 Board members and members of the public and staff. Thank you everyone for joining us today. My name is Logan Pitts. I'm the chair of the Santa Rosa board of community services. With us today, we have board members Terry Griffin, Carolina Spence, Carol Quant, and Madonna Cruz. And our hosts today will be Julie Guzzi and Shelly McClure. Our hosts will be coordinating the comments from the public and assisting during the meeting and taking notes for any follow-up needs. Panelists and presenters, please silence your cell phones and keep microphones muted if not speaking. Members of the public joining this meeting will have their cameras off and microphones muted. If you're phoning in to join the meeting and you choose to speak during the public comments portion of the agenda for privacy concerns we'll rename you caller and just show the last four digits of your number. And the city of Santa Rosa is committed to providing a safe and inclusive environment free from disruption and we will not tolerate hateful speech or actions. Everyone is expected to participate respectfully or if necessary, we will end the meeting immediately. Host, will you please explain how our public comments will be heard today? Thank you, Chair Pitts. At each agenda item, the item will be presented. The chair will ask for board comments or questions and then at the appropriate time open the floor for public comments. The host will lower all hands until the public comment item is open. Once the chair has called for public comment the chair will ask the public to raise their hand if they wish to speak on a specific agenda item. Those joining by phone again may dial nine, star nine to raise your hand. The host will then call on those who've raised their hands in the order that they are raised. Public comments is limited to three minutes and a courtesy timer will appear on the screen. Emailed public comments received by the deadline would have been distributed to the board of community service members and uploaded to the agenda prior to the start of today's meeting. There were none received for this meeting. Thank you. With that, I will call this December 14th, 2022, meeting of the board of community services to order at 415 p.m. And pursuant to government code section 54953E and the recommendation of the health officer of the County Sonoma, we will be participating in today's meeting via Zoom. Board members and staff are participating from our remote locations and practicing our distancing and members of the public may view and listen to the meeting as noted on the city's website and on our agenda. Host, may we have our roll call please. Thank you. Please respond when I call your name. Chair Pitts. Here. Vice Chair Spillman. Board member Griffin. Here. Board member Kwant. Here. Board member Cruz. Here. Board member Spence. Here. Board member Boca Leone. Let the record reflect that all board members are present with the exception of vice chair Spillman and board member Boca Leone. Thank you. I'd like to open the floor now for public comments on non-agenda matters. This is the time when any person can address our board on matters not listed on the agenda but are within the subject matter of our jurisdiction. Host, do we have any public comments today? We have no hands raised at this time. Okay, great. Thank you. We are going to move to item four which is our approval of minutes. Do any board members have any edits or corrections to the minutes from October 26th? Terry, yes, please go ahead. Thank you. Just one super minor correction under approval of minutes item 4.1 on the minutes. It should read regular meeting minutes for August 24th. It currently reads for October 26th. So just a correction to the date. All right. Thank you. Thank you for your eagle eye look there, Terry. Appreciate that. Do any other board members have any edits or corrections to those minutes? Great. And seeing no other hands, we will submit them as suggested by Terry with that change. And now we're going to item five. Deputy Director Santos, hello, please give your report on upcoming and accomplished events. Thank you, Chair Pitts. I appreciate that. You all have in the agenda packet the accomplished and upcoming events and I'd like to add a few more to our upcoming events than you have on your sheet right there. Looks like we didn't capture January for whatever reason in these. So I just wanted to note that we do have on New Year's Day, Fitlap Swim is open. So those of you that are interested in Lapswim, that's the first day of the year for Lapswim, 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at Bridgeway Swim Center. So that's one thing that'd be great way to start your New Year's. And on the 9th, just another reminder, we have a lot of classes, but there's a ukulele class, you're really popular. And there's a few sessions still opening from 11 a.m. to noon on the 9th of January. If that's full, there's another one in February. Also a really important coming up. It's gonna be a great day at Martin Luther King Day of Service, 9 a.m. to noon on January 16th. It's gonna be a big day and there's lots of slots open still to participate in that. It's a really fun, eventful day. And we're thinking of expanding a little bit farther in the neighborhood, not just the park itself. So stay tuned for that. And last but not least, all the way out into February, our fairytale ball from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. on the 25th of February. And then as far as accomplished events, there's a lot since October to cover, but always is a highlight as the handmade holiday crafts fair on December 3rd and 4th. Great success again this year. Looking forward to it in years to come. That's the end of my report. Thank you for that report. Moving on to item six. Poor kids, could I just add one thing real quick? Oh, of course, go ahead, Jeff. Sorry, so, you know, Jen had mentioned the handmade holiday crafts fair as we're compiling as sometimes those events that are right up next to the meeting. We don't really have the information to share when we're submitting it. So it was a huge success. I just wanted to announce that we had 3,000 participants join us between the two days. So despite the rain, it was a very rainy weekend. If you remember that weekend, very, very big attendance and increase from last year. So kudos to all the staff that made that possible. Great, thanks for that update. I wish I could have been there, but I was not feeling great. But I know it's always a great event. So good job. Great. Thanks for that, Jeff. Moving on to director updates. Okay, thank you. Can we have any of those, Jen? Thank you. Just a few, let me see. So we recently went to the city council with a study session regarding an update to the status of Bennett Valley Golf Course. Touchstone Golf has been operating now for six months. And so we checked in with city council on their progress and also received some feedback regarding updating the fees in the coming new year for golf to match to be consistent with market rate. And there was positive feedback to do so. So we will be returning in the next year to update those fees officially at the council. And just a little plug and reminder that the restaurant is open for not only your event, but for food and dining. If you haven't checked it out yet, please go visit them and give them some feedback on their progress today. Also, we have at Bear Park and Deturk Round Barn Park. We have some new picnic tables that are compliant with building codes related to Americans with Disabilities Act. So check those out. Some new sites, those are both in. And then also a reminder that if we have a new host tonight, Julie Guzzi, she's joined the recreation team. We're really happy she used to be in the city manager's office. And we're so happy that she's joined our team. So she'll hopefully be a new face or at least a name up on the board there to help us as we move forward with our board meetings. Let's see, we are also still looking at potentially doing a hybrid meeting into next year for our future board of community services meetings and we'll keep the board posted as new regulations come out about working back in person. So stay tuned for that. We also are submitting two new grant applications, one for the Boating and Waterways, State Boating and Waterways for Howard Park Boat Launch. So we hope to get that out across council for approval soon. The other one is the acquisition of Cold and Creek Park. So we owned a portion of Cold and Creek Park in the Southwest part of the community and the Ag and Open Space District that just accepted us into their matching grant program for acquisition of their remaining portion of that piece. So we're really excited about that and we'll be going through that process with the Ag and Open Space. The other part of that is it looks like the district, the Ag and Open Space District has additional funds available. So we're gonna try to put in a grant application for implementation of the construction of the park. The original application to the Ag and Open Space was only for acquisition. So we're really excited that there's additional funds and we'll be looking to put in an application soon to implement the remainder of that park. So fingers crossed and we'll keep you posted on how those are doing. And I think I reported last month, but if not our last time we met in October, we did receive the Aquinas Springs Community Garden, a community park grant application from the state. So we are moving through that process with the state to finalize an agreement with them and are gonna be moving towards implementation in the coming year of getting a construction bid out and starting construction on that. The other news is that at council last night, we are gonna, we are seeing two new council members. We're just gonna see Jeff Okretski, who is taking on district six for council member Schwedhelm. So that's really exciting. And we are also gonna see Mark Stapp sitting in for district two and replace council member Sawyer. We're really excited to see the new folks on the council and thank Mr. Schwedhelm and Sawyer for their duty to the council all these years. It's been exciting to have them. And then also council member Fleming is going to be staying in her seat. She also won her seat and is staying there tonight. So we have a brand new council starting in January, all the same members except those two new members. And we're looking forward to working with them. Other very, very exciting news is that the city manager is moving forward with a proposal to bring the recreation of parks teams back together. Although we all work together really well, it makes a difference when we can call ourselves the recreation of parks department. So we are looking forward to doing that very soon, actually and bringing the parks and maintenance teams together under one house starting January 1st. So we're really excited to be working together. We already do, but you know, officially the final official vote will come from council on as part of their budget process in July 1st. If they approve the final transfer but we are making arrangements in the background moving staffing units, people are not physically moving but we're moving budgets around things like that in preparation of that. So super excited, we'll all be reporting to assistant city manager Jason Nutt temporarily as the city manager and the assistant city managers work on a interim solution for the director position. But meanwhile, we'll be reporting to assistant city manager Jason Nutt. And we're all really excited, but it's all brand new news to us as well. So stay tuned, we'll keep you posted if there's anything new, but that's very exciting. And that is the end of my report. Well, that was a lot. Thank you, deputy director Santos. Glad to see everyone back as one big happy family. And also welcome to Julie. Thanks for joining us here. And we're glad to have you. So we will, do we have any questions from the board for Jen? Seeing no questions, we will move on to our board member updates. And I'll go first to board member Kwan. Do you have an update for this month? Sure, first I'll toot the cemetery horn. I know that it says that there were 20 volunteers in October. We had two dozen in November. It was not a rainy day. We had a great turnout from Circle K, which is the Kiwanis club at the junior college. It was very cute at break. Almost all of them were recipients of the Doyle scholarship. So they took a selfie with the Doyle stone. It was pretty cool. And it was lovely to see young people up there in mass having a good time and enjoying history. Also I was able to go to the Doyle park cleanup, which was a while ago. I don't remember what month that was. And a couple of rather historic entry stones were exposed, which got me thinking about the history of Doyle park. And I posted on, I remember Santa Rosa Wynn who has old pictures. So we now have a picture. It wasn't at Doyle park, but the jet that was a play structure in Howard park. Somebody submitted a photo from that. And some play structures from Doyle park in the 1950s. So if anybody is on historic groups in social media and those people who were in Santa Rosa in the 40s and the 50s and the 60s, there are lots of park features at our historic parks that have changed that would be lovely to capture and share. And last but not least, I went to the craft fair on Sunday. I hear it was even busier on Saturday, but Sunday was wonderful. And the ukulele orchestra that was set up in the lobby, which I thought was a great location as opposed to back on the stage in the senior center was just charming, well done to all involved again. And that's it. Great. Thanks Carol. Board member Spence, do you have an update from for this month? Yes, I did the craft fair also on that Sunday. I'm surprised I didn't see you Carol. There are only 3000 people there. And but I've also gone to the Galvin Park because I have gone to the grill, the Pinnott Valley Golf Club Grill. I don't know if I have that name right. And if the food was delicious, it was fun. People seem to be thrilled to be there. So I would encourage all of you to come for lunch or cocktails after work because it looks wonderful and I'm very happy to see people having so much fun there. So that was a good sort of social slash trip to a park. So now you're in a social life. Thanks, Carolina. Board member Griffin, do you have an update? Yeah, thank you just briefly. I also attended the craft fair on Sunday, believe it or not. And I intended to go on Saturday, but when I drove past Finley on Saturday and saw the line of cars trying to get to the parking