operators um are not allowed to have a permit and many of them um have been operating short-term rentals in our neighborhood beautifully and have never had any issues and do so so that they can remain here those are the very people that we all want to protect that you want to protect many of them are you and in this process there wasn't a lot of community outreach i've talked to several of them and there was no community outreach no one was contacted they've paid their taxes they could have been contacted they were not someone mentioned there were some articles in the press democrat and an update on the website but not everyone reads the press democrat every day and every article and knows to go to the website so i would just urge city council and the subcommittees to regroup reprioritize residents who live in this community who work in this community who live in their homes um they only operate in the home that they live in it doesn't have to be so complicated it sounds like it's getting way out of control and um i'd really like to prioritize the community members here but thank you lola let's go to dan followed by carl did we lose dan all right we'll go to carl and then we'll come back to dan hello i i don't see a clock so i don't know if i should start yeah go for it okay hi my name is carl yeager um i think uh one of the council members asked for compromise i think this forum the way you're doing it does not lend itself to compromise a lot of people are talking at one another and i know you all are here to learn and here and that's great i would recommend a town hall with a professional moderator where people could actually have working sessions this is a complicated issue so you ask for compromise create the forum to do it um if i understand the uh council member mcdonald's questions and the answers to them we have one we have three quarters of an fte put into um enforcement if we had created a regulation or an ordinance that had focused in on noise nuisance and safety we would be in a very different place right now we created a very complicated urgency ordinance that was rushed in faster than staff has been able to implement it way behind in issuing permits if i heard the answer to another one of council member mcdonald's questions there isn't really a fine structure for people who haven't even applied but are doing it illegally so and i'm not sure i got i heard that answer correctly and so i do not operate an unhosted rental but i'm here to talk to four of my colleagues especially working class and middle class colleagues who do um there are some people like school teachers who can afford to stay in santa rosa if they leave for part of the summer when they are not working and rent out their home there are retirees and senior citizens who when they go visit their grandchildren can afford to do so because they can rent out their home sometimes if you have a law that focuses in on noise nuisance and safety creates education around how to have an unhosted rental and do it well creates true enforcement i believe in enforcement and heavy fines for bad actors like that should be the norm i think those those that do it well are tired of having the bad actors get all the play instead i think this this law has pitted neighbor against neighbor it there's a lot of hyperbole and a lot of stuff going back and forth that's a very very harmful i too have had guests that have been harassed a nurse who was a nurse a woman of color who was here to help the sick and dying in our hospitals harassed by people on my street we don't want that that's not what we want i would say that if you think about a cap of 215 out of 69,515 housing units in santa rosa you're way out of proportion there are people who need this economic benefit let's instead focus on helping them do it well helping neighbors understand each other and have a regulation that focuses in on the problem i would grant that there's probably been more staff time spent on floor plans than there has on noise news and safety thank you very much for your time i really appreciate it and i appreciate how hard the staff is working they've all been great with me thank you carl let's try to go back to dan and after dan will go to claudia he needs to okay can you hear me now there we go okay sorry i don't know if it's my iphone ipods okay so three minutes uh yes hello this is dan guvino and i live in santa rosa i'm a certified vacation rental manager with wine country getaway and i manage a few non-hosted properties in santa rosa i also head the santa rosa short-term rental association facebook group well we are in favor of a fair short-term rental regulatory package there have been several issues with the initial urgency ordinance the biggest issue being that absolutely no input was taken from professional management companies on best practices to address issues such as parking noise and large gatherings employing the hospitality trade best management practices solves any negative issues neighbors may experience this is in direct contrast with amateur operators who don't care about the neighbors in the larger community please keep this distinction in mind when you address the professional short-term rental community from the analysis of the staff report an adoption of a new urgency ordinance set a limit of 250 non-hosted permitted permits is proposed a report claims certain non-hosted activities continue to generate police and court enforcement complaints related to noise occupancy and large events a total of 126 str related complaints were received with 73 open court enforcement cases still pending it is interesting to note that report fails to provide any granular details in the type of complaints it will be great to hear exactly the breakdown of how many complaints arise from noise parking parties and court enforcement issues perhaps staff can disclose this granular details today from our direct engagement with cited hosts we have determined that a large number of complaints are related to listing descriptions nested in their tot number maximum number of guests etc most hosts are not aware of what exactly to disclose to the marketing channels as the permit application fails to provide this guidelines also note that this type of listing inaccuracies are of a lower seriousness compared to noise or party complaints my recommendations for the city council is to temporarily vote no on the cap of non-hosted permits let us work together with you on implementing the solutions we know work best also there are some fire rebuild homes still in the process of construction that are in good standing but may be denied a non-hosted permit by the proposed cap limit we are currently working very hard on bringing together the hosting and neighbor communities so we can just diagnose and provide best solutions to the issues that might be experiencing on another note please keep in mind that some homeowners want to subsidize their their cost of travel whether they're on a business trip or on vacation by leaving their property their primary residence in the hands of professional management the binary non-hosted versus hosted permit configurations as they stand today offered no opportunity for these homeowners it is important to consider an additional two type of hybrid permits such as the one implemented by the city of San Francisco to allow 90-day maximum nine experiments for folks on their primary residence it is open to uh lastly please join that santa rosa short terminal association facebook group it is open to all and it's a main purpose is to bring together host and concerns neighbors so we can start on this when in contact with the city government on addressing current and future issues related to the short term rentals i thank you for allowing me to speak thank you dan we'll go to claudia followed by david okay there there i am can you hear me now yes we can okay excellent um this is claudia castrow um i'm a short term rental owner of the sonoma wine nest um i've just been on the call and listening to everyone and just had a comment in regards to something that was not brought up i think the gentleman who talked before i think maybe talked a little bit about it um there was a lot of people on either side of the issue but i haven't heard anything on the qualifications of what an owner or manager has to complete um i've been in real estate for nearly 20 years and i'm working on getting my broker's license for about seven of those nearly 20 years i was in property management and for about two to three years after that i had a small business helping short term owners on how to rent their property in those years i found a lot of owners who did not know what they were doing this caused a lot of problems as you can imagine such as unclear leases and communication to their renters when we had a real problem affording a home my husband and i decided to purchase a home in one of our favorite places on earth which is sonoma county um however it wasn't without a lot of knowledge to this day we've had our