 Council Member Sawyer, can we do a quick mic check? Sure. How's that? Loud and clear. Thank you. Thank you. Interpreter Charles, can we do a quick mic check? Mic check. Thank you. Loud and clear. Pablo, I'm going to join the Spanish Channel from my phone to confirm I can hear you from the Spanish Channel. One moment please. Thank you, Pablo. I heard you loud and clear. All right. Let's go ahead and start our regular city council meeting for this Tuesday. Madam City Clerk, could you please call the roll? Yes. Thank you, Mayor. Council Member Tibbets, Council Member Schwedhelm. Here. Council Member Sawyer. Here. Council Member Fleming. Here. Council Member Alvarez, Vice Mayor Rogers. Present. Mayor Rogers. Here. Council Member Tibbets, have you joined us? Council Member Alvarez, have you joined us? Yes, I'm here, Stephanie. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, let the record show that all council members are present with the exception of Council Member Tibbets. Great. Thank you so much. We'll be starting with our closed session items. It's 2.1 conference with labor negotiators. Let's see if there's any public comment on that item. Andina, do we have anybody on Zoom looking to do public comment? No, not at this time. Great. Then we'll start with Mr. DeWitt. I wanted to make sure and advocate that the City of Santa Rosa continue to have a hard-headed fiscal oversight approach on its finances. This approach has been so tight-fisted, when an expense such as an extra $300,000 comes up in the budget, the city has cracked down and said, no, we can't do that, such as our public television station, our senior center over in District 1. And I ask you to do the same thing in your negotiations for the wages, especially at the upper level. Currently, we've had a numerous year policy of heavily rewarding the city manager at the top and basically leaving the front line workers at the bottom struggling to get by while our city hasn't had enough services that we need. So I would advocate for you today in these discussions that you make sure and keep a tight rein on your spending for the wages of many of these organizations you're dealing with. Public safety folks, they're well rewarded. The firefighters, the police, they're doing really well. It's our front line workers, the people out there taking care of the city's streets, the city's parks, and the necessities, the amenities that we as the taxpayers expect to have in our society. We're not getting it. It's basically been something that for at least the four years since the fire, the city has been pleading poverty and we're losing. We basically have given our parks over to the homeless community. Anybody can go in and start camping in a park and it's theirs. And we don't have the workers to take care and move them on. So I specifically would ask that you make sure and help the operating engineers, local three, the maintenance and utility system operators, the mechanics, the service employees, the international union local folks, and perhaps give them that raise that they so deserve. But I would ask for a wage freeze on everybody else until we get through this pandemic. We're 15 months into the city essentially having locked us out of city hall, having a lockdown on the public really being involved. I'm standing here in an empty room about 50 feet away from me having to wear a mask. This whole thing is like tight times and the Delta variant is coming up on COVID. Difficult times could lie ahead if we have a resurgence of this problem. So please be tight-fisted in your negotiations with these different agencies. But help our frontline workers, especially the frontline women, who do a lot of the work to help the public here at the city hall. The people that need the help the most. Help them and that helps us. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. DeWitt. We'll go ahead and recess into closed session. For those of you just joining the meeting, I'd like to remind you that we do have Spanish interpretation available. To join the Spanish channel, please click on the icon on your Zoom toolbar. It may look like a globe. We recommend that once you join the Spanish channel, you turn off the main audio so you only hear the Spanish feed. Interpreter Pablo, would you be able to repeat that in Spanish? Of course. Bienvenidos a la reunión. Interpretación en vivo será disponible para esta reunión si desean escuchar en español. Pueden hacer click en el icono de interpretación en la barra de herramientas que ahora aparece un globo terráqueo. Ya que se unan al canal de interpretación, les pedimos que apaguen su audio primario para que solo se escuche la interpretación. Claramente. Gracias. For those council members who are participating by Zoom, could you please activate your camera? We cannot see if you are in the meeting. So by activating your camera, we know that you are in the meeting and we can establish a quorum. Thank you. All right, Madam City Clerk, let's go ahead and resume our meeting. We'll move on to item 3.1, that's our interviews for our housing authority vacancies. Council, we have four vacancies that we'll be filling today, two are for tenant commissioners and two are for at large. We'll be going through all of our interviews, starting here at 1.30 and finishing right around 3.30 and then we'll be making the appointment later in today's council meeting. So we'll go ahead and start with our first applicant who will be joining us via Zoom. Do we have Magdalena on Zoom? Hi, Magdalena, how are you? Go ahead and make sure you unmute so that we can hear from you. Yes, thank you. Excellent. So we do, it is a little bit of a cattle call, each interview is five minutes long, but I'm gonna go ahead and kick it off. Can we hear our translator still? We need to move them to the Spanish channel. Charles is interpreting on the Spanish channel and Pablo, you on your rest period. Perfect, thank you so much. So Magdalena, we will start just by asking you to give an overview of your experience and why you're interested in being appointed to this position and you're going for one of the at-large appointments, correct? Say it again, to which appointment? As an at-large member of the housing authority. That's correct, though honestly, I have missed a job description. I read a lot on the website as much as I could, but didn't really find a job description, but that's okay. Well, go ahead, why don't you go ahead and tell us why you're interested in this position and what your experience is that you think makes you unique or qualified for it? Well, I moved here to Santa Rosa about one and a half years ago. I have lived with my husband and family in the Bay Area for over 30 years. I have never worked in a city position. I ran a business as interior designer and one of my two boys is on the blanking spectrum, on the artisan spectrum. So ever since he was a young child, I have worked with many agencies in this capacity to help him thrive and grow. He's 30 years old now, so I'm still helping him along. But so we moved from the Bay Area to Santa Rosa. I'm, say, my retired sort of, and I wanted to do something for the community. I have seen that homelessness is a big problem in Santa Rosa, and I'm just curious how I can contribute to solving it, helping to solve it if this role has this option. So that's more or less the gist of it. Okay, great. Thank you so much. Council members, who wants to start with questions? Council member Sawyer. Thank you, Mayor. Well, first, I just want to thank you for your willingness to involve yourself in city governance and I appreciate the thoroughness of your application. So I don't really have any questions. Thank you. You're welcome. Council member Schwedhelm. Thank you, Magdalena. Have you ever attended a housing authority meeting? And if so, what were your thoughts? No, total new to me. Okay, thank you. Any other questions, Council? I'm not seeing any hands pop up. Magdalena, we really appreciate you applying and we all have your application and have read through it. And as I mentioned at the outset, we'll be making our determinations later in tonight's meeting. Okay, thank you so much. Thank you so much for joining us. Bye. I believe our next applicant is coming down. How's it going? I appreciate your mask, although I know that Council member Schwedhelm and Council member Alvarez will not quite so much. Oh, I'm so sorry. Well, welcome, Kevin. We appreciate you not just being here but being interested in the position and it is a quick interview that we're doing. Council members have your application. We've all read through them and then we're just giving you a chance to address the Council and seeing if anybody has any follow-up questions based on your application. And so if it works for you, we're doing about five minutes. And if you wanted to start just giving us a quick overview of who you are, why you're interested and what might make you stand out as an applicant. Okay, my name is Kevin Craker. My wife and I just moved here from Colorado Springs about three or four years ago and she's a doctor here. She just became a neuropsychologist and she had her internship here and we had troubles when we first got here as far as being able to stay and afford the rent out here and the city helped us out. And I've told my wife that the opportunity ever came up, I want to give back to the city as for y'all have helped me out. And now I work at AAA Energy Systems, which is an HVAC company and I love that company more than anything, but also I'm willing to devote my extra time to the city in any manner that I could help out. All right, thank you. Council members, who wants to start with questions? Council members, with him. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Kevin for applying and going through this process. On your application, you talk about homelessness being one of our biggest challenges in the city. How do you see the city addressing homelessness in what role would the housing authority in your opinion play with that? Well, we could maybe organize a little differently as far as the homelessness, more programs for the homelessness to give them the opportunity that some say that they don't get, that they don't have the opportunity to get back to society and get back on track to have an actual life. And I would love to be a part of something like that to help out, you know, to reorganize or to make sure things go efficient. All right, thank you. Other council member questions? Go ahead, John. Thank you, Mayor. I'm curious, you mentioned your ability to communicate with people. What do you believe gave you that skill? My whole life, I've always been social. My wife's an introvert. She doesn't like to socialize very much, but me on the other hand, I like to talk to people. As I'm outgoing, I love to speak to people. And as part of my job as well, when I'm meeting customers, going into their houses and their homes to make them feel comfortable that I'm there to do my job adequately and efficiently. I just, I don't know, I'm a people person. I love to talk to people. Thanks, Kevin. Any other questions, council? Kevin, have you had a chance to watch any of the, or attend any of the housing authority meetings? No, sir. Okay. But you are comfortable with the workload of the board. You wouldn't have any trouble working it in with your schedule. No, sir, we'd have a problem. Great. Thank you so much. Anything else from council? All right, we really appreciate you being here and taking the time. As I said at the outset, we'll be making our determinations later in the council meeting and we'll definitely circle back with you and let you know as well. But just want to be, just express our gratitude for your interest in serving the city. And we look forward to talking with you soon more. Thank you much. You have a great day. You too. All right, council. Next up, we have Wayne Downey. Dr. Downey, how are you? I'm wonderful. Thank you for this opportunity to have a conversation with you all. Absolutely. And thank you so much for being interested in the position. And thank you so much for joining us today on Zoom. As I mentioned at the outside, it is a quick interview. Council members do have your application and we will be asking you specific questions that we had from the application. But first, I want to give you just a chance to introduce yourself and talk a little bit about why you're interested in the position and what skills you think you can bring to help us at the Housing Authority. Thank you again. My name is Dr. Wayne Downey. I possess a doctoral degree in Educational Leadership and Program Management. I also serve as a commissioner for the City of Santa Rosa Housing Authority. This has been a blessed privilege to participate in helping the city address its housing needs. What you're not seeing about me is that I happen to be a person who uses a wheelchair in addition to being a person of color. This experience has afforded me the optics that are not normally viewed when pursuing housing opportunities so I have enjoyed utilizing my own experience trying to obtain housing since graduating from college and really focusing on creating opportunities that are easier and more streamlined for people in similar and dissimilar situations. So this has been a fantastic opportunity not to mention the fact that I roll around the city and it's absolutely thrilling to see structures being built that I know that are going to go up for people who are of modest means, homeless, needing emergency housing and so forth. Well, thank you so much, Dr. Downey. I'll see if there's questions from Councilmembers, Councilmember Schwedhelm. Thank you. Thank you, Doctor, for your continued interest in this. So since you do have some experience on the Housing Authority, can you share with us what the most challenging part of that role is and what is the proudest accomplishment you have during your time on the Housing Authority? I think the most challenging has been trying to keep the NOFAs going out, trying to comply with the Community Development Block Grants and other governing agencies dictated by housing and urban development. I think the most challenging thing in the last three years has been in addition to business as usual pertaining to getting things built. Every year we have had some sort of catastrophe in Sonoma County, albeit fire or pandemic. So this has afforded me the opportunity to have to jump from one parameter to another parameter in addition to interfacing with the San Francisco Office for Housing and Urban Development, the Department of Homeland Security, FEMA, and other agencies that have provided me information that is more germane to our housing needs in Santa Rosa because not all jurisdictions possess the same housing needs. So I've been able to provide a voice to these governing agencies as the how the best, how best, and Santa Rosa, and that's been extremely exciting to have that opportunity. And then of course the challenges is trying to, I mean, how do you prioritize when everything needs to be full attention number one? So there's been a lot of juggling between keeping things going, a lot of juggling as far as making sure that emergency services are streamlined and a lot of juggling as far as conveying to federal agencies. This is the issues that we're experiencing in Santa Rosa and these are the parameters that we need to have tailored to best serve our most challenged populations. All right. Well, thank you so much, Dr. Downey. We really appreciate your service and your interest in continuing to serve and we'll be making our appointments later at today's meeting. So thank you so much for taking the time to be here to answer some questions for folks. Okay. That's it. Thank you for your time. Next, we'll move on to Thomas LaPena. Hello, Thomas. How are you? Good. How are you? Welcome. Just wanted to say thank you for being interested and for applying for this position. Council members have your application and we just have a couple of questions for you. But wanted to give you a chance to kick it off here, just to talk a little bit about what your experience is and why you're interested in the position. Well, it's the Housing Authority and that hit me first off because I'm a retired building inspector and code enforcement official. I served five years on the board of directors of the State of Georgia Code Enforcement Association and actually what brings that to mind is when you say housing to me, it means quality of life for people. And I had an occasion in my former job, we initiated a apartment inspection program because the county that we lived in didn't do it and the municipality wanted the apartments inspected because they hadn't been inspected since they received their certificates of occupancy. It's almost like what just happened in Florida. The first building of apartments we inspected was like 35 years old and had 308 units and we came away with 1200 violations and we didn't go into the apartments. We just walked the common areas and there was a lot of things going on. So that affects people very, very much and I thought I could bring another perspective to the Housing Authority, something not only people need to live and get off the streets, but they have to live in housing that's quality to maintain a quality of life. All right, thank you so much for your answer. Council members, any questions? Go to John. Well, Thomas, you know, your application speaks for itself and your experience speaks for itself as well. So it's unusual that we have someone from with your background applying. So thank you for your willingness to apply and I think you bring a unique perspective to this body if the decision is to bring you on board. So thank you for your application. I think it's great to have your expertise as a possibility on this board. Thank you. Thank you. Well, one thing that brought that me to applying for this position is I went through the recent CPE Academy right before COVID hit and right after I did the Academy I knew I wanted to join the VIPs to help, to give back. And I rode along with Nick Vercelli before he came a canine officer and what struck me was out of the 10 calls that he had that day, eight of them were homeless related and it just hit me that we've got to do something to get these people off the streets and help people, but then my background from code enforcement comes in and one of the slogans is quality of life for people. And I just thought with my background I'd be a different fit and I sort of think outside the box and I'm an ex-New Yorker so you can't tell me something can't be done. There's always a way to make it work and I worked in community development in this city and we were contracted. I was not an employee of the city but yet they gave me this quote Velvet Glove Award one year because my city manager used to say you get people to do things and you give them a citation and then they say thank you. And I said well I've always been lucky that way. People saw me, maybe it's because I'm so small they don't want to hit me they just want to talk to me. But there's a way of dealing with people and I feel really care about people who don't have a good place to live. Well we certainly appreciate your interest in the position and thank you for being here today to talk with us. As I mentioned we'll be making our appointment later in today's meeting and looking forward to that discussion amongst council members and just really grateful that you'd be interested in helping to serve your city. Well thanks very much. Thank you. Thanks Natalie. We'll go on to Ladonna Moore who is joining us via Zoom. Mayor it does not look like Ms. Moore has joined us via Zoom yet. Okay we'll go ahead and give that a minute and see if Ladonna joins us. There's a Patrick Moore that's on here perhaps that's Ladonna from a shared computer. Hi do you see me now? Yes is that you Ladonna? Yes it's a shared computer thank you. Ladonna let me promote you to panelists so we can have your camera on. One moment please. There we go. Ladonna how are you? You're on mute. So make sure you unmute because we've got a couple of questions for you. So council members have your application. We're very grateful for your interest in serving the city and participating in the housing authority. Before I give them a chance to ask some questions do you want to just give us a quick overview of who you are and why you're interested in the position? Well I would say that I'm really interested now that I've recently retired to take some of my time and energy and help the city. So I've been looking around at where can I fit in. I used to manage a civil engineering company I understand about plans but quite frankly listening to Thomas the gentleman before me he's got the experience I'd vote for him. But yes I definitely have the drive I want to help this city now that I've got the time and I'm just looking for the slot in which I can best help. So housing seems something I at least had a knowledge of and an interest in. So that's why I applied. We certainly we appreciate you applying and we always love when it's congenial between folks who are going for the same position. So let me go ahead and see if the council members have any questions for you. I'll start with John. Thank you Mayor. Thank you for applying for this position and regardless of the prior applicant who had some unique talents to bring to this body can you give us a little insight into what you might bring that it's unique as well? Well I grew up in a my father was a contractor I grew up in that world so I had a husband whose past who was in architecture so housing is something I seem to understand and really enjoy in terms of reading the mission for this council I understand that what the focus is on and I agree that we need to find housing for everyone we've got to find a way to support this. Well I was reading the county's five-year plan and you know a key piece here is housing how do we get affordable housing so that it interlinks with all the other steps the city is trying to make. So I think I was in education for 37 years there's definitely an international baccalaureate coach so I'm an out-of-the-box thinker I can find solutions that sometimes people don't look at and I'm ready to give my time. Thank you very much. Vice Mayor. Hi thank you so much for being here today. So I just wanted to throw out the comment and let you know that I wish you the best of luck with this and also let you know that some of us still have some board positions that we need to get filled so right and I'm one of them so definitely reach out if this doesn't doesn't work out I'm sure we can find a place. The city council and look and see what other openings there are. Yes. I can do that information at srcity.org forward slash boards. Okay I will check that out. All right thank you so much Ladonna we really appreciate you being here and applying. We'll definitely be making our appointments later today and then we'll perhaps a council member or two if you were not selected for this position we'll also be reaching out as well. That'd be great. We'll go on to Phillip Olson. Madam clerk I don't see Phillip on zoom. Mr. Mayor Mr. Olson did notify us that he is traveling and he may have challenges connecting via zoom whether it be with the camera on or via telephone but he was interested in serving his continuing his service on the housing authority. But I do not see his name or hand being raised under his time slot. Okay we'll give it another minute here and just see if he can find a way to pop on. All right I'm not seeing Phillip he must not be able to join us while he's traveling. Do we have Frank here? Not yet all right. Well we're a couple minutes ahead of schedule so we'll go ahead and wait and see if Frank joins us as well. Hi there you Frank. My name is Frank Panza P-A-N-Z-A. Thank you. How are you doing Frank? Excuse me? So we're doing quick interviews here so all of the council members have our applications in front of us that were submitted and so I was just if you have a couple of minutes we are going to ask you a few questions that council members have about your experience and why you want to be on the housing authority. I'm sorry but I'm not understanding a word you're saying. Okay. I have my hearing aids on. I can hear you perfectly but I can't make out the words. All right let's try without a mask. Is that a little easier? That's a lot better thank you. Okay welcome. Council members have a few questions for you about your application. Just if you would start by telling us who you are and why you're interested in the position. Okay. As I said I'm Frank Panza. I'm a retired lawyer. I practiced in a corporate environment for 30 years and in the Internal Revenue Service and Treasury Department as a trial lawyer for 10 years. I'm here because I owe this community the benefit of what I can provide in looking at complicated issues. I've always been concerned about housing especially for the homeless but since I've retired I really haven't been active other than in speaking out and writing stuff. Writing things like that. But at this point I have a duty. I believe I have a duty to do what I can to make things better for the people in Santa Rosa. I'm not interested in politics. I was involved in politics in my 30s in New Jersey and I wasn't able to get on boards then because the elected officials were in a different party and had been for 30 something years. But I am interested in working on substantive issues. I've been reading about what the housing authority does. I see a lot of it is dealing with governmental issues which I believe I'm fairly competent to do. I mean in looking at the Internal Revenue Code for 40 years I'm used to dealing with completely incomprehensible directions and regulations. So I think I could do that effectively for the housing authority. I think that's really all I have to say. If you have any questions I'd be happy to answer them. Absolutely. And we're very grateful that you are interested in participating. Councilmember Sweatham. Thank you Mr. Mayor. Yeah thank you Frank for applying for this position. And I noticed that your answer to the top three issues facing the city very comprehensive, very detailed. How do you see any potential work with the housing authority would be able to address some of the issues that you surfaced? I noticed that there are facilities here that provide money for housing. I think I can work effectively with those other facilities in addition to the Section 8 stuff which is I'm not sure how long the waiting lists are or how many facilities there are in town. I looked at the list of facilities but I don't know how practical it is to get into each of them. I can do that kind of stuff. I can write. I wrote for 40 years. That's what I did as a living. I think I can communicate effectively. And that's how I believe I could help the housing authority. I didn't see a lot about homelessness on the sites, on the site for the housing authority. I saw a lot about rent and subsidization. I would be more interested in working on homelessness issues as well, especially if that's something the authority does. I'm a lawyer. I'm used to dealing with complicated stuff. I'm used to dealing in adversarial situations and recognize that the best thing to do in an adversarial situation is cool things down. And believe it or not, as a trial lawyer for the Internal Revenue Service, I had to cool things down because I had 40 cases on my docket. And I only could try two of them on account. So I had to deal with 38 of them some other way. That's about all I have to say about that. Thank you. All right. Well, thank you so much, Frank. We will be making our appointment later at tonight's council meeting. And we'll circle back with you after that. Just really grateful that you'd be interested in serving your city. And we'll be talking with you soon. Thank you very much. One thing I would mention, I've lived here for almost 40 years, but only three in the city because we lost our house in the county in the 2017 fires. So I haven't been a resident of the city for 90% of the time that I've lived here. Thank you very much. No, thank you. In council, our next person, Cynthia, has canceled and will not be joining us. So we'll take five minutes here and then we'll come back with our following one with Kevin. In the time, we're doing quick five-minute interviews and then council will be making our determinations later at today's meeting. We all have your application. And so we'll be asking you a couple of specific questions about it if you get a chance. But first and foremost, I just want to open it up and have you introduce yourself, talk a little bit about your experience and why you would be a good fit for this position. Thank you very much. Yes, my name is Kevin Diaz-Ramos. I am new to the Santa Rosa area, so I do not consider myself a local quite yet, but I've been living here about two and a half years. And I am currently a master's student at the University of San Francisco. So I would really like to see how the city puts into practice this inclusionary housing policy and how we seek affordable housing to develop. All right, thank you. Council members, questions? Council members, what help? Thank you. Thank you, Kevin, for applying for this. Very impressive list of volunteer, your work that you were doing. Have you ever attended a housing authority meeting and how would that time commitment, if you were selected, fit in with your other going to school and these other volunteer opportunities? Thank you for that question. Yes, I have thought about how that time commitment might fit for me. And it does seem to fit well on Thursdays in the afternoon. I have availability. I have not attended a housing authority meeting specifically in the city of Santa Rosa at all. Or in my hometown of Southern California in downtown city, I have not attended a specific housing authority meeting, but I have made a public public comment once. And so I probably would have to get acquainted with the process of being on the board. But I do have the availability and the time commitment that I'm willing to make. Thank you. The time that you made public comment, what was the issue that you felt so strongly about? Yes, of course, there was a public comment that was proposed for, I believe it was an affordable housing project that was being directed towards veterans. And it was a large development, many units. I wanted to specifically make a comment in approval. Although there were many folks there that wanted to make a comment to deny that. For my specific comment, I wanted to have more availability of mental health resources which I think would be very helpful for the crime rate which I think was very steadily unchanged. Council, other questions? Council Member Sawyer or Alvarez? No, thank you Mayor, the application was very complete and I appreciate it. All right, so we, as I mentioned, we'll be making our decision later today. Just very grateful for your interest in serving the city and we'll be circling back with you after tonight's meeting. Thank you. Thank you so much. Hi there, are you Tara? Hi there. My name is Tara Montoya. I've been a job developer working with Department of Rehabilitation for 16 years. And due to COVID last year, of course that kind of ended everything. Also I'm an academic tutor, computer repair, person so I know how important it is to be able to feel safe in your house and to have a good landlord. And I'm very fortunate I've been living in my place on Sonoma Highway for almost 14 years. And I have a great landlord and it makes all the difference. I really like working with people with disabilities because just getting a job is hard enough but then to have to find an employer that will accommodate them that's another challenge. So it's been an interesting work. I think with my background and my education I think I'd be a great I've done work in the county only through like employment type of services. So but I love Santa Rosa and I've been here about 35 years, grew up in Napa and always seem to come back here. This is where my home is. We're very grateful that you applied. We love seeing folks who are interested in serving their community, particularly people who have experience, good and bad experience that they can bring to the community. Thank you. Council members, do we have any questions? Council member Sawyer. Thank you, Mayor. And thank you very much for applying. I'm curious given your experience as a such an eight voucher recipient and a disabled person and a businesswoman. What would you say was the body in which you saw it? Well, being on the waiting list for six years was extremely difficult and I was working and I was disabled and really shouldn't have been working and so I spent many years just going through kind of a cycle of trying to work and then becoming disabled again and so that process I think needs some changing in some way. I don't know how to do. I know there's a lot of people that are really wanting this and everything but that is a long time to wait honestly. Council member Schwedel. Thank you. Could you just share a little bit of information as to why you're choosing this opportunity now? What has come? You've been a resident for quite a while. I'm just interested in hearing why you're taking advantage of this opportunity now. Section 8 person, Jodi that was the one that recommended to me because of my background and she felt that and I thought, you know, I've I've always wanted to get involved in government. It just I've had a lot of other