lot, I thought, I'll come back on Sunday. And it was wonderful. As always, it's so good to see it back to its full extent. I also had an opportunity to visit the Bennett Valley Grill and I was reminded what a really beautiful location that is. It was really hopping when I was there because apparently there was a pebble beach qualifier going on. So it was kind of fun to see that happening even though it was a pretty rainy day and the food was wonderful. So that was a really nice experience. And then in terms of park visits, most recently I did another park visit to South Davis in preparation for tonight's agenda item. And that's it. Thanks, Terry. Board member Cruz, do you have an update for this month? No updates, thank you. All right, thanks a lot. My update from this month is I do have to add one thing to your director update, Jen. We also have a brand new mayor and vice mayor. So congratulations to Mayor Natalie Rogers making history as the first black mayor of Santa Rosa. So that's a big deal. And then also we have a new vice mayor, Diana McDonald. So congratulations to both of them. And we'll have a new leadership team. So that's great to see. But we also still have a Mayor Rogers. So that's easy for the staff. You don't have to learn a new name. And then on that note, if you're a appointed council member has departed the council, we'd love for you to stay with us. So please talk with the new person or you can ask me to do that or whatever you'd like. So please reach out to your council member on that. And then also, I'll just talk about my park visit for the month. I've been trying to get to a new one every month. So today I ate lunch at Airfield Park far in the far southwest corner of the city. It's where two air scripts used to come together at the former Navy air base. And it's pretty flat and there's good views. So you can see all the snow on Mount St. Helena pretty well. So if you wanna get a good snow vista, that's the spot and the park was looking good. There was a family playing at the playground. So always good to see it being used. And that is my report for this month. So thank you everyone for sharing those reports. And now we're gonna move on to the meat of the agenda, which is item eight. And we're gonna do something a little different in that we're gonna switch around the order a little bit due to our staffing needs. We are going to have item 8.4 go last. So 8.1, 8.2, 8.4, and then 8.3 will go. And with that, we will launch into our neighborhood services program. Recreation coordinator Juan Flores will provide a neighborhood services update, which will include a recap of the school of rec program. Take it away Juan. Good evening everybody, my quick correction. I'm just gonna be providing an update of all of our programs over the beginning of our fiscal year in July and just updates within neighborhood services. And really my, well, let me start off. My name is Juan Flores. I'm a recreation coordinator here with neighborhood services. I'm gonna go ahead and move to our next slide. And we click thank you, Julie. All right, so neighborhood services. So we are providing early intervention and prevention programming that promotes positive youth development through recreational, social, and athletic activities. Next slide, please. And just to recap some of the programs and events that we posted since summer. So fiscal year, recreation camps. We have four recreation sensation camps this summer with over a hundred participants per locations. Our family event during the summer was our splash bash with over 200 families and attendees. And programs for teens that were offered this summer was a teen sports camp as well as a volunteer LIT program for giving our teens space to come out and volunteer within our programs themselves. Recapping some of our fall sports programs just ended recently. Highlight our family events. Halloween bash and trumpet treat at Finley Community Park within our recreation camps are during Thanksgiving. We hosted a fall break camp at Shepherd Elementary School with over 60 youth and sports. We finalized co-ed cheerleading recently, Junior Warriors basketball, co-ed cheerleading with over 50 participants and Junior Warriors basketball with over 80. And we had multiple sport clinics going on for a couple of months during the fall as well, which is a new program that was implemented over the last couple of years within COVID. It's been one of our most successful programs with a lot of youth at earlier ages in our sport clinics. Okay, next page, please. And currently within our after school programs, we are hosting eight different sites. There are eight bourbon housing locations ranging from 15 to 20 youth per location. And that's been going on since the school year and we'll complete that all the way till July. So that's our, sorry, it's till the end of May. That's our after school programs upcoming camps. Next week, actually we do have a winter break camp at Shepherd Elementary School with over 80 kids registered. We're already planning for our spring break and then thinking about summer. Summer, we always think about summer, it's our biggest camp. So that's something we're already thinking about our family events coming up in the spring and summer as well with our fairy tale ball that we're assisting with within the department and our spring fest. For sports, currently we have our football program, football and sala. So we're playing indoors. It's an indoor variation of soccer and bringing a co-ed sheer intro to dance, Junior Warriors basketball and NFL flag in the spring and summer of 2023. But I did wanna highlight how you can be involved within our programs. One of the big things that we've been doing with Neighborhood Services is trying to assure that we're providing programming to the most at need within the community. So what we did is we started a membership program. So we have a free membership program which is used to qualify families to participate in our low-cost sports recreation and afterschool programs. And to become a member, we do have some qualifiers. First and foremost is living in Santa Rosa and listed below here, we have some of the qualifiers which is Social Security, Supplemental or Disability Income for the Family, Public Assistance to Sonoma County's Human Services Department. That can include TANF or CalFresh. If the family's receiving assistance through a housing assistance program, MediCal benefits or children are in foster care or families that are experiencing homelessness. And one of the newest qualifiers that we've come up with is providing our programs to residents of Neighborhood Services priority areas. As identified through the Violence Prevention Partnerships Community Scorecard, which I'll talk about here in the next couple of pages, is how we came up with these areas and why we feel like they are areas of Santa Rosa that we really wanna prioritize and assure that they receive access to all of our Neighborhood Services programs. So as you see on the map, areas including West Elaine, West Nights, the South Park area, Corby-Hurton area, and the Roseland area. So if families live within these areas, they're automatically qualified for our programs. And for all of our programs, there's just that $10 cost for programs that vary for the entire school year or camps or sports programs that are, from one to two weeks to sports programs being up to eight weeks. So these are the locations that we're really prioritizing and wanting to provide these programs with and give access to the youth within these areas. And one of the big reasons why it's selected is highlighted on the next page here, is that it really correlates with high-need areas in Santa Rosa. And this is a map of youth-involved crimes within Santa Rosa that was provided by the police department. So as you see, it really overlays very, very closely to areas that we're targeting within Santa Rosa. All right, next page, please. And our community safety scorecard. So the scorecard, we borrowed this from our partners within the partnership here with the city of Santa Rosa. And it really breaks down the city into nine subsections and it's reported as partnership zones that are consistent with the centers of police department's patrol beats. And it reports different demographics indicators that are some of the root causes that have been determined for violence. And while mapping these areas are there concentrated youth violence as well or really high-need areas. So this is where we really came to determination of how and where, which areas we wanted to serve and make priorities within Santa Rosa. And to view just the full scope for the community safety scorecard, you can visit the city's website and search the partnership for a complete update for the community safety scorecard. Next page, please. And as we really grow, our focus is the community in providing these programs. As you see here, we have full gymnasiums going on with junior warriors basketball and cheer. On a Saturday morning, we have a full gym. Families are accessing these great programs. And now that measure O has thankfully been approved for extension in measure H. We look forward to years and years of being able to provide these programs for the residents of Santa Rosa and assuring that they're of the most need. And that's where our membership program really comes into play. Next slide. So since we started our membership drive, we already have over 1,500 neighborhood services members. And this is just ever-growing. Just in the last couple of months since we've added our high priority neighborhoods, we have an additional 500 new members. So this number even here is a little outdated. And it continues to grow. And that's something here that we really take pride in is giving access to great programs to members of our community that maybe weren't aware of them or may not have income for some of these various programs like more expensive camps or sports programs. So we really thrive in trying to provide them with great quality programs at a low cost, doing our best to keep their tax dollars at work. And now I really wanna introduce our guest speaker, which is one of our parent participants or parent of some of our participants within neighborhood services, Maricela Olivares, who has agreed to come in and share some of her insight and experience with our programs. Hi, everybody. My name is Maricela Olivares and I have two children's in the neighborhood services programs. Both have participate in fall, winter, spring, and summer camps. They have also participate in football, basketball, sports programs. Their programs are great demand because they come great demand with community. And we have a participate for years. My oldest son is 13 years old, no longer qualifies for the vacation camps as a participant, but nevertheless, they have volunteer the program for him. He participate in the volunteer program over the summer and reside training to help them in the camp and helping and help them supervise the children. I'm recommending this program 100% because they are very professional. All their staff highly trained to work with children. They have a lot of patients. They are very friendly, very responsible and respectable. All of these program staff are very accessible and always our people help the children all the time and has a very low cost for this, for these members. It has helped me because my husband and I working during our kids' school vacation and we don't have anyone available to take care of my kids. So the program helped me and my kids have a lot of fun, a great opportunity for them to be busy and different activities. And it's very nice. And I'm very thankful for his help. I'm really recommending like 100% because we are very satisfied as a family and my children are very happy during school vacation. They are busy for a local in good hands with dedicated and professional people. They have very good leadership and that's why this program are accessible. I hope they continue may more these programs for years because it's very, very excellent experience. The most children's have needs to have this very nice experience. I like this program. Thank you. Thank you, Maricela. I really appreciate you coming on and sharing some of your experience. And then just to finalize, does anybody have any questions for me about neighborhood services or any of our recently completed programs? Thanks, Juan. And thank you, Maricela, for letting us know your personal experience. Appreciate that. Do we have any questions from board members about this presentation? Board member Kwant, go ahead. Thank you, Juan and Maricela. I really appreciate the firsthand stories best of all. For one, I really appreciate the number of members. The 1500 plus is a huge number. That means that they have signed up for the program that doesn't mean at any one time there are 1500 active participants simply that they've availed. Correct. So they've signed up for our programs. They've gained our membership and at one time they have participated what could be our summer program, our sports programs. So throughout our time with memberships, it's slowly been growing. But yes, it means that they are members. They're receiving all of our information for all of our upcoming programs as well. So it's really good to really build the connection with the families and our availability for their newsletter for them to have as well. Great, that dovetails into my next question which is if you could provide a little bit of information on how you do your outreach, such as the newsletter. And my other question was I'm looking at the two maps. The one is the South Park Corby Hearn and Roseland and the other is the high needs area. If you could briefly talk about how many of the services that you provide are actually within those zones so they are easily accessible. Thank you. Yeah, definitely. Okay, so first question I will dive into is the maps since we just reached back into our map here. So a lot of our programs fall right into these coordinates here within Roseland, our basketball program. We have sites at the Roseland gym, Shepard Elementary is where we host our break camps. Over the summer we have Meadowview Elementary that we've been participating in which is right along the Corby areas here with Hearn. In the Northwest, we were at Lincoln Elementary School with West Knights. And we were at Helen Layman Elementary School as well which is right in between here with West College and the West Steele Lane areas. So giving all of these families really close access and a lot of these areas also aligned with where our after school programs are currently