str since 2015 and have never had any complaints from our neighbors knock on wood as an str owner i have had a successful renter but only because of the knowledge i gained from property management helping other owners and real estate laws that i had to learn and pass on tests just to get my license my question is if anyone in the council has any information on the background of the managers and owners that are being talked about um is there any information that you guys have on any of these short term rentals what's their background what's their qualifications i have a five page lease crafted by a broker and six pages of bike tnc is taken from professional bike companies strs are is a business that takes a lot of knowledge and i'm just wondering if the city is working on helping owners to understand and learn the business to mitigate the complaints instead of just applying for a permit um i have a good relationship with my neighbors because they were happy to have the squatters who were living in the garage with multiple cars always parked on the grass along with a lot of trash that was removed when we actually purchased the property today we have gardeners it looks nice so anyways i was just wondering if the issue of qualifications to attain a permit has been brought up because these bad actors that are being talked about could possibly be just untrained unqualified business owners thank you so much thank you claudia and we don't get into a back and forth during the public comment but we can ask that question once we're done and have staff respond let's go to david followed by emilia hello um some of the guys can hear me my name is david uh i think i bring a unique perspective to this call and that i've been a resident of santa rosa for two months so uh pretty sure the newest resident which hopefully uh still qualifies let me just speak after hearing everyone else talk but i want to kind of rebut a point that i heard a way earlier from people that were still talking in the room about people that come to these short-term vacations not caring about the community i'm a first-time homeowner and the reason that my wife and i moved here is because we had such great experiences visiting airbnb in the area um and so far in our short two months here it's been an absolutely lovely experience uh listening to this call though has been kind of disheartening to be honest uh just hearing like from my perspective the sensationalism and fear about airbnb rentals i think everybody can agree that nobody wants you know 10 person parties loud noise next door as new homeowners that's something that we're worried about we're still getting to know our neighbors somebody's gonna be a long-term renter right next to us in fact i just watched them move in today and you know i'm hoping they don't make a lot of noise but at the same time uh the housing market the way prices have been it's as a new homeowner one of the things we were thinking of is hey maybe we can afford to go on vacations if we're able to rent our home out when we're traveling to subsidize the costs and instead what i'm hearing is we're building a culture of if you got in line early enough uh then you have this privilege of renting your home if you saved your spot uh because you had your home before these policies were put in place and i don't think that's very inclusive and i think if the goal of the council and the city of santa rosa is just to preserve a status quo um then maybe that's the best policy just limiting it to the people that have already gotten their stake but it seems to me like the solution would just be combating the actual problem as a lot of people have said the noise the parties and not just panic limiting um how many people can apply for an sdr permit so i think a lot of people have brought up the data is really i'm sorry to say but like half baked in terms of why we're copying at 215 just because the number of people in the queue uh how many complaints i mean we weren't able to produce the number of infraction there's actually been we weren't able to say how many duplicate complaints there are so i just want to reinforce like it'd be much better to actually take some time study what's best uh listen to the professionals and listen to some opinions of people that have just moved in as opposed to just panicking out of fear and saying let's let's cap these rentals and um you know preserve what we have and not opening up to anybody new thank you thank you david we'll go to amilia followed by richard hi everyone i hope you can hear me yes we can okay great first of all thank you for having me i am uh bernadette's neighbor who spoke earlier and i've been listening for over two hours and appreciate all the comments thus far i've been in santa rosa or santa rosa for four and a half years and have been a vacation rental owner for over five i know everyone on the street where my vacation rental is i've never had a complaint and i've had over 105 star reviews uh for our vacation rental we screen all of our our guests even though the city approved for up to 12 guests we only allow six at a time and two children and we know every neighbor including the family across the street who has a two-year-old child we're super strict about who we allow in and we walk every guest who comes to our house through the house and explain very clearly that there are cameras all around it and what the quiet hours are hence we've never had any complaint what i don't think is fair is that we not only pay 12 taxes we bring in tons of business for the restaurants and wineries and and uh stores in our neighborhood through our vacation rental but we don't know where that 12 percent goes we don't understand why if there is a complaint that there is not support for homeowners on the weekends this is absolutely unfair for someone like me who has saved all their money to be able to buy this house has spent so much money redoing it and has great joy welcoming these people they've never been a disturbance and i don't think it's fair that these bad apples even though i'm sure i'm being listened to as a block sheep are ruining our neighborhoods we should have strict laws but we should not restrict it to these hundred plus privileged people who have gotten in early like myself it should not be that way and i agree like many other people in this room who have spoken that we should not allow people just to get these permits without education i went through certification i passed the course i pay my fees on time i pay my taxes on time i've never had any issues the cleaner we've had for our house has three children one of them is severely disabled and she depends on the money to clean our house so i hope you will consider people like me who actually are contributing to our community and not causing a disturbance thank you for listening thank you amilia we'll go to richard followed by alina richard are you able to unmute let's go ahead try alina and we'll come back to richard my name is alina and i'm a homeowner in santa rosa and i'd like the opportunity to have the flexibility to list um my property as a non-hosted short-term rental from time to time um when me and my family are on vacation before moving here we've rented a few arabian bees in the past in the county of sonoma and have had amazing experiences um we've solicited multiple businesses um restaurants uh multiple wineries and um it's been an amazing experience um when we've come to stay we treat these homes like there are ours just as we would hope someone else to caps on the quantity of s dr just creates a limited supply that would increase the cost for people who also want to visit this amazing and already expensive place to visit and limits the flexibility of people to earn additional income from their properties and limits the jobs created for many trades i also want to comment that when the complaint tracking is not accurately tracking the number of original complaints and duplicates are ambiguously considered significantly less as a way of record keeping this doesn't really speak to me as having accurate enough record keeping to create ordinances off of that would impact people's lives there doesn't seem to be a sound basis of data to make these impactful decisions on and it sounds like this ordinance takes a broad approach to just generically limit strs to address code issues instead of coming up with creative and specific solutions that won't so aggressively impact strs and many people's lives i think speaker dan said it very well um let's focus on enforcement and the bad actors instead of targeting all strs i ask you to please not approve this urgency ordinance thank you thank you alina let's try richard again so can you hear me now there we go okay my name is rick bay we'll live in the end of the height section above summerfield road in march we had a short-term rental move in directly behind our property and we do we have had a number of problems with the short-term rental however we weren't aware of the complaint process which is actually