challenges to deal with in my life and so now I'm at an age and I have the time because I don't really know about my employment or my being a vendor with the state any more given how things are going right now. So I think it would be really interesting to get into the middle of it and see what kind of insights I might bring that might be different and new. Great. Thank you. Thank you so much and the five minutes goes quick. I know we'll be job developers. So five minutes is a great time to have an interview, right? Well we do have the application and appreciate your responses on that as well and as you've heard we'll be making our appointment later tonight so feel free to tune in otherwise we'll circle back with you as well tomorrow or in the next couple of days but thank you so much for your interest and for being here and for bringing your perspective. Thank you. Our next individual is Erlian Roger. Ms. Navarro is not on the Zoom meeting yet but we do have Ms. Rawhouser on the Zoom who is the next candidate. Okay let's go ahead jump we'll jump and then come back if we see Ms. Navarro. Ms. Rawhouser I just promoted you to panelists. When you get to the panelists side please turn on your camera. Okay there we go. Can you hear me now? We can. How are you? Okay I'm doing very well. Well thank you so much for your interest in the position and for taking the time to join us today. It goes really quick as I'm sure you've seen five minutes and council members have your application and have a couple of follow-up questions for you if it works. But first I wanted to turn it over to you give you a chance to introduce yourself and to tell us why you stick out or why you think you'd be good at the position. Okay well I'm a Sonoma County girl I lived in Santa Rosa proper for most of my life I was on the Spring Creek Elementary as a cheerleader at Herbert Slater I graduated from Santa Rosa Junior College and then in 2017 I finally went back to the University and graduated from Sonoma State so that pretty much rounds it. I opened up the Santa Rosa Plaza and managed to reach as hair stylist for five years and then I was working independently as a stylist after that I lived the experience of being homeless as I owned a three bedroom two bath house at the journey's end and as we all know what happened at the journey's end during the Tubbs Fire and I was unfortunately had one of the houses that was left standing so I was caught in the limbo of my insurance company claiming that I did not lose my home due to a wildfire but due to a government action therefore they had no responsibility to reimburse me for the loss of my home and so I'm also disabled I'm a four-time cancer survivor and I'm living with compromised kidney issues and so I had my golden ticket my home was paid for I just graduated from the University with no student debt I had no credit card debt I was ready to start my second chapter in life and the fire just happened and threw me into that huge trauma of what do I do where do I go who's here for me and so working with Kendall Jarvis and Tucci I was able to just rebuild my life again and so without their help I wouldn't be as doing as well as I am today and so with Tucci what I did was I got involved with them and we created a community group for the Journey's End and that was to give them one day a week where we could meet as a community share lunch and we planned different activities I got different guest speakers to come in to talk about issues that were pertinent to the Journey's End residents and we got a grant so we did a couple of parties and a few field trips just to kind of get a sense of community again and unity and I believe that really helped a lot of people and then with legal aid Kendall took, we did a class action suit against foremost which we finally did get restitution for that so I was grateful for that and Kendall's the one who because I had lived at the Journey's End for 30 years I was on rent control so I had my golden ticket my rent was frozen in perpetuity I owned my home I moved forward to live on my disability and I was set and I was feeling I could branch off and do my second chapter in life by using my degree that I just received in sociology and so what I found during my Journey the most traumatic part was I had a house so I wasn't houseless I was homeless I didn't I moved a total of 13 times before I actually was able to find a little bungalow on Sonoma Avenue and so I stayed between friends family and hotels for the first few months after the fire and it was just really traumatic just going through all the listings and seeing basically people's garden sheds for rent for $1200 and so I went from a highly affordable life to an affordable life and what I found that the most traumatic part was the sense of hopelessness and when you lose your hope that's when you begin a downward spiral and you just don't see how anything can be better so I think that finding a way to integrate hope into the existence of homelessness would greatly benefit the people who are dealing with the situation. So sorry that you've gone through that but I appreciate you be willing to your willingness to share your perspective with us and to use it for good within our community. Council members do we have any questions? The five minutes goes quick we really appreciate you being here and we'll be making the selection later in this council meeting tonight. I did have another comment if I may. Absolutely. When I was going around looking for places to live before I got rehoused and I had my section 8 housing voucher I was very upset because I had an excellent credit rating and I would walk into places and the first thing I'd be told is we've met our quota and when I was in business to me a quota was a minimum and a goal was something you strove to achieve and so I feel that there needs to be a better establishment of shutting people down by saying we've met our quota when I don't know if they honestly had met the quota and I think that's an important issue that as we open up with all these new apartments coming in that the quota for the section 8 housing members is more transparent. I appreciate that. Thank you so much for being here today and for lending your experience. We'll be making the appointment and then we'll circle back with you. You very much. All right, thank you. We're going to go back. We're going to see do we have Erlina. I'm not seeing her on zoom. No, it does not look like she has joined us via zoom. Do we already have Shashana here? How about we take a quick break and we'll see if we get applicants and we are a little bit ahead of schedule. Julie, how are we looking up there? Anybody materialize yet? Okay. We'll keep waiting. Mayor, I do see the 250 interview for the at-large tenant commissioner on the line. All right, let's go ahead and promote Constance and see if Constance is able to do a little bit early. Constance, Kenny, that's the 250 interview. Hey, Constance. Let's go ahead and get you to unmute but it's good to be able to see you. Can you hear me? We can hear you now. Oh, perfect. Are you good to do your interview a few minutes early here? Absolutely. Great. Well, thank you so much for taking the time and thank you for your interest in this position. Before I turn it over to other council members, do you want to just give a quick introduction who you are and why you're interested in the position or why you think you'd be good at it? Absolutely. My name is Constance Kenny. I'm 57 mother of three. Coming from a position of being homeless myself back in 2012 due to domestic violence, I was homeless with my son and in 2013 I was blessed to be able to go into Catholic Charities to where I've learned a lot firsthand of the homeless situation and the needs to be met from Catholic Charities. I was blessed also with getting a voucher from the city of Santa Rosa along with Burbank Housing to where that's where we are now. I'm great talking with people and because of my experiences firsthand I think I would be valuable, very valuable to your board. All right, well thank you so much for bringing that perspective and thank you for your application. It's very, very happy to see it. All council members have had a chance to read through it. Let's see if there are any questions about it. Council members, what help? Good afternoon Constance. Thank you again for applying for this position. On your application you talked about improvements on the structure of the wait list as to shorten the time in which applicants have to wait for the wait list. Could you share with us some of your thoughts on how we might achieve that? Thinking that if there could be a possibility of, I don't know if there's just one wait list or different types of wait lists but different types of housing needs that might help. And then possibility of if there was different outlets of steps in which you're going to get your housing help in the interim. I had to work two jobs in order to pay my rent as a single mom and my age it was kind of hard but it's just steps in order to help people on their road to getting help with the wait list. Great, thank you. Other questions from council members? I'll just ask you Constance have you been following the work that the housing authority has been doing and do you feel comfortable being able to plug in and pick up where other commissioners have left off? I have not been following that I do intend to and I do have the time I do have Mondays and Tuesdays off and any evenings so I am going to to study up on it and follow it and I would really love to be on board I think I would be a great help. All right, well thank you so much we are grateful for the application council members will be discussing later in the meeting the appointments I see down you're going for one of the at large tenant commissioner positions so there will be two folks pulled from that bucket and we'll circle back with you shortly thereafter. I appreciate your time. No, thank you so much. You take care and we'll talk to you soon. All right, thank you folks. Are you Lewis? Go ahead, let's use the microphone over here. First and foremost, welcome. Thank you for taking the time to be here today. So Lewis Brown we are doing quick five-minute interviews. All council members have your application in front of them both my two colleagues to my right as well as our colleagues that are participating via Zoom. So if it works for you to start off by introducing yourself talk a little bit about your experience and why you want the position and then we'll go on to some council member comments or questions about your application. All right, we'll do. My name is Lewis Brown and I'm coming at this from a number of different angles. The first angle is the single parent of a disabled child I've had the experience of dealing with section 8 housing in both Sonoma County and Santa Rosa so I understand the issues the angle of a person who's receiving the benefits or the detriments of being on a section 8 voucher. The other angle I'm coming at this from is the angle of an attorney. Despite being on section 8 for so long I was able to get through law school was able just within the last couple of years to pass the bar and one of my major interests is affordable housing and development in communities such as this. So I would like to be able to take both my experience and my education and put that to work to benefit my community. All right, well thank you so much for bringing those perspectives. Council members, who wants to start with questions? Go ahead, Council Member Swinnell. Thank you. Thank you, Lewis for this application. In reading your application your top three issues, you go to some great detail and I'm wondering how you see the intersection of what you put there is the top three issues facing Santa Rosa and your role should you get on to the housing authority? Where would those intersect? Well, if you could refresh my memory. What were the top three issues that I put down? Well, yeah. So you say at this point my information is limited but off the cuff I would say the first is affordability driven by the enormous hurdles to even the most benign development proposals and then you go on from there. Right. Well it is difficult. I mean there's a lot of push we pull you is in terms of coming up solutions for these these significant problems on the one hand you can have a piece of property say for instance that city owned and the city may want to put a development there that would help to alleviate these problems but you're immediately going to get pushback from the community around that development so ways of making this not just appear to be but actually be a win-win for the various stakeholders in the community are essential and that means bringing all sorts of different people to the table all sorts of different perspectives and finding compromise. So just with that on the same point you mentioned specifically NIMBY backlash so how would the housing authority fight some of the NIMBY backlash? Well that's a difficult one isn't it there's really only two ways of going about it that I can think of right now off the cuff number one would be to show that there's some benefit to the people in that community that they're not recognizing if you can sell them on the benefit then you can sell them on the proposal and the other one I don't recall whether it's one of the council members or one of our supervisors simply put out there that you've sometimes got to be willing to stake your own political career on what is right sometimes you have to do the things that are right for your community even if there is a powerful subsection of that community that doesn't like it Thank you My other question for you too was just about your general interest in other boards as well here serving Santa Rosa are there other boards that you've looked at or applied for before that also interest to you I haven't really looked at any others recently so I mean if there's any way that I can serve my community I would love to be able to serve my community so if there's something that intersects with my interests, my education, my knowledge and I can have a positive impact I'd be more than happy to devote my time and energies to that Thank you so much Our five minutes here we really appreciate your application and are grateful of your interest to serve your community in any way that you can we'll be making our appointments later tonight in our open session for our council meeting and then we'll be circling back with you to talk in the next couple of days if that works Wonderful, thank you so much Alright, thank you Next up we have Shashana Shashana, welcome in we really appreciate you being here with us today we're doing quick interviews all the council members have your application in front of them and have had a chance to read through it so if it works, I'm going to ask you to just introduce yourself a little bit, talk a little bit around why you're interested in this position and why you think you'd be good at it and then I'm going to open it up for questions from council members on your application I'm Shoshana Burney and I've been on HUD for quite a long time probably almost 20 years on and off actually this last time was only the last six years and it's helped me out so much I just wanted to be part of helping others that don't like the process was a lot for me at first and not understanding some of the things that like what you needed to do the paperwork to follow through and that the county and the city are two different you know things that entities that kind of got me welcome for years and then opened up right away I'd like to serve my community I don't have as much to say as he did but I don't have much experience on boards like this but I would like to put input if people ask me what I think about certain things absolutely we're really grateful for you to take the time and be interested in so we do want to talk to you a little bit about the process it's going to open up to council members for additional questions and comments council member Sawyer I see you've unmuted yes thanks mayor Shoshani you've mentioned that you have been through the process and I'm curious in your experience if there was one thing you could change in that process that you have been through a number of times what would that be I mean really the waiting period of not knowing no contact with anybody you know it's just you're hanging for a long time and also to let landlords know that like I mean I was thinking during COVID like they're the only ones that were getting paid you know the people that had had I mean it's a guarantee grant but they might want to somehow fish out the bad apples better too because some people give bad names to people like I'm disabled I've been disabled for a long time but you know I'm very respectful where I live so I don't know there's tweeting out people that take the time from us from people that need a home so thank you thank you council member Schwedl no questions just to review the workload that the committee has had before it over the last year you know I asked for anything and I didn't receive anything and I just said bring yourself and don't worry about it I never got emails or anything just told the other day okay but do you feel confident you can just jump in and help out if you know what if that's what is needed then yes I mean like absolutely the place for but like I'm wondering what's going on with community hospital up there on ill and what can be used for that that just drives me kind of crazy thinking why isn't that being used besides the earthquake stuff so I mean that's just some of the stuff I wanted to ask and bring forward the homeless situation too okay well we really appreciate you being here today that that five minutes goes really quick I know but as I said council members also have your application and we'll be making the appointment later tonight and we'll be circling back just really want to thank you again for your time and your interest is there something that I should have been able to read about the workload or something because I wasn't told that because this is a consistent board and commission just curious if you've kept up on what the agenda has been that they've had in their open meetings it's been infrequent because of the pandemic so I was just curious absolutely thank you for coming in I see Greg's here ready go ahead come on up to the microphone there hello how you doing Greg so I know you've been through this before so we're doing quick five minute interviews all of the council members whether up here at the dais or via zoom have your application in front of them and so I'm just going to have you first introduce yourself and talk a little bit about your experience and why you'd like to serve on the position and then I'm going to open it up to council members to ask questions about your application okay my name is Greg Jan I'm a long-term city resident I moved here in 67 I've been chair of the mental health board and I was elected to point her all of it school board I've helped build a school called Jack London I've been on the Democratic club and Sonoma County Democratic Central Committee I helped design the mental health services act I try to be busy I'm an author this September I'm authoring my publishing my fifth book on political commentary and mental health stigma I have a light schedule so I can perform these duties I'm in our own voice presenter at NAMI I also have my own health business license here at Sonoma County Santa Rosa County City my own health trade mark mental health trade mark filed by attorney that keeps protects my property that is unique in mental health services I don't make much money from my own little independent company but I try to do it I have a family of siblings two brothers and three sisters my parents passed away 2011 2016 and my mother was a long term district attorney of Santa Rosa Sonoma County and my father was a national minister who spent time in Santa Rosa First-Best Presbyterian Church I went to schools Sonoma State Santa Rosa Junior College Montgomery all the way from kindergarten and I went to Chico State graduating from everybody so any other questions lots of hats that you bring to the position so we appreciate that I'm going to open it up for councilmembers and see if they have any questions about your application seeing them from the dais councilmember Sawyer thank you mayor and thanks for applying for this position you show a great wealth of volunteerism in your application how do you immediately apply your specific volunteerism with housing I live in housing I live in the Rosenberg I have a real estate license sales license that expired in the 90s I have I have an interest I don't know how chair of the mental health board worked with mentally ill adults I worked at community support network which was providing housing I worked as a union rep working for line staff provided housing section 8 housing certificates my life has been intertwined with mentally ill disabled adults I also housing in the twilight of life I worked in summer field nursing facility not worked but volunteered in the men's club 10 years visiting men coming from housing in that issue of when they lose housing and go to nursing home volunteering is just in my blood and I perform service you know I'm on disability now it's not much likely that I can make money because I lose a lot if I try to make money I was recently accepted into a masters program at Grand Canyon University it was called mental health and wellness with an emphasis in community mental health administration and if I were to pursue a job in that field I'm not sure I would try to get a masters it's just something to consider but I would lose so much in health housing and social security benefits that it might not be worth it to pursue a job but my volunteer spirit is to help and my father was a minister and my mother did good good work as a district attorney secretary so it it's all blending together thank you all right thank you so much Greg we really appreciate you taking the time to come in council members will be making our determinations later at tonight's meeting and we just we're grateful for you for coming in for bringing your experience and being interested in the position but we'll talk with you soon is it televised in Windsor my sister's in town we're staying at a condo watching movies and things like that you can access the link at srcity.org or on YouTube or on Facebook okay thank you very much all right you take care and I will be informed by email or so yes we'll also reach out to you thank you we have Adam here yet I'm looking on zoom Tisha and Scott are not on yet so we'll take a quick break and see if we can get one of our applicants hi there are you Adam excellent step up to the microphone very nice to meet you so we're doing quick five minute interviews council members have your application in front of them and so if it works for you what I'll have you do is first give a quick overview of who you are what skills you bring to the position and why you're interested and then I'm going to open it up for my colleagues to ask you questions about your application okay my name is Adam Larson I let's see not really prepared for this but I served in the National Guard I'm looking forward to maybe re-enlisting soon what else can I say I've been on housing for some time over 15 years I believe and I live in a place called Del Nito apartment so I don't know if you guys have heard of them or not but it's a pretty difficult place to live for somebody that well I've been getting cyber bullied a lot by my neighbor and it's no fun it makes life a lot more difficult to get things accomplished and so I'm going through that and I have troubles right now but I'm kind of a shade tree mechanic so I'm getting through that but I'm persistent I have a good head on my shoulder so I think I do good in this job I believe in God I think that's the most important thing in my life right now it always has been actually and what else can I say just thank you for this opportunity you know thank you for being here we're certainly very grateful that you're interested in serving your community and bringing your perspective to it so I'm going to open it up for council members to see if they have any questions for you we'll start with council members thank you Mr. Mayor thank you Adam for coming here today have a little chat with us I noticed on your application you talked about you know people on housing who are taking advantage of and you also know you selected for this position on housing authority how would you use that information in a role on the housing authority board let's see so I know people that have been taken advantage of on housing reflect on that for a second I wasn't really prepared for that question can you go ahead and read that to me one more time so you just made comment on your application that you know people on housing who are taking advantage of and they also commented that you know how people take advantage of the program and so what I'm interested since you have this information how would you apply what you know if you were selected to be on the housing authority board how would you use that information to change that why even said that fair enough I'd have to reflect on that for a while you know to get that answer I'm sorry all good are there other questions from council members all right well we are very grateful for you to come in thank you so much for being interested we'll be making our selections later tonight in our open meeting yep and so we'll circle back with you but you're also welcome obviously to sit in or to watch that meeting since it's all done out in public all right thank you so much all right council I'm looking it looks like we've got Tisha and I apologize Tisha if I'm mutilating your name go ahead and introduce yourself to us here when you join our zoom hi Tisha please unmute your camera and your mic and we are ready for you oh I got it all right there you are got lost all right very nice to meet you so we're we're doing okay well I thought I would try to help make housing more affordable to people because I'm in lower income housing myself and maybe make the conditions better for people that complain that they're not living in the best of conditions for their in their area or housing and um I've been on section 8 for a long time so I'm familiar with lower income housing and some of the problems that people have with that and that's about it for now forgot what I put in my application well council members we'll have some questions for you about it I'll start off I just wanted to ask some of the things that you that you mentioned where would you start for making quality of life better for folks who are living in the maybe it's more affordable if I could and make the conditions better by making repairs things try to get them to fix things that need to be fixed and make sure that they have a suitable place to live in for those people that don't have a suitable place to live in and pretty much take it from there okay council members council member Sawyer you know I'm curious you've been in the worked with the city and it's housing authority how has your experience been with them and your ability to attain housing pretty good luck but I know people that haven't had a very good experience with housing that's why I try to get involved with that and help out people like that more thank you for that dedication yeah appreciate your willingness to apply thanks council member Alvarez any questions I can't see that if I had a question for you and I do appreciate you applying for this and really want to help the city of Santa Rosa especially with your experiences what advice do you have for us as the council members and how to really assist our section 8 members of the community what can you tell me that I could really help our fellow members any recommendations I would recommend if I could that they pay less than what they're paying some people don't get that much on disability or whatever it is they're getting a month and they really need a break on their rent especially since they can't work so some type of financial assistance or something of that type is what you suggest perfect thank you very much for that sure alright well thank you so much for coming in virtually joining us via zoom as you heard me mention we'll be making our decision later tonight in our council meeting so feel free to drop it on that zoom as well so circling back with folks to let them know who was appointed and then the next steps for those individuals in the next couple of days okay great thanks alright thank you so much council I don't see scott on the zoom but I do see david so let's go ahead and promote david we'll go to that interview next that's our 310 interview I apologize I do see that scott just jumped on so we'll do david back for your interview scott if that works for folks david how are you I'm good this is my service dog chiquita she just wanted to say hi I'm going to let her go adorable thank you well first and foremost thank you for being interested in the position and for joining us here today I know it's not easy in the middle of the day we do have quick 5 minute interviews so council members have your application in front of them we'll start first by asking you to introduce yourself and why you're interested in the position and then I'm going to open it up to my colleagues to see if they have any questions about your application before we deliberate later tonight wonderful um well I am a transsexual black Jew I've lived in sonoma county for almost all of my life I was born in pasadena I am disabled I'm a transsexual black Jew and I'm also on housing and I have a service dog because I'm on housing I've been housed for the last 5 years of my life before that I was homeless I'll start off and I'll just ask what was the biggest barrier moving from homelessness into housing and how can we make that easier for folks through the housing authority well one of the biggest challenges is um the way that the biggest challenge was finding a place to live first of all not the second go round but the first time it was really difficult and I would also like to say that because I was living on the streets for so long and I wasn't able to get certain things I did have a little list of things if that was okay to go through with y'all some things that might be helpful absolutely that'd be great okay well my first point would be about mental health I myself have severe post-traumatic stress syndrome and I have psychogenic seizures which I'm not convulsive but I have seizure disorder so I have to keep my stress level down but I'm also able to function very well um disabled people as well as disabled vets um need some help with mental health services we need some better help with our facilities that handle mental health issues for people who are on the streets um and a part of that point um is that in my opinion because I haven't necessarily researched this so much but I would consider about 80% of people who are homeless or vets um have major mental health issues it's hard for people to go and live in a place when those issues aren't addressed so my second point would be that after there is um more help for folks like that um you know there could be mental health professionals in their lives that help assist with drug intervention proper medications and mental health issues for people that way that when people are housed who do have certain disabilities it's easier for them to be better standing community members because they'll have a home they'll be mentally stable to be able to live in a place some people have a hard time living in a place so that also makes it so a lot more people living in housing or who would like to do that will also be able to take proper meds and a lot of folks would stop doing drugs and alcohol and live stably I myself live on SSI so I know a lot about that I have 19 years clean and sober from drugs and alcohol and also in conclusion I'd like to talk about the fact that not only um I would love it if y'all did find it in your heart to accept me to be able to help with housing because there's other things I have to offer like early childhood education I am the retired teacher since I'm on SSI and I would love to see a low income stimulus thing um in some form for folks here in our county who have it really difficult and just need that assistance that are very low income targeting one group of people which is the lowest income you know because what y'all have done for me is more than I could give I couldn't give you enough gratitude to thank you for the opportunity here the opportunity to be housed and to have my service dog and for my family to know that I'm housed and that I'm able to be doing well I have a psychiatrist and a psychologist and I am mentally stable and I am housed so I'd like to stop talking because I don't know if I over did it I apologize if I did No, no it's wonderful and we really appreciate talking with applicants who have a perspective that they'd like to bring and who have thought through the issues that they'd like to work on that five minutes does go quick and so we are at the end of the time and I apologize but we do have the rest to make decisions on and I just want to thank you so much for being willing to put yourself out for this position and for being interested in serving your community and we're just grateful for all of the applicants and for you for coming forward and asking to be able to