held. Apple Valley, Olive Grove, Olive Grove is right on Marlowe there. And Southwest community area, we have Panus Place, we have Colgan Meadows, Amorosa Village, and these are all bourbon cows and complexes. Graze Meadows which is closer to the Kowana Springs area and the Fairgrounds area. And our newest one, Colgan Meadows and Carrillo Place which is closer to Morland as well. So a lot of our programs are within these areas. And again, it's because it's very targeted. Our outreach, so for outreach we work with schools also in these areas. So whether it's flyers, providing flyers on paper flyers through a program they call Peach Char which is digital flyers. We also market at different events with different partners within the partnership. So that includes other nonprofits who are working with the same demographic. Those are just some of the ways that we're marketing our programs. And then I missed one of your questions. You did not, but I do have a follow-up. Hopefully weightless. Are you able to provide services to most of the people who both qualify and seek your services? So we do have weightless and it's a good just indicator for us where the need is for our residents. Like our summer camps, we always have wait lists but we try and accommodate as much as possible. And it's really dictated by the spaces that we're allowed to host these camps at. So we're coming on campuses or we're requesting gym spaces. So these wait lists that we may incur if we have the space and really the budget for staffing, we try and accommodate. I'm gonna say for the majority of time, we are successful, but there have been times in the past where we can't accommodate those youths but we plan differently in the future to attempt to accommodate. Thank you. And again, thank you, Maricela. Real quick, I wanted to add one more thing to the marketing, the targeted neighborhoods and the maps that are up right now is fairly new. It's been used in the choice grant process to the Violence Prevention Partnership. New to be using it with neighborhood services and when we unveiled it, the marketing team help us do a direct mailing to all of the homes in those identified neighborhoods. I believe it was about a 10,000 household mailing of a flyer kind of brochure of all the programs. And then again, once those families start signing up for things, then they're in our database to get the regular outreach information. Great. Harry, do you have any questions? Thank you. Just a quick follow-up to Board Member Kwantz's questions about marketing. So I understand the marketing that's done within the target areas, but what about people that live outside those areas that might otherwise qualify under some of those other qualifications? Do you do marketing outside the areas as well? So our programs are also included in our activity guide and they are on our website. And from there, they'll receive the information about our programs as well as how to sign up for our membership. So activity guide would be the best bet for that. We don't necessarily target the schools that are outside of these areas because we're prioritizing these schools. In the past, we prioritize schools by their free lunch enrollment and the percentage. And we would always try and target the schools that were above 90%. But now that, thankfully, California is giving all of our elementary school students free lunch, we had to come up with a different game plan and this is where our membership enrollment went. We looked at priority neighborhoods that's still aligned with where these schools used to be. But yes, they are also included in the activity guide which would be available to all families in Santa Rosa. Thank you. Thanks. Do we have any other questions from the board? Okay, Juan, I had a question for you. For the eligibility screening, if we could go back to that slide, Julie, possibly. There we go. There you go. Yes, that one. For number six, you said that that was a new criteria living in the priority area. When did that start? It started, I believe in August. Jeff, correct me if I'm wrong. I believe it was in August right after, right at the beginning of the fiscal year. So July, August is when it went out. Great. And how do people prove their residency? Is that like a utility bill? Or what's the doctor's name? Yeah, so it's a utility bill. Initially, when that first marketing material went out, it was bring your brochure into our community center and something that proves that you reside at that residence and they would be automatically qualified to become a member. Okay, great. I'll have some comments on that too. But, and then it is maybe just a minor thing. Do you have any more recent crime data than 2013? Or is that the latest you got? Just curious. Unfortunately, it's a map that I have access to, but that's something I'll work with our deputy director to ask the police department for a newer map. Okay, just being a data nerd. I saw that data at the top. That's old stuff, but it's still, I love maps. So thank you. Cool. All right, we will now go to public comments. Do we have any public comments on this item? We currently do not have any hands raised. Okay, thank you. And then now this will be the time for board comments. If you wanna offer any opinions or critiques or anything else for one or anyone else on the team, do we have any comments from the board? Okay, yeah, I'll launch into one. I think the residency thing is great one. I'm really glad that we added that. I think that I'm particularly thinking about our undocumented residents who might have some of the greatest needs for these programs and they would have been eligible for some of the other stuff. But I am really glad that it's now just a residency requirement. Almost anyone will have a utility bill so for like a cell phone or water or anything else. I just, I'm hoping that we welcome them and that there isn't, because there's often fear in that community of providing any documentation. Do we give them, give folks any sort of assurances that it's confidential? Is that website also in Spanish for folks to better understand? So our website can be translated with the Google translator. Assurances, that's something really great that you bring up, but there's nothing in writing that we have. I mean, when I go out and market, obviously they're talking to me and we have that in-person communication, but I don't believe we have anything in writing stating this is confidential. But that's something good to note for us to add to our website and add possibly to our mailers as well if we have another one here in the near future. Great, okay. Thanks for working on that. I'll add one thing to that because I think Juan is not given himself and the rest of the neighborhood services team enough credit. Certainly some things in writing can be added and that's key, but the relationships obviously are the most important part and I think it goes back to member Juan's question regarding where the programs were located and stuff. So it's even with words, it's sometimes hard for those people to have some of those fears to get them to come out of their safety zone and into a government building even if it's a recreation center. So big kudos to all of the neighborhood services staff for, as you saw the different programs throughout the year constantly being in those neighborhoods and with those families and real quick to share the importance of those relationships. We've always found that when we started a program that goes elementary to middle school, elementary fills first because moms signing up elementary kids and middle school kids are like, oh, that's not cool. But then within a couple of years, our middle school program is full because staff get to, the kids are in the program, they build a relationship with the staff and they wanna participate as they're in middle school. When we came back from COVID, what we found is that we had to market for our younger age things and our older age was filling and we're like, this has never happened before like what's going on and it took us awhile to realize the older kids, those relationships from before COVID are established the younger kids, we haven't, those families, we haven't built those relationships and stuff so they don't know us yet. So we have to get back out so staff had to go to the elementary schools, open houses and those types of things. It's really, again, the writing, I'm not saying that we won't do the writing and that is important, but it's going to the schools, it's going to the places where the community feels safe and being present and our staff do a tremendous job. So I just wanna give them kudos on that aspect of building the relationships by going out to the communities. Great, okay, Jeff, that was super helpful. Thank you for that detail. And you gotta brag more, Juan, that's what Jeff's saying. It's really hard, it's really hard. I agree, we do. All right, you're doing good work. Okay, and then the last point I wanna make and then we can move on is the measure H funding was renewed by the voters at a very high level at 71%. And so I just wanna say thank you to your work for that because that really helped get that across the finish line. You know, it funds a lot of different things, but people love what you do. And I was involved in the campaign and I heard that directly from voters. So just wanna thank you for your good work that pays off at the ballot box. And we got the trust of our voters, our taxpayers for another 20 years. So that's a big deal. So thank you. I appreciate the feedback. Definitely, okay. Thank you for that presentation and we will now move on to agenda item 8.2. And that is our general plan update known as Santa Rosa Forward, our equity and public health planner Beatriz Guerrera Ana will present an update on the upcoming general plan. I'll tell you, I'm a planning nerd also, just all types of nerdery tonight. So I'm excited, take it away Beatriz. Oh, we can't hear you though. Sorry about that. It seems that we know how to unmute ourselves, but no, after two years I'm still trying to do that. Sorry, thank you for having me. Today we are presenting general plan update and I'm saying we are presenting because the whole planning team is behind this work. We had to split forces today because there were a lot of meetings happening today and we had to present a general plan update, but thank you for having us here. And we can go to the next slide. As we were mentioning before, this presentation is about the general plan update that we call Santa Rosa Forward. And for us this process has been an important opportunity for staff in the city of Santa Rosa, but also for the community to revisit and rethink how we do community planning and how we change policies and programs that we wanna see in the city. If we can go to the next slide please. For us, it was a really important part that we have the community engage in this process and to identify opportunities and solutions that could help us at citywide level, but also at the neighborhood scale level. So this was a really important part of the initial requirements that we did when we were requesting for consultants to help us with this work. If we can go to the next slide please. And so you know where we are at. We had not presented to your board, but we are halfway in the process and we are right now at the preferred alternative process. If you were able to participate at one of our community engagement events or one of the surveys that we had, we started with a community involvement strategy. As I mentioned before the community engagement part for us was really important. So this was the very first thing that we worked on. And then we worked on existing condition analysis and vision and talking about data, maps and information in relationship to the city. This is the document that has everything with the most updated data from demographics to fires and different hazards that the city is facing. So if you're interested in looking at this documents, they're all available on our website and they're there for us to be able to see and analyze and I'll share the website in the following slides. In terms of, oh, we can go back. Thank you. Thanks. We also, after this existing condition analysis, we worked on the vision and then we had the land use and circulation alternative. So these were the different options that we have for the city to be growing and to be having more housing in the city. And then we came to the preferred alternative, which was the alternative that the community actually chose and built together with us in the planning department. So this was a really interactive process with the community that went back and forth. And then you can see we did a preferred alternative summary then we had community discussions to select the preferred alternative. And then we created an online community survey and pop-ups and events. So we could figure out what was the preferred alternative for the community and then we presented this to council. And right now, just this week, we sent an email with the final preferred alternative. So this is where we are at and we're looking forward to start drafting our general plan and going through the environmental analysis as well as the public review and adoption around 2023 and having additional zoning amendments related to our plan. And now if we can go to the next slide, please. For you to know how all this work has been done together with other departments, we have a technical advisory committee. This tech includes 75 members of the city staff and partner agencies. This includes, of course, the parts team and the recreation team as well as many other departments from the city and divisions from the city. And they help us draft the materials and all the work that we're doing in the back analysis while we, on the side of a planning department, we do the community outreach to show this information to the community. We can go to the next slide, please. We also have a community advisory committee. And actually one of your board members is part of this community advisory committee. He was not here today, but this group of people have been helping us to be the liaisons with the community and to help us expand our involvement with the community and share the information to their own communities, but also to people who we are usually not able to reach through our own work. So this has been an important role from this community advisory committee. And we can go to the next slide, please. And so you know what we have been working on and what you can look for in our website which is sanarosaforward.com. We have the community involvement strategy which