a pretty clear process we have found out about the process educated ourselves gone down to the city planning office and we have filed two complaints in the last 13 days so the complaint process seems very straightforward uh and what we don't know is how effective it's going to be is very unclear both at the city planning office and from the comments i've heard tonight what the enforcement's going to be i have not heard and it's probably too early to find out have there been any enforcement's have any has anybody lost their permit i'm curious what happens with the complaints for instance when we talk about verifying word verifying was used uh just uh half an hour ago or so i don't understand nor do i think anybody understands but what verified means how do you verify a complaint so say we're sitting in a a not a council meeting but an operating office complain officer and he's got four complaints four complaints for the same property for the last year he looks at somebody who's made a complaint he has no way of knowing whether that's a valid complaint or not i think we need to figure out a way to really codify what a complaint actually is it strikes me that if more than one complaint comes in for one incident there might be likely to think it's more valid but there's a lot of fuzziness here i heard one person i think it's the the mayor who said maybe we ought to uh just uh give them one shot without it you know maybe they don't know well it's hard to imagine anybody getting a permit who doesn't know what the qualifications are and if they don't they shouldn't have gotten the permit so i guess in in in uh in summary what i want to say is geez it looks like a very straightforward complaint process it's actually very easy to do my question is and can't be answered right now but how is this going to get enforced how's it going to be verified and how is it going to be enforced i'll be looking forward to that answer thank you hey richard we'll go to ian and wendy followed by chris hi thank you for allowing me to speak my name is wendy sewell and i lived in santa rosa for over 20 years i own a permitted short term rental in the skyhawk neighborhood in 2017 i could see flames out of the bedroom windows as i scooped my then six and eight year olds out of bed and tucked them into their car seats trying not to let my voice shake as i explained to them that we needed to leave our home it took two weeks for us to be allowed to go back 2019 found us evacuated again thankfully we got to return just in time to trick or treat in our neighborhood the following fall i was so scared to be in my own home i couldn't sleep every gust of wind had me panicking my kids eyes would open wide at the sound of every siren every breeze i packed up my house and got it ready to be a short term rental i promised them we'd come back some time in the future when it felt safe and that we could always come back to visit and stay in our own home spend time with our friends and play in our favorite parks we left our home september 24th 2020 september 27th the glass fire burned down 13 homes in our neighborhood and charred the beautiful hills surrounding our home our first guest that we hosted was my friend and her family who lost their home to glass they stayed for seven weeks a few more guests enjoyed our home before we got a call from friends who are also neighbors they could not find a place to stay while their home was being repaired from glass of smoke damage once again our home was able to provide a refuge they stayed for several months i cannot live in san aroza full time right now i need time to heal time for my home to feel like the sanctuary that it was meant to be but i want to be able to keep the promise that i made to my kids that we can still go home we can still spend time in our beloved community since we left in 2020 we have been nomadic when you think of people staying in short term rentals i want you to think of my family because that's where we live our guests may not all be nomadic but they're looking for the same things we are a clean place that's well kept up a comfortable home a place to make beautiful family memories i really hope that san aroza can continue to be that place for many more families just as it was for mine i hope my guests and others get to continue to experience what a warm and welcoming community san aroza is and i hope that one day i will feel safe coming home for good thank you thank you wendy we'll go to chris followed by chuck hello can you hear me yep hi i work for a property management company who currently manages short term rentals in san aroza and so today i wanted to talk about our experience with the ordinance and specifically what i believe is the most important aspect of the ordinance which is the enforcement of the operational standards and requirements as mentioned in the presentation four there's 136 complaints related to short term rentals and 70th the open code enforcement cases as a result of that however there was not presented any type of context behind those numbers and what those numbers speak to whether those actual complaints and issues were justified whether you know whether they related to a hosted rental or a non-hosted rental or whether the complaints are even just simple mistakes such as not forgetting to put to disclaimer about quiet hours and properties airbnb listening currently the data that's being used i feel like it's not completely accurate and well contextualized to be making the claim that short term rental activities and especially non-hosted short term rentals negatively impact public health and welfare currently i can say that confidently five of those cases that are open and listed should be closed as they relate to properties that my property management company currently operates for two of those cases my company has signed letters from the city dating august 5th that no violations were found on the properties and that the code cases should be considered closed however to date and the online registry for the city those code cases still show is open and currently being investigated for three more of those open cases the listed allegations which were dated back in november shortly after the urgency ordinance just passed those allegations are for unpermitted short term rentals and as of today we have submitted legal permitted applications for those properties and two of those complaints were made actually after we had received permits under the current urgency ordinance so we had already had the permits for about a month or two and then saw that we received complaints for having an unpermitted short term rental those cases are still open and they shouldn't be open as they easily would have been resolved by a quick look of the city's list of permitted rentals which i assume they have with this current permitting process the city is going to be using and presenting data to make decisions which would add restrictions to residents private property rights and create a negative narrative of short term rentals in santa rosa especially that it's not hosted rentals and i think it should be with more accurate data and better contacts to better contextualize any issues that are attributed to short term rentals as of right now i don't think the data presented to use that though the conversation is currently being dominated by anecdotal evidence and emotion and is backed up by very little data in fact and this will only lead to grading regulations which aren't effective and don't solve the issues and create for the divide in the santa rosa committee instead of creating the goal with councilmember sloyer correctly identified in the economic development subcommittee meeting on the 17th of grading regulations which work for the entire community of both short term rental owners and neighbors alike thank you and look forward to the discussion later thank you chris we'll go to chuck followed by jeff we have chuck okay can you hear me there we go um and i would just like like to make one comment that um one of the things that and it's been referenced before as far as the data goes i think it'd be very enlightening to identify the complaints as to whether they're one bedroom two bedroom four bedroom five bedroom six bedroom what i would venture to say is that i would imagine that a high percentage i would suspect to be over 75 percent of the noise complaints are coming from five bedroom uh places that are renting for several thousand dollars a night in by definition or a party house because if you're charging that kind of money it's not for a family it's for a number of people a number of several couples and it's a party house and so i think that you know some of the conversation here is maybe not really focusing on where a high percentage of the problems are and you're likely to penalize people that shouldn't be penalized and that's that's my comment thank you chuck we'll go to jeff i'm jeff bean i'm a 66 year resident of san rosa i live in the mcnaughtle neighborhood for many years the one bedroom