help and to serve so we'll make our appointments later tonight and then we'll circle back Okay and as we say in Hebrew Shalom So shalom Alright take care David and Councilman we'll go on to our next interview with Scott Okay there's no picture There we go Can you hear us? Looks like we lost, we've got video but we don't have audio for you at the moment Okay what about now? There we go Okay like I said my grandson is helping with this I'm not really good with zoom or anything like that What's your grandson's name? Devante How's it going Devante Well thank you so much Scott We really appreciate you taking the time and Devante for helping out as well We're doing five minute interviews Council members have your application in front of them and if it works for you I'm going to have you introduce yourself the perspective and the experience you'd bring to the board and then turn it over to council members for additional questions about your application Okay Briefly my name is Scott McWhorter I am Okay you got to slow down I just got back in the house and I'm rushing So I'm a disabled veteran I've been on disability I got through HUD VASH back in 2010 That's how I got on section 8 I got it through HUD VASH program I was one of the first people that got section 8 through that I'm a graduate of Sonoma State I got a philosophy degree I'm working toward getting a master's degree at Sonoma State I raised my grandkids I've actually got custody of my grandkids I have two grandkids who live with me that's Devante and Maya My perspective of what I think I would bring to the board I'm still taking back with the last applicant I listened to everything she had to say and that kind of struck me here So I'm thinking more about what she said But my perspective is more so Again I'm a disabled veteran and I had the unique opportunity of having one landlord for a teen year period We became friends So I got to see section 8 from not only my perspective but from her perspective as well and how she viewed tenants and how she viewed people It's not like I really search out people that are on section 8 or anything like that But I did have an opportunity to run across people in section 8 and look out to hear what their experiences are And what I believe I bring to the board is two folds One is I have the ability or just let's say I have the opportunity to learn from a landlord's perspective of what they think of section 8 and how they perceive section 8 and then on the other hand I got this side that I'm on a person that's on section 8 and how I view section 8 from somebody else and what their views are That's all I'm going to say I really appreciate the perspective Let's see if council members have any questions about your application Council Member Schwedhelm Thank you Scott for your service and for applying for this position On your application you talked about accountability of landlords which is a unique perspective Can you tell me what you think the role of the housing authority could be Okay with I'm trading lightly here on how I say this I'm preface what I'm saying is not to say that landlords don't do their job or section 8 doesn't do their job But what I witness is that whenever there's an issue and there's an issue between a landlord or a marriage attendant section 8 and their infinite wisdom sometimes 90% of the time they will side with a landlord over what a tenant is saying and I think that creates a one sided kind of relationship where the power dynamic is more that the landlord has more control and more say where a landlord can literally do whatever they want and at section 8 tenant doesn't feel like they have a voice or they have a power or they have any way of opportunity to give these issues address Great thank you Other questions Council Members I'll just follow up on Council Member Schwedhelm's comment a little bit I've been able to track the agenda for the housing authority and have you seen the different workload that they have and would that meet with your schedule and your time that's available You mean as far as the meetings last this is not the first time I was asked to become a part of this but last time that I heard it was on Mondays was one o'clock it was once a month something like that it's been changing since then but I know I was going through school during that period so I didn't really want to take up any more responsibilities other than the ones I have now I'm more open because it's more the master's program is a little bit different than it is just going to like a regular summer state or regular college so I'm more open with my time Okay that's great and I apologize the five minutes goes quick but we appreciate you taking the time to be here as you heard me mention earlier we will be making our decision later tonight in the council meeting there's two tenant positions that we'll be considering and we'll circle back with you after the council deliberates and we'll talk next steps outside of that I just want to express our gratitude for your willingness to serve and looking forward to continuing to talk to you in the future about these issues Okay if I might say just in closing I just appreciate you taking your time talking to me like I said I was rushing to get the grand kiss of me so when I got back here my thoughts I had not a chance to really sit down so it might seem like my thoughts might be a little bit you know more nerve you know I am nervous talking this way I feel I'm more face-to-face type of person than I am a Zoom person I'm totally uncomfortable with Zoom so I apologize if I seem a bit nervous don't apologize Scott you did well many of us are definitely not Zoom people so we completely get it just again thank you for taking the time and thank you to Devonte for helping out as well and we'll talk soon alright thank you alright so council next we have William William please turn your camera on and unmute your microphone I believe I have audio we've got audio so William I appreciate you coming on and taking the time to talk with council members there we go oh hi well good to see you having some kind of technical difficulties but I'm sure that's not a hurricane of a concept for anybody of a certain age but I'm glad to be here and see what's happening I think we're all understanding the struggles of Zoom over the last year and a half so we're glad that you could join us and we appreciate that you're able to turn on the microphone and talk with us for a couple of minutes here so we do have about five minutes if I could get you first we'll start have you tell us a little bit about yourself why you're interested in the position and I'm going to open it up for questions from my colleagues on your application absolutely I'm just having a little problem with the audio volume level for some reason well we can hear you just fine oh that's much better I see okay I'm going through a phone rather than a tablet and that's kind of strange yep it's all good so it's great to be here I have been kind of following along with some of the other with some of the other folks and I think most of the issues at hand are pretty much addressed pretty well basically I think the main thing is holding up the show really me personally from my experience being on section 8 in my experience I waited seven years to you know get in and I've seen people you know many of people don't have that much time on the clock and there's a lot of people that are hurting out there I'd like to see that moved up I realize there's the bureaucracy involved with a certain amount of allocated you know allocations of however many and there is a bit of a stigma with the rental with the with the renting around the around the county there's a sort of stigma attached with accepting section 8 applicants I think there's maybe an unfair assessment that they believe that they're getting kind of a trace of society a lot of these people are marginalized a lot of these people are just picking themselves up by the bootstraps they're just trying to scratch and survive and I think the machinations the way this thing is operating it's not really serving people because you see a lot of people going by the wayside if you're waiting years and years you know something's got to happen I don't know if it has to do with the federal government I don't know if it's at a local level city, county, whatever state I know all the agencies work together but I think you know that's definitely a thing it's a time thing and not only that getting a lot of the rent you know landlords to get on board I don't know what it's going to take I know you can't expect your agency to become some kind of advertising agency or going out soliciting available space for people but I see people who are approved and they're just having a whale of time just trying to find anything where they're just even accepting it they're ending up having to move away from the area to different counties different you know so those are the biggest things other than the waiting part which is well worth it if you're in a social economic strata of a lot of us who are old disabled on a limited fixed income it's a real blessing you know to receive this and it's something you want to hold on to and maintain and preserve and protect but I'd like to see the process of it maybe the available units somehow I don't know how to get the landlords on board with this you know it's it's there's a stigma that somehow I don't know it's following a lot of people and I talk to people all the time you know it's not just typical financial fiduciary issues like oh well you know I've been homeless and I have bad credit or something I'm talking about people with normal credit and you know and yeah and people from all walks of life I live in a senior building here and we have all kinds of people and one thing we do have in common is this is for low income people and we've come from all walks of life and all professions and all levels of education and we've all seen greener pastures and we're all in the same boat we're just we want to survive we want to be good neighbors we want to be helpful with one another and we want to keep positive things coming coming in and we want to perpetuate this for more people going forward mostly because we see a lot of pain out on the street there's a lot of trouble out there and you can't put the onus on the police it's not it's more of a social issue it's something that everybody has to work on at a at the street sidewalk level you know it's not the police you know it's not their issue it's not the fire department it's not all the public safety people it's not the it's not the agencies you know it's certainly not the housing you know they do what they can they're tireless workers and all the ones I've ran across are all dedicated to their job and they do and they are compassionate people and that's what's most important that's how we have to go forward I think was with compassion but we have to find some solutions to get these people in the building somewhere and not in the creek and not on the side of the freeway it's just you know it's a public safety issue there's liability issues with property owners when these people are camping and stuff you know I'm a bike rider I don't like what's happening with Joe Radota or any of the various trails the Prince Greenway I see it every day this is a tragedy there's trash everywhere it's an ecological disaster you know these people and it's subhumanizing it's we've got to get these people you know in a building and I think after that I think they will I think the majority of them will want to elevate themselves further once they can take a shower you know well thank you so much William that five minutes does go pretty quick I just want to express the council's gratitude for your interest in serving in this position we'll be making our determination later tonight and then we'll circle back with you shortly thereafter thank you for your time and keep up the good work absolutely you take care we have one last applicant let's see if we have Michael here Michael if you are on the zoom under a different name please raise your hand via zoom we'll hang out for a minute and see if Michael joins us looks like we do have one I'm unmuted now I guess I apologize is this Michael? yes it is the video though let's get you promoted so you can turn on your video Michael I just promoted you to panelists so your video should be able to be enabled now there we go hello a bit dark but we can kind of there we go all right thank you so much Michael for taking the time we're doing quick five minute interviews here every council member has your application in front of us and so if it works I'm going to ask you just introduce yourself talk a little bit about why you think you'd be good at the position and then I'm going to open it up for my colleagues to ask some questions specifically about your application if they have any okay my name is Michael Whitaker I do have a masters degree and I moved here in 2010 with all full of vigor to take on the world and help my daughter who was over here having trouble long story short 2010 happened and thank God for her leader in HUD BASH because within six months I was completely going to be on the streets first time in my life and thank God her leader in them worked with me and got me through HUD BASH and got us going because I had two children and my daughter just graduated from Berkeley with honors and has her own life and her own job now and I let her know that without that help that wouldn't have happened that would have been the end of it for us I was circling the drain and I was doing everything I could every bit of savings everything I could there's nothing working and so this program is huge for everybody out here and I just think there's a lot of things that we can improve upon especially with the new program that's going on and I don't know why we can't have something like that involved with some of the housing that we set up for people but if you have other questions I hope that answered a lot really appreciate it Council members I'm going to open it up see if you've got questions about Michael's application Council Member Sawyer thank you Mayor and thank you Michael your application was very comprehensive and I don't have any questions I really appreciate it like I said I couldn't be here and my daughter wouldn't have graduated Berkley without you guys sounds like a success story to me it really was I still have trouble and so does my daughter believe in that she actually made it you know through all of that we were in a hotel room before I got the place that Herlita helped me get into for two months so it was like I understand what these people are going through well congratulations thank you thank you again really very much and Michael you've touched the housing authority before either in person before the pandemic or via Zoom I have looked in before I've applied before over different years but at certain times I was really busy raising a daughter again by myself but now that she's on her own you know there's so much free time in my life now and things are getting better and better in my life every day even through this pandemic so thank God for like I said if I wouldn't have had this housing I'd be in the same trouble a lot of Californians right now waiting to be evicted and you know I'm just so thankful and I know there's a lot of things we can do you know I've done little things myself I bought some solar things myself off Amazon and I'm off the grid most of the time because I don't want to have to pay the electric bill I don't have the extra money you know so I know there's certain things we can do that can make it cheaper for people and again I heard the gentleman at the end on there but I was trying to make sure I was on and I heard him talking about you know give some dignity you know I see people I live on college out and I see people all day long shuffling down the road but totally lost I don't know what to do you know so I appreciate what you guys are doing I just know there's got to be more solutions we certainly are grateful for your application we're grateful that you're interested in serving on the on the board it's wonderful to hear your perspective and to hear success stories from folks who have received the help that they needed to and are interested in paying it forward 100% 100% thank you guys enough no thank you so much and we'll be make our determinations later tonight we'll circle back with you shortly thereafter alright sounds great you guys have a great day and gals too I apologize everyone thank you very much thank you Mr. Mayor Michael you too alright council members and with that that was our last applicant we'll go ahead and go to public comment on item 3.1 Madam Zoom host I'm not seeing any raised hands for the zoom public comment we'll go to our live in person public comment looks like Mr. DeWitt hello my name is DeWayne DeWitt I'm from Roseland I have a great opportunity especially after hearing the interviewees to make a clean sweep on the housing authority this would be a good time to essentially clean house on the housing authority and I say this because I've been following it for over 25 years and most recently one of the most honest people I have ever met I've served as a community but especially here in Santa Rosa was pushed off of the housing authority after he became chairman and he advocated for the housing authority to follow the rules and to do as it should according to the Brown Act which then hadn't been suspended because of COVID so you've got some incumbents that want to be reappointed I believe you should pick a new people and it should be from these interviewees you've done today decades ago Santa Rosa talked about how it was going to begin a process of having new faces in our boards and commissions and city government and it didn't follow up on it the community action team was formed 25 years ago with that idea it's never really taken any effect yet in the process today you could appoint people of color you could appoint people of different gender approaches you've had interviewees here today who've talked about their diversity you can show the community that you actually are going to talk and walk your talk about true inclusion and helping the disadvantaged at the housing authority it's still essentially run by the guy who was the former director of it while he was a city employee he's the highest paid retiree in the city currently sitting on a board it shouldn't be that way as a matter of fact some people think the problems we have with our housing in this community started because of that same person so that person has been involved in this housing authority activity for close to 40 years and we haven't solved the problems that have been right in front of our face this entire time over 25 years ago the Sonoma County Housing Advocacy Group was formed to talk about how these issues could be addressed so today you have that opportunity to actually walk your talk and appoint all new people to the housing authority and then have those people interact with you have frequent discussions about how you're going to implement those ideals that you tell the community you believe in because we're not seeing it happen thank you Madam City Clerk did we have any pre-recorded voicemails on this item? we had no pre-recorded voice messages on this item with that we'll end item 3.1 and we will recess until 4 o'clock for the remainder of our meeting once you join the Spanish Channel we recommend you shut off the main audio so you clearly hear the Spanish translation Charles would you be able to repeat that please in Spanish? Thank you Charles Alright Madam City Clerk I recognize a quorum of the council we'll go ahead and resume our meeting would you please call the roll yes thank you Council Member Schwedhelm here Council Member Sawyer here Council Member Fleming Council Member Alvarez present Vice Mayor Rogers present Mayor Rogers here Council Member Fleming have you joined us let the record show that all council members are present with the exception of council member Fleming and council member Tibbetts right so council just a quick reminder on some of our housekeeping today is a hybrid meeting that means that we'll have council members both available at the dais as well as on zoom council members on zoom just remember that if you turn off your camera you disappear from the meeting we need to make sure that we have a quorum so all three of you should determine who is going to stay on at all times if not all of you we also are asking that council members stay on mute unless they are speaking at today's meeting and of course we'll have public comment that's available on every item both in person as well as via zoom Madam City Clerk I heard you make the public comment I'm joining on the Spanish Channel for folks who need translation can you also remind the public how they might participate in today's meeting during public comment moments yes thank you mayor after each agenda item is presented the mayor will ask for council comments and then open it up for public comment the mayor will first take public comment from those participating via zoom then move on to members of the public comment the host and zoom will be lowering all hands until public comment is open for the agenda item once the mayor has called for public comment he will announce for the public to raise their hand if they wish to speak on a specific agenda item if you are calling in to listen to the meeting audibly you can dial star 9 to raise your hand if you wish to provide public comment and are attending the meeting in person please sign up to speak on an item with the administrator at the top of the room this process is in lieu of speaker cards in order to reduce touch points due to COVID-19 the administrator will ask your name what item you wish to speak on and for a one sentence summary of your statement for the record the mayor will then call on those in person who have signed up to speak on an item once all live public comments in zoom and in person have been heard the meeting host will play voice mail public comments if you provide a live public comment on an agenda item but also submitted an email e-comment or recorded voice message public comment your e-mail e-comment or voice message public comment will not be duplicated, read or played during the meeting additionally there are two public comment periods on today's agenda to speak on non-agenda matters at items 13 and 17 this is a time when any person may address the council on matters not listed on this agenda but which are within the subject matter jurisdiction of the council throughout today's agenda when the mayor calls for public comment an interpreter will be prepared to assist anyone needing interpretation those using interpreter support will be afforded additional time for your public comment as required by the brown act we ask that those listening on the Spanish channel but wishing to make a public comment to turn off the interpretation channel entirely at the time you hear your name called so you can join the main channel to make your public comment so your public comment is heard and translated into English this icon may now look like a circle with an e-s in the middle of the city so you can join the Spanish channel at the conclusion of your comment to continue listening to the meeting in Spanish thank you thank you madam clerk we'll go on to item number 6 that's our report out from our closed session madam city attorney do you have a report yes I do the council met in special session this morning we have a discussion on closed session items first was a conference with legal council regarding existing litigation concerning public utilities commission of the state of california proceedings related to pacific gas and electric utility council met, discussed and gave direction to legal council 2.2 this is again on the special in the special meeting was also a conference with legal council on the city's paving and grading versus city of san rosa and again the council met, discussed and gave direction to legal council 2.3 was a conference with the real property negotiator concerning renegotiation of leases and license agreements at a number of different properties the council again met, discussed and gave direction to the real property negotiator the council then in the regular meeting began at noon met in closed session with the labor negotiators and again met, discussed and gave direction to the labor negotiators and thank you thank you so much we have no proclamations tonight we'll move on to item number 8 our staff briefings mr. city manager mayor rogers and members of the city council we have no COVID briefing for this evening our staff briefings are going as planned that is good to hear we'll move on then to city manager and city attorney reports so do you want to start sure i just wanted to give a very quick brief update to let you know that the as you may have seen in the paper the governor did sign yesterday signed into law ab 832 passed by the legislature and he signed into law and it extends the state's moratorium on evictions until September 30th 2021 again that's for we'll prohibit evictions for failure to pay rent due to financial hardships caused by COVID-19 the state moratorium does still allow for evictions for other causes for at cause at fault cause or no fault cause but again the state moratorium has extended until September 30th 2021 that also extended the time in which landlord could begin proceedings in small claims that also got extended through the end of September and I'm sorry that one extended it actually through the small claims course can begin actions on November 1st and then equally significant the bill doubled the state's relief rental relief fund and it made that fund available for 100% of a low income tenants past due rent back to April 2020 for so as long as the fund has monies in it so 100% of your past due rent and also 100% of a low income tenants past due utilities also back to April 2020 the bill also includes some landlord assistance and I will note that the governor's office also noted that of the $1.4 billion available only $73 million thus far has been paid out out of $722 million in applications so the governor and the state have made a real commitment to streamline that process and ensure that that money does get out to low income tenants to assist them so good news on that front and I have nothing else to report council do we have any questions for the city attorney on her report Mr. City Manager just briefly Mayor and Council I'd like to share a bit of good news about one of our employees Jennifer Miles one of our senior buyers that are purchasing department was just certified by the NIGP which is a national procurement program as one of the first 551 people in the universe to obtain an NIGP CPP certification congratulations to Jennifer and on continuing our tradition of great procurement and purchasing services in the city well congratulations are echoed by the council for Jennifer really well done and obviously a great addition added to the team as well council are there any questions for the city manager we'll go to public comment on the city manager in city attorney reports not seeing any in the chamber nor am I seeing any hands pop up for live public comment on zoom Madam city clerk do we have any pre-recorded voice mails we did not great we'll go ahead and move on then one second we'll go on to our statements of abstention by council members is there anybody who has to abstain from an item tonight looks like we're good to keep moving on to mayors and council members reports who wants to start looks like we have no reports for tonight's meeting go on to item 11.2 that's our board commission and committee appointment process earlier today the council met and did interviews for applicants for our housing authority we have four openings to our at large positions one is a tenant commissioner position and one is a senior tenant commissioner position that council needs to consider typically we do a process of elimination for applicants but with I think we had 22 that we had I think instead what we'll do is we'll open it up for nominations and see if we can reach consensus that way so let's go and start with our at large positions is there anybody who'd like to make an initial motion council member and again we're going to do these one at a time we'll do them one at a time and see if we have consensus so I'd make a motion to appoint Wayne Downey as one of the at large commissioners second we have one motion for Dr. Downey made by council member sweat helm and seconded by council member Sawyer is there any discussion on that motion let's go ahead call the roll council member I council member Sawyer I council member Fleming council member Alvarez I vice mayor rogers I mayor rogers I that motion passes with five eyes with council member Fleming absent and council member Tibbets absent okay we'll see if we have a second motion for an at large member council member Mr. Mayor make a motion to appoint Thomas Lapeña to the housing commission as an at large appointee second we have a motion and a second is there any discussion on that motion okay let's go ahead and call the roll council member sweat helm I council member Sawyer I council member Alvarez I vice mayor rogers I mayor rogers I that motion passes with five eyes with council member Fleming absent and council member Tibbets absent great thank you so much so the council has chosen Dr. Downey and Mr. Lapeña as our two new or existing members on the housing authority as at large members and I'll now entertain a motion for the senior representative position. I move Ms. Moore looking council member Donna Moore so did I miss did I get in the wrong category yes so Ms. Moore was an at large applicant so so I would move Yvonne Rawhouser okay there's a motion is there a second for this nomination I'll second mayor okay is there any other discussion we'll go ahead and call the roll council member sweat helm I council member Sawyer I council member Fleming council member Alvarez I vice mayor rogers I mayor rogers no okay that motion passes with four eyes vice mayor rogers voting no and council members Fleming and tippets absent that was myself voting no not the vice mayor I'm sorry mayor rogers voting no so congratulations Yvonne you are our representative for the senior category let's move on now to our at large tenant commissioner appointment that we have one position on this and I'll entertain a motion council member thank you Mr. Mayor I move to nominate Scott McWhorter to be a tenant commissioner on the housing authority there a second motion by council member seconded by council member Sawyer any discussion okay let's call the roll council member I council member Sawyer I council member Fleming council member Alvarez vice mayor rogers I mayor rogers I that motion passes with five eyes with council member Fleming and tippets absent excellent well first and foremost I want to thank all of the applicants for being interested in serving the city we did have a lot of good choices to choose between it does sound like the council was able to coalesce around some of the same individuals so I definitely appreciate that and we're looking forward to the continued service and the new service for our appointees Madam City Attorney and Mr. City Manager we'll reach out to the rest of the applicants in the next couple of days great let's go ahead and we have to take public comment on this item yes because we took public comment after the interviews but yes take public comment again okay we'll open it up for item 11.2 not seeing any movement in the chambers I see no hands that have popped up via zoom let's go ahead and see if we have any voicemail public comments we received no voice message public comments on item 11.2 all right we'll go on to approval of the minutes we have item 12.1 these are the minutes from our May 4th and 5th special meeting were there any amendments or additions to the minutes I'm seeing shaking heads let's go ahead and go to public comment and see if there's any corrections that the public wish to provide and I'm seeing no movement for live public comments either in the chamber or via zoom and did we have any voicemail submitted no we had no voice message public comments on item 12.1 okay without objection we'll show those minutes adopted as presented to our consent calendar Mr. City Manager Mayor Rogers and members of the City Council we have night items on the consent calendar this afternoon beginning with item 13.1 a motion to accept a contingency action for the Pacific Avenue reconstruction Humboldt Street to Montecito Avenue item 13.2 a motion accepting the 2020 general plan annual review report item 13.3 a resolution authorizing submittal of a grant application to the state of California Department of Parks and Recreation office of grants and local services per capita grant program for the revitalization of the playground area at South Davis neighborhood park item 13.4 a resolution for approval of an amendment and change order number 3 to the communication system and services agreement with motor roll of solutions incorporated to increase compensation by $2,755,731 dollars and 11 cents for a total not to exceed 8,104,319 dollars and 80 cents for nine years of maintenance and software system upgrades item 13.5 a resolution for approval of the fifth amendment to the general services agreement number F00 1776 with Patricia Enterprises Inc. DBA advanced