states what work we have done to involve the community and all the residents of Santa Rosa, including communities that haven't been usually involved and what have been historically not included in planning events. And that we are very mindful about getting involved in this general plan update. The existing conditions report that as I mentioned contains demographic information, but also geographical information about the city as well as has a related information, health information. So this is available also on our website. Our briefing book, which is a briefing of all the things that I mentioned before, but for us it was important that people could also have a very easy to read document and with a lot of graphics that was more accessible than the existing condition report that is a really thick document with a lot of data as well as a lot of maps. And in August, 2021, we also got our vision statement. I'll talk about it later, but it's the vision that the community built around how they wanna see sanarosa in the next 30 years. And then the alternatives that we proposed to the community as well as our last document, which was the preferred alternative summary that all of those documents are public and you can see the documents on our website, sanarosaforward.com. We can go to the next slide please. And so, you know, this is the vision that was created with the community, asking people what exactly they wanted to see in their city and how they want sanarosa to be in 2050. And we were very pleased to integrate what we heard from the community. Sanarosa is a diverse, equitable and sustainable community built on civic engagement that empowers everyone to provide and support equal and affordable opportunities to obtain good housing, education and jobs, to enjoy vibrant cultural events and arts and to leave healthy lives in resilient neighborhoods that adapt to social and environmental change. And so, those are the words that we heard from the community, the 13 circles that we have on the right that integrated the general plan vision statement. If we can go to the next slide please. And so, you have a little more information about what were the alternatives that we provided for the community based on the vision. We came up with three alternatives that were alternatives that we could follow for the city to accomplish that type of vision. And the community with a majority selected alternatives one and two. And the first alternative was to concentrate growth in central corridors, meaning the main corridors of the city that actually have the most, the largest amount of traffic. And the second alternative was concentrating growth on neighborhood main streets. This spread a little bit more the areas where we would be focusing on building housing. And alternative number three was distributed housing. This pretty much looks like how the city has been focusing the growth and just basically building wherever it's available where we have available lots to build. And if we can go to the next slide please. Just for you to get a little idea of what the preferred alternative summary, which is our last document that we created looks like. This is the document. If we can go to the next slide please. We split the document on four different topics. The first one for us was economic in housing. The reason that we split the documents on four different topics was this were the topics that we heard from the community and that we thought made sense to integrate our policies and goals. And so I'll just mention a few of the things that we integrated here, but the housing conversation is one of the most important conversations that we have right now with the community. A lot related to the housing crisis that we're suffering not only in the city of Santa Rosa, but in the Bay Area and the state. And for us it was really important to create policies in relationship to that. In this specific preferred alternative that was created together with the planning staff and the community, there were 19 areas of growth that were selected and we'll see the map in the next slides. But for us the number of homes that can be built is 24,000 by 2050. And this would accomplish the goals that we have provided by the state, our arena numbers. And we have some additional details about how can we create jobs and business at the same time that we create these areas of growth and how the increased residential density has to be around this specific areas. And some goals, specific goals important to this economics and housing part would be continuing the distribution of housing that is accessible and very accessible to low and very low income households. And to ensure that there's new growth and development that is resilient to economic cycles and forces, as well as facilitating future annexations with thoughtful design and transparent strategy. If we can go to the next slide, please. Talking about efficient and sustainable development, we are including here the conversation about transportation systems as well as transit. And one of the most important things that we heard from the community was that the community really wanted us to focus on walking and biking and providing people the opportunity to have infrastructure for this. And this meant also to expand our transit system and to have a plan in relationship to have equation as well as achieving goals related to sustainability, carbon neutrality being one of them, as well as active modes of transportation that could actually meet the daily commuting needs that we have in the city. And also providing really good quality city services. So this including not only infrastructure, but also parks and recreation, as well as accessibility for everyone in the city. And if we can go to the next slide, please. The third topic that we addressed in the general plan update preferred alternative was resiliency and safety. And I guess everyone is familiar with the topics that have affected the city for a really long time. And so in relationship to this concerns that the community has had, one of the things that we propose in this preferred alternative is that our wildland urban interface is limited to the current development that we have there and not increase density on those particular areas. And this was something that was actually supported by a lot of community members. And also improving our evacuation capacity in specific areas, particularly Highway 12 and support the evacuation needs that we have for specifically zero vehicle households, those being households that don't have access to vehicles. And you can see in our maps that we have mapped the welfare urban interface because we need to create policies specifically for those areas. And if we can go to the next and last slide in relationship to this topic, the equity and health conversation. For us, this was a very relevant conversation to have. And similarly to what the department has done, we created an equity priority communities map. This map maps two specific variables. The first one is our top 25% below poverty areas. These are the 25% poorest communities, not only in the city, but in the county. So this is data county level. And then we mapped on the left side, on the blue side, communities of color. Those are the areas that have the highest percentage of communities of color. And the reason that we did this was to follow the Metropolitan Transportation Commission methodology on the areas that have been more under-invested for the last years. And we're not only talking about Santa Rosa, we're talking in general about California and particularly the Bay Area. So we thought it was really relevant to start figuring out what areas needed more attention from us as well as how can we avoid exposure to environmental threats that these areas face, additional to other things that have happened in those neighborhoods. And for us, there were other policies that came to consideration in this part, as well as establishing setbacks for residential growth next to the highways. And to fill in the gaps in the sidewalk and pedestrian network that we have had that actually match the green areas that you can see the intersections in between the low income communities and the communities that have the highest concentration of people of color. And for us, an additional conversation in relationship to equity and health was the visitability conversation, talking about how people with disabilities and people who have strollers and people who actually face more barriers to be out in the community, also want housing to be designed in a way that is accessible for everyone. So this is just a little taste of what we have there. If you're interested in looking into the details, we'll be happy to share this document, they're public, they're on our website, as I mentioned before, before, at Santa Rosa Forward.com. We can go to the next slide, please. And so you can see this is the last map that we had created with the 19 areas of change that you can see around the city where we're thinking about creating complete neighborhoods. That's our purpose on each of these areas. And we think this is also a really important conversation for the community to let us know what exactly they were missing on each of these areas of change that were proposed. If we can go to the next slide, please. We created a lot of pop-ups, the planners and me personally and other planners from the advanced team, we went to a lot of community events and created opportunities to talk, not only to people in those neighborhoods, but to youth and to different groups of people in different locations of the city, mainly focusing on our equity priority areas on this project going on, as well as how important it was for them to participate. We brought our maps to the street and we asked people to provide us with input on what exactly they needed in their neighborhood. If we can go to the next slide, please. And we had two bilingual Oakland houses where we received the community members who were more interested on participating on the policy part. And we also brought maps and we left everyone had discussions with the neighbors and with the planners too. Then we can go to the next slide, please. And the interactive online survey that we had had an access to maps so people can actually let us know, hey, I'm missing sidewalk in this area of the city. Hey, I would like to have a safer light in here. We would like to have X or Y things. And we had over 600 people who actually viewed and participated the online survey which gave us a lot of information to create the last preferred alternative document. If we can go to the next slide, please. And we received a fair amount of community feedback, but for us it was really important to get this to actually create a plan that people could feel connected to and where we actually share the information that the community provided us with our city council and our planning commission. And we can go to our next slide, please. And just for you to know, this is my last slide. Our next steps, we are working right now as we speak on drafting our general plan, which means goals and policies for the city. We're actively working with the staff in this call who is really interested and active on the parks and also the youth engagement and recreation conversations. And we will include detailed goals and policies and actions for the programs that we are planning to have the most important topic areas in the city. This including land use, housing, mobility, equity, infrastructure, safety and resilience as we introduced in the previous slides. And we will continue having community discussions and events on the draft of this general plan that we will be held during spring and summer in 2023. So this is what we've been working on and I'll be very happy to take any questions or comments that you have. Thank you so much for letting me present on your board. Thank you, Beatrice. Before I get to the board questions, I wanna just ask one to maybe help folks. Why do we do a general plan and where do you get the housing numbers from? I'm kind of referencing the state laws behind that. So maybe explain that to folks briefly. Absolutely. We are supposed to update one of the elements every eight years, which is the housing element. That's because of the law in the state of California we have to do it every eight years. In the case of the city, we decided to do a general plan update after the fires. We were thinking that we needed to rethink the strategies that we were doing in terms of development. But a general plan usually happens every 10 to 12 years. That's on average. And every time that we update more than three elements we're supposed to update also the environmental justice element, which would be a new element for the city of Santa Rosa. We don't have one yet. And the numbers for housing, the state and in our case, the ABAC Bay Area Organization of Governments provides us with the renown numbers, which is the regional housing allocation number. And we receive a number of units that we have to build every year. For us this year, I think we're close to 5,000 units in an eight year cycle. So in the next eight years we will have to build close to 5,000 units. And that's what we're currently at. And all this exact numbers are published on our website too, in case I missed any details that you want me to provide for members. No, that was great. That was, thank you. That was exactly what I was looking for. And you even defined your planning acronyms. Good job. Thank you. So, okay. Let's go to comments from our questions, excuse me. Questions first from the board. Any questions for Beatrice? Terry, go ahead, please. Thank you. Thank you for the presentation. This is great. Is the preferred alternative a compilation of alternatives one and two? It is, okay. And then can you describe a little bit more what the environmental justice element is? I'm not familiar with that. Absolutely. So, Jess, just to clarify, our preferred alternative is a combination of alternative one and two, but it's also a combination of the input that we got from the community. And for example, we included two new areas of change based on the request of South Park neighbors and Oakland neighbors, for example. Those were two things that were particularly changed because of their requests to be included in the complete neighborhood conversation. And your second question was related about, I'm sorry, Terry, I just- That's okay. The environmental justice element that you just mentioned. Yeah. SB1000 requests every city in the state of California to update, to create an environmental justice element, which is an element that