home next door to me has been a traditional rental home the most recent tenants were drug addicts they were up all night arguing and fighting drug deals for a common occurrence the police recalled on numerous occasions this was not a short-term rental this is a traditional rental i'm sure that there are many problems with traditional rentals yet i don't think you would limit the number of rental houses allowed in san rosa as a solution well we currently we recently bought that little one bedroom home next door to make it a short-term rental this would be a non-hosted short-term rental even though i'm right next door only 20 feet away possibly closer than someone with a hosted rental would be if someone can have a hosted short-term rental i think someone in my situation should not be denied a short-term rental permit i'm right next door thank you thank you jeff we'll go to jeva followed by rc i'm jeva and i have a comment regarding the city of san rosa where i've called on three different occasions prior to purchasing our home in order to make sure that no mandates were in place and that if we had to go back to work in southern california after the um two-year hiatus of working remotely we had that option to rent our home part-time as need be within few weeks of me confirming that there are no str restrictions on the day of our closing of the home the city passed on the same day as it discussed the str restrictions the city simply could not have had enough time nor data to have made a decision of this magnitude um and did not give the city due process in order to restrict and create um consequentially um affecting numerous community members and of course as we had no idea we had to apply for these permits in time in order to reserve our rights because the city negligibly did not inform the community and it did not allocate the proper amount of time for us to get the permits for example right now the city is voting to cap 215 permits out of over 650 000 homes in the entire city which is less than 0.3 percent of its housing meanwhile other neighboring cities like hildsburg have it capped at three percent exponentially more other cities are five percent this really shows the lack of relevance of understanding the microeconomics of what is at play and what the fact that there's truly not real data and no relevance in our case we were first told that we can rent our home then we were told we cannot because our neighbor who has the ability to share her home um because she lives on the property she likes to travel so then she was forced to get a non-shared permit because few weeks out of the year she travels truly compromising our ability to enjoy our home meanwhile the city collected our $1,200 permit fee under the pretense that we will approve us but behind our backs you forced our neighbor to change her permit to a non-hosted permit within the proximity permitting seems like a real scam i know you're working hard but you have created a real mess in this hasty decision having done the due diligence on our end to confirm the legalities the city has managed to provide that their value for people is nilch thank you yava we'll go to rc followed by shawn and i do see a hand that's popped back up you only get one bite at the apple in the public hearing so we'll go from rc to shawn okay i think i unmuted is that correct yep we can hear you great thank you thank you uh members of the city council of santa rosa thanks for the opportunity to comment on agenda 15.1 so i work for a short-term rental property management company avance day and we have a strong interest in the well-being of the community as well as the any other community that we operate in you know despite commentary to the contrary the city short-term rental industry allows numerous visitors to enjoy the city of santa rosa and adjoining areas and these visitors drive a tremendous amount of business and tax revenue as as we all know but you know the vast majority of avance day's customers are families who may not otherwise be able to enjoy santa rosa if not for the ability to share a rented home and these diverse families provide santa rosa the opportunity to showcase its welcoming welcoming nature and as we do in other jurisdictions we encourage comprehensive and balanced regulations finds and penalties for bad actors but we encourage an open and transparent process with community input before considering another urgency ordinance and we frequently ask get asked to participate in rulemaking as we see the regulatory process play out across numerous cities and so we are quite easily able to participate and help cities with their drafting of ordinances now we've heard some very challenging stories that largely sound like irresponsible operators of short-term rentals are running amok our company's name was used i can only speak for us but it's disappointing to be lumped in with irresponsible operators because each of our homes maintains ring cameras and noise monitoring sensors and we have a dedicated internet of things team iot team that knows about noise issues parking issues and occupancy issues before any enforcement officer would even have time to arrive and we are as diligent as it can be in deterring bad behavior and we share our process with cities so they can see it live and can we promise that there will never be any responsible guests no does everyone have the same resources we do know but we care about being good neighbors and our reputation and it's disappointing that people largely diverse families are purposefully heckled and harassed during their stays you know while we support reasonable non-hosted permit caps and and regulations designed to rein in bad actors this process generally requires broad community input the city staff has been diligent as they can be in researching but they only have the bandwidth to do so much i'd respectfully suggest that the council takes the step to adopt an urgency ordinance that focused solely upon fees that allow the city to set up a proper enforcement process and mechanism in an attempt to limit the bad actors and we're all working towards the same goal of a safe and prosperous city of santa rosa and i appreciate the i appreciate the opportunity to collaborate with you all thank you thank you rc we'll go to shawn followed by synthia hello thank you council members for you know having this open forum my name is shawn hermese i'm a local real estate agent and each of the home that we've owned in the past after we moved out we had some short term and some long term rentals and now we have three short term rentals over the hundreds of people that have stayed over the years we've had no police interaction and we've done our best to keep only good guests coming and visit and i think it's great to have an ordinance so people that do misbehave are penalized properly uh as the str community involved with the sonoma county coalition of host and also with other individuals that have proposed a new ordinance or suggested ordinance with noise monitoring and and hefty fines for people who do misbehave because it is incumbent upon the managers and the owners to make sure that whoever is staying abides by the rules and lets everybody else around them have quiet enjoyment of their home from some figures that we found is there's about 800 to 1200 homes that are second homes that aren't even occupied throughout the year and a lot of that stock could be used up for short term rentals excuse me go sorry kids um so with that being said having a cap having only less than 0.3 percent of all the short term rentals in santa rosa be the sixth number which seems kind of you know uneven compared to the other surrounding communities so i just asked the city council to really consider meeting with uh people who are in good standing people who do have a good reputation create an ordinance that makes sense for the whole community at large that way well not only can we be an economic engine for the county but also let other people families that it's the most affordable way for them to come and visit we've had doctors contractors nurses through the years that we've been hosting and we just like to continue this especially for some of the older clients that have you know financial issues and this is a great vehicle for them to share their home either an extra bedroom or a whole house if they go on vacation so i really hope that you reconsider and how you fashion this ordinance and meet with some of the you know good good participants in the str community because we're here and we want to make sure that the bad actors are punished and lose their opportunity while the good ones still can stay around thank you thank you shawn we'll go to synthia followed by prosan hello good afternoon good evening my name is synthia air mocio and my career is being a short rental manager exclusively for non-hosted homes in san aroza in fact i've hosted over 800 times in my short-term rental career and since 2016 i started short-term renting at my home that was burned in the