security systems item 13.6 a resolution to approve the first amendment to the professional services agreement number F00 2259 with best best and Krieger limited liability partnership for real estate legal services item 13.7 a resolution approving the second amendment to the professional services agreement number F002008 with Gooden McGride squary and day legal liability partnership for legal presentation representation in proceedings before the California public utilities commission item 13.8 a resolution approving the first amendment to the professional services agreement number F002270 with O'Donnell, Gratton and Mitchell PC for legal representation and finally item 13.9 a resolution approving the first amendment to legal services agreement with Myers-Novey for legal representation also do we have any questions for you councilmember Schwedhelm thank you Mr. Mayor I had a question on item 13.1 Mr. Coleman my question is about the cost increase specifically about the pavement section thickness the increase and at this point in the project how that comes up now versus when it first came I just want to understand the process sure Lisa Welch our associate civil engineer who is managing this project to respond to that question thank you Lisa you have been promoted can you please unmute your camera or microphone yes sorry I had some issues can you repeat sure so my question was we're anticipating an increase of $300,000 for the thickness of the roadway for longer life I'm just interested in the process about how at this point in the project this comes to our attention and increase additional funding I appreciate that thank you there was a design oversight late in the game and the design phase it happened around the 90% mark and it resulted in us not knowing that it happened until after the project was out and we had to make sure that it was out so in light of some of our earlier discussions today is this a city staff oversight or was this a contractor oversight it was a change made by city staff that was okay thank you Madam City Attorney just as a point of clarification there's a number of items on here that are helping the city in specific ways correct that is correct and to clarify in particular because I notice it wasn't in the title the agreement with Gary Shea O'Donnell is for a particular litigation that is going on that requires particular expertise and likewise 13.9 the agreement with Myers-Novey also concerns a particular litigation matter that also requires specialized expertise great thank you are there any other questions from council alright let's go ahead and go to public comment on our consent calendar we'll start with Gregory Farron good afternoon my name is Gregory Farron 13.2 it's a great staff report I appreciate it I hope a lot more people get to read it the thing that's really been disappointing for years and this is no surprise to any of you is how poorly we have done in building housing housing in general but especially housing for those in the extremely low and very low income levels you seem to have done pretty well in the moderates you know the marketplace and your housing authority have done a good job of trying to get people who are you know I won't say wealthy but at least you've got some money in their pockets for those on the lower end of the scale we're really bad I mean we have not done very well and I'm trying to inspire all of us to do a better job because that's clearly where we're deficient and so I'm hoping you guys will use every tool at your command and we will certainly from the community but this is no surprise but this report really lays it out clearly about how badly we're doing in building housing in general thank you thank you Gregory I don't see any other hands on Zoom so I'll look to the chamber is there anybody who wants to speak we'll come back for the other items later this is specifically for the consent calendar so we'll go to Mr. DeWitt I'm from Roseland I ask you to pull this matter and actually reconsider it at a different date because streamlining the process has become essentially discriminatory and exclusionary the current process that's ongoing has not done a robust effort or authentic community engagement it's essentially been something that's been utilizing this Zoom format which as you saw in your interviews earlier today is problematic for many people in the community this needs to be a process which has actually opened up more and you should actually have the meeting between the planning commission and the city council here in the chambers where people from the public can come and interact with those bodies and talk about this plan which is so very important for the future the previous speaker referenced the information that's been made available pointing out that plenty of housing gets built for the well to do in this community and that your regional housing needs assessments falls short especially so for the extremely low income and the low income and it's been that way for decades it's not something new it's a policy that's been ingrained in Santa Rosa cities activities for all of these decades the only way you'll be able to change this up is if you have authentic community engagement in the general plan process it's not happening now the consultants that have been hired are just fine with that they get paid whether or not there is good authentic community engagement that's not happening so I ask you to please pull this item reconsider it so that you can have a joint meeting with the planning commission and you the city council with the public there to participate I've also asked to speak on item 13.3 as a separate and distinct item under the brown act and I ask for the full amount of time to speak on that sir that's not traditionally how we do things so I'll look to the city attorney Mr. Mayor it is within your discretion okay I'm going to stick with the norms of the chamber Mr. DeWitt but we can discuss that as a council and see if we want to change what our policies and process is I did see you had 45 seconds that were left on your time if you'd like to take that to talk about 13.3 Dwayne DeWitt from Roseland in 45 seconds I'd like to point out that this park needs this grant and it was the only park in Roseland for over 50 years and the only reason we got that park was because the freeway was built not because the city wanted to give it to us give us more neighborhood parks stop with the big community parks we need small neighborhood parks throughout Roseland and you could be applying for these grants at the state to get them I hope that you'll take that into consideration and do your best especially the new council member for district one to give us neighborhood parks with funding from the state even if the city pleads poverty thank you for your time thank you so much Mr. DeWitt is there anybody else who'd like to speak on the consent calendar Madam City Clerk do we have any voicemails we received no voice messages on item 13 for the consent calendar alright Madam Vice Mayor it's your favorite time of the night I move items 13.1 through 13.9 and wait for the reading of the text motion by the vice mayor seconded by council member Schwedhelm let's go ahead and call the roll council member Schwedhelm council member Sawyer council member Fleming council member Alvarez vice mayor Rogers aye mayor Rogers aye that motion passes with 5 ayes with council member Fleming and council member Tibbetts absent all right that will take us to item 15 the rest of our agenda cannot begin until after 5 o'clock when we resume at 5 o'clock we will be going to our public hearings that's item 16.1 and 16.2 which is in accordance with our sunshine ordinance trying to take public hearings as soon as we can so we'll gavel out for now and we'll be back at 5 o'clock all right and we are back Madam City Clerk can you please call the roll thank you mayor council member Schwedhelm council member Sawyer council member Fleming was that you council member Sawyer it was thank you madam thank you council member Fleming council member Alvarez vice mayor Rogers present mayor Rogers here let the record show that all council members are present with the exception of council member Fleming and council member Tibbetts great Mr. City Manager let's go on to item 16.1 our first of two public hearings Mayor and members of the City Council our first public hearing of the evening is item 16.1 a resolution to adopt a proposed water demand fee schedule an ordinance amending chapter 15 of the city code to adopt the proposed wastewater demand fee schedule based on the 2021 water and wastewater demand fee study final report presenting the staff report this evening will be Kimberly Zunino deputy director of water resources and Bob Reed of the reed group mayor I'm just waiting for Ms. Zunino to join the meeting I have Bob Reed on the panel side if you would like I could proceed or wait for a minute your pleasure let's go ahead and wait one quick second Mayor Rogers I'm not sure what's going on with Kimberly if you would like me to go ahead and introduce this I'm happy to do so on her behalf please do director and if she does get a chance to pop on we can hear from her then great good evening Mayor Rogers and members of council I'm Jennifer Burke the director of Santa Rosa water and we're here today and follow up to a study session we had done with the city council to present our recommendations for the water and wastewater 2021 demand fee schedule public hearing with us today should be Kimberly Zunino our deputy director of administration with Santa Rosa water and our consultant Bob Reed with the reed group and it looks like we're going to go ahead and we're going to go ahead and we're going to go ahead and really has been able to successfully join us so I will now turn it over to her to finish the introduction thank you sorry about that I think I have both streaming right now so I'm going to turn off the other one there we go can you hear me now yes we can all right sorry about that I was running you from a different way as you may remember on July 8th we held a study session to provide you with an overview and to receive comments from you on the 2021 water and wastewater demand fee study and the proposed fee schedule today for the public hearing you will be again provided the details on the report and the proposed fee schedule and the request for adopting the report and approval of the proposed fee schedule we'll be presenting the majority of the information for you today at the end I will give you a little bit of an update on the outreach that has happened and then the request for the recommendation so I'm going to turn it over to Bob now great thank you for that good evening Mayor Rogers Vice Mayor members of the council it's a pleasure to present this information to you this evening if we could have the next slide please I'm going to summarize the demand fee study that we've completed for Santa Rosa water talk about the demand fee framework and methodology look at the use factors for both water and wastewater as well as how we calculated the proposed demand fees and then show what the combined water and wastewater demand fees mean for different types of customers and then talk about next steps and I'll turn things back to Deputy Director Mike please so demand fees are sometimes called capacity charges but they're generally the one-time fees charged in new development for capacity in the water or wastewater systems occasionally they're paid by existing customers that may change their use for example a retail store has converted into a restaurant or something they might pay an incremental demand fee for that change of use but generally it's for new development the fees were last updated in 2014 with a comprehensive study however the city does have a practice of adjusting the fee amounts for inflation each year so that they keep pace with inflation but it is a good idea to update the analysis every once in a while and that's what we've been doing for the city the legal standard for demand fees is in the government code and basically it says demand fees are capacity charges shall not exceed the estimated reasonable cost of providing service which is charges are imposed that's a pretty broad standard that applies it's really a reasonableness test that applies go to the next slide please so there are a number of different methodologies that could be used for calculating demand fees what we have used with the city existing fees are based on what's known as the system buy-in methodology and this is an approach that's really looking at the investment that's already been made in the utility infrastructure we take the present value of the existing facilities so we look at historical costs we escalate that up to current dollar value using construction cost index as a inflationary index and then also reflect appreciation of those assets and then we divide that total value by the existing units of development or the demand that is placed on the system the current level of demand and that comes up with the unit cost that's then used to charge new development for connecting to the system this is a pretty common methodology it's best applied in areas that are largely built out with infrastructure largely in place or capacity is available to meet the needs of new development it's a very common and well accepted methodology the development community is familiar with this approach it does incorporate the cost of existing facilities so we're looking at historical financial information fixed asset records in the accounting system for the cost of facilities rather than relying on plans and estimates of what the future might be and what future facilities might be that are required and so because of that we're not relying on a capacity analysis of the engineering study to assess what future needs may be and so it's a simpler calculation approach using this methodology and then also the buy and fee because we are looking at the existing investment in the system paying that fee really represents a reimbursement to the utility for the investments that's already been made in providing system capacity and then that money can be used for any capital improvement projects rather than having to be earmarked for a specific expansion related facility that's part of a capital improvement plan so it's a little more flexible in the way that the money can be spent next slide please so this slide summarizes a lot of the financial information that went into the fee calculation the water is highlighted in the blue section of the wastewater system in green as you're aware of the wastewater system is comprised both of the local collection system within the city of Santa Rosa as well as the regional reuse system the treatment plant and the reuse facilities that benefit not only the city but some of the neighborhood communities as well so we look at both of those separately and combine those together but at the top of this table we summarize the fixed asset information coming out of the fixed asset records of the utility what we do is we take that historical cost information and then as I mentioned before we escalate up to current dollar values and then also reflect appreciation another way of saying that same thing is we look at the book value which already reflects the appreciation of the assets and then escalate that book value up to current dollar amount either path gets into the same place and you can see this is a summary of the different major categories of assets in the fixed asset records I think there is a couple thousand individual assets in these utilities so we look at each individual system component and going through this calculation we then make some adjustments to that we add in the cost the present value of past interest and debt issuance costs when we debt finance some of the infrastructure we pay interest costs and debt issuance costs those are added in that's part of the cost of acquiring the assets we subtract out outstanding principle is representing the part of the assets that have not yet been paid for and then to the extent that money has been set aside into capital reserves for capital improvements we add that money into the system and then we add that asset value that dollar in the bank is going to be pipe in the ground next year in the near term and so we include that as part of the value of the system is those monies that are dedicated in earmarked for capital projects so you can see the water system on looking at all these system assets and adjustments it's almost 300 million waste water system the collection system is also close to 300 million and the regional reuse system is close to 400 million dollars we then take those values we divide by the current system demands a million gallons per day and we come up with a base demand fee and that's expressed first in thousand gallons per day and then a thousand gallons per month and then the bottom numbers in the box there the proposed demand fees expressed in dollars per thousand gallons per month and you can see here in the wastewater we've added the local collection system and the reuse system together both of these fees are increasing from those unit fee amounts from the current fee schedule but as you'll see coming up we're also updated the usage factors and those are declining and those two things work in opposite directions and so for the most part fees are generally going down and we're all for the for the utilities if we go to the next slide describe that process first for the water utility here in doing this update we looked at water use records for the last four calendar years that we had so 2016, 17, 18 and 19 we looked at water use during the peak demand month of the water system generally in July or August for different types of residential customers single family by lot size and then duplexes, triplexes, condominiums apartments and so on we did do some refinement to these categories we've got better information now than we did before and also recognize some of the development trends within the city so working with staff we adjusted some of these categories from the current fee schedule so that we could be more accurate for each of the different categories here this shows in both in gallon per day terms for dwelling unit as well as 1,000 gallons per month units in this table the last line here for commercial industrial irrigation customers it's just expressed at 1,000 gallons per month and so when there is new development non-residential development there is a specific water use calculation made for each project and then the fee on a 1,000 gallon per month base is calculated based on estimated water use for those accounts go to the next slide please this summarizes both the current and proposed water demand fees for the different types of residential property and then that base fee amount for the non-residential at the bottom you can see some of these fees are going up slightly some of them are going down again the unit fee amount is going up but the water usage we are seeing because of drought because of increased water use efficiency because of the efforts made within the community to reduce water use those usage factors have come down and those two things offset each other so some of these fees are going up slightly others are coming down and you can see that as you compare go to the next slide please looking at wastewater now same schedule we looked at the winter water use for wastewater demand fees we look at winter water use this is the time when customers generally are not irrigating so water going into the home ends up going into the wastewater system different types of residential development again here looking at data from 2016 through 2019 and again usage factors all declining across the board across the range of different residential types of development here and the next slide will show the current and proposed wastewater demand fees and you can see here across the board because of the lower demand by each different type of development the fee is declining across the board for all types of residential development you can see that commercial and industrial fee amount is increasing because that unit fee is increasing however staff is also updating the usage factors that apply to different types of non-residential development and that may also result in fees generally going down for non-residential development as well the next slide will show the combined water and wastewater demand fees in most instances new connections are obtaining both water and wastewater services and so this shows the combined water and wastewater demand fees both under the current fee structure the proposed fee structure and then you can see both the dollar change and the percentage change and you can see for all residential types the combined fee is going down by varying degrees in all cases and again for that non-residential it would depend on the specific usage characteristics of each individual development project so that would be determined on a case by case basis if we go to the next slide we wanted to look at how these proposed demand fees stack up with some of the neighboring communities and that's depicted in this graph here the current combined water and wastewater demand fees are in about the middle of the pack but with the reductions that are being proposed you'll be at the low end of the range here and so you can see the blue represents the water demand fee and the green is the wastewater and you can see how they stack up with some of the neighboring communities conspicuously absent is runner part but they've got a very complex fee structure and it wasn't practical to try and include that in this graphic because of the complexity of the structure that they have but this is for typical single family homes in Santa Rosa compared with the neighboring communities and the next slide I believe I'll turn it back to Deputy Director Zanino and I'll be available for questions thank you so we also wanted to update you we talked about this previously as well on the outreach that we've done with the development community in the current environment we've had some challenges but we've done everything we can to make sure that we're reaching out to the developers and contractors to let them know that this change was coming we created some FAQs or frequently asked questions so that that information was available to the public as well as our internal groups so that if any of the groups that work with those developers and contractors are having conversations they could also make them aware of the changes coming we also sent a letter to all of the contractors and developers that we deal with currently and even any that were left on the list that might have been more historical we sent them to everybody so we sent a letter letting them know what we were doing what the process would be and then also attaching those FAQs in addition we also emailed local associations for engineers, contractors and developers to let them know that we would be available to attend to their membership meetings if they would like us to in order to give them an update on the process and answer any questions that they may have next slide please this slide is just giving you a timeline and the work that's been done to lead up to the consideration today the budget subcommittee and the budget or the Board of Public Utilities met many times as you can see here in order to review these documents to provide comments to us to make sure that they were comfortable with bringing a unanimous recommendation to you so once again we'd like to thank them for all their work we do tax them quite a bit looking at all of the different items that we bring for them and then on June 8th we had the study session with you and today we are here for the public hearing and the consideration of the adoption of the new proposed fee schedule I do want to mention that in December of 2020 was the first time that we brought the proposed fees to the Board of Public Utilities and it was at a subcommittee meeting that was a public meeting and in the documents that you have and are approving we are going to go back to that date and go through the process of requesting an adjustment to that demand fee that they were charged and we will work with them to make sure that they have paid those demand fees at the lower rate. Next slide, please. So it is recommended by the Board of Public Utilities and Santa Rosa Water that the council by resolution approve the amended water demand fee schedule and introduce an ordinance amending Chapter 15 and 16 of the Santa Rosa City Code to incorporate the approved sewer demand fee schedule, re-adopting the annual adjustments and making related changes. With that I will hand it back to the Mayor. Thank you so much, Ms. Nino and Mr. Reed. Really appreciate the information. Councilor, are there any questions? Looking to zoom. We will go ahead and open the public hearing then. This is an opportunity for anybody to comment on item 16.1. Not seeing hands via zoom. So we will go to in chambers. Mr. DeWitt. Thank you. My name is Duane DeWitt. I am from Roseland. I appreciate the fact that these deliberations to lower the costs have been put in place working with contractors and developers. I am supportive of lower costs but at the same time as I look at a sign saying drought is here, save water I must ask that you folks once you pass this put it on hold and have a moratorium on new hookups until we get through the drought and we know just how much water we will need to actually declare the drought over. Along that same line decades ago the city of Santa Rosa was discussing how to move water to the geysers. It was considered to be tertiary treated wastewater and at the time in those hearings myself and former council member Noreen Evans spoke about how no water is waste and all water is a commodity. And we should be trying to find a way to get money back from the water that we send north to the geysers. That's a private organization that's profiting from what is essentially a publicly owned asset. That water could be helpful to us. So as you get ready to tell everybody in the community we have to save water and we have to really hunker down and work together on this perhaps you can lead the way by saying first and foremost we're going to limit development until the drought is over and just have true city centered here in the downtown area housing built where the infrastructure already exists and the water is already available. So now is your opportunity to shine. You get to have these lower fees for contractors and developers but also help the public. Thank you. Thank you Mr. DeWitt. Yes sir. You've got a good point. Most of your sewage ends up in the Russian river, right? A lot of sewage ends up there. You guys might not be responsible attached to the Russian river. Make sure you speak right into the microphone there so folks can hear you on Zoom. A lot of raw sewage ends up in the Russian river. That's a fact, right? You look at your habitat there, there's no steelhead, there's no salmon, okay so he's got a point. If you lower the tax base on that stuff and you have companies coming or contractors coming in from other counties why not tax them up there and repair some of that damage? It's called grey water. If you're paying a fee to send it somewhere you guys could get a grey water plant here employ city employees, you could train people and you save money. You just save money. It's grey water treatment and you dispense it your parks and your wetlands around here you guys got solar stuff, you love trees. This is a real simple thing to do. I'm going to cut fees. I would do it for low-income housing apartments and duplexes that help support mothers and kids that need help. Families that need help. I won't cut it for anybody else. There's a lot of income here and if you have contractors coming in and companies like that, tax them. They're going to destroy your habitat. They don't care. They're going to pay the fee. They don't care about your ecosystem. It's all about money, right? Tax them is the best thing you can do. And save your ecosystem. Put it to play here. It'll help your families. Thank you. And did you want to identify yourself for the council minutes? My name is Mitchell Suza. Great. Thank you so much. Adam City Clerk, did we have any voicemail public comments? We received no voicemail public comments on item 16.1. Okay. Council Member Swethelm, I'll have you introduce the resolution for discussion. Okay. I would move the resolution of the Council of the City of Santa Rosa amending the schedule of water demand fees for properties to be serviced by connection to the city water system and way further reading of the text. Second. So we have a motion from Council Member Swethelm and a second from Council Member Sawyer. Madam Director, if you're still with us, I did want to ask you, I hear pretty frequently from folks in the community asking questions about the Geysers contract. Could you just remind us, I think we need to promote Jennifer, if you could, could you remind us what the stipulations for that contract were and how long it's in effect for? Yes. Thank you, Mayor Rogers. I'm happy to answer the questions about the Geysers system. First, if I may, I'd just like to note that I think one of the commenters noted that our wastewater is discharged to the recycle to the Russian River and that is not true in most years. We recycle 100% of our recycle water with two thirds of that water going to the Geysers steam fields. It is used to produce green energy for our region, which is a great benefit and helps fight climate change and then that contract is in place through 2037 with the Geysers community invested a lot of money in that project as well as the Geysers to provide that recycle water through 2037. All right. Thank you so much, Director. Vice Mayor, go ahead. I just wanted to make a comment and thank everyone that has worked on this initially coming onto Council. I knew nothing about water and the one thing that I asked you guys was to make it so that the public could understand what you're talking about because I know that you guys are very passionate about this, but everyone else does not share that passion. So I would like to take the time to thank you for all the time and dedication that you put into it and I think I've seen this presentation maybe five times and I learned something new every time that I see it. So thank you guys so much for your time and dedication. All right, Council with that I will close the public hearing and I will go ahead and call the role on the motion. Council Member Schwedhelm. Aye. Council Member Sawyer. Aye. Council Member Fleming. Council Member Alvarez. Aye. That motion passes with 5 ayes with Council Members Fleming and Tibbetts absent. All right, Council Member Schwedhelm. And then I'd also like to introduce an ordinance of the Council of the City of Santa Rosa amending sections 15-16.030 and 15-16.050 of Title 15 of the Santa Rosa City Code adopting sewer demand fee and waive further even in the text. Second. Motion by Council Member Schwedhelm. Second by Sawyer. Let's go ahead and call the roll. Council Member Schwedhelm. Aye. Council Member Sawyer. Aye. Council Member Fleming. Council Member Alvarez. Aye. Vice Mayor Rogers. Aye. Mayor Rogers. Aye. That motion passes with 5 ayes with Council Members Fleming and Tibbetts absent. Thank you so much, Director. Thank you, Bob and Kimberly. We really appreciate all of the work that you've put in on this and I know that we're not done here tonight. We'll be coming back for that item in just a little bit. Mr. City Manager, let's go on to Item 16.2. Mayor and Members of the Council, Item 16.2 is also a public hearing. The matter before the Council is an ordinance regulating wireless facilities in the public right of way and a resolution adopting design and development standards for such facilities. Gabe Osborn, our Deputy Director of Development Services and Gail Karish of Best Best and Krieger will be presenting this item to the Council this evening. Good afternoon, Mayor Rogers and Members of the Council. As mentioned in the introduction, the main topic for tonight's conversation is associated with the placement of wireless facilities in the public right of way and the need for today's conversation has really spawned from the fact that we've seen fairly dramatic advancements in technology on the wireless front over the last 15 to 20 years. We have seen most new developments and new infrastructure that's built today has a tendency to want to rely on wireless communications. Most communication devices have evolved dramatically over time on the cell phone front. We have started with cell phones being purely for voice and we have seen that evolve to text messaging, and now cell phones are consuming massive amounts of data at a very high speed. So we've seen those general trends occur over the last 15 to 20 years and what we've seen from the telecommunications providers is a significant amount of capital investment to meet that demand. And as that capital investment moved forward it looked for different types of locations for traditional wireless antennas. Historically those were placed on private property. What we've seen over the last five years or so is there was more of a push to push to move those into the public right of way. And although that has advanced wireless communication in the network that provides that connectivity it has also created a series of community concerns that are not just specific