requests us to identify which are our vulnerable communities in the city or in the jurisdiction because this is also for counties. And to create strategies to figure out how we are gonna address the inequities that we have in terms of built environment and also in relationship to health. I think they're both really connected. And that's one of the reasons that we have to update it this time because the last time that we updated our general plan, that bill had not passed yet. So we need to do it this time because we're updating more than three elements as the usual request that they say. So we're updating all the general plan. Thank you. You're welcome. Carol, go ahead. Hi, Breetus. Nice to see you again. I think this is the third or fourth time I've seen, excuse me, seen your presentation either in real life, last at CHOPs or online. And I am overwhelmed every time by both the breadth of this and also the scope of knowledge. So my questions are gonna be very simplistic because this is way over my head. First, you said you had 600 online respondents. How many unique broad stroke, how many unique real life engagements do you think the team's been able to have with members of the community? Nice to see you again, Carol. And thank you for saying that you have seen me a lot in the street because that means at least we've done a good job of being out there. But we have recorded more than 21,000 comments from the community. I cannot tell you exactly if that's 21,000 people because we have a hard time tracking the in-person interactions because we have some forms to know who we are engaging with but people don't always respond to them. So yeah, 21,000 interactions, including both electronic and in-person. Thank you. I was also wondering if there will be as much community outreach both online and in-person this coming spring as took place in the initial. And my last question for now was, I see from the timeline that additional zoning amendments are scheduled for the fall of 2023. Is there a deadline for when this document needs to be, either I assume it has to go to see council by when it has to be approved to meet state mandates? In relationship to the last question, we don't have a deadline except for the housing element. The housing element does have a deadline. It has to be adopted by January 2023. And we are in a different timeline for the housing element. So that will continue a different path than the rest of the general plan update. But no, we don't have a particular deadline and we're planning to have a very thorough community engagement part on this site. And we are trying to create a new timeline where we actually try to put out, put everything that we have in terms of resources, staff and community engagement capacity to focus on the policy part because we believe this is where we can actually get a lot of the community excited about changing not only the goals of the city but actual policy on things that they are more tangible for everyone since this was a very high level conversation on what do you want your city to look like? How do you want your city to be? Of course we want an equitable city, but how does that look like in a map or in terms of the policies that we're working on? So yeah, that'll be my answer. Thank you, a point of clarification. Did you just say the housing component is due next month? And is that gonna happen? It's already, we're on the second draft with the Housing and Community Development Department in the state. So yes, we'll be done. We don't know if the state review will be done but we will be on time since the city is planning to adopt even if we don't have the review from the state and we'll wait for the review of the state to get it changed if we have to, but yes, we'll be done. We'll be ready to go. Great, congratulations. Thank you. Any other questions from the board? We will now go to public comments. Do we have any public comments on this item? We do not have any hands raised at this time. Great, okay. Let's go to board comments. Do we have any other comments from the board that they'd like to give? All right, well, I'll share a few thoughts. Yeah, good job on going through that. That is dense stuff and you did it really well going through it quickly. We could spend hours on it and I'd love to do that but that's not the point of the Board of Community Services. So I appreciate you giving us the high level. I did appreciate the mention of outdoor recreation and parks especially being a new goal that's in there. And I saw that on the TAC, on the TAC was some of our staff from Reckon Parks. So thanks to them for helping with this process. It's a big deal. It's the future of our city. And we did have one of your pop-ups also at our community cleanup in Rinking Valley. So I'd encourage you to go out to those again. You usually get pretty good turnout at them. And I saw some members of the public interacting and taking materials. And yeah, I served on the downtown community advisory commission for the downtown plan. So I love this stuff and you did a great job. So I just want to say thanks. And I think I pestered Jen to have this presentation for a while. So thanks for delivering on that. And I think it's important for us to see it too, for everyone in the city to see it. So that will be item 8.2. So thank you again for a great presentation. Now we're doing our switcheroo. We're going to go to 8.4 first. So that, I believe, is our maintenance update that we've been waiting on for a while. I'm sorry, that is the south. We're doing South Davis next, right? Yes, OK. My apologies to maintenance. So Brianna, hello. Thank you for coming and helping us with this. And I will now give it to assistant parks planner Emily Ander, who will present an update regarding the community engagement process to amend the South Davis master park plan, which includes two new playgrounds and some other amenities. So thank you, Emily. Take it away. Good evening, Chair Pitts and members of the board. I am Emily Ander, park planner assistant, and I'm pleased to come before you today to share the proposed master plan for South Davis neighborhood park. Next slide, please. I'll introduce you to the project beginning with the project team. Next slide, please. The project team is made up of Santa Rosa City staff and Carlisle Macy. I'm serving as the project manager and Jen Santos is providing oversight and direction. And Brianna Morrison is the project manager for Carlisle Macy and also the landscape architect. And she's working closely with their civil engineer, Rachelle Stewart. Next slide, please. South Davis neighborhood park is located in the southwest quadrant of Santa Rosa, which is shown in green on this map. And the park is indicated that pink star. You'll see it's kind of nestled up in the corner of the intersection of highways 101 and 12. It is in council district one, which is represented by councilor Eddie Alvarez. Additionally, I just wanted to tie into the neighborhood services presentation and say that the park falls in the Corby Herron area, which is one of their high priority neighborhoods. So that was interesting information to hear tonight. So if you need to me. Next slide, please. In 2021, the city was awarded $285,000 from the state's per capita program to replace the park playground equipment. And the play equipment is 21 years old and no longer meets current safety standards. And although the state funding is limited to replacing the playground equipment, staff felt that this was the right opportunity to engage the community in an update of the park master plan so that it reflects the neighborhood that lives there and uses the park today. Additionally, having a recently adopted master plan does allow staff to look for and apply for grant opportunities to develop other requested amenities in the master plan. So we have three overarching goals of this project. One is to update and amend the 2003 master plan that you see here on the slide, and which Brianna will talk about a little bit more later on. And as well as to design and construct and install a new playground area before December 2023, which is a mere 12 and a half months away. But we know we can make that. And then finally, the new master plan and the park improvements must provide for proper safety, accessibility, equity and connectivity. Next slide, please. During the master plan process, there have been six opportunities for community input over the past eight months. Those have been both virtual and in person and they included a park input day with about 250 students at Luther Burbank Elementary, which is the neighborhoods elementary school for the neighborhood around the park, as well as an informal meeting with the neighborhood on the east side of Highway 101 from the park. So our next step is coming before you today to have you review the master plan and recommend it to council after you hear from the public. And due to the grant short timeline, Carlisle and Icy will begin working on the construction documents as soon as possible to ensure that we can meet that December 2023 deadline. We do expect to go out to bid in late winter with construction beginning in mid spring. So I'll now turn it over to Brianna to discuss the existing park. Next slide, please. All right, thank you, Emily. And thank you to the board for allowing me to do a little rearrange of items. I'd like to briefly introduce you to South Davis Park and walk you through the design process to date. And then I'll present the proposed amended master plan and the community feedback that informed it. Next slide, please. These aerials show how the location now known as South Davis Park was and still is part of a vibrant community that's bisected by Santa Rosa's major roadways. Next slide, please. South Davis Park, shown in the center in yellow is bounded by Highway 12, 101 and the smart track. The inner yellow circle shown is a quarter mile radius and the larger circle that goes off the page is a half mile radius, which is this neighborhood's park service area. You can see some of the park service area is east of 101 and just a small portion is northeast. The pedestrian bridge shown on as a pink dotted line connects the park to the east neighborhood. Next slide, please. So this is zooming in on the park and we've rotated the view. So we're now looking east. South Davis Park is named for the street that borders its Western edge. It's 1.34 acres and is very linear. The pink lines represent sidewalks, which are not continuous to or along the length of the park. There are three main amenity areas, a playground and picnic area on the north, a basketball half court and access to the pedestrian bridge at the center and a large lawn with picnic area on the south. East of 101, there's an empty triangular lot which was considered for inclusion in this master plan. And I'll talk about that later. At the boundary with 101, there's a corrugated steel fence on the north end and a masonry block sound wall that starts out the basketball court and goes south. The area between the block wall and the recreational lawn where you see all the trees is Caltrans right of way. Next slide, please. This is the existing park master plan that Emily mentioned with the exception of the chain link fence under the pedestrian ramp and the second basketball half court at the end of Carrington Street. This is more or less what the park looks like today. Next slide, please. I'm going to go over some high-level community feedback that informed the design process before we get into the actual designs. Next slide, please. There's a lot on this slide that I won't read because Emily talked about it already but what I want to stress is that the city tried to reach this neighborhood where they are. So what was originally supposed to be three community meetings turned into six meetings over zoom at the project site in a neighbor's backyard and even at Luther Burbank Elementary School. The feedback that you'll see is a combination of all of these meetings. Next slide, please. Noticing for the meetings was done in many ways including online in digital ways as well as traditional methods like postcards and A-frame signs. Next slide, please. So our survey responses covered a good range of ages but didn't include many kids under 16 which is the main demographic for playgrounds. So that's one of the reasons why parks went to classrooms at Luther Burbank Elementary and around 250 kids gave feedback on the playground concepts. Next slide, please. As Emily mentioned, South Davis Park is in the city Southwest quadrant but it serves almost all of the other quadrants. So the percent of responses from each of these areas for our three surveys seems fairly balanced. Next slide, please. In our first survey responses were that bringing kids to play and being outside in nature were the main reasons to visit South Davis Park. Next slide, please. So unsurprisingly, the most appreciated park features happen to be the play equipment and the abundance of trees. Next slide, please. When we asked for future goals of the park the responses showed that and what was frequently shared in meetings was that people would like to keep the park safe, clean and well-maintained. Next slide, please. Other comments that came up frequently include providing an inclusive and accessible space which is safe and comfortable to use for all ages. We also received a lot of support for incorporating the East lot into the park and comments about homeless encampments which pop up in this area. Next slide, please. So now I'll do a quick review of what we presented before. Next slide, please. We initially developed three master plan concepts each focusing on a theme that we felt responded to the initial feedback we received and with a goal of eliciting really strong responses from the neighborhood. Next slide, please. Concept A focused on active recreation and gaming including ideas like multiple sports courts, fitness stations and even a skating spot. Next slide, please. Concept B focused on the strong sense of community in this area and opportunities for connection. So it includes amenities like public art, lots of seating and picnic spaces and a community garden. Next slide, please. Concept C focused on the top uses of nature and play. Its design is the most similar to the existing park but with upgrades and enhancements like more picnic spaces, native plantings and an expanded play area. Next slide, please. After receiving feedback on these three concepts we developed this draft master plan. It's primarily based on the nature and play concept with some of the highly rated elements of the other concepts incorporated in. In this