tubs fire and ever since then i now managed multiple properties because it's been such a positive experience i'm at this meeting today to make you aware of how positive it's been for me and also to the city of san aroza my business which is the short-term rental business has employed more than 15 full-time house cleaners a full-time assistant and i've helped launch a gardening business that maintained the homeowner's lawns so as you can see i've taken my you know my um step into making sure that our neighborhood looks good everyone on my team depends on their income because of these short-term rentals i've partnered up with various wineries including harvest moon bowman sellers paradise paradise ridge and hannah to experience a unique experience for those that are staying in these homes here's a fact that came from one of the staff at paradise ridge i was just told last week that out of all of the hotels in the area i have part i have partnered and sent my home guests i have brought in more business at that winery than any other hotel in san aroza 90 of the homes the people that visit these these uh wineries are here to visit these small wineries i've also partnered up with several restaurants in the area we give them a vip and a discount basically i've dedicated my last six years to create jobs create careers create my team to manage these homes at the highest level of management so my dream personally has come true which is to be a participant to drive a strong economy i am an economist by any high by higher education so my mind and my life is trained to find the maximum output out of anything my goal is to keep visitors spending their strong money within the san aroza city limits i believe in a strong economy and i also believe in entrepreneurship so here's my question for you san aroza has over 65 000 homes and we are tonight focused on 198 of them possibly maybe perhaps possibly 215 if it's passed that's less than 1 percent as a matter of fact that's 0.3 percent so basically that's 0 percent because 0.3 percent is 0.3 percent so let's talk about those 0.3 percent now out of 198 homes in san aroza the city can't give us exact numbers on complaints how many homes have had a complaint so far since december 3rd and what kind of complaints are being submitted i've heard about the parking on monoceto heights but my homes are not at all on that side of town mine are all on the west side also it is my understanding thank you it's my synthia we'll go to prosan hello my name is rebecca prosan and i'm a property owner in rincon valley i have a elderly tenant who lives there and i am there from time to time we live next door to a party house you can't i define a party house as five bedrooms or more uh a ping pong table a pool and all the accoutrements of you know what i would want to do if i were going to a place with 10 of my friends to have a good weekend um we've had calls with avance day and i'm i'm only speaking because the person from avance day was purporting to be a good neighbor i've had calls with avance day i've tried to share schedules with avance day i have tried to work with avance day they have been less than uh less than truthful in their comments tonight um i've had to call the police when i've had friends over we've had people threaten super spreader events in the backyard with while i have an elderly tenant we've had tenants next door who have refused to um let the avance day people know that they have a dog and so they would have a dog in the winter in december after december third who was barking for hours on end and the police couldn't do anything because that actually isn't illegal try living next door to that try living next door to potential super spreaders try living next door to bachelorette parties try living next door to fraternity parties look i want i'm a property owner i want people to be able to share and use the property as they are but i also want people to be responsible and i don't trust that avance day and airbnb and all the other share better platforms are doing everything that they possibly can to end this problematic behavior um i've we've we've become first name basis with the folks at avance day we've also become first name basis with the cops the cops have said that they've had to come to that house not just for us but for our neighbors across the street for our neighbors on the other side in fact there was one night that our neighbors across the street called the cops on avance day because their tenants were literally blocking our driveway every time i've heard somebody talk about the fires tonight i fear that there is a time when there is a fire and the avance day people can't seem to figure out where to park their car and so they park on our driveway instead look i'm happy to work with people i want to work with people but i also want the use and enjoyment of the property that i own i'm also supporting the economy i also think that is a good idea please support this ordinance thank you so much adam deputy city clerk i think we had one prerecorded voicemail yes mayor my name is david long this comment is for the august night city council meeting agenda item 15.1 the public hearing for short term rental zoning code text amendments good evening mayor rogers and council members i applaud city staff and the council for their work to make some changes to the short term rental urgency ordinance changes sorely needed to improve enforcement capability and provide a much needed pause in the growth of non-hosted rentals enforcing any form of short term rental ordinance is difficult and will continue to fail unless the city takes proactive steps to reduce the number of non-hosted rentals in residential neighborhoods this has been proven time and time again in communities of all shapes and sizes throughout the united states and the world there is no reason for santa rosa to believe that they are unique and will fare any better in august 2021 the city conducted a survey about short term rentals that had nearly 2,500 respondents the second most respondents of any survey in the city's history in that survey more than two-thirds of the respondents favored not allowing short term rentals to operate in residential neighborhoods period staff and council would be well advised to take action that satisfies this super majority of residents short term rentals has become a polarizing issue in the city with real estate professionals investors and hosts on one side and residential neighborhood groups on the other in the final analysis one needs to decide what position is best for the overall health and well-being of our community this should eventually lead to ordinance adjustments that support preservation of traditional residential neighborhood character more strongly than transient occupancy tax revenue derived from commercial businesses masquerading as homes thank you for your time and energy in getting this one right all right and with that we will go ahead and close the public hearing i think uh 0.3 percent of our community called in or participated as well today are there any questions from council councilmember swatham thank you mr mayor i i did have a question about our current hours of operation for code enforcement several speakers mentioned it and i just like a little bit more information on what flexibility we may have because i believe it may be a meet and confer issue if we were to adjust those hi jesse can you take that one please yes thank you and thank you council member swatham we have been allocated some resources to hire two contract code enforcement officers and that will afford us the ability to provide response to after hours and weekend calls i'm i'm not positive on the extent that i can confirm uh where we are in the process other than i knew i know it's ongoing to to get that underway and i i've worked with my staff to have the contract at the ready once we get the okay great just just clarify when you said once we get the okay okay from whom is it city council direction you're looking for city manager my apologies that would be um realistically human resources okay thanks and jesse you know on our economic development subcommittee meeting earlier today we're talking a little bit about staffing within code enforcement can you just give a really quick sort of overview because i just after some of the comments that were made i don't want it to linger that uh that there's there's nobody doing the work absolutely thank you mayor so the to clarify the point seven five officer that's not the only officer we do have we have about three quarters of an officer's time that's being able to be allocated towards short-term rentals so we do have a staff of and again super pleased and happy that we do have staff filling positions historically since pre 2018 we have not had a full code enforcement contingent and we are nearing that now we have a new senior on the way and also a we've just promoted some folks so we are nearly at the point where we have full staffing and then this this additional