to Santa Rosa but we are seeing more widespread throughout the nation in certain areas when these facilities get closer to where people live and work. So today's action really is attempting to balance that out to the best of our ability. So obviously we know there is a need to expand these facilities but we also have this desire to protect the aesthetics of our community and maintain our streetscapes. So joining me today is Gail Karisch and she is with Best Best and Krieger. So what we determined early on in this process because this is a very unique situation and it requires a very specialized expertise in telecommunications law to assist. And Dale's firm and her team have a significant amount of years experience developing policies for multiple municipalities and fairly instrumental in the development of this. I'm not sure we would have been able to get it to this point without her assistance. So Gail will be stepping in a little further along in the presentation and she will also be available for any questions you may have. Next slide please. So this slide will just provide a really rough agenda of what we're going to touch on today. There is quite a bit of content so some of these areas I'll try to move forward fairly rapidly. The first piece we'll touch on is really a review of the types of wireless facilities that are being installed. We've had quite a few study sessions on this topic and a lot of the slides in this area will be taken right out of that and they provide a background to understand the types of wireless facilities. We will talk specifically about small cells which those are the facilities going in the public right of way. At that point after that, excuse me, Gail will step in and give an overview of all the state and federal law affecting wireless facilities and that is an important piece because it really does limit local authority. It gives us various areas where we can protect aesthetics. I will then come back into the presentation and give an overview of the proposed code updates today and the development of our design and development standards. And I'll also talk a little bit about the next steps overall for telecommunications in the city of Santa Rosa. Next slide please. So when we look at the different types of telecommunications facilities macro sites are likely the most common. Macro sites we've had a long history with. They were the first types of antennas. They're the facilities that go on private buildings and they can be a ray of antennas so you can have multiple providers that are on one building and they typically have a larger coverage area and they're typically higher and they can be placed on private structures or they can be placed on city buildings. This image to the right is our fire training center. We also have these on water tanks. They're fairly common and the approval of these is addressed under our zoning code which typically is the section under our planning side that deals with land use entitlements. Next slide please. So the approval process with these historically they have gone through a use permit. They do have design review. In some ways they are discretionary but in other ways they are very ministerial and that's because of the federal law associated with them. They are typically reviewed against published design guidelines which makes them ministerial. They have often had to submit what are referred to as alternate site analyses which basically take a look at various other locations that are proposing and that's all intended for them to take the least intrusive option for basically closing a coverage gap. So that was a lot of the regulations that did apply to some of the macro sites we have. They also are required to basically submit radio frequency analysis which basically shows the radio frequency emissions that come from these sites and that's an important point. Gail will talk about that a little more in the regulations section. The FCC or the Federal Communications Commission has set those admission thresholds so sites do have to show that they are operating within those thresholds. Macro sites also involve a public meeting because it's more of a planning application and they have a public hearing and they typically have longer shot clocks which is the time frame in which we can improve them and once again Gail will go into more detail on that front. They have building permits and when they are on city property there are lease agreements associated with them. Next slide please. So the public installation are what are referred to as small cells and this was really the push into the public right of way. So small cells are intended to basically fill in smaller coverage gaps and they basically do some heavy lifting when it comes to densifying a network. So there may be situations where residents experience the appropriate number of bars on their phone. They can still call, they can still have text but they're not getting good data connection and that data connection the speeds might reduce when multiple people jump onto the network so that's usually capacity issues and small cells really densify the network so they're smaller, there are more of them and in most situations they're attempting to increase the capacity level for that big data demand that we're seeing on cell phones. And they are almost solely placed in the public right of way that was the big push is to put them in the city's right of way and typically on polls in that location. Under our current policy chapter 13 of our city code does apply and our public improvement plan and our public improvement standards apply. The challenge with those documents is we don't have any language in that those two documents that are specific to small cells. They're very general in nature so they address general operations in the right of way which are traffic control, pedestrian safety. There's no specific requirements for siting for those locations or how they're built. Next slide please. And I do apologize there's a slight typo that should be joint utility polls in that title but small cells are going on two poll types. Joint utility polls are wooden polls and they are typically owned by PG&E the city does not own the infrastructure. Those do have to go through an approval process on our end. They get an encroachment permit and that has a traffic control review and it has consistency with our design standards and once again there is no specific language in there for small cells so it's fairly general it's protecting public infrastructure. We do have notification requirements but those notification requirements are for construction impacts. So typically after the permit is issued we will notify the residents that within 24 to 48 hours work is commencing which might impact parking which might create noise in the area. There is no notification of a pending approval for the permit. And they also do have building permits because all of these are powered they have separate meter connections from PG&E. Next slide please. So the small cells are also going on city owned polls and those are typically street lights and they have a very similar approval process from an encroachment permit standpoint so they have to march through that same process but before they get to that point they do have to go through a license agreement process. So we require that all providers are executing a master license agreement which gives approval to deploy on city street poles and then they also go through a site license agreement which approves a specific street pole. And as part of that there is a bit more discretion. We can mitigate operational issues with that street light how does the wireless facility function in a pole knockdown situation there's issues with routine electrical maintenance and obviously we can control ground equipment in that area to to avoid negatively impacting the available space in the right of way. Next slide please. There have been a few past council actions surrounding telecommunications facilities. Council policy 300-04 addresses telecommunication facility placement on city owned infrastructure that was initially adopted in July of 2000 at that point really all we were seeing were macro sites that addressed placement on water tanks or city buildings and it was tailored to that. There was an amendment to that policy in February of 2017 to address street lights and that policy is what creates the master license agreement process for street lights the site license agreement process for each individual location it also brings into the equation an annual license fee for the placement on those street lights and it grants the execution authority for those pole agreements to the city manager as you meet. Next slide please. In addition to the adoption and the modification of those policies we've also had a few study sessions that focused specifically on small cells those were March 6th of 2018, June 5th of 2018 and then also December 10th of 2019, July 21 of 2020. In 2018 most of the conversations in those study sessions focused on the deployments that were happening through Verizon at that time well we just started rolling those out there were community concerns as part of that and those were opportunities to discuss that as we got into the study sessions in 2019 and 20 we started talking more about solutions to address some of those community concerns. Next slide please. So this slide was pulled out of some of those those previous study sessions and it addresses some of the community's concerns that we were initially hearing with those initial deployments of small cells and they fell into a few different categories one was health risks there were concerns from the community about RF exposure and the proximity of those polls because obviously in the right of way they're getting much closer to businesses and residential units. They were concerned about aesthetics and those fell into really two buckets at the time which were loss of property value because of the infrastructure changing the visual characteristics of the streetscape and there were also scenic impacts in some areas where they were thought to impact a view corridor that somebody was experiencing from their home. There were also concerns about saturation because obviously if these were providing the network their lower power there are more of them how many ultimately are there going to be and those were some significant concerns from the community. There were also concerns about lack of notification and I think that was typically notification up front of a pending approval of an encroachment permit. There was construction notification but that's really done on the back end and then of course there were at that point we were looking at backup batteries that were providing two to three hours of power to those small cell sites in the event of power shutdowns and concerns about environmental impacts due to the fact that those batteries were in cabinets and they were very close to the street and how would that operate if there was a vehicular strike to that cabinet. Next slide please. In many of those concerns have progressed through this. Of course there have also been concerns about 5G and a lot of times the 5G conversation bleeds right into the small cell conversation. 5G is dealing with generational changes from the cellular providers. Typically as you go up in the generations there is more of a robust services provided through that and much of that discussion has been about data and the speed of data and the small cells are really needed to maximize that so they really go hand in hand but what we found is that all the current installations in Santa Rosa are still supporting the 4G network. They're still building that out. The providers have not provided any timelines associated with 5G upgrades and when it comes to 4G there actually is still infrastructure that needs to be done. Most of the small cell wireless facilities do communicate with the greater network through wired connections. They refer to it as backhaul. So there's fiber connections that go into it and there's quite a bit of infrastructure that goes out to extending and building out that network. The important point and one of the concerns expressed from the community is once these sites are acquired they are acquired. They are permitted for that site. There's nothing that basically takes the rights away from the site simply because there's an upgrade to 5G. So existing small cell sites can convert to 5G with software upgrades or minor equipment and those can occur with little or no local control and Gail will talk about that a little more in her presentation. And I think the important point here is the new sites that are deploying now will support 5G so even though they are 4-4 they can support 5 and then 5G deployments will obviously be required to meet FCC requirements associated with exposure. And that's an important point as well. Next slide please. So this is going to step us into the federal and state regulations and I think we can go ahead and move to the next slide. And at this point I will hand it over to Gail and she'll talk about some of the more relevant federal and state regulations that have happened over the years. Great. Thank you very much Gabe and thank you for having me. Mayor Rogers and council members I'm pleased to be working with your staff on this update and I really think that Gabe is giving me way too much credit. He's worked very hard for quite a number of years on these issues and I just came in to sort of help shepherd the last few steps but I'm going to focus my presentation quite as a very brief overview just to give everyone a basic understanding of some of the major federal and state laws that place limits on local authority with respect to the placement of wireless facilities and in particular emphasis on what we're talking about tonight which is wireless facilities that are placed in the public right of way. And so the first statute that I just want to go over briefly is one that was actually adopted in 1996 and this federal statute recognized local authority to regulate wireless placements but it imposed some limits on that authority and as you'll see as I go through the presentation the FCC the Federal Communications Commission has picked up on some of these limits and expanded them into various orders and regulations. So one of the limits is that action on an application must be taken within a reasonable period of time. The second is that your regulations and decisions may not prohibit or effectively prohibit the provision of personal wireless service so that's a reflection of a national policy that there should be wireless service available throughout the nation and local jurisdiction could not simply say you know no wireless here we're not going to let you build your network. Another another limitation is that it's not really a limitation but a procedural requirement if a local jurisdiction is denying a permit application it must be the denial must be in writing and it must be supported by substantial evidence. A very important limitation again reflecting a national policy is that in making decisions on citing wireless facilities or regulating replacements you cannot consider the environmental effects of RF emissions so long as the applicant meets the relevant FCC standards so that again is a reflection of a national policy that the Federal Communications Commission is responsible for establishing what is safe RF emissions and so long as an applicant will comply with those there's not an opportunity to really regulate or deny placements on the basis of a local view of what may or may not be safe. Another important limitation is that there can be no unreasonable discrimination among providers of functionally equivalent services so that's a nod to the fact that different carriers use different technologies to roll out their networks and there shouldn't be unreasonable discrimination among these different providers and finally this Federal law allows for an expedited appeal to the courts and in a lot of instances where local governments are sued over a denial for example those that litigation is launched, it's a 30-day limitation and it's usually filed in a Federal Court. Next slide please. So that's the law that was adopted in 1996 and I'm going to get into some of the FCC regulations that have interpreted that law but I also want to alert you to the other Federal law that was adopted much more recently and that is in 2012 and this is a law sometimes called Section 6409 because that was the original statute number, this is the codification 1455 it's also referred to as eligible facilities requests and basically this statute Federal statute indicated that for a certain category of modifications to an existing wireless facility so you'd have an existing wireless facility already there certain modifications must be approved at the local level completely eliminates your discretion to deny them and so those EFRs can entail colocation of new transmission equipment so adding equipment removing equipment replacing transmission equipment and I would just note that transmission equipment includes power supplies so if you have batteries or generators that potentially also could qualify as an EFR the city has no discretion to deny an EFR if the requirements are met and one factor in determining whether a qualification as an EFR is whether the proposed modification would actually defeat the concealment elements and this is part of the FCC's regulations that interpreted what is an eligible facilities request so if there are concealment elements or actually a stealth structure now meaning a facility that looks like something other than a wireless facility if that's how it is so say decorative streetlight or something like that and there is an applicant that wants to propose to add equipment that would make it look like a wireless facility and no longer like a streetlight then that would be an example of something that might kick it out of the box of qualifying as an eligible facilities request and it would have to be processed under another procedure in your local code and it would not be subject to this mandate to approve so as I mentioned a stealth facility is one that is designed to look like something other than a wireless tower or base station and these two terms you see in the ordinance a wireless tower is purpose built it's something that was built for a wireless facility a base station is simply an existing structure that then has an antenna attached to it so if you have a light pole it's just a light pole until a wireless facility is attached to it and then it potentially can become a base station for the purposes of these rules next slide please so as I mentioned the FCC has been very busy adopting a lot of rules and regulations and I'll run through these just hitting highlights but you know that this really starts in 2009 and yet I mentioned that first law was adopted in 1996 and 2009 is really because if you think of when the first iPhone came out and people started just being glued to their phone doing all kinds of things and just using a lot of data 2007 so since that period there's been a huge demand to upgrade networks we went from 2G to 3G to 4G to 5G and so the first action that the FCC took in 2009 it was the first time that it adopted shot clocks interpreting what's a reasonable period within which to act on an application that was a 90 day and 150 days depending on if it was a co-location attaching to an existing structure or with proposing a new facility in 2014 the FCC adopted rules that implemented that 2012 law that I mentioned so put down all of the criteria that have to be meant to qualify as an EFR that must be approved at the local level in 2018 the FCC adopted two really important orders one banned any sort of moratorium on wireless deployment so a city can't hit the pause button and say we want to stop taking applications and just decide how we want to upgrade or change our policies you must continue to take applications in and meet the shot clocks and also in 2018 the FCC adopted another order that we typically refer to as a small cell order and it adopted new shot clocks two more so I should mention when the FCC adopted the rules for eligible facilities request in 2014 they also adopted a shot clock for those applications so in 2018 when they adopted a small cell order two more shot clocks we now have five federal shot clocks that apply to any type of wireless application there's no application that wouldn't have a shot clock applying to it now the two for small wireless facilities are 60 and 90 days those are the typical applications you would probably see in the public right of way under this ordinance that's being discussed this evening and the FCC also adopted other rules that put limits on sorry I just got some alert put other limits on the aesthetic rules that you can adopt at a local level and limits on your fees that you can charge for use of your light poles and for processing applications in 2019 the FCC interpreted the scope of cable franchises to grant a grant of cable franchises to include wireless devices and cable operators are sometimes involved with small cell deployments because they have large fiber networks that can serve as backhaul in 2019 there was an order issued reaffirming the RF emission standards that the FCC had adopted in 1997 and actually that order is under appeal in the DC Court of Appeals the two orders that the FCC issued in 2020 so last year were clarifying and modifying the rules on eligible facilities request that category must be approved so if we can go to the next slide so I talked briefly about federal law now I'm going to turn briefly to state law because state law also imposes some limitations on local authority with respect to the review and approval of wireless facilities I'm focused in particular here just on facilities that are placed in the public right of way so California public utility code section 7901 provides a grant of a state franchise to telephone companies to use the public right of way for their facilities so that grant include has been interpreted as of also applying to wireless companies and wireless facilities and there are some limitations on that grant it's not unfettered the grant is for placement but these placements may not incommode the public use and that's kind of an old phrase or phraseology but that's because this is a long standing state franchise grant in state law and that incommode the public use has been the subject of quite a bit of litigation to determine whether it means just very limited cannabis traffic or it means anything else and it actually has been upheld to mean that it includes the regulation of the aesthetics of wireless facilities or other facilities in the streets so it confirmed in the California Supreme Court decision in 2019 confirmed a decision that the federal court had made 10 years earlier so you do have under or under state law a limitation in terms of preventing you cannot prevent of carriers from placing facilities in the public right of way but you can regulate the safety and the aesthetics or I should also mention there is a bill pending and I see that it should be SB I think SB 556 that would actually mandate as a matter of state law the use of city light poles and traffic poles just for wireless facilities right now the cities are making those poles available for use largely because under the FCC small cell order there was language that suggested that it may be mandatory it didn't actually impose the requirement but it suggested the FCC order suggested that not allowing the use of your poles may create an effective prohibition of wireless service but if this bill is adopted in sign into law it would require cities to make their light poles and traffic poles available and the 270 per year rental rate is the same rate that the FCC adopted as a safe harbor next slide please so I mentioned the shot clocks just a little bit of information about how they work they're so important with respect to the processing of applications these are specific time periods in which a city must basically take final action so it will include the appeals and it includes all the permits and authorizations that might be needed so in this instance if you're looking at being in the public right away on a city street light that would include the master license agreement as well as the requirements that would be needed and of course which shot clock might apply depends on the type of application I mentioned there are five in federal law and the shot clock may be reset or told in only two ways one is you can always agree with the applicant if they do agree to stop the running of the shot clock but the more common way it's stopped is by local jurisdiction issuing a timely notice of incompleteness so when the application comes in there's a certain period of time it can be as little as 10 days and as long as 30 days to review the application and determine if it is complete or not and send out a notice if you send out a notice of incompleteness that will toll the shot clock if it's a small cell it will actually reset it the first time you send it out and after that each review of the resubmittals continues to eat into this very limited time period within which to act on applications next slide please so I mentioned already all of these five shot clocks that have been established by the Federal Communications Commission the one at the very bottom I haven't spoken about yet there was a law adopted last year in the state legislature went into effect in January 1st and that requires certain types of generator applications to be approved and so it's sort of like a mini eligible facilities request just for generators and it has a 60 day shot clock the criteria of what size of generator and things like that that would go on a macro cell site and that law will only be in effect for three years but there are a lot of applications that are coming in for those types of upgrades to existing macro cell sites next slide please I already mentioned this that there are deadlines for I always called this the shot clock within the shot clock deadlines in order to send out a timely notice of completeness in order to stop the shot clock on the review and these as you can see 10 days for resubmittals between 30 and 10 days for the initial and so this is very much a part of why it's important to have a pretty streamlined process for reviewing applications because you really can easily get tripped up and run past the shot clock deadline next slide please and the reason why you would be worried about running past the shot clock deadline is that there are certain remedies available to the applicant if you missed the deadline so for the eligible facilities request ones that you must approve that are 60 days there's actually in federal law and federal regulations a deemed granted remedy you missed the shot clock as a local jurisdiction the carrier the applicant can simply send you a notice and say you missed the deadline the application is deemed approved for the other for the emergency generator shot clock under state law there's also a state deemed granted remedy for the other shot clocks that are the 90 and 150 day shot clocks under the original ones from 2009 that were adopted by the FCC again there is a state remedy that would those applications complete simply not complete granted simply if the local jurisdiction was the shot clock deadline in the carrier sent the notice the small cell shot clocks do not currently have under federal or state law a deemed granted remedy but there is a bill pending in the legislature that would actually give a deemed granted remedy and basically a construction authorization for missing shot clocks for the federal shot clocks next slide please so I mentioned before a little bit about aesthetic regulations this is just to kind of recap what your authority is based on limitations in state and federal law generally local governments can regulate aesthetics however there are certain instances where you have limitations eligible facilities request one if an applicant can meet the criteria which will allow height increases and other additions if they meet the criteria under federal law that overrides your aesthetics unless of course they are defeating concealment which would kick them out of the box and qualify aesthetic regulations for personal wireless facilities must not prohibit or effectively prohibit the provision of wireless services and the FCC in their small cell order as revised based on a nine circuit ruling that struck down part of the order basically leaves you with these limitations your aesthetic requirements must be reasonable and that is technically feasible and reasonably directed to avoiding or remedying the intangible public harm currently or out of character deployments and they must be published in advance and so that is an important reason why it is good to have a resolution that addresses these requirements spacing, separation and setback requirements for small cells are subject to the same federal standards reasonable and published in advance and under state law as I mentioned wireless carriers and telecommunications providers have the right to install facilities in the public right of way so long as the placement does not incommode the public use that also allows you to consider aesthetics but you will be limited by federal law as well and spacing requirements may not keep the carriers out of the public right of way entirely that would give rise to not only potentially an effective prohibition claim but also a claim under state law that you are frustrating their state franchise right to use the public right of way and I think that concludes my presentation I'm here for questions and I think I turn it back to Gabe now thank you Thank you Gail so as we can see with that portion of the presentation there is a significant amount of federal and state regulation that overlays this so as part of this process what we had to do is really take those regulations where we did have control on the aesthetic side and then try to better understand the community's concerns and incorporate that into the process and I'll talk a little bit at the end about the public outreach we did as part of this but it's really about creating that balancing act so the next set is going to talk a little bit about our specific proposal today so next slide please so this slide was actually presented in the July 21st study session and it really laid out what our conceptual plan was at that point and based on all these I just want to highlight that this is the direction we wanted to take it and how does this overlay with the direction we actually did take it so what we really identified at that process is obviously we had macro sites and small cells and we had different codes and policies associated with them so our goal was to create some level of alignment on that level we needed to revise our submittal requirements because we didn't have any specific language for small cells we did recognize that the notification and the public participation processes were different between macro sites and small cells so we wanted to look at some opportunities to align that and obviously deal with development standards that was an important piece when we talked about the amendment process at that point we were really anticipating a bit of a heavy lift and I know Gail wants to give the credit my way but I think she has really helped us with that heavy lift because we were looking at a 9-12 month timeline as part of that and typically with these policies we take resources from other council goals and specifically housing that's one of the core functions that PED handles so by leveraging professional services we were able to keep those other pieces intact so it didn't become as much of a priority setting discussion because we were able to find other solutions so the benefit of professional services definitely helped us move this forward next slide please so specifically we have two actions today so the first is an ordinance and that ordinance will be adding chapter 13-6 to the public right of way to the city code and that lays the base foundation for what we want to do moving forward and what that focuses on it actually creates a separate permitting process we're calling it a wireless facilities permitting process for all those installations in the public right of way so it gives us that individual permit avenue for treating these separate than other general work that occurs in the right of way as Gail mentioned there are shot clocks and those are fairly aggressive so typically with a 60 day shot clock if you can imagine we may very well be 45 days in the review not necessarily that there's that amount of staff hours but that is in the bucket of encroachment permits and other permit types that are coming in and hitting PED so in some situations it may be difficult to manage those we do think we can but it is still a very aggressive timeline so we wanted to make sure that the process was very administrative which would allow us to meet that seminal requirement in that review within the 60 days we also needed to obviously publish those requirements in advance so really what we're doing is we're laying the foundation in the code that allows us to publish those specific application requirements and those design and development standards as separate documents and I do want to point out in the council package we do have standards and those are adopted typically by