draft we proposed that areas at the end of Carrington Street and at the East neighborhood be flexible spaces which can respond to future community needs. However, we depicted the one in the park as a pickleball court and the one on the east side as a community garden. And we also added a walking path around the neighborhood. I'm sorry, around the playground. Next slide, please. So now to the main event, the proposed master plan. I'll show you the overall graphic and then walk you through each of the elements with supporting feedback. Next slide, please. Based on the feedback from the draft master plan we made revisions and additions to the plan to create this graphic. The biggest change is that the area east of 101 has been removed from the plan. This was direction from park staff because they would like to review the area separately from South Davis Park. We of course have all the design ideas and the community's feedback about this area. So hopefully it can be useful for those future endeavors. On this proposed master plan we've also added some notes and legends to help make it a useful guiding document for the city. Next slide, please. One major element of the master plan that's hard to see in plan view is related to the existing steel fence and the eucalyptus trees. The neighborhood hopes to see the steel fence eventually replaced with the masonry block wall and the existing eucalyptus trees removed. Next slide, please. The master plan illustrates the steel fence as a new block wall which will improve the sound levels in this area of the park and provide additional safety. The trees along the steel fence are not in great shape or dead. So the master plan depicts them as removed. We're also showing fencing under the pedestrian ramp which is part of the 2003 master plan and an element that was requested by the neighborhood. Next slide, please. Because the play area is very close to the road where a lot of people park, we received feedback that some physical separation like a fence or a low wall was desired at the playground to create a protected border for small kids and those with special needs. The idea of a walking path was added in the draft master plan and it was very popular also. Next slide, please. The play area here is in generally the same spot as the existing playground but we've expanded it to fill in all the spaces between the trees. Fencing is provided between the road and sidewalk to enclose the play area and sections of walls at seat height which is about 18 inches are provided around the perimeter to have plenty of seating opportunities. The walking path around the playground creates a loop that parents or guardians can use while still keeping an eye on their kids and low baller lights around the play area provide enough light to discourage late night laudering but not to illuminate the playground. Next slide, please. Since the city has funding for the new play equipment we asked a lot of very specific questions about play equipment. This question from an early survey shows the desire for a lot of traditional play elements like climbing, swinging and sliding but also for bigger elements like a zip line. Next slide, please. So this chart looks confusing at first glance but it's showing results of ranked choice voting. So we developed six playground concepts A through F that fit in the themes of naturalistic and modern which were the highest rated themes in our previous survey. The concepts were ranked in order of preference with one at the top. So that's at the left and six at the bottom or on the right. We know that it was mostly people over 16 responding to the survey. So we call this the adult results. For the number one and number two first place choice so that's the first column. Adults preferred play that looked more natural whether it was actual wood like concept F at the top right or equipment meant to mimic it like concept D at the bottom right. So those are the two top choices for first choice. The number one second place choice is concept E which you'll see on the next slide. Next slide, please. Concept E on the right is very modern and includes a lot of visually exciting and physically challenging equipment. The Luther Burbank elementary school student feedback which we're calling the kids results overwhelmingly ranked this as their favorite playground concept. Next slide, please. To help develop the playground design the kids were asked to pick their favorite versions of different play elements. You can see the top images. So you can see the images of the top rated spinner and slide here. Next slide, please. Traditional swings received the highest votes but in general swings were very highly favored and the funky green wave from concept E was a huge hit. I think Emily told me the kids were really excited about it. Next slide, please. When it comes to balancing the tightrope and pretty classic seesaw were highly rated. When we asked what other activities kids would like to see in the park a zip line got lots of support. This is in line with a lot of the feedback we received in surveys also. Everybody likes the zip line. Next slide, please. So what will the play equipment really look like? Probably a blend of play elements and equipment that are natural, modern and respond to the feedback that I just shared. The play area is pretty generous even working around the trees. So I'm confident we can create a really fun and exciting playground. And I've already started engaging playground manufacturers. Next slide, please. We got early feedback that some of the or some game tables or areas would be a really good addition to the park. So we asked for more specific feedback. Adults rate cornhole the highest or bags. And kids really liked ping pong. Next slide, please. The master plan shows a loosely defined picnic and gaming area with some tables dispersed under the trees or on stabilized surfaces. The intent is to leave this open for interpretation so it can be designed to support whatever elements are most needed or request in the future. Some examples from Coffee Park are there on the left. Next slide, please. Let's see. In our first survey, we tried to get ideas of what sport or gaming features besides basketball the neighborhood would like. There was support for exercise and fitness stations but also for games that can be painted on walls or pavement like you often see in square arts. Next slide, please. The master plan illustrates how the existing basketball court next to the masonry block wall could become a multi-use game and activity space. The block wall could be painted for wall games and the court could be resurfaced and re-striped for schoolyard games in addition to basketball and other sports. I wanna point out that the existing court is really currently the dead end of Pearl Street. So the master plan proposes building new curb and gutter across that space and connecting the sidewalks on either side. Next slide, please. The addition of schoolyard games was well supported by adults and kids really liked the idea of playing twister. I didn't know kids played twister so that's really fun to see. Next slide, please. At the park south end, the master plan keeps much of the long recreational lawn that you see. The picture on the bottom right is actually of the park. I also wanna point out in this graphic on the bottom left, there are two orange objects near the tree. That's a new monument sign and a drinking fountain that I realized I didn't identify on any other slides, but they are included in the master plan. Next slide, please. These results from survey one and two show interest in new park features such as barbecue grills, community gardens, pollinator and native plantings, sports courts and public art. These weren't always the number one feature but they were consistently highly supported. Next slide, please. Seeing that we wanted to provide space in the master plan for all of these amenities like barbecue pits and picnic areas that are separate from the playground and gaming. This area and the lawn near an existing shade tree is a great location for that. Next slide, please. I mentioned that in the draft master plan we identified this space at the end of Carrington street as a flexible area but had depicted it as something specific. Based on community feedback, we've revised the graphic to be non-specific. The space could fit a number of activities that the community supports like pickleball or a community garden or a skate spot but what ends up here will be based on the future community's needs at the time that funding is available. We do think that regardless of the activity some additional low level security lighting again to discourage laudering but not to illuminate the space here as beneficial. Next slide, please. Fitness stations received consistent support so the master plan proposes locations on the south end nestled in the tree line along the new and existing sidewalks. Next slide, please. And last but not least the community always really liked the idea of native plantings and they responded that they'd be willing to volunteer to maintain such areas. So the park's south end includes space for this. Next slide, please. So here's the full official graphic for your consideration. It includes a symbol legend of the various plan elements and descriptions of the various features that I described to you. Next slide, please. And with that, I will turn the presentation back over to Emily. Thank you, Brianna. Next slide, please. Today's staff is asking the board to discuss and recommend the proposed master plan to council after hearing the public's comments. Once you're ready to recommend the master plan it will go forward to council as a public hearing. Public hearings require notification to the community in our case by postcard, signage in the park and a notice published in the fest Democrats. We are planning for a February 14th city council date but in the meantime, Carlyle and Macy will begin construction documents for the play area. We anticipate having 100% construction plans ready by late winter and developed a bid by late spring in order to have the play area installed by the end of December. Next slide, please. The recommendation that staff puts before you today is, it is recommended by the Department of Transportation and Public Works Parks Division but the Board of Community Services approved the South Davis neighborhood park master plan amendment to include a revised playground area, picnic tables and barbecue areas, game tables, walking paths, updated sidewalks, a renovated basketball half court, security lighting, fitness stations, native planting areas and space for future activities. And recommend to council approval of the same. Next slide, please. Thank you so much for your time tonight and we would now like to open the floor to your questions. Thank you, Emily and Brianna for the detailed presentation. This is a question for maybe Jan or Shelley. We're actually gonna be voting on this, correct? Yes, we're looking for approval, recommendation to approve a council so yeah, we need to vote tonight. Great, okay. So we'll go through our normal questions from the board and public and then comments and then a vote after that. And do we have questions from the board? Terry, please go ahead. Thank you. I was just curious about if Caltrans were to agree to replace that metal fence, how would that intersect with the planning and construction of this park? I imagine that's a long, long process dealing with Caltrans, but I just was curious what that would look like time-wise. That's a great question, we did reach out to Caltrans during the process to have them fix the corrugated metal fence because there had been a hole in it for about six to 10 years. So during the process they did repair that, but we did not refer with conversations about replacing that with a block wall. I think that that would come when we have funding, probably Jen should answer this, but I think that probably happened when we had more funding to be able to do more of the park at one time and be able to reach out to them and share our interest as soon as they would probably want to see some funding come from us as well. Okay, and then you mentioned that the eucalyptus trees are going to be removed and I noticed there's a fair amount of redwood trees in the park. Are any of those slated for removal and are all of those located within the Caltrans right away? The only trees that the master plan proposes to remove are those eucalyptus trees along the steel fence, which is within the park property. No other trees in, definitely none of the trees in the Caltrans right of way, no redwoods and no significant trees have been proposed to be removed. And those would only be removed at the time that those elements were to be constructed. Okay, and then in terms of the activity space, I like the idea of keeping that sort of broad and not defined to meet the needs of the community going forward. But if at the point where it's determined how that space is going to be utilized, would that require a master plan amendment or is the current master plan sufficient to allow that to happen in the future? We would go back out to the community. Jen, I don't know if that would have to be a master plan amendment to change that from future use area to our future activity area to community garden or multi-purpose course. Yeah, we would, as Emily said, I'll just chime in, definitely go back out to the community to confirm, but we would not likely need to have an amendment unless it was so completely significantly different than what types of activities are being recommended in general in general plan, sorry, in the master plan. So we should be good to go without an amendment as long as we're talking about some of the options that have been included through this master planning process. Or if it is completely different than what we're hearing, we would look for an amendment at that point. Okay, great. Thank you. That's all of my questions. Thanks, Teri. Here, I'll go ahead. Thank you, Brianna. You do the best presentations. The visual components that you provide are really helpful. Having said that, the funding that is in place from the grant from the state, will that fully fund the new playground structures as well as the, do we have enough money to go forward with this fast timeline playground structures? When we developed the playground concepts, we reached out to multiple playground representatives and gave them the budget. And the concepts we presented to the community fit within that budget. So I believe even though we're going to be doing this combination of maybe different types of