need that is going to be filled is going to help account for backlog from nearly five plus years of low staffing and in other words not a full team and then one is going to be committed to responding and working through short-term rental complaints and the the process that we we intend on utilizing these contract staff is to literally because we can utilize them in the way that we propose is they can with two of them and I've spoken to their their company they can be responsible to respond to the after hours and weekends so code enforcement is is bolstering up and I'm confident that we're going to you know make strides in the in the very near future with with the additional resources we're we're getting on board I appreciate that and I also thought it was interesting earlier when you were talking about how it's not even just the budget it's not even just the staffing level it's finding people who are qualified and trained to be able to do this has apparently been particularly difficult absolutely thank you for bringing that up mayor the as as we all know there's the the supply chain issues and part of the supply chain is the talent chain as well meaning those individuals who are interested in utilizing their talents in a career in enforcement of any kind meaning building code enforcement building plan check code enforcement itself so that has been a challenge city-wide California-wide finding folks to fill these positions so hence the the pretty long process and how long it's taken us to get these positions filled code enforcement for sure and and development-wide as well and they're very close to hand-in-hand kind of the same industry right thank you mr vice mayor thank you mayor my initial question was asked and answered I did have an additional question in regards to videotaped or evidence that's collected by the neighbors it can this evidence be used why and or why not so I'll take the first stab at that and then I will defer to the city attorney if I have to due to the the the real possibility that any complaint and or code case the complaint that that becomes a code case has to be treated as a court case so much like again I won't go into waters that I don't understand fully but much like a complaint for a potential police investigation the complaint is a basis for an investigation then we do have to find the proper means for documenting actual evidence meaning at the current time per direction a video or photography sent in by other than authorized and and confirmed sources cannot be used but it is a foundation for foundation and basis for the an investigation thank you jesse for the clarification adam city attorney did you want to add anything no I think uh jesse explained it well okay there are no other questions council members what I'm go ahead put a motion on the table please right so ultimately there would be two motions I'm going to start with the ordinance so I'd move in urgency ordinance of the council the city santa rosa amending title 20 of the santa rosa city code chapter 20-48 short-term rentals to set a maximum number of 215 non-hosted short-term rental permits to be issued citywide and to clarify that enforcement penalties apply to permit holders and operators and good standing file number re z 22-002 and wait for the reading of the text second so I believe that was a second from council member rogers mayor can I ask a quick clarifying question will we be able to discuss the item now that it's on the floor did you okay I want to make sure I thanks all right council member Fleming yes um prior to getting into discussion I wanted to offer a friendly not a friendly amendment but a competing um motion that we set the number at 198 rather than 215 let me say okay there's a motion and a second do we need to do it as a competing motion or for me I am comfortable with the staff suggestion of 215 and the methodology how they came up to that number and why that was chosen so it sounds like it'd be a competing right so we have a substitute motion that's on the table with the second to keep the number at 198 that'll be the first motion that's discussed if that fails we'll revert back to the original motion which was 215 uh council member Fleming did you want to make comments sure I'd be happy to make comments about that first of all I want to say that you know I listened to each and every commenter today and I heard a lot of compelling and to my mind sincere and heartfelt information from multiple perspectives I don't want to even say both sides I thought that there were some really interesting um and um just really thoughtful folks who were not necessarily you know the traditional um you know one way or another kind of people and so I want to thank the community for coming out for me where this this falls is that I think that what we see in other communities is that when the number in particular gets set um high as we see in the county then they have to go back and say we're not going to allow any of these going forward um and then you have to wait decades if not longer for these uses to be taken off of the market and so while I appreciate that most um operators are good um and I do appreciate the need for additional income that many people have here and living in Sonoma County it is not an easy place to afford to live um I do believe that having hosted rentals is the way to go about obtaining that additional income and that um while I say that I acknowledge that that doesn't work for every person in every situation and that is one of the challenges of creating regulation is that we cannot adequately accommodate every single person in every single situation so I'm not suggesting that this is going to work for everybody um the the other issue for me around limiting it to 198 rather than 215 is that while many folks pointed out that there's a very low percentage of short-term rentals in the city of Santa Rosa well they didn't point out is that the concentration of them in certain parts of Santa Rosa is very high and the issues for me and my constituents in particular have to do with you know the quality of neighborhood life on the reduction in students attending schools the draw on government resources in terms of you know enforcement here and in particular fire safety ingress and egress and so when we do do the the permanent ordinance I look forward to taking up these issues but for the issues in front of us today well in particular I'll just stick to the number um 198 to my mind is the number that we're required to do when we do the permanent ordinance we certainly could change it but what it doesn't do is it doesn't set up further in future entitlements before we address this issue fully and comprehensively which I believe is what this council intends to do so it prevents us from creating additional problems that in the future we would need to fix I don't know that will end up settling on 198 but for today this is the number that we are stuck with and so I say let's not further dig in our heels let's be methodical and thoughtful and we'll see what happens next thank you council member let's go to council member rogers thank you mayor um I just wanted to say I support the 198 number for multiple reasons but I would like as if possible um if not here in the future but to look at the definition of what hosted and non-hosted is because if for the most part people are within their homes and it's a hosted rental making it a a non-hosted rental because they're away for one or two weeks a year I think is pretty extreme and it limits the number of um rentals that they can have in a neighborhood as we heard from one of the people that commented during public comment so that would just be my suggestion all right thank you council member council member mcdonald I think the thing about lowering it to 198 I guess my point of clarification that I'd like to make is that if a license or permit is revoked does that then push somebody else in the queue up so that it would be allotted to 198 I just want to make sure that we know what we're approving because I feel like there's pieces of this whole ordinance that are not clarified and we could get that when we talk about the ordinance as a whole but that would be something I want to know for this particular motion mayor rogers would you like me to address that yes please do so if we did set the cap at 198 it would um allow for all permits in the queue however if somebody does fall out if they're denied for over concentration or whatever that would mean however many of those permits there are we would accept new applications up to 198 unless you guys chose to to do something different is that answer your question all right council member Sawyer thank you mayor um this is of course is a very difficult um issue because of the realities of problem of private property rights and you can't legislate common sense or respect of neighbors um what i'm touched by is let me preface I firmly believe that if we did not have situations where we have over concentration or if we had um a some