resolution we also attached some of our supplemental submittal requirements we typically develop those at the staff level we're more or less providing those an example we're not asking for an adoption today that's typically part of our permitting process so I just wanted to point that out so one of the pieces by doing that it makes those documents a bit easier to amend in the future updating the code is always a bit of a heavy lift if we have those design and development standards they can be a bit more fluid we can test these out, we can change as needed it also approves the transparency and the noticing so what we're doing as part of this process is we will have a noticing that goes 300 feet in a radius from the proposed site and that noticing will be when we receive it and the C handles this noticing which is typical with most of our development applications so that notice gives it's typically on a postcard it gives information about the project it allows people to get in touch with the applicant as well as the staff member that is processing that application it also gives them access to any digital files associated with that application and instructs them on their appeal rights that they have so we try to put as much as possible we also put visuals in there to make it look like and this ordinance also creates an appeal process and I think that's an important point to touch on a bit typically with appeal processes you render a final determination by an individual and then the appeal goes to a group of individuals and that may be the council that may be a board or commission the challenge we have within this particular process is that it's very difficult to administer in a 60 day review because it's quite possible that we can receive appeal on the back end and simply getting it before a board and commission on a time frame we just don't think we can commit to that on a regular basis so unfortunately we had to neck that down to an administrative appeal process so in this particular case the director of transportation and public works has authority for that initial approval and then the appeal goes to the city manager or his or her designee next slide please so as I mentioned in addition to the ordinance we also have a resolution and that's tackling the design and development standards and these are the particular nuts and bolts of the requirements that apply to those specific installations and I think this is an important point we talked a little earlier that there are two different pole types between joint utility poles and city-owned infrastructure we're trying to align the requirements for all joint poles because they are going in the right of way they have the same impacts aesthetically to that streetscape so we want to align that we are also looking at stealth elements and techniques to blend the facility into the surrounding environment and I think an important point with that is there's a lot of push to keep it and we've seen artificial trees to mask cellular infrastructure but there's also a transparency point to this to notify the public of what it is so to stealth is not necessarily good because it loses that transparency so there is even a balancing act there important piece we have undergrounding of a pertinent equipment when technically feasible so a lot of these include boxes or equipment on the ground there's also cabinets on the poles that are in addition to the actual antenna it tends to be incredibly transparent the undergrounding of that a lot of agencies have attempted to encourage that there are some situations where you can do it in most situations it probably is not going to be technically feasible it is very challenging and oftentimes it will result in a fairly large vault in the right of way that has other impacts to maintenance of underground utilities taking space in the right of way so we will encourage when we can just for the visual aspects of it but I just want to point out that in many situations it likely will not be feasible to underground all those equipment components we also complying with state and federal law and I think that's the important point with this is that we built in flexibility on all these steps to be in compliance with state and federal law and at least have the flexibility to do so and it also basically sets design requirements for replacement poles, new poles and existing and once again is trying to align as much as possible across all those different options one of the most important points in the design and development standards are typically what are referred to as location standards or preferences so these are citing requirements so they determine aesthetically where these can be placed so what we've incorporated in our design standards is a street preference so we have certain street types and those certain street types are in certain zoning districts so we have defined our most preferred location are major arterials that are in commercial zones and the benefit in a commercial zone is there you don't have the typical residential impacts we do a lot to protect the aesthetics of our neighborhoods we have design standards that protect the aesthetics of our neighborhoods so this would place in commercial zones and major arterials are typically wider streets there's more of a buffer from the structures so there are better location for these types of facilities our least preferred location are dense residential neighborhood streets they're very narrow there's usually structures very close to the street the visual impacts are more prevalent to the people living there we also incorporated into our proposal 300 feet measured from the property line of schools, childcare centers, hospitals and religious facilities those are civic and community use spaces and we typically protect the aesthetics of those as well so once again this is all about the visual aspects of those areas a significant number of members of our community are going to these sites so we take additional steps to protect this aesthetic value of those types of uses we also have 50 feet from residential structures and as I mentioned before there's a lot of push from a design and development standpoint to control how residential structures look and the visual impacts of those so that is our attempt to address those concerns we've also incorporated a thousand feet from other small cells from the same provider and I think that's an important piece because you wouldn't necessarily have one provider taking available area from another by simply getting out of the gate earlier so the providers are creating separations from their own utilities essentially you could have AT&T and Verizon in a closer proximity than that a thousand feet but that's really attempted to address kind of the cluttering and the saturation concerns that we've heard from the community we also have a few other components located as close as possible shared property lines and not located directly in front of a window or door now the important piece as Gail mentioned you can have aesthetics but you cannot effectively prohibit the deployment and when we look at the human effects of these standards how do you know if you just pull that out of a box and say 50 feet looks good that it works or it doesn't so we've done a few different things and there's future slides that will go into more of exposing the engineering process that we went through to develop these but we've also created a relief valve and that is in the form of a variance or a limited exception so if it is not technically feasible for the provider to meet these they have an opportunity to show why it isn't to come in and how they can get closer to those preferences to say there are other sites that might not exactly meet all of these but the site here that does is not technically feasible this other site is basically making modifications on some of these and they can get closer to those preferences so there is a relief valve built into that to avoid that effect of prohibition of service next slide please so what we've seen here is that when we went through this exercise obviously you look at the cumulative effect what you're doing with that is you're taking away available geographic area for deployments and what we wanted to do is do a little bit of a GIS exercise to show as we apply the setbacks what sort of effect did it have and what we see here is the dark lines are our tiero streets so that's our highest preference for a street the gray dots are street lights and those are highlighted in this situation simply just to make them stand out off the image and we have about 16,000 street lights so we don't actually document the number of joint poles because the city doesn't own those as infrastructure I could not tell you how many joint poles we have there are a significant number they don't exist in a lot of areas where we've undergrounded but where they do exist they have a tendency to exist at a higher frequency than the street next slide please so when we start to look at how small sales really kind of interact so the brown in the situation shows the area that's not available that is a thousand foot radius from existing small sales that we know today and most of those were deployed by Verizon AT&T as had it some this doesn't include some of those AT&T sites but that gives you an idea of the area you're taking away next slide please so now when we look at all of the cumulative effect of all of that what you really end up with is a fairly significant impact to the geographic area but there's some important pieces to this so what we wanted to expose is we wanted to expose available poles on the arterial street so as you see the green show through it's showing areas where these can go in and what you're also seeing as part of that is those areas where it can go in have a tendency to be in all areas of the city so we have the northeast, northwest we have the Oakmont area we're seeing some options we have the southeast, southwest so what that's doing though is that out of the 16,000 poles there's approximately 5,000 available through that process and that brings us down to a percentage of street lights that's hovering around 31% so we can see that over all of that that in some of these areas and I'll talk about this in a future slide you're seeing very dark areas where there are no options and that likely is where we have to exercise those limited exemptions next slide please so one of the things that we also looked at is typically with these we'll often try to take a very regional approach with these sort of standards and in this particular situation it's difficult because all cities are made up in a different way Santa Rosa has a lot of residential structures and we're encouraging housing to go into areas that it wasn't in before so when we take Petaluma's requirements which they're a bit more aggressive they have 1,500 feet from small cells and 500 feet from residential buildings when we take that aggressive approach you can see it's taking on the vast majority of the geographic area so that would neck us down to 539 street lights of 33% of the available pulse and there were some discussions in previous study sessions about trying to align regionally we looked at that as part of the exercise and unfortunately we're just not able to do it based on the pretty significant impact that some of those standards have on Santa Rosa next slide please so now what we saw in some of those very dark areas in those slides where we weren't creating an area this kind of highlights really why that occurs so what we see in this particular case and I think it's a great example this is the Mendocino Avenue corridor adjacent to the Santa Rosa junior high excuse me Santa Rosa high and the junior college so it has two schools it has a major arterial road that runs in it and a commercial corridor and it's really surrounded with residential so we would normally say that placing these on Mendocino Avenue in front of commercial is our preferred location but what's happening is the school setback is encroaching into that commercial corridor and you have no flexibility to go further away from it because you're getting into the residential area so this is a prime example of where we would need to work with a provider to figure out a good location and how we would look at that is obviously if you're not impacting the streetscape of the school visually impacting the view of that school from the street we would say put it on the other side of the street you're not necessarily meeting that 300 foot setback but you're still meeting the general aesthetic design it's in front of commercial areas that's on a main arterial we could also look at locations where you put it in front of the parking garage in front of the school instead of right in front of Santa Rosa high school which really has a beautiful streetscape so that's really how we would balance that out we would look to basically meet those preferences to the best of our ability based on where we know technically it works from the provider so hopefully that exposes a little bit of that exercise that would go through the limited exception process next slide please so one of the main questions is what do we really do if development standards are too restrictive and you know the reality is is obviously we talked about the relief valve what we want to do is have some flexibility with the design and construction standards to amend in the future and it really can go either way as we you know really track where federal law takes this in the future state law we will have the ability to change as needed but this just highlights some of the specific data so really any separation from residential can become problematic and that's due to the fact that half of our streetlights are within 50 feet of residential structures so certain things like reducing that to 30 feet gains 2,000 poles into the mix so there's certain pieces that we can play around with for example reducing the civic and community use where you're not measuring from the property line but you're measuring from the structure itself but it still could end up placing those right in front of the use where we're trying to protect the aesthetic corridor so important piece is flexibility in this much of this the city does control much of it doesn't we need flexibility to be consistent with state and federal law but we also need flexibility to really interact in that band of authority that we do have under state and federal law next slide please so this really documents some of the next steps in what we want to do so this was all about addressing small selves that was the biggest concern and we identified that as the biggest gap in our code we do have obviously some code sections that are associated with macro sites so what we want to do and those are very stale actually many of those were developed in the early 2000s and they need to be refreshed so as part of this process in a second phase we're going to be looking at those macro site code sections and looking at making changes that will also give us some time to monitor our small cell procedures and codes and to push some permits through it and to test some things out to see what works and to see where we might need to create a little more flexibility so our goal is to move that forward by the end of the calendar year that's our target goal at this point and what that really does once again is we're trying to align as much as we can but we also have to create these permitting procedures that are consistent with state and federal law and efficient because what we're finding is as those shot clocks decrease, decrease, decrease we have to be more efficient with our process to make sure it can happen within that shot clock so we constantly have to review that to make sure it's feasible for that overall steps in that application to operate within that short window of time and I think an important point to this is when we look at overall telecommunications wireless plays a role it plays a significant role with cell phones what we've seen from COVID is that obviously people are operating in their home some communities have better broadband service or sections of the community than others and there's a lot of different things that go into fix that and we can't discount the benefit of cabled infrastructure that's needed for small cells the deployment of fiber is important to that backbone infrastructure and it also provides different service to the building so we'll continue to analyze the feasibility of those programs some of that's through the city some of the other providers are also providing that function but I do want to mention that is one of our focus is to maintain our keep our eye on how fiber deployments are happening in the city. Next slide please. So I know it's been a long haul and thank you for I know it's very technical and thank you for going through all this and I want to just mention before I close with restating the recommendations we did try to implement quite a bit of public process in this so in addition to the item today in the public process that that provides we developed some websites to give us much information as possible about this process we did some newsletters that were published in City Connection and that was pushed out to all subscribers to that which are getting close to 97,000 people but we also over the years had a very targeted audience through this and those were the providers and those were members of the public that were concerned and I do have to actually extend a special thanks to Alex Cron as part of this and I know many of you have experienced received emails from Alex and I know many members of the community have run the full range of emotions with this from frustration to anger and it's been a bit of a long process but Alex has helped me really consolidate that and better understand what those were and it gave me an avenue to better educate those individuals that had those concerns on where the city's flexibility is so we worked very closely with that group there's been multiple meetings we've stepped through this kind of more engineering approaches that we took to make these determinations and we also gave opportunities for the providers to comment on that so they were able to review those draft documents early and provide comment. So with that I will conclude the presentation and restate the recommendations and we do have two so we want to consider an introduction and a first reading of an ordinance adding chapter 13-6 to title 13 street sidewalks and public places of the Santa Rosa city code pertaining to wireless facilities and environmental quality act and adopt by resolution design and development standards specific to the placement of wireless facilities in the public right of way as authorized by chapter 13-6. Next slide please. And with that I will open it up to any questions you may have. All right thank you so much Gabe and Gail that's quite a bit of information so I appreciate you putting it all together on one place for us. I did have a couple of questions to start with. I'm going to start with a little bit on a little bit SB 556. I wanted to start with just an overall question around whether or not I'll just say that bill is expected to pass in Sacramento this year. If it does pass does this ordinance still hold up or would the council be right back here having this discussion again early next year? Thanks and so that ordinance is that ordinance that bill is what would potentially have some impact on the license agreement that the city has entered into for use of light poles it's not according to regulate the permitting process but it does create what I would call shot clocks for review of requests to use the poles and it puts some other limitations it mandates that they have to be made available establishes that you would have to the $270 rate or I think you're allowed to do your cost it may mandate a cost study I can't I'm not sure what the current version looks like it wouldn't impact this ordinance which is dealing with the permitting process not just for permits to use street lights or traffic lights but also utility poles so this is wearing a regulatory hat what the permitting process is for we're going into and making installations in the public right away on certain types of infrastructure the bill is targeting your property that you own in the public right of way and ensuring that it's available for these deployments alright thank you just sitting it out front the mayors and council members legislative committee has already opposed the bill so just want to make sure I put that out there as well but I do get concerned when I see phrases in it such as unreasonably denying the leasing or licensing there's another section that talks about poles must be made available under fair reasonable and non discriminatory fees those are obviously things that the courts will have to help to define as cities have ordinances like this and so it's always helpful to the best that we can to put in place an ordinance that we think is defensible particularly against some of those lawsuits gave under the current fee structure are you able to recover your costs for the applications coming in excellent question mayor what we'll be looking at is since we're changing this process slightly we do have obviously a fee schedule that addresses encroachment permits so as it comes in now we are recovering that fee associated with that review as we layer more of these requirements in it will likely increase the staff time associated with that review there is a safe harbor fee that we can incorporate but really I think when we look at it that would not properly recover the cost so our goal is as we test this out and we run this through the paces you can do a bit of a nexus study to actually determine how many staff hours go into that and the rate of that how much time goes into the noticing and the cost of that and we will likely be adopting a different fee schedule specifically for this as we're able to get that data to inform what that fee should look like thank you because we talk all the time about cost recovery particularly in your department and this is one that I know that the council is eager to see cost recovery on I don't think the $270 fee is going to cover it if the legislation does pass at the state but hopefully we can put that in place in the short term the other question I had sorry if I may Mr. Mayor just to clarify the $270 is the rental rate the annual charge for using the poll and I think Dave was talking about the permit processing fees which are required to be cost based both under state and federal law and the question is whether you will do a fee study to determine what are those costs of service of processing the applications. I appreciate that clarification my understanding of SB 556 was that it eliminated the additional fee the encroachment permit fee and perhaps I'm just mistaken in that but I thought that the $270 per year rent was the only charge that cities had available but I can go back I can reread see where the bill is out on that and then my last question Gabe is when you talk about requiring under grounding of the components when it's technically feasible I noticed that that doesn't say economically feasible and it doesn't have any standards around reasonability can you expand upon that a little bit. Yeah absolutely so typically anytime you underground facilities and I think there's really a few issues with that so most wireless providers have some level of cabinet that goes along with that what we saw with Verizon they were doing ground equipment and what they were doing is most of those infrastructure pieces are now going on to the pole with the original Verizon layout there were bigger cabinets in the right of way they had triggered a whole another set of concerns so basically what we had looked at really as part of that process is can you underground all of that so if you have backup batteries and meter connections can you put that below ground and the challenge that creates is that I think it is a very technically infeasible and I think when you run it technically infeasible you're running into some other concerns we have in the right of way to where we're not approving it and for example if you put a large vault in that large vault can create a trip hazard there might be cooling in that vault because it's more exposed to moisture you might have fans that violate noise ordinances so it starts getting into a very technical review to determining you're benefiting it from aesthetic standpoint but you're just not visual so it is a little difficult to give a clear definition of how one would march through that but that typically is how it is the right of way is used for a variety of different purposes so you can address the aesthetics but at what point are you negatively impacting the ability of another provider or the city to utilize that right away or when are you not creating a safe corridor because of trip hazards and vaults failing and things of that nature thank you has this ordinance been run by safety chiefs to make sure that it wouldn't interfere with the public's safety particularly noticing and alerts during an emergency yes especially on the fire front there was a lot of discussion with the previous study sessions about you know really the deployment of wireless infrastructure and how it functioned in an emergency situation and that really is one of the benefits of wireless infrastructure is that in disasters people are communicating with their cell phone and maintaining that connectivity is important to that we had gotten to a lot of discussions initially about the safety element of these so at what point when battery backups were being installed does that become a fire hazard so our fire chief and our fire marshal had a lot of review into that overall design they will be reviewing these applications as they initially come in to determine the nations about the safety element so we did get into both of those discussions and they were involved which are the benefit of wireless facilities and putting them in certain locations from that you know communication benefit in the disaster but also these are powered infrastructure sitting in the right of way so how do we maintain the safety of those in pole knockdown situation so all of the department's transportation public works fire we've all been looking at those to make sure that we're informing that review of the safety elements to be placed in the right way then my final question game is looking at this from an equity lens which is something that we're trying to do as a priority for the council does this ordinance disproportionately impact certain parts of our community versus others and in particular obviously during COVID we've seen access to the internet has been crucial for students and for younger folks in our community to impact their ability either to have adequate network coverage or also disproportionately placing more of these in specific neighborhoods the excellent point and I think really when we look at it from aesthetic standard what has a tendency to happen is you start pushing it away from residential structures so the denser the residential structure the tighter the area the more standard start keeping it out of that area and that's where the relief valve comes into play because I think the important exercise that we wanted to look at as we went through this and we developed these more regional standards is how did it affect the different quadrants of the city are we creating opportunity for these to go into those areas and if we're not we need to because that reason that basically the provider is providing a baseline level of service that should be available to all members of our community we also have aesthetic standards we can still get them towards preferences we can incorporate those in the communities that may not currently have them but we can also do it by maintaining that aesthetic standard and I think that's important because you can get it in but you don't necessarily overly burden that situation because I think that's been some of the concerns from the community and there's many members of the public that don't necessarily use the wireless communications inside the house they're still relying on broadband connections and I think that's what we do if we're dealing with this issue where we're disproportionately providing service wireless plays a role in that but the broadband aspect also does as well so how do we provide cable services in those areas that are more stable connection and I think we've really seen it with Zoom is that all of a sudden where data wasn't used as heavily now we're pushing significant amount of data and many of us are communicating through Zoom meetings so it's an incredibly important thing from a telecommunication standpoint we have our eyes on it we're having an equity aspect of how we're deploying these both from aesthetic standpoint but also availability of services and the legislature has definitely stepped up and is allocating funding on the broadband front so we'll continue to utilize some of that and work with our state and federal partners on that as well Council Member Sawyer you have questions thank you Mayor just one quick question I think it's very simple and thank you all for bringing this forward to us and it took a while to get here and it's very easy to see why lots of information a lot of hurdles to jump my question has to do with slide number 24 pertains to that and the administrative process and the what are the chances of an entity that they would do this on purpose overwhelming a department in looking for entitlements and then because of the number the quantity of work necessary that the shop clocks run out or do we have enough do we have are we so well staffed that that just wouldn't be would not be a concern that's an excellent question that Gail chime in on that a little bit basically the way it works with encroachment permits is we have historically received probably about three to five hundred a year that's our typical average on encroachment permits over the last five years we've seen that dramatically increase and much of that was due to the Tubbs Fire to where we're almost doing 2,000 encroachment permits per year so our staffing levels that's pretty much the top end of what we can handle so the staffing levels are kept because that's peak can come down they're kept at a level to be financially responsible to make sure we can meet that demand but it can get overwhelmed fairly quick because that's a very small team so if we throw the small cells into the mix of that in a significant number of those it becomes very challenging and I would say based on the batches that I've seen thus far they do come in waves and what would happen likely is if we focus our attention on that because it has this defined shot clock that will be pulling our resources from other development types so because of the threat of these really going into an approval state on the back end we really need to take that opportunity to review those and it probably would have an impact in a batch situation to basically the other permits that are hovering around that may be just general encroachment permits they may be associated with larger projects so that piece and I'll maybe let Gail talk about if there is any impact if there is any remedy in a situation where a provider may actually be able to overwhelm a jurisdiction and then clean shot violations. Thank you and I look forward to Gail's response and it would concern me and I would assume that we would get an alert if that situation started to present itself which could slow down development in other areas so Gail what are the odds of things slowing down? Well I would say that that's definitely a risk that is a risk that you could be in a situation I've heard of some cities where that's happened where you know they get 175 applications or something that all come in at once and there are a couple of things to think about in that aspect and one that I've seen cities look at is to have potentially outside reviewers that can come in sort of on call to take up when there are additional need for review for large projects that might be something where you want to look at modifying your fee schedule so that you can pass through those costs so that's basically like contract reviewers to assist the department when you hit high levels of demand but the main point that I want to make is with respect to the shot clocks that are the five that I spoke of not the eligible facilities request which is under that 2012 law but the federal ones that are under the law that was adopted in 1996 that requires you to act within a reasonable period of time those are all presumptively reasonable periods within which to act meaning that the presumption is that typically you could act within those periods but if you were challenged on it you could potentially have a defense and say with respect to this project or these circumstances it was reasonable the presumptively reasonable period shouldn't apply and a longer period should apply that would be what you might say in court in defense if you were sued if the circumstances presented it and that's what makes those deemed granted remedies so dangerous because they kind of flip the responsibility so the carrier simply sends a letter says here's your notice the out you missed the shot clock it's deemed approved and puts the onus on the local jurisdiction to go to court to try to overturn that result so