equipment, we won't have any trouble providing the playground equipment that we've presented to the community. And in addition to the other updates that need to happen related to the playground equipment. Fantastic. And to echo Teri's questions, the trees are not being dealt with and do not interfere with the new playground structures, even if the trees are not dealt with for several years. There's no conflict there between the trees, be they redwood or eucalyptus and the structure and the location of the new play structures. Correct. The location of the proposed play area is not, would not be affected by the eucalyptus trees. Fantastic. And last question is for staff. By looking at and potentially approving this master plan, the master plan is not set in stone. It is a working concept in 2022 that will be reviewed and amended in the future whenever that is based on the needs and desires of community members at that time. Correct. It will be adopted as an amendment to the master plan of 2003. And once we have funding, we will go back to the community to determine what happens next. Perfect. Thank you. Jen, do you wanna say something else? Yeah, I would just maybe add a little clarification that we are looking to counsel to approve this as is and we really only look to go back if it's been a long time. And if we, you know, it's been a long time since we had it or if we again have a significant change in one particular area that the community is desiring. So this is our update right now. It should last us for quite a few years to come. Okay, thank you. Any other questions from board members? All right, I had a few questions. Yeah, on that space, that's gonna be a future pickleball court or basketball court or whatever it ends up being, what will it be after the park's finished? Just like a concrete pad or what will it look like? Right now it's just gonna remain that recreational lawn that's brownish. Oh, I see. Right, okay, great. Good stuff. And then that east lot that's on the other side of one-on-one is that technically a park property or just a city property right now? It's a vacant city owned property. That is taken care of by the park's maintenance staff. Okay, I will not be visiting that in my future park visits, but just curious what it was doing there. Okay, and those were all my questions and Terry asked about the ugly hole in the fence. So I was gonna ask about that too. I'm glad Caltrans finally did their job. Okay, do we have any public comments on this item? We have no hands raised at this time. Okay, great. I'll just say thank you for doing those extra meetings as well. We really appreciate you going out to the community and making sure all those voices were heard and lots of surveys, love the data. So thank you. Any other comments from the board before we go to a vote? Okay, so I'm looking for a motion from the board to approve the master plan as recommended by staff. I'll move to approve the South Davis Park master plan as submitted by staff. And I'll second. All right, a motion by Terry and a second by Carol. We will now ask folks to either raise your hand or say aye if you are in the affirmative on this. Great, I see Carolina raising her real hand and her virtual hand. You can't vote twice, but we will count that as one vote. Thank you. Great, and so that's all the yeses. So there's no nos or abstentions and that passes the Board of Community Services unanimously. Great, thank you again for all your time on that. Thanks, Brianna. Thank you all. Yep, and now we will move on to our switched around item that was 8.3 and that is our maintenance update. And Parks Superintendent James Castro will provide an overview of the Parks Maintenance Section operations. So James, please take it away. All right, thank you, Chair Pitts and board members. It's really nice to see all of you. My name is James Castro and I am the superintendent that oversees park maintenance. Got about nine slides here. I know you guys have been here a while, so I'll try to get through them quickly. Hopefully initiate some conversations and we'll jump in. I want to start with this first slide. This is a picture of our Prince Muir Greenway and I'm hoping that everybody on the board is familiar with this space, but I think it's worth reminding that this opened in 2009 and there was a hopeful notion that small shops and cafes would have an overlook of the creek and create a creek walk for the city and for our public to enjoy. Someday in the near future, I am going to have a presentation specifically on the Prince Muir Greenway. Today, I'm just reminding you that it's there and hopes that you don't forget about it because it is one of our beautiful spaces that need some love. So next slide, please. There they are. These are our silent heroes of the city of Santa Rosa. This is our park maintenance staff. As you'll see at the bottom, we have 23 full-time employee positions. And if any of you counted these employees, which I'm sure Carol did, there are only 17 employees here. And I want to highlight that for about the last six months, we have been short six employees. And so operating with this many employees with the 1,100 acres that we have is no small task. We have injuries, we have sick time, we have holidays and vacation. And we're still operating with a very short staff. And as you can see from the national average, we're two thirds short of what we should be in order to keep up. So next slide, please. 2008 numbers. I keep getting asked, why do I keep bringing up 2008 numbers? Well, it's an important benchmark in park maintenance history. We once upon a time had these specialized crews in order to take care of all of our spaces. And now we have all the same responsibilities, but we don't have these crews anymore. So we're constantly shifting our resources to address whatever issues are in our daily regimen. And one of the biggest things that we have to address is trees. I think that it's fair to say that post 2008, 2009, it was probably a better value to contract services out, which is the direction that the city went at that time. But with the introduction of the Department of Industrial Relations and the requirement for contractors to pay their city, to pay their employees prevailing wage to do work for the city, we as the city do not pay our employees prevailing wage, which in itself is an issue that I'm not here to discuss, but we are a better value, not just by the cost, but with the quality of work that we produce. We really need to look at bringing some of these services internal. Next slide. So no tree crew. I mentioned in the last slide, we have over 60,000 city-owned trees. So what we've done is we've developed a process to prioritize the trees. And I won't tell you all the priorities, but basically priority one means that we need to remove it for the, to prevent life and safety issues. And so when we look at that number of the $300,000 that park maintenance spent, that $300,000 was towards contracted services, towards priority one trees. That does not take into account city staff time, which equates to about 10% of our labor, which also equates to another $300,000. In addition to that, the city, other departments in the city, outside of park maintenance, have also spent upwards of $350,000 on trees in the last year. So these are big numbers, we're almost a million dollars in trees that the city is addressing and we don't have a tree crew. This needs to be looked at. And I will say that at the end of this presentation, Chair Pich, you'll probably ask me, what can the board do for you? What the board can do for us is help us get in front of the people that can help us make a decision to spend our money better to address the trees. All of the trees that I just mentioned and all of the money that's been spent is addressing priority one, meaning it needs to be taken out right now. There is no preventative maintenance. We are not taking care of the trees that we have. And if we were able to bring those services back into the in-house, then we would be able to address those issues. So what we're doing now is we're tracking and collecting all the data in hopes of bringing a tree crew in-house. I wanna point out the picture on the left. Anytime a tree falls within the city of Santa Rosa, park maintenance gets called. And we have to respond to these trees in the safest way possible. We don't have a city arborist. We don't have anybody that's certified as an arborist. We have training for all of the equipment and tools that we use and take all the safety precautions. But if you'll notice the picture on the right, that's one of our bunny trees. We've got one in Depot Park and one in Courthouse Square. The one in Courthouse Square is about 130 feet tall. They can grow up to 170 feet tall. And we're putting our staff in there because we have to address an issue. I don't know if you guys are familiar with a bunny or bunny tree. But this is a cone from the bunny or bunny tree. Bigger than my head and it can weigh up to 22 pounds. The city has an obligation to remove these cones from the trees. And that is currently in park maintenance category of things to do. These trees will grow higher and we need professionals to address some of these issues. So I'm highlighting that because I don't know if any of you have ever been up on 135 foot lift before, but it's scary. It's very scary and there's no, well, there's no sugar coating it. So next slide please. I think it's easy to forget that one drought wants to rain arrives because things look green and everything kind of gets pretty. But in winter, we have a lot of work to do on our irrigation systems. We have to exercise our valves and we have to address a lot of the issues that we identify during the sports seasons in order to get the systems repaired. We don't do the repairs during sports season because we don't know how long the construction projects are gonna take until we start digging into the ground and finding out what the issues are. So you will see our irrigation systems exercise regularly once a week for two minutes at a time just to get things moving and help us identify problems. We've been working really hard with the water use efficiency team from at Santa Rosa water and we've been meeting them on site. They've been doing soil testing of our turf and assessing our irrigation equipment and helping us look at grant opportunities to have more water use efficiency components in our irrigation controllers. We're really excited. We're putting our first smart controller in and at Martin Luther King Park it's actually going in this week. And just to give you an idea this will allow staff to access all of our systems remotely. So our hope is that when an alarm goes off or there's a mainline break we're gonna get an alert to that on our phones and we're gonna be able to shut the system down right away. That's not currently the system that's in place. We have some systems where the controller is up and it's up a hill in front of a school. We have to go turn the controllers on walk down to the fields assess the whole irrigation system then walk back up the hill to turn it off. It's not efficient. So we've been very grateful that the water use efficiency team has agreed to meet with us regularly so we can address some of these concerns. Next slide please. I can't say enough about this program. Park and Month Volunteer Program has really taken off over the last year. Excuse me. You know, the city makes decisions sometimes that a lot of staff doesn't always agree with and the separation of recreation parks with one of those. But this program I think is a testament to the work that recreation and parks continues to do together even though we were separated. We are coming back together, which is fantastic but we have city staff out there for every event from recreation, from park maintenance to help bring the community together and it's become a lot of fun. The snow cones are a hit. We always have music playing. And I really wanna point out the little asterisks at the bottom, 250 volunteer hours by park maintenance staff. When I first presented this, they thought that was a mistype that those weren't volunteer hours. I can assure you that 250 hours by park maintenance staff were volunteer hours not paid, which is very important because there really isn't anybody that wants these spaces to look better and feel better to our community than park maintenance staff. They have been chipped away at and things have been reduced but they continue to push forward and we're really starting to see a difference now. We're continuing to develop a program. We're not done. We're really excited to be collaborating with other departments in this next year. We're getting ready to put out the park a month schedule for this year. And we're gonna do a couple of things that are different and we're excited to continue to work with the departments and other volunteer organizations to do as many different community cleanups as we can. Next slide. So I wanted to take a couple of pictures of some of the beautiful spaces that we have here. I'm gonna start with the one on the right, Prince Memorial Greenway. I did talk about it a little bit, but more recently, we evaluate and then we reevaluate how we operate. And one of the feedback that we received was that the Greenway had a constant issue with graffiti. And so we kind of realigned our resources in order to address that. And we ended up needing to pull in additional resources, which we got from the streets department. The streets department has a graffiti team that is outstanding. And they have now agreed to help us once a week going down the Greenway to address the graffiti in a way we haven't before. So I know it's hard to see in that picture because it's a little bit small, but if you notice below the rock wall, that wall is painted. So we've decided on a neutral color paint. And if you walk the Greenway, hopefully you will see a difference. The two pictures on the left, Courthouse Square and Depot Park. We've been working really hard with the downtown organizations, the Railroad Square Association and the business owners to address their concerns. There's a common goal and that is to attract and welcome visitors and our residents to downtown to create a more vibrant space. And we're very excited about the progress that we've made. And those relationships that we created are gonna be instrumental in moving forward. Next slide, please. So Park Main is responsible for 65 acres of median and roadside landscaping parcels. So these are the streetscapes around the city that include our medians and include some of the landscaping on the side