rules in place that were really after the bad players seriously after the bad players and a way to track the complaints and be accurate about the complaints we wouldn't be having this conversation right now because people wouldn't even know because the people that are that the people wouldn't know that they have a problem because the people that are that are occupying the short-term rentals would not be a problem and i think the vast majority of short-term rentals are not a problem it is a very small number which makes me uncomfortable in in in restricting um the unhosted short-term rentals i believe that the vast majority of unhosted short-term rentals are actually operated well i don't know how many are not i don't know what the number is of those that are really bad actors but like i said before they are the ones they are my target and i would want to concentrate my efforts and code enforcement's efforts and in any effort on the point on the part of staff to weed out those bad actors remove their ability to to have short-term rentals at all and with with um and expedite that that effort immediately that being said you know i am comfortable with to give them the benefit of the doubt those extra up to 215 which came out as a recommendation from staff um i just i i think it is unfortunate um that the that those that are doing a good job and actually providing providing a service here in santa rosa and given the small percentage of our housing stock being dedicated to short-term how to short-term house or short-term rentals um i'd be i'm actually looking to support um council member schwedhelm's original motion i just find it's very frustrating because i i think that there are a lot of people that are being vilified because of the the really unfortunate behavior of a few that i would like to not allow them to be operating in santa rosa and to start that process as soon as possible thank you council member council member schwedhelm thank you mr mayor excuse me for me i've really appreciated the number of members of our community who've participated in this discussion and i also really appreciate oftentimes many people don't realize the challenge being one of the seven of us who are making this decision because for me it's not a black and white issue so for me what i was looking for is a nice balanced approach which i think staff has presented before us in addition to the feedback from um the subcommittee and so with that balanced approach and i was really encouraged by what jesse said about the code enforcement because again the fine the find is not in my opinion is not to get additional funding for the city but it's to get compliance and the part i would like as we move forward and continue on these discussions is a little bit more information about who was fine and is it did it create the desired change we want so if someone does you know is 500 bucks enough encouragement to comply with our ordinance or should it be 2,500 bucks for the first one i don't know but i'm looking at that intent and that enforcement code enforcement is that when someone has done something in contrast to or in conflict with our ordinance how do we get them into compliance right and i know we heard some speakers talk about education i really like the fact that there are property manager out there that apparently they figured it out and there may be some others that aren't so how do we blend those two together to make this so it's a win-win for everyone and again with the uh the 215 a lot of work has been put into this staff is you know it is somewhat subjective just like 198 subjective so for me i'm only supportive of the 215 number but i really do appreciate all the work from so many different staff members that have gone into what is before us today thank you councilmember mr vice mayor thank you mayor you have to hear an every everyone speak it sounds like we're putting san rosas against san rosas and even worse neighbors against neighbors and there's a comment that i that that a that a speaker said where i'm paraphrasing but pretty much where we're we were running before we were crawling and i take responsibility for that uh it's definitely new territory for for a lot of cities especially ours after the fires and the loss of the hotels just a couple on the hillside and it's definitely us trying to adjust to the need of of the visitors who come to the great city of san rosa to do business visit family see the beautiful place that we are now i'm looking at the number of 215 or the 198 and again are we pitting neighbors against neighbors councilman soyer said it perfectly if we had a system that enforced the laws with with teeth we would not be hearing about these issues we would be hearing a lot of the comments that we heard tonight where where neighbors were actually complimenting other neighbors for running an exceptional str program and i believe that to be the goal so i do not wish to add the vilification of the str folks against those that have to deal with the lessening of the quality of life in san rosa because ultimately that's who i believe we as council need to look after is to make sure that every person who sleeps here for not just a week for not just a day have peace in their home and that is also why i'm here happy to hear that that jessie oswald is creating and looking for additional staff to assure that our code enforcement has the teeth necessary to enforce the laws that we put forth uh and i look forward to the future i i do want to see a program that compliments each other instead of vilifies each other i think it's it's a program that could be run i've i've participated programs in other cities where i visit and it's absolutely awesome to arrive into a home opposed to a hotel or a motel and and again it's and i'm not even visiting san rosa i'm not even trying to leave san rosa so so just imagine those that have the the blessing to come here thank you thank mr vice mayor did you have more to add if you if you have more to add go ahead and do i'm i could wait but i i did have something around the 198 the thing about the 198 is that's who's currently operating right now so the 215 is just a what-if scenario and it was based on a thought that maybe when this started to come out that more people would actually then file for permits and they haven't yet so we're allowing more opportunity based on a number we don't know whereas the 198 we actually know right now so that's why i could be in support of that because we aren't harming anyone who's currently in the process we're just saying this is it until we have the opportunity to go back and actually do a full um engagement with the community um to go through the whole ordinance so i can see doing that part of that and then i can reserve my comments for the rest of the issues that i think we need to look out for enforcement and fines but i think for the 198 if that's the only portion that we're voting on for that resolution then we could do that and then if we go back and we vote as a whole i don't know how you want to do that part mayor well let's start with the motion that's on the table which is the 198 um and it included the rest of the proposed so if if you'd like to okay so if it's the 198 i would still have the same um concerns whether it's 198 or 215 what the concerns are is what the red the rest of the council has said is that we have an enforcement issue we have not been enforcing the um the complaints because we haven't had the staff to do that so that is on on the city of santa rosa as far as i'm concerned we have not we put something in place and we didn't have enough staff to actually enforce the rules but in addition to not having enough enforcement what i don't see is clarification around what is a violation if the noise is at what level what constitutes a violation and how are we verifying the violation so just as in any court case you have to have evidence and if this is how we're treating these specific things we would need to have evidence and that's either dispatching our um police or that's going to be dispatching code enforcement officers so that is why increasing the fines that would happen after a via a verified violation would occur could potentially help offset the costs of enforcement in my opinion so i think having some additional teeth in the cost of a violation would be something i would be in favor of so nobody says 500 bucks is nothing if you're making 800 or a thousand dollars a night on a on a on a airbnb so that's not going to probably be enough i would look to steeper fees as long as we're verifying the violation um for these bad actors and then in addition to that not just charging the person that actually is renting out the um the home but actually charging the person renting having some type of process like that which i know is done in other jurisdictions so if you're renting the place and you have a verified violation you're going to pay part of that fine so that way the people that are actually renting have some skin in the game and then the