that's why those deemed granted remedies are so dangerous the one other thing that you can always do and I mentioned this in my part of the presentation is you could always go to the carrier and ask them to agree to toll the shot clock on the applications to give more time and I would say that in a lot of instances you can get that agreement you can't bank on it obviously and you can't set up a process that would guarantee that you'd have that but for large projects or where a project or an application becomes quite complicated and it's just taking more time that's another potential action for the city is just to make an arrangement with the applicant to agree that more time should be allowed to process the applications well thank you for that I'm more concerned now than I was before I asked the question I appreciate the answer I was hoping for a little more relief but it sounds like we may lift up potentially our legal department at the same time we're beefing up our entitlement the permit department so it gives me a small amount of concern thank you piggybacking off of councilmember Sawyer's question is it possible to build into the ordinance a limit on how many can be reduced or applied for at one time by an applicant would that be considered reasonable to meet the city's staffing abilities do you want me to take that game yes please gal so I have seen some smaller cities actually do that not to just try to manage the flow of applications given the size of their staff the require applications to be submitted only on certain days of the week or by appointment or we developed language and I'm blanking on which city it was but where we said if you're going to submit more than a certain number say 10 applications then then you should alert us to that and allow us to set up a separate fund for funding contract reviewers that we're going to need to bring in because our staff will be able to handle that so there are ways that you can try to manage that the pushback at the end of the day that you have to be cognizant of imbalance is that you can't if your rules are too strict in terms of submitting applications then you maybe get to the point where an applicant is accusing you of effectively prohibiting service because you're slow rolling the development or you're creating a moratorium in some way because you're not accepting applications routinely but I think in certain circumstances certainly it's justified to try to manage those situations and certainly I should also mention when there are communities that I've worked with that have suffered fires wildfires and evacuations and things like that certainly notifying putting up a notice that we're not going to meet the timelines in these circumstances and you've just got to accept that is that's not something that you're going to get challenged on by a courier or an applicant in those sort of circumstances in May or if I may add on to that quickly the discussion about professional services and consultants is usually a very useful conversation to have as part of that typically when we hit our capacity level professional services is our relief valve so it is a conversation we can have as we move this forward and we adopt the appropriate fee some utilization of professional services will have kind of a full cost recovery as part of that program so we can discuss that as a reasonable relief valve which would then help us avoid any additional impacts to the current staff would have with moving their time on housing projects or the other menu item of things that PED normally deals with so we'll analyze that as part of the process to see if that is a suitable means to assist with this potential issue alright thank you Gabe Council Member Schwedell thank you Mr. Mayor for this presentation Gabe you always bring me a great level of comfort when I know you're involved in a project and this is no exception to that so I want to talk just kind of our voyage you outlined when we this first came to council and I know my first recollections I know we saw images of these on city polls which seemed really like who would be bothered by that and then you showed another picture in this presentation on Yalupa and then the reality with one of our council meetings we had the situation on West Ninth and Link Lane which it really seemed like it was in their front porch so if we are to adopt this ordinance with a situation that occurred and again I don't know if it's on Link Lane or West Ninth and hopefully remember that one would that be allowed under this ordinance or what would be different that's an excellent point and it really is trying to protect against that in a lot of ways and I think what we've seen from the aesthetics is are incorporating different technology into the design and the streetlight polls have a tendency to be a bit more streamlined one of those reasons is you can use the polls the conduit they can hide wires so the joint utility polls the aesthetics are not as good as the streetlights but we got into a lot of conversations about when we look at these conceptual designs of these polls that are submitted as part of applications and you look at them in real life at different angles they look very much different and that was some of the concerns with the community is I thought it was going to look like this and it looked like this so we've done a couple things to protect against that one is we're attempting because that is directly out of somebody's living room window we do focus on our streetscapes it is aesthetics we're attempting to not allow deployments in that area there's some situations where that will be challenging because they're literally the only option but overall that would be protected against with that 50 foot separation of the arterial and I think a great example in Ling Lane is from a proximity standpoint can you put it on College Avenue we have main arterials there they're close to it so we protect that we're also implementing more designs more requirements on the specific equipment that they can install within our rights under federal code so I think with that cabinet type that was one when we looked at backup batteries so the backup batteries literally only provide three hours of communications when that equipment is down is that something that we do want to incorporate we have that right to say yes or no to that by making that backup battery go away that entire cabinet goes away on the ground so it protects those aesthetics so this whole process that we've gone through we've utilized those examples to say how do we really control that and can we yes or no and is it a tweaking or is it a moving from that site so that is an excellent point some of those sites did look very different than what we initially saw we want to have the community assume that it's going to look like something and have it look like something else so we have examples now we're going to provide images as part of our notification that are more real world visuals of those sites and then obviously we're trying to protect the best of our ability those very dense residential corridors where people are more impacted by the physical elements of those sites great thank you for that I also want to applaud you for recognizing any comments before this body and I really appreciate his understanding in depth and his commitment because he's all about the safety of this community so thank you for acknowledging his efforts are there any other questions from council members okay with that we will open the public hearing I'm going to look first in our chambers and see if there's anybody interested in speaking in public comment on this saying nobody moved to the podium I'll go to our zoom public comment if you're interested in giving a comment on this item go ahead hit the raise hand feature on your zoom or hit star nine we'll start with Hannah followed by Alex good evening Mayor Rogers and council members my name is Hannah Boris speaking on behalf of Verizon Wireless thank you for the opportunity to provide comment on the proposed ordinance and design standards regulating wireless facilities in the right of way we would like to thank the council and staff for their efforts on this important topic there are a few key issues that need to be addressed to ensure that the code and design standards are workable to make the necessary investments to improve services for your community Verizon supports the adoption of the ordinance with the following key changes section b2 under appeals on page 6 provides a process for automatic appeals to the city manager for applications that are approved based upon a finding that denial would result in an effective prohibition under federal law that criteria for this type of appeal would be and how the city could complete these automatic appeals within the federal shop clocks additionally it's also unclear who the appellate would be in such a scenario and typically a city manager would not have the appropriate training and expertise in federal law to adjudicate such matters Verizon therefore request that this requirement be removed condition of approval number two regarding permit duration on page 9 states that a wireless encroachment permit shall be valid for a period of 10 years unless it expires sooner or is terminated pursuant to the code the minimum permit term for wireless facilities is 10 years under the California government code and limits less than 10 years are presumed to be unreasonable condition of approval number 4 regarding the commencement of operations on page 9 requires the operation of an approved facility commits no later than one month after completion of the installation or the permit will automatically expire there are a number of factors that may delay the removal of the wireless provider to commence operation that are outside the control of the provider such as the delivery of commercial power or fiber Verizon therefore request that a reasonable exception process be provided as an end user of the design standards the Verizon respectfully request that the design standards be continued to allow additional time to work with staff to ensure the standards are feasible and consistent with FCC requirements as currently drafted many of the standards are infeasible and would materially comply with the CFC and would not accommodate the simplest of small cell equipment configurations the standards also currently require that antennas and radios be top mounted on utility poles however PG need no longer allows antennas on the top of poles in the space it controls and while we appreciate the fact that an exception process has been provided for we fear that the current standards are restrictive so we're not standards are so restrictive, whereas the exception might follow the rule. These are just a few examples of current design standards that would make deployment in Santa Rosa infeasible under the current requirements. Additional technical and legal compliance concerns have been more fully outlined in the red lines submitted to the city prior to the hearing. We respectfully request that the council defer approval of the design standards to allow staff time to make the revisions needed to craft workable standards, but also presents a path forward for the efficient deployment of wireless technology in Santa Rosa that also preserves a look, feel, and aesthetic goals of your community. Thank you. Thank you so much. Alex. Hello. Can you hear me? Yep. Go ahead. All right. I'd first like to thank Gabe for his hard work on this issue. He's definitely the smartest and nicest guy in the room, and thanks to the council for listening and being open-minded and really understanding the concerns from the community. This is Alex Krohn speaking. I'm a part of Safe Tech for Santa Rosa and a longtime resident, lifetime resident of Santa Rosa. And I want to say that it's just not me. It's a group of many other Santa Rosans working on this issue to protect the health and well-being of your constituents. And I just want to be clear that companies like Verizon and AT&T are private companies, and they are beholden to their shareholders and their executive bonuses. They are not putting the top priority of our people at hand in terms of things like the digital divide and emergency communication. They like to throw these things around in order to make it seem like them gaming the system with their lawyers and lobbyists, the state and federal level, making laws to take all their responsibility and liability away and take all the local control away, make it look like it's something for the better. But it's not. So the digital divide, access to internet, we already have the infrastructure and cable to provide gigabit speeds for data and the home and network places. And the reason we don't have that is because monopolies like Verizon and AT&T want to jack up the prices as much as possible and charge as many hundreds of dollars a month in order to maximize their bottom line. And that's just how it is. And I want that to be front and center to this discussion. Verizon is a public utility company. They're also a private wireless company. Verizon is a public utility company. A lot of places back east New York. And AT&T is also two separate entities, a public utility company in California. And they are also a private wireless company. And a little story, we paid for broadband connection, fiber optic to the premise over 20, 30 years. And what happened was is that the public utility company cross subsidized that money to their wireless company because they make so much money off wireless. So of course, they want to provide services wirelessly because they can charge tons of money for data. And really Verizon's goal with small sales is to be able to provide video streaming services to people. They'd love to be able to sell you cable video services through your wall wirelessly. This is not about the digital divide. It's nothing to do with making broadband connection affordable. And if they really wanted to do something for emergency services, they could put up facilities that were only active during an emergency. So that needs to be understood. Thank you for your time. All right, thank you so much, Alex. That is the last hand that I see. Let's go to our prerecorded voicemails. Agenda 16.2. Hello, it's me again, Mary Doll. Sixth time I've addressed the city council in regards to the cell tower at 439 Calistoga Road, Lincoln Valley. Last Tuesday, June 21st, when I spoke via phone, I need to clarify one part. It is, I can't, cannot live in 90% of my home due to the enormous amount of RFR emitting from said tower. It ranks weeks from a carrier's request to apply with clear opportunity for public input and appeal. Even a community meeting with date scheduled, helpful RF radiation. Thanks for considering these recommendations and thank you for serving the people of Santa Rosa. This is Jennifer LaPorta, item 16.2. Thank you and Gabe Osborn for your service. You are about to vote on the telecommunications ordinance, which is going to have far reaching consequences for this city for decades to come. 5G intends to provide streaming services while gathering data from its users, which is spying. 5G will not bridge the digital divide because big telecom is unregulated and unaffordable to many low income people. The FCC is a captured agency run by industry insiders. The city could greatly benefit by providing municipal broadband, fiber optic lines to the premises, thus creating low income tiers of service to bridge the digital divide. This would reduce the need for small self and protect us from all their negative effects. Aesthetic blight, reduce property values, potential fire danger, and yes, damaging health effects. Fiber is faster, easier to upgrade, more cyber secure, safer to health and fire, and more reliable and affordable. This is what we need in the ordinance. One, signage on poles of potential cell sites with large lettering, easily visible from vehicles and passers-by posted immediately upon telecom's request of permit. Two, no camouflaged antennas, however aesthetically pleasing, as people need to know that they are being exposed to RS radiation. Three, how can we ensure that the facilities are non-flammable when they contain batteries and or petroleum fuel as well as flammable smart meters? Four, insurance coverage without a pollution exclusion so that their harmful health effects are insurable. Five, Americans with Disabilities Act compliance must be included and the carrier must assume all liability and hold the city harmless. The ordinance should say that the WHO recognizes electromagnetic sensitivity as an illness under ICD code W90. Six, no co-locations for small cells on any structure. This will double the aesthetic blight, add to fire danger, increase the amount of RS, and increase electricity usage. Seven, periodic RS admission testing needs to be done via an independent certified engineer, not a telecom employer or contractor whenever our resident requested with results posted on the city website. Eight, since technology is changing so fast, 10-year permits are too long. How about two-year permits? Nine, must include parks, walking trails, and community centers with protective setbacks. Dear city council, please remember, you are accountable to we the people, not telecom corporations. Hello, this is Richard Boyd. I'm calling in reference to agenda item 16.2, small cell ordinance to express my concerns about its ability to regulate the activities of the telecommunications industry. I am familiar with the ordinance you are considering and while it is not perfect, it is a good first step. And Mr. Osborne deserves a great deal of credit for bringing it to its present state. I want to comment on how the telecommunications industry is attempting to perpetrate. I'm a retired physics professor, so I know a bit about radiation. The buzzword telecom is using is connectivity, which is supposed to provide all of us with improved Wi-Fi and with the advent of 5G, greater speeds, self-driving cars, better daming, et cetera. Some of these things really may be improvements, but others are catering to the whims of human beings and are in serious conflict with the needs of many of those same humans. I note that much of this connectivity could be achieved by fiber to the premises, that is the radiation that floods our atmosphere is not essential. However, it should be noted that radio frequency radiation at the 5G frequencies has not been tested to see how damaging it is to living organisms. What's more, there is apparently no intent to do so at least in the United States, but the signs are not good. The FCC has set limits on the amount of RF radiation that emitters can create that are more than a factor 100 greater than those said by many other countries. And their regulatory agencies have, unlike the United States FCC, considered modern medical evidence that shows without a doubt that RF radiation at the FCC's levels can create serious medical effects in humans as well as other animals, insects and plants. Let me emphasize that point, the stuff can be dangerous and absolutely is at the limit set by the FCC and happily adopted by the telecom industry. Rachel Carson had it right when she warned the world decades ago about DDT in her book, Silent Spring. We're facing a new threat, RF radiation, that could cause another Silent Spring, only this time it won't be just the birds that die. Humans would not escape the die-off this time. The organs you are considering certainly will not cater completely to telecom's desires. However, we'll give them much authority and placement and ultimately intensity of the small cells with which they want to clutter the Santa Rosa landscape. So more will be needed for the future. In conclusion, let me congratulate Mr. Osborn on a job well done given the constraints under which he had to operate and thank him for his extraordinary effort. But I want to advise the council members that this is a first step, that much more needs to be done to protect the citizens of Santa Rosa from the ubiquity of the RF radiation to telecom industry would like to inflict on us. Thank you. Hi, my name's Tom Laporta. This is for item 16.2. I'd like to see the city make some money from their fiber to the premises set up that they can have going. I mean, Palo Alto makes $2 million a year from their fiber access. San Leandro's gross profit margin is over 70%. There's so many cities that have made a go of this that it's not even funny, Bristol, Virginia, Jupiter, Florida, Chattanooga. It's amazing. I would suggest you might want to get in touch with Magellan advisors who put together San Leandro's master plan. There's a lot of good info in there. Now on the safety front, I think we need an ordinance restricting small cells for at least 300 feet from any residents. Not 50 feet, not 100 feet, at least 300 feet. Petaluma and San Otomo have 500 foot setbacks. Now that would be ideal, but I doubt that's gonna happen. Anyway, that's about all I have to say. Okay. Hello, my name is Sydney Cox and I'm calling for agenda 16.2, the ordinance regulating wireless facilities. First of all, it's great that there will soon be a wireless small cell ordinance that will give the city some control over the placement of small cells. I understand the constraints placed upon the city by the FCC's rulings and state mandates. However, it sounds like you've obtained excellent really good counsel and Mr. Osborne has been at this for a few years and has done a really good job. So a big thank you to you, Mr. Osborne. Looking at the bigger picture, I have to add my advocacy for a municipal fiber network for Santa Rosa that will provide fast connectivity without the need for small cells all over the city. Please do whatever you can to make this a reality. Probably most important to the residents of our communities is the issue of setbacks, distance of cell towers from homes and the levels of RF radiation that is being emitted from these small cells. Anyone with a good RF meter can give you numerical values and tell you they are dangerous emissions at 50 feet, 75 feet, 100 and even 200 feet. My findings have been alarming. I have emailed the council an info sheet on my meter readings at five different locations. Of course they are below the FCC limits, which are certainly high and based on thermal effects, eating of tissue only and for short periods of time, 30 minutes, a few hours, not days, not 24 seven. And the levels of the FCC are 10 million. The council of Europe and building biologists have precautionary RF levels for sleeping areas at 0.1 and determined by building biologists and countless studies that levels of 1,000 or more, have been considered extreme concern. Last Saturday I took readings on a driveway at Monteverdi Drive at 75 feet from the small cell that measured 203,000 microwatts from meter squared. The man there, that lived there, made comments about his frustration and helplessness over the small cell that's in direct line to his house. And my meter can't even measure if horizon is millimeter waves that are emitted at 28 to 39 gigahertz as the meter only reads up to eight gigahertz. But these small cells emit a combo frequency of 3G, 4G, 5G. So undoubtedly there's a lot more radiation than I can even measure. Can you imagine co-locations? That would be twice the radiation and twice the visual blight, which is another concern. We can't control the FCC. We can't control the laws. The telecom is getting passed thanks to their contributions to our reps. But we can educate the public and speak out in public comment times like this about our alarm at what's coming. Thank you. Hi, this is Kim Schroeder and I am calling on agenda item number 16.2, ordinance regulating wireless facilities. I live in Santa Rosa. I grew up here. My husband and I raised our children here. First of all, thank you Gabe Osburn for your efforts in becoming educated at length on this topic and preparing these documents. I support a municipal cyber network just as many have over the years passionately as been stated in goal-setting meetings and so forth study sessions. The fiber network is superior to small cells for several reasons. It protects our neighborhoods and schools, et cetera, from the negative effects of wireless, but even more importantly, we don't have the unsightly aesthetics, reduced property values, potential fire dangers, the negative environmental effects of wireless as well as health impacts. Cyber is faster, more cyber secure. It's got privacy, it's more reliable and affordable and it is that that will eliminate the digital divide. As a green city who adopted a climate change resolution not too long ago, please recall the testimonies and prior study sessions regarding the significant negative impact that wireless has on our environment. The consumers already paid the phone company's fees to build fiber optic cable as they promised years ago. The fees were paid in our landline bills. They never fulfilled their promise and now they want these invasive cell towers in front of our homes and our schools. This is not for the people. Remember, this is for the telecoms, data mining is a lucrative business and we the people, once again, pay the price. While they can't be completely avoided, cell towers should be strategically placed with the least intrusive means and proof of significant gap in coverage. Another important point is small cells must be covered by insurance without a pollution exclusion. Additionally, I feel important point is regarding the Americans with Disabilities Act, ADA compliance must be included and the carrier must assume all liability and hold the city harmless. Periodic radio frequency emission testing should be done by an independent certified engineer, not a telecom employee or contractor. This should happen once or twice a year as there needs to be accountability which is not happening now. Also please keep in mind that we elected you to represent us, the people and we thank you for that, for all you do for us. Hello, my name is Royal Lynn Wooten. This is for item number 16.2. You are about to vote on the telecommunications ordinance and resolution, which is going to have a far reaching consequence for this city for decades to come. 5G intends to provide streaming services while gathering data for its users, which is buying. 5G will not reach the digital divide because big telecom is unregulated and unaffordable to many low income people. The city could greatly benefit by providing municipal broadband or fiber optic lines to the premises. Thus creating low income tiers of service to bridge the digital divide. Other cities have huge benefits on their fiber optic investments. This would reduce the need for small cells and protect us from all their negative effects, aesthetic light, reduced poverty values, potential fire danger, and yes, damaging health effects. Fiber is a faster, easier, upgradable, more cyber secure, safer to health and more reliable and affordable. This is what we need in the ordinance. One, signage on poles of potential cell sites with large lettering easily visible from vehicles and passers-by, posted immediately upon the telecom request of permit. Two, no camouflage antenna, wireless facilities, cell towers, however, aesthetically pleasing as people need to know that they are being exposed to RF radiation. Three, how can we ensure that the facilities are non-flammable when these contain batteries and or petroleum fuel as well as flammable smart meters? Four, insurance coverage without a pollution exclusion so that their harmful health effects are insurable. Five, Americans with Disabilities Act, ADA, compliance must be included and the carrier must assume all liability and hold the city harmless. The ordinance should say that the WHO recognizes electromagnetic sensitivity as an illness under ICD code W90.0, six, no co-locations for small cells on any structure. This will double the aesthetic flight, contribute to fire danger, decrease the amount of RF and increase the electricity usage. Seven, periodic RF emission testing needs to be done by an independent certified engineer, not a telecom employee or contractor. Whenever a resident request it with results posted on the city website. Eight, since technology is changing so fast, tenure permits are way too long. Two year long permits are preferable. Nine, include parks, walking trails and community centers with protected setbacks. Dear city council, please remember that you are accountable to we the people, not telecom operations. Thank you. Hello, this is Martin Miller. I'm calling regarding agenda item 16.2, the ordinance regulating wireless facilities. I do considerable amount of work in Santa Rosa and live just over the border. First of all, I wanted to make the point of supporting fiber networks as opposed to wireless. The wireless approach is aesthetically unpleasing. It reduces property values. It's a potential fire damage. And there is a case being brought to the FCC. It was brought in January of late this year that they asking the FCC to reevaluate its safety standards which have not been examined since 1996. There's lots of new reports that were brought in that says that wireless radiation is a damaging both to health and environmental matters. Fiber is far faster and easier to upgrade. It's more secure, more reliable and affordable. I just, there's just no comparison. Next, how can telecom companies ensure that facilities are nonflammable as stated under exhibit A, design and development standards dash vi.c. Small cells must be covered by insurance without a pollution exclusion. Americans with disabilities that compliance must be included in the carry must assume all liability and hope the city harmless. I strongly, if we have to have this wireless, I strongly support transparency and notice for all residents, property owners and occupants within 300 feet of a proposed site. This is gonna be far difficult on everyone, especially Americans with disabilities. No locations for small cells in any structure. This is gonna double the aesthetic damage, contributive fire damage, increase the amount of RF. And lastly, because the technology is changing so fast, 10 year permits are way too long. We suggest, I think a shorter permit times, perhaps every two or three years would be best. Thank you very much for your time. Mayor, that concludes voice message, public comments received on item 16.2. Great, thank you so much. We will close the public hearing. There were a couple of questions that were brought up. I did want to give Gail and Gabe an opportunity to respond to a couple of them. One was specifically about the permit duration language that we have in the ordinance. And I'll read it. It says, a wireless encroachment permit shall be valid for a period of 10 years unless pursuant to another provision of the code or these conditions, it expires sooner or is terminated. What we also heard is that 10 years was the minimum under state and federal law. I just wanted to see Gail if you could confirm that. And if so, what are some of the conditions that might necessitate expiring sooner or terminating prior to that 10 year provision? Thank you for that question. So first of all, let me just clarify what state law actually says because I think we weren't given a full picture. What the state law requires, and this is in section government code, section 65964B, it says as a condition of approval of an application for a permit for construction or reconstruction for a development project for a wireless telecommunications facility, a city or county shall not do any of the following. And B is unreasonably limit the duration of a permit for a wireless telecommunications facility. And then it goes on and says, limits of less than 10 years are presumed to be unreasonable absent public safety reasons or substantial land use reasons. However, cities and counties may establish a buildout period for a site. So the part that wasn't conveyed in the comment was absent public safety or substantial land use reasons. And the reason we have that language in the permit conditions is that for eligible facilities requests, those applications that would modify an existing wireless facility, instead of a 10 year permit for an antenna swap out or an additional transmission equipment added, what we have proposed would be that the permit for that modification be the same length as whatever is left on the existing permit. So that I think is justifiable as certainly a substantial land use reason and just common sense and reasonable. So that's the sort of situation that we're talking about. And certainly a permit could be terminated early for issues like non-compliance. Okay, I appreciate that and that seems reasonable to me. One of the comments that was made was about the one month duration to be able to start. I'm missing or I'm blanking on the specific the names, but more emergency related. There was concerns about it sounded like procurement of some of the components to be able to start construction within a month of approval from the city. I guess my particular question is, is the ask from the telecom representative that the city is required to do this approval in a specific amount of time because of an emergency, but then asking for a waiver on them having to actually construct within a specific amount of time when they've said that it's an emergency. So I think, Gabe, did you catch which provision? I thought that might have been a comment related to commencement of operations, which is a permit condition for under 13-60.8 conditions of approval. And