of our roads. For the last three years, this has not been a contracted service. This has been something that has, I don't wanna say fallen on Park Maintenance because it's always been Park Maintenance responsibility but it's been performed by a contractor. So over the last three years in Park Maintenance, we've been trying to figure out how to juggle our core services within the parks as well as taking care of this. And quite frankly, we haven't done the best job. You all see how the city looks and we need more help and more support in this area. So internally, we're continuing to evaluate proposals to bring those landscaping services back online. And with the help of the Deputy Director of Guild Services as well as Director of Transportation and Public Works, we've made some huge progress and we're very excited about what's coming in the very near future. Next slide, please. Just have to say, don't scan the QR code. I thought that if I put the words not a valid QR code over it, that would detract people from wanting to scan it. But I tend to like to present these presentations to Park Maintenance staff before you guys. And as soon as I put this slide up, I turn around and everybody's got their phones up. They just wanna take a picture. What's going on? I'm gonna get back to that QR code in a second. The last time that I met with you guys, we were talking about the rollout of this new Park Maintenance email address. It has been a huge success. This allows the public to email the city and that Park Maintenance email address is linked to all of our staff members' phones. As soon as a request comes in, they get a ping on their phone and oftentimes they're within range to respond. So it's created not only a paper trail, but it also has a quicker response from Park Maintenance staff, which is fantastic. So what we're working on as far as the next phase is a QR code. We're working to develop one that will be placed in each park on each park sign that will give not only Park Maintenance staff, but the public the opportunity to scan that QR code. It will show you that you're at Doyle Park and there will be a button that you can push to make a service request for maintenance. There are so many possibilities with the QR code and what we can do with this. I was a little hesitant to put this on here because we're still into the development phases and once we get to the point where we're ready to roll it out, we'll be working with our comms team in order to make that happen in a productive way. But this is the future and we're trying to get in line with it. And the example I was giving earlier of maintenance staff scanning it, there's a lot of younger people that this is how they operate. This is how things are done now. So we're trying to get in line with that. Next slide, please. I am here to answer any questions that you guys may have. Thank you for your time. Thanks a lot, James. We appreciate your work. Do we have questions from the board? I'll ask a question for you on the tree crew staffing. Oh, I'm sorry, Carol. Go ahead, didn't see your hand. I was late to raise it and mine was gonna be tree crew. So why don't you start? Sure. So James, you talked about almost a million dollars spent on taking care of trees. I'm guessing that's a higher cost than it would be to hire a full-time maintenance crew, a tree crew. What would that cost be as an estimate? Our calculations are showing about a 50% reduction. So 50% of the crew. Okay. How many people would need to be on the crew? There's been a couple of different renditions of this because we have to look at it through a park maintenance lens and then we have to look at it through a city lens. And so we're still working on the numbers specifically. We do have some proposals, but there's still a little data missing from those proposals such as if planting an economic development is working on some sort of housing development and the trees are gonna be removed as part of the project, but they're not dead and they don't fall into what we would call priority one. We have to look at that data a little differently. So again, I appreciate that question and I'm hoping that these questions continue because this is the data that needs to be looked at. Well, yeah, and I thank you for answering that truthfully. You definitely wanna get that request very specific but I've already forwarded it to my council member. So that just doesn't sound right that we're spending more on contractors than employees. Okay, Carol, do you have a question on that still? So for a little bit more detail, if there's tree work that needs to be done on an emergency basis that is too big for staff to do our non-arborist staff to do, we have to hire the contractor. What is a typical turnaround time to deal with? Tell us a little bit about the contractor and how that goes, which would be remedied, I assume, by having a tree crew. Yeah, so we have actually four different tree contractors with the city, three of them being emergency tree contractors. So when we run into an emergency, our first initial response is to get on site and see what we can do. Oftentimes that includes the streets department because what we do as far as emergency response is to keep the right of way cleared. So when you talk about a big tree that could potentially fall across the road between the streets department and the parks department, we try to get the right of way cleared and then whatever is outside of our scope, we will call an emergency tree contractor to come in. Oftentimes we have not run into issues where we can't handle the work internally when we have something that is obstructing the right of way. But I'm gonna say that within the last four months, five months, the remaining employees of the tree crew have retired from 2008. So we've lost a lot of institutional knowledge and a lot of training that's associated with handling big trees. And when we go out, when the managers go out and assess the tree situation, we're not gonna put our employees in a non-safe position. So we do have some skills and I don't wanna downplay the skills that we have. These guys are all guys and gals are all very, very skilled in what they do. But you've seen the trees removed at the cemetery. It is not a small task and it takes a very specialized training in order to do it safely. Thank you, James. Could you also flesh out how much additional equipment would need to be purchased or how much of the equipment already exists that would not need to be purchased to bring a full tree crew in-house? What is the real overhead? And a follow-up to that is, is anyone at the city crunching these numbers besides park maintenance currently? Okay, so the second part of the question being is anybody other than park maintenance? Currently, park maintenance resides under transportation and public works, as you all know. And so all the way up to the director, these things are being looked at and these numbers are being looked at. It's, there's still data to be collected. And when they ask for things to turn around, historically, it usually takes about three years of data. In order to make that change. So I believe that people are looking at it. I assure you that nobody's looking at it as closely as park maintenance because it's a big deal for us. And it is a lot of money that we're spending on something that the city has decided that we don't need anymore. So can you remind me of the first part of your question? So I rarely do this, but I'm gonna disagree with you for a change. I do think this is a priority for the city. I bet they're looking for which pocket to try and find the funding to increase the tree maintenance, which is much delayed and between drought and fire and other ongoing disasters. It's getting worse and worse and worse. I don't think you're alone. It's simply how can it be addressed effectively either by bringing it in-house or increasing the contract. And I don't want you to feel alone and I do want us to discuss how we can help. But it's a matter of looking at the big picture, how much equipment would need to be purchased to replace the outside contractors, how much more value work, maintenance work, preventative work as well as the, if it's gonna hurt someone, the disaster work that is all that really gets done now, those numbers have to be looked at and the money has to be found. And I appreciate your honesty and hope that we can help remedy this because it's only gonna get worse as we all know. Yeah, thank you. And we've maintained a lot of the equipment from our old tree crew. We don't have it all and there is a figure of one-time costs associated with getting a tree crew back. But again, we're still crunching numbers and I'm still collecting data and all the powers that we know this and they're supportive of it. Yeah, we're just gonna add, we are working with the finance department on a city-wide basis to make sure we are looking at it thoroughly working with the department and the teams you're doing the work to bring this back to council and at a future date. Great, thanks for that, Jen. Harry, do you have a question for James? Yeah, just a quick question. James, is it fair to say that with an in-house tree crew and a certified arborist that the city is more proactive in assessing the condition of our existing trees and addressing issues early on before they become emergencies? Was that correct? 100%, in the preliminary numbers that we've run, we would anticipate that if we were able to bring a tree crew in that 70% of that work would be preventative maintenance, 30% would be reactive. And just to give a further comparison, the city of Rone Park has a certified arborist. They've got 17,000 trees. We have 17,000 trees and we don't have a certified arborist. So that's where it comes in, right? You could say we're gonna give you a tree crew, but we really need an arborist. We really need a specialist that can look at these trees and tell us what to do with them. And that's the missing piece right there. And I would assume that in the roughly million dollars that the city is spending on an outside contractor, that figure does not include any monies paid out through tort claims or litigation caused by tree damage. Is that correct? Okay, thank you. I have a request and that is if this goes to city council that we be notified ahead of time as a board so that we can express ourselves in a timely fashion. Thank you. We'll let you know. Board member Quant, when this goes, it's gonna take a bit of time to get us back to council, but we'll keep you posted. Okay, any other questions from the board? All right, do we have any public comments on this item? We have no hands raised at this time. Okay, any comments from the board for James? All right, well, James, I will have the QR code. Good job embracing the future. And also, yeah, just to reiterate what was said, that is a decision for the city council, the city budget. So everyone should talk to their council member if they feel that there should be any changes ever to the city budget and check in with them and make sure you know when they're working on that, they'll be doing budget workshops leading up to the end of the fiscal year on July one. And that's the time to let them know how you feel at the meeting or one-on-one. And hopefully we'll be able to help with that. It's an obvious need. So I appreciate you bringing it up, James, and we really appreciate what your crew does. Maintenance is super important and it doesn't get enough attention. So people like building shiny new stuff, but they usually don't care about how it's maintained. So really important function of our government and it's really something that affects people's everyday life. So thank you for that work and for your presentation. Thank you for having me. Absolutely. Okay, we will move on to item nine on the agenda, which is our committee reports. The first one, 9.1 is the mayor's lunch. We didn't have that this month because we have a new mayor. So they didn't do it. It would have been today, but we did go back in person back in October. So I hope that continues. And we had some great Indian food. So hope that continues too. Item 9.2, board member Kwan. Do you have an update from the waterways committee this month? There's been no meeting. Okay, thank you. 9.3, we just as a reminder, embarked on a fun journey, Terry and Carol and I, it's we're doing a subcommittee of the board of community services to dig through our enabling ordinance. So this is what gives us the legal authority to do what we do within the city code. And it needs some updating, real bad. So as you've probably heard, we need five people to do this meeting, which is not generally how the Brown Act works. We should have that before, but that was a mistake once upon a time. We're gonna look at some other stuff. We haven't made any final decisions yet. So there's not much to update you on, but I think at our next meeting in early January, we'll probably be able to get some stuff moved forward. We're starting to gel around some ideas. And I just wanna thank Emily and Jen for getting us tons of stuff from other cities. Of course, we do everything the best, but it's still good to see how they do it. And looking at cities around the Bay Area and Northern California and other states, it's been super helpful to see what they do and to get some ideas. So if any other board members ever have any ideas on how we could be better or anything we need to change, please contact myself, Terry or Carol. And like I said, I think we'll have a little bit more to update you on next month, because we'll be probably pushing some stuff through that. Okay, item 10, written or electronic communications. We have our Zest newsletter for December through February of next year. Deputy Director Santos, do we have any written or electronic communications? There are no other written or electronic communications. All right, thank you, Jen. Okay, so item 11, future agenda items. Are there any items that anyone would like to see on a future agenda for the board? Okay, not seeing any issues raised. So we will not be having anything specific added in the future. You can always let us know if you think of it later. And with that, I will now adjourn our meeting. Thanks everyone for going through this long lengthy meeting. Those were really important updates. So thanks to all the staff and the board members who could make it. And the next schedule, regularly scheduled meeting on the board of community services is Wednesday, January 25th at 4 p.m. And with that, I adjourn this meeting of the board of community services at 6.35 p.m. Thank you everyone. Happy holidays. Happy holidays.