actual owner of the house has some skin in the game too but i don't think 500 a thousand and 2000 is enough and i think after this third one you don't get to come back in a year you just don't get to come back five years or ever it's just not tough enough policy in my opinion and i i think that there needs to maybe be a bit more work on it but if i was going to approve this tonight i would increase all the fines i'd get rid of people after the third strike and i'd make sure that we have enforcement officers out there on weekends and nights when the issues are occurring thank you councilmember councilmember rogers um point of clarification um the 198 are applications that have currently been submitted so those are an additional 198 with the ones that we already have um currently operating and these are are non-hosted so it's not as if we are um saying if people are in the process or if they already um purchase their home and they put in their application that we're not allowing them to complete their application um for me what the 198 is saying is that we're trying to work it out we want to get additional community feedback um and for right now we're going to stop with the applications that we currently have until we're able to completely work it out and see where it is that we're going with the short term with the short term rentals i work really hard i cannot imagine uh not being able to sleep when i need to sleep or not being able to enjoy my home that i've worked so hard um to purchase and or just to live it so um i think that we need to look at it from that standpoint too in addition uh i know that we're saying it's a very small percentage of homes but uh we do have a housing housing crisis um so some short term rentals if they're not five and six bedrooms i don't know who really afford that i can't um but they um they're taking away from they are taking away from our housing stuff so at some point we do need to have a limit about how many we're going to have in our city and the concentration um that is something that we definitely need to look at and i heard it mentioned but i don't really hear a resolution or what we're going to do about that because um we're looking at citywide and when i look at the map uh a lot of them are concentrated um in certain areas of the city so thank you councilmember soyer thank you mayor you know i think it points out given the number of hours that we've been dealing with this today and and we're only dealing with two issues um it points out the amount of work it's going to take to come up with a comprehensive ordinance uh that is going to work um to allow people peaceful enjoyment of their homes uh respecting private property rights and allow people to actually operate short term rentals in santa rosa um it is good there is a lot of work ahead of us um and this is why you know spring was sure it may not make everybody happy though that we won't have anything final until spring but this it points out the difficulty in getting from point a to point b um when we have the these couple of issues that we've been spending hours on and there are so many other issues that have to be dealt with and and people and compromise and people willing to um uh respect other people's opinions and having and having meetings and we look at the next steps it's really it it's one page that points out the amazing amount of work ahead of us the community engagement alone is going to be a massive undertaking with an issue like this when there are already people that are very uncomfortable with their with their living next to a a short term rental so um you know i i think it's just it bears repeating that this is going to be a very long process i think that the those that are in attendance that were in attendance this evening and thank you very much for coming and all the people that phoned in or that's zoomed in um they need to know that this this is not over this is just one one piece and even what we do tonight is changeable in the future so you know it's it's important for the for our entire community to understand the the gravity of the of the of the questions before this council and also the the amount of work it's going to take to come to some kind of resolution and something that that most people can live with again respecting the the peaceful enjoyment of their homes um which is the my major um hope that we end up with at the end of the day at the end of these many months is that people are no longer victimized by the unfortunate behavior of operators that do not have a handle on their on their tenants their short term tenants so we've got a lot of work ahead of us thank you council member and i'm going to echo some of the comments that were made for me 198 215 doesn't really matter if we don't have enforcement and you're hearing i think a desire from the council to get back to that holistic conversation for me i'll be supportive tonight uh first at the 198 and then if that motion fails at the 215 uh strictly because we clearly have not figured this out yet and we need to make sure that we are crafting rules before we have too many people in the process and change too many things uh i'm actually particularly concerned that if we were to have a cap that uh kicks people out of the process or has folks who are not in the pipeline uh able to get their vacation rental approved that we would potentially have a takings issue uh with our land use policy that people would have been dedicating resources towards uh a process that they'd be entering into and then we change and pull the rug right out from under them i think that that's a legal issue for the city and so until we actually have our rules in place long term i think that it's reasonable for us to to put a cap in place for now it's a one shy one one shade away from calling it a moratorium i understand that there's folks who can fall out of the process that makes room for an additional person one way or another but i think that there is that commitment there that we need to figure out the enforcement piece before we continue to allow additional homes to be used as vacation rentals without clear guidelines and without clear enforcement there are a lot of other issues that i want to talk about as a council member mcdonalds brought up tonight is not the place for that the place for that will be in our community engagement and then ultimately when we bring a comprehensive ordinance forward later this year so with that the motion on the table is the staff proposal with the amendment of changing the number from 215 to 198 it does require five votes so madame city clerk if you could please call the vote on that measure thank you mayor councilmember schwedhelm no councilmember soyer no councilmember rogers yes councilmember mcdonalds yes councilmember fleming yes vice mayor alvarez mayor rogers aye that motion passes with six eyes and i'm sorry with five eyes and two nos by councilmember soyer and schwedhelm okay thank you and councilmember and then we have a resolution so i'd move a resolution of the council of the city of san aroza assigning existing service fees to short-term rental permit renewal applications and authorizing the director of planning and economic development to prove future fee adoptions and changes to the short-term rental renewal permitting process and wait for the reading of the text second we have any additional discussion let's call the vote councilmember schwedhelm aye councilmember soyer aye councilmember rogers councilmember mcdonalds aye councilmember fleming aye vice mayor alvarez aye mayor rogers aye that motion passes with seven eyes okay thank you council and thank you to everybody who participated it i know it was a long long process but really grateful for it and i hope you'll continue to be at the table and have these conversations there were a couple comments that were made about folks meeting with council members and staff both neighbor side as well as those who operate short-term rental we're all willing we're all happy to our contact information is on the website and so please continue to reach out we have no written communications tonight let's go to our last public comment for non-agenda items if you have a comment on an issue that we have not discussed tonight go ahead hit the raise hand feature on your zoom all right seeing none we'll go ahead and adjourn thank you everybody really fast i apologize councilmember schwedhelm was about to flag me down we've almost forgotten two meetings in a row and i apologize but we are adjourning tonight in the memory of two individuals who've had an incredible impact on our community the first is john flitner who was a former santa rosa city attorney who passed away a couple of weeks ago and we extend our condolences to his family and friends the other is ann gray bird who is the founder of the gray foundation and has also left behind an incredible legacy of advocacy here in santa rosa so tonight we will adjourn in their memories for john flitner and ann gray bird thank you everybody