I should also just mention. Where are you looking in the ordinance just so that I can follow up? I'm looking at 13-6.80 conditions of approval under A-4. I think that was the one that they were referring to, which says the operation of the approved facility shall commence no later than one month after the completion of the installation or the wireless encroachment permit will expire without further action by the city. And Mr. Mayor, that is on page 10 of the ordinance. Thank you. And I would concur. I believe that's what the comment was focusing on was the commencement of service after the issuance of the permit. And typically I will state on that front that there are certain timelines that require specific action by the provider. And one example would be as we go through the permitting process, we want the activity under that permitting process and to happen within a reasonable time frame of the issuance of the permit. And it's pretty common to have those timelines associated with it. And if you don't exercise your rights, then it can have some negative impact on the status of the permit. I think the important point with that and with the comments we did get from Verizon is we're aware of those. We did not experience similar comments from AT&T and we're really trying to balance those out. But I do want to stress the important points with this is that as we go into not really uncharted territories, but for us a new permitting process, it will have to be fluid on some of these. We'll have to figure out what works, what doesn't if those timelines need to be extended. What we'll commit to, as I mentioned in the presentation, is prior to the end of the year when we're able to get to those macro site discussions, bringing back some of those comments that logistically just don't work. And I think that's an important point to bring to the forefront is that we are willing to allow flexibility in those. We just want to better understand where that flexibility is needed and we need to run some of those permits through the process before we can fully get to that point. I appreciate that. And in particular on this section, the commencement of operations, it seems to me like there is an opportunity for us to build in some provision here to allow flexibility that would then hopefully in the event that we needed flexibility, create a mutual playing field between the city and the provider at that point to help build a relationship there. And so perhaps we can talk about that once we get a motion on the table. The last one, sorry, go ahead. I'm sorry to interrupt. I was just going to make two other points on this. One is that this section of the code lists the conditions of approval, but it does say that these are the conditions that will apply to all permits granted pursuant to this chapter or by operation of law. So that would be a deemed granted situation where the city failed to act and there was a deemed grant shall be subject to the following conditions unless modified by the approving authority. So it builds in the flexibility and actually issuing a permit to make small modifications if that is deemed appropriate in the circumstances. So that's one point I wanted to make. And the second is with respect to this particular permit condition, this sort of issue has come up in other jurisdictions and one of the modifications that sometimes is made is something along the lines of saying that, that this one month period may be extended by the director for good cause shown. And that's in a circumstance sometimes that the carriers will say, well, we got our facility in but we're waiting for PG&E to put the power in and that's why we haven't started operating those sorts of situations. I think that might be where they gave would be willing to be flexible. It's sort of beyond the control of the permittee why they couldn't start operation. So I just want to make those two comments as well. And I think for the record, we would show flexibility in those areas. Obviously there's a lot of pieces that come together as part of that process. We have had a history of working with the providers through the deployments that we currently have. So absolutely if there's some logistical issue where those timelines don't work, that's a lot of times why we build in variances in those relief valves to be able to address that situation really at the staff level when it's reasonable to make that accommodation. Okay, and Gail, if you can keep that language handy because we may have some discussion on that. The final comment was around the current aesthetic standards that perhaps do not meet the technology or would be overly burdensome. I just wanted to give you an opportunity to respond back to that, both Gabe and Gail on whether or not you've heard that from other providers or if there is any opportunity to reach some form of reasonable agreement with that provider. So I'll go first and just make one comment with respect to the comment that the Verizon rep made on the volume in the FCC order. There was a comment that the volume limits in the design standards are less than what the FCC small cell order has for volume limits. And let me just explain what is going on there. So the FCC defined what a small wireless facility is in terms of height and volume of equipment. And it actually defined it as like 28 cubic feet volume of equipment, like very large, but a small, so that's the definition of a small wireless facility for the purposes of the shot clock. So if it meets those criteria or it's less than that then it would be considered to be a small wireless facility with a 60 or 90 day shot clock. But the FCC order, as I also mentioned, allows local governments to impose reasonable aesthetic requirements. And so our interpretation is it does not mandate you to consider 28 cubic feet as a reasonable volume standard for aesthetic purposes. It's merely for shot clock purposes. And so I'll let Gabe talk about the standards that they came up with. I just wanted to clarify that point on the record. Thank you, Gail. And then obviously there's two different types of standards of there's more of the design and then the location. What we've seen in the design and we just discussed this a bit in the presentation is in the questions obviously too is the underground requirements. So when are those technically feasible? So that dramatically affects the overall design. Some of the other points that came out which is one of the reasons why we need to be fairly nimble with this is that the joint utility poles are controlled by PG&E and the requirements associated with the antenna placement structures on that pole can change. So as those evolve, we have to have that flexibility in our proposal to be able to approve those types of installations and we don't want to be necessarily overly restrictive because then it can create a situation where we're inconsistent with PG&E requirements. So most of the comments that we did receive on the design obviously when we get to location requirements that does add another layer. It does thrust the whole proposal into a limited exemption because some of those are going to be challenging to meet. So we did get feedback on that that that can be challenging from a deployment standpoint. We did receive feedback on the underground requirements which we recognize are challenging and we will work through them. And that was pointed out in the comment from the Verizon representative around the poles. We do understand that that can change. So PG&E can change requirements about metering that can affect these. So we do understand that and we will be nimble with those. Our concern is to keep these as aesthetically pleasing as possible and to put them in locations where the aesthetics in that area are benefited by not having them there if we technically can do that. So that's the main goal. And I once again just want to stress that we did incorporate that flexibility for that very reason. So we tried to find this balance of being specific but being flexible at the same time. All right, thank you Gabe. I'll see if there are any other questions from council members. Okay, council member Sawyer, do you want to put a motion on the table? Thank you, Mayor. Just to be clear that we do this correctly, the resolution speaks to design and development standards and the ordinance speaks to rights of way. So if the changes that you are considering or would you want them read in the ordinance piece or the resolution? And that might be a question for the city attorney as well. And I believe that that particular language that we were talking about on the 10 year or excuse me on the one month to commence, that was in the ordinance. Ordinance. Yeah, it's on page 10, 13-06.80, section A subsection four. This specifically what was brought up. So I'd like to be able, I'd like to be able to put the ordinance on the table and then consider, I guess at that point, consider adjustments to it. So I'll just let me just introduce the ordinance and we'll go from there. So I've introduced an ordinance to the council of the city of Santa Rosa adding chapter 13-06 to title 13 streets, sidewalks and public places with the Santa Rosa city code pertaining to wireless facilities in public rights of way and way further reading. I can second that. So we have a motion from council member Sawyer and a second from council member Schwedhelm. And then Gail, if you could remind me what that language was, I'd like to offer it as a friendly amendment to the aforementioned section, which is the commencement of operations. Gail, you're muted if you're speaking to us. I thought she was just being very pensive. So many buttons to push. I forgot to unmute. It's a little odd for me to be suggesting that you needed to unmute. So it's kind of, it's an inside joke. Oh, I see so. I'm not alone in this problem. Okay. So yes, the, I think it would be, okay, I have better like, okay. This period may be extended by the director of transportation and public works for good cause shown. That's the motion. Council member Sawyer, will you accept that friendly amendment? I will. And the second? My only question should be just that one person or his or her designee. Good point. All right. With the, with council members, what Helms suggested modification, the director of transportation or his or her designee. I would be supportive. Or their designee. I think in the ordinance you're using just for designee. Okay. You're comfortable with that council member Sawyer? I am. And for the second? Yes, I am. Right. Were there any other amendments that council members wanted to seek? Okay. Do we have any comments on the motion? All right, seeing none, let's go ahead and call the roll on the ordinance. Council member Schwedhelm. Aye. Council member Sawyer. Aye. Council member Fleming. Council member Alvarez. Aye. Vice mayor Rogers. Aye. Mayor Rogers. Aye. That motion passes with five ayes with council members Fleming and Tibbets absence. Secondly, I've introduced a resolution of the council of the city of Santa Rosa establishing design and development standards for wireless facilities in the public right of way and way further reading. Second. Motion from council member Sawyer and a second from council member Schwedhelm. I did want to make a quick comment just because I know that there was concern on the last part of this around the standards and not having reached agreement. There are opportunities built into the ordinance for some level of exception with finding a good cause or with working directly with the city. And so I feel comfortable that even though we have one telecom provider suggesting that they can't make it work. I'm fairly confident with our staff that we can find paths forward for them as well as I fully believe that SB 556 is going to pass this year. And so there may be some modifications that we need to make to the ordinance and to the resolution in the beginning of next year when that goes into effect that perhaps that's an opportunity for us if we do have those changes to also check in on the design standards to make sure that once it's in place are we running into any reasonable roadblocks that we need to fix? And I hope Gabe that you'll bring it to us at that time if we need to. With that, let's go ahead and call the vote. Council member Schwedhelm. Aye. Council member Sawyer. Aye. Council member Alvarez. Aye. Vice Mayor Rogers. Aye. Mayor Rogers. Aye. The motion passes with five ayes with council members Fleming and Tibbetts absent. Okay, thank you so much Gail and especially you Gabe. I know the two of you have been working very hard on this and I think we heard in public comment just how accommodating you've been and how much the public has enjoyed working with you and congratulations to everybody who's been working on this for years to get this in place. The council is going to take a dinner break so we will come back at 8.15 for items 15.1 through 15.3 and we'll be back at that point. Three more. Thank you, good evening. Thank you. Huh? Okay. Present. Vice Mayor Rogers. Present. Mayor Rogers. Here. Thank you. Let the record show that all council members are present with the exception of council member Fleming and council member Tibbetts who are absent. All right, we'll go ahead and jump back into our meeting. So we are at item 14, our public comments for non-agenda matters. We'll start in the chamber. Is there anybody who'd like to make comments for items that are not on the agenda tonight? Mr. Dewitt. Hello, sir. My name is Dewane Dewitt. I'm from Roseland. I wanted to congratulate the city on its ability to utilize this hybrid approach to conduct meetings in which you've been able to have people participate from afar and people here in the chambers. I hope you'll continue to do this type of activity on into the future, even after COVID may have been defeated. This is a good process which follows up on something that you passed in your open government ordinance in which you sought a commitment to embrace a culture of open government to ensure public trust, engage the community and establish a system of transparency, public participation and collaboration. This process has been shown to be helpful along those lines. I wanted to talk with you about the power of a promise. I don't know if you remember the idea of when you make a promise, you're attempting to try and keep what you've said to actually occur. And with government, the power of a promise is very important because if people believe you're not keeping the promise, they lose the trust in the government. That's happened for a lot of people recently, not for me, I still believe in our government and in our system, but I do believe there are people who are being paid by the taxpayers who are not keeping the promise. This is especially important during this opportunity that you folks have labeled Santa Rosa Forward in which you have a opportunity to look into the future for a general plan. General plans are aspirational. There are nothing but promises. There's nothing in a general plan that's required actually. There's no stipulation that anything will be done, but there's the hope. And what's really important though is especially when you get money from state and federal sources that you follow through on a process, which is inclusive. And I feel unfortunately, the Santa Rosa Forward process, the general plan 2050 has been discriminatory and exclusive of disadvantaged, underserved, overburdened community members, especially the people in Roseland and South Park who've essentially are being left out if they're not on the Zoom train. So an example of this is that there are no neighborhood advocates on the Technical Advisory Committee. You may think that's no big deal. I've worked with general plans down in big cities like West Oakland, and it's been pointed out if you're not on the Technical Advisory Committee, you're basically on the menu and someone else is choosing what to cook on you. It's not a good process. So the process needs to be restarted with an authentic community engagement component that actually exists, not something that's just talked about by a paid consultant who's blown smoke up people's tailpipes. We really need to have this true authentic community engagement begin. It hasn't happened yet. And so I'm hoping that you folks will take that into account. I'm hoping to stay for the item later in report items, 15.2, depending on how many more hours we spend here tonight. But you got my message. I'm hoping that you understand that message is from a lot of people in Roseland, at least, who can't make it to your meetings. You can't be on that Zoom thing that everybody does these days. So live up to what your talk is. Walk that talk about that open government. Age the community. Thank you, Mr. DeWitt. I'm not seeing any hands raised on Zoom. Do we have any voicemail comments? We had no voice message, public comments on item 14 or 18 non-agent, it matters. Okay, we'll go on to item 15.1. Mayor and members of the city council, item 15.1 is a report and resolution for approval of a disposition and development agreement for a low income development property on city property located at 702 and 716 Bennett Valley Road and 921 and 927 Rutledge Avenue in Santa Rosa, California with Free Bird Development Company, LLC, and Allied Housing Incorporated. Jill Scott, our real estate manager in Nicole Rathburn, our interim housing and community services manager, and Ethan Walsh with Best Best and Krieger will be setting the staff report this evening. And I apologize, Mr. City Manager, before we start item 15.1, I did want to bring up item 15.3 on whether to add it to the agenda, not to jump to the item, but this is in accordance with the open government sunshine ordinance, a necessary step if the council chooses to add item 15.3. Madam City Attorney, could you please explain? Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Yes, the council's early agenda policy generally requires that all items of business appear first on the preliminary agenda, which is published about two and a half weeks before the council meeting, and then again on the final agenda that we published the week prior to the meeting. The early agenda policy however does provide an exception and that is that an urgent item of business that did not appear on the preliminary agenda may nevertheless be placed on a final agenda and discussed and acted upon by the council if there is a showing of good cause and only with a concurrence of six council members or a unanimous vote if there are fewer than six council members present. So a showing of good cause requires a finding by council that as a result of exceptional circumstances beyond the control of the council, compliance with the preliminary agenda requirement would quote impose a substantial burden on the city's ability to conduct its business or result in prejudice to a private person. And tonight item 15.3 was not on the preliminary agenda, but we are asking that the council take up that item tonight despite it having not been on the preliminary agenda. And in fact, it's one of the cases that really falls very squarely within the provision for good cause. The circumstances are that on June 14th, the state water resources control board issued a temporary urgency change order ordering Sonoma water to reduce its diversion from the Russian river by 20% starting July 1st. So just in a couple of days. That in turn requires that the Santa Rosa water whose water comes from a contract with Sonoma water implement a mandatory 20% community wide reduction also by July 1st. So that timeframe between the state board's order and the implementation date of July 1st did not give us time to place it on the, on a preliminary agenda to then be considered by council. So we would ask that the council consider making the findings of good cause to allow item 15.3 to be considered tonight. Vice mayor. I would like to make a motion to find good cause to add 15.3 onto the agenda tonight as an urgent matter. Second. All right, we have a motion from the vice mayor and a second from council member Swenhelm. Are there any questions from council members? Let's go ahead and take public comment on this. If you're interested in providing public comment on whether the council should consider item 15.3, go ahead and hit the raise hand feature on your zoom. I'm also not seeing anybody make their way to the podium here in person. So we'll go ahead and call the vote. Council member Schwedhelm. Aye. Council member Sawyer. Aye. Council member Fleming. Council member Alvarez. Vice mayor Rogers. Aye. Mayor Rogers. Aye. That motion passes with five eyes with council members Fleming and Tibbetts absent. Okay, we'll add that item as item 15.3. We'll continue through our agenda 15.1. Good afternoon, mayor and council members. I'm Jill Scott, the real estate manager and I'm here today with each Ethan Walsh from Best Best in Krieger Law Firm who's helped us negotiate this and also Nicole Rathman, our interim housing manager who has worked on this from the beginning. And we are here to talk to you today about approval of a disposition and development agreement for a low-income housing development on city property, also known as the Old Bennett Valley Senior Center Complex with Freebird Development Company and Allied Housing. Next slide, please. Back in May 29th of 2019, the city issued a request for qualifications and proposals for a low-income housing development that was located to be located on city property at 702 and 716 Bennett Valley Road and 921 and 927 Rutledge Avenue. Those are also known as I said before as the Old Bennett Valley Senior Center Complex. Proposals were due back to the city by July 15th of 2019 and of the two proposals that the city received, Freebird Development and Allied Housing, collectively the developers, were chosen by council on September 24th of 2019. Then an exclusive negotiation agreement was negotiated that we call an ENA with the developer and that was approved by council on May 19th of 2020. Next slide, please. And then pursuant to city council's direction on price and terms, staff has now negotiated the terms of a disposition and development agreement, a DDA, in compliance with the city code as well as the city's stated housing objectives. And staff is here today seeking approval of this DDA from council. Next slide, please. So the disposition and development agreement includes all the prices and terms for the sale of the property and the terms of the development. So in this DDA, the city would convey the property consisting of about 1.9 acres to Freebird Development and Allied Housing. In accordance, the developer would build approximately 62 units of affordable housing on the property. The city will agree to sell the property for $1 on the condition that it will be used for affordable housing with the following restrictions. Approximately 50% of the units will be set aside for extremely low income, formerly homeless households or persons. Approximately 50% of the units will also be set aside for low and very low income households. Next slide, please. The affordable housing restrictions will remain in place for at least 55 years and at closing, the city will record a regulatory agreement ensuring the long-term affordability of that property. And then prior to the close of escrow, the developer must secure all the entitlements for the affordable housing project, which they have already done. Secure all necessary financing for the project, which they are working on and be in a position to be able to pull building permits at the time of the close of escrow. Next slide, please. The purchase price of $1 really reflects the proposed development's benefit to the community and the furtherance of multiple city goals and objectives. Some of those are providing affordable housing at deep affordability levels, including but not limited to formerly homeless households or persons, providing supportive services to assist those formerly homeless households in transitioning from homelessness, helping the city in meeting its obligation to contribute to its fair share of regional housing needs and repurposing underutilized city property for uses that serve a community benefit such as this. Next slide, please. So with that, it is recommended by the Housing and Community Services and Transportation and Public Works Departments that Council, by resolution, approve the Disposition and Development Agreement on city property located at 702 and 716 Bennett Valley Road and 921 and 927 Rutledge Avenue, Santa Rosa, California with Freebird Development Company, LLC and Allied Housing Incorporated, substantially in the form attached to this as exhibit A and subject to city attorney approval. And that is the conclusion of the presentation tonight. And as I mentioned before, myself, Nicole and Ethan are all here to answer any questions that Council might have. Council, any questions? Looking to my colleagues on Zoom, any questions? All right, let's go to public comment and we'll start with folks on Zoom. Start with Gregory Farron. Hi, this is Gregory Farron. Okay, now you get to sit back, relax because I'm gonna pay you the best compliment, the strongest compliment I can give you in my memory. If there was a Mona Lisa of best practices in transferring land to create homeless housing, this would be it. And I'll tell you why I believe that. The biggest gap in housing for homeless, as you probably all know, is the gap between homeless services and homeless facilities, shelters, transitional, all this stuff we put homeless money into and low income housing. And what we do with it, you have for lots of years been doing both and the gap between them is huge. Low income housing people, Burbanks projects, my projects, lots of others. We look at it as they're not really for homeless because first of all, I have no money and second, they're probably gonna flake out after a while. That's the attitude of most of the property managers of the low income housing you fund, okay? And the folks on the other side who are trying to prepare people have no skill to be able to prepare people to get into the low income housing. It's a huge gap. Now, a developer like this who's willing to take the risk to put a permanent supportive housing component in it and you who are giving him away the land free basically, have the ability to go deep into the subsidy. You can say in effect, we'll help you go low. That's best practices like nobody in the state is doing and I want to compliment you. And I have a particular ability to do that because 35 years ago you did the same thing for me. You gave me a piece of property when I was an executive director of a permanent supportive housing program here in Sonoma County Community Support Network four blocks away from this. Down on Grand Avenue, you gave me a piece of property, we built a six bedroom house and it's been used exactly like this. So thank you for taking another stab at doing what's right and I hope we can do a whole lot more. I want to thank Jill, I want to thank Ethan, I want to thank Nicole and everybody who's been associated with this because this is the right way. Thank you. Thank you so much, Gregory. That's the only hand that I see on Zoom. So I'll bring it back to our chambers. Mr. DeWitt. Dwayne DeWitt from Roseland and also the Sonoma County Housing Advocacy Group, totally supportive of this project, would only ask that you put a stipulation for 99 years and not 55 and secondary to that because this old South Park Elementary School once became a senior center which was used a lot in that community which is disadvantaged that you work with these developers to also find a way for there to be a community type meeting room or community room that's available to the seniors in the South Park neighborhood. Essentially they've been at a loss since you narrowed it down to only one senior center in the entire city over on the west side. So this is a good project. This is a good example and to perhaps echo what Mr. Farron just said about that city-owned property being sold for a dollar. Got a lot of other city sites that could be utilized in this same way. One that I think of is the former White House site across the street from the post office downtown right in the center of our city which has already had a study done over a decade ago showing that it could be used for something like housing. So with this in mind I ask that you folks put on your thinking caps and look forward about how to use other Santa Rosa surplus lands for housing. Over on Stony Point Road there are a number of parcels where housing was destroyed by the city to widen the street even though the community had pointed out you didn't have to. You could have widened the street within the existing right of way. After a decade the roads have been widened and parcels sit empty. Those could be parcels used for housing just like this. As a matter of fact some Rosen residents had advocated for that to move some Santa Rosa properties, some houses that had been bought with taxpayers' money to those sites. But the director of transportation and public works I believe it is is his title. He didn't like that idea and those actually valuable housing assets were destroyed. And so you've got at least seven maybe eight parcels on Stony Point Road in which this type of model could be followed also. I hope Ms. Scott will work with the community and not against us. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. DeWitt. I will bring it back. Did we have any voicemail public comments? We did not receive any voice message public comments on item 15.1. Okay, council member Sawyer I'll have you introduce this item for discussion. If you would unmute please. Would like to introduce a resolution of the council of the city of Santa Rosa approving a disposition and development agreement for a low-income housing development on city property located at 702 and 716 Bennett Valley Road and 921 and 927 Rutledge Avenue, Santa Rosa, California with free bird development company LLC and Allied Housing Incorporated and Way Further Reading. Second. So it's a motion by council member Sawyer and a second from the vice mayor. Are there any other comments? Council member Swidham. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I'm just so excited for this project and I know council members, Sawyer and I joined two members of the housing authority that reviewed both of the development proposals and this free bird proposal was just excellent. And I'm so excited. This is really a gift to the community and I think it will serve us, this community serve us very well for years to come. So thank you, Nicole and all Jill and Ethan. Thank you all for bringing this forward to us because this is gonna be a great asset. Well said, Tom. Any other comments? I just also wanted to echo those sentiments. Thank you, Jill and Ethan and Nicole. As was pointed out earlier in the evening when we approved our general plan annual review, we've only created 48 housing units in this income bracket between 2015 and 2020. So we're essentially almost doubling the amount that we've been able to do in one given year by approving this project and by continuing to move forward. That's really life changing for the folks who end up getting into these units and are able to make it. So thank you so much for your efforts. And I agree with one of the speakers. This is something that this community should be considering more of. We have looked at our facilities index and our properties that we have. And I know that it's something that is directly in the interest of both our community as well as the city's bottom line for us to find properties that we might want to divest from and utilize those properties for other purposes such as our priorities around homelessness and housing. And with that, Madam Clerk, if you could please call the roll. Council Member Schwedhelm. Aye. Council Member Sawyer. Aye. Council Member Fleming. Council Member Alvarez. Aye. Vice Mayor Rogers. Aye. Mayor Rogers. Aye. The motion passes with five ayes with council members Fleming and Tibbets absent. Great work. Mr. City Manager, item 15.2. Mayor and members of the council, item 15.2 is also a report item regarding amendments to the open government ordinance. Sue Gallagher, our city attorney, Stephanie Williams, our city clerk, and Magali Tellis, our Deputy Director of Community Engagement will be presenting the staff reports this evening. And good evening, Mayor and council members. And I will mention that Ms. Tyus is not able to be here this evening, but both the city clerk and I are here and we'll cover the proposals. So next slide. So last December, December 2020, the council adopted the city's open government ordinance which set new standards for openness, transparency and access in city government. The ordinance established new guidelines for early publication of agendas, for translation services, for disclosure of public records, for public access and for community education. Recognizing the time and resources needed for implementation of the new requirements, the council provided for a six month transition period. The council said July 1st as the effective date of the ordinance, but did direct staff to begin implementation in the interim and those efforts were undertaken. Council directed staff to report back on the progress issues and challenges. And our first report back was in last March where in that March study session, staff outlined the status of a series of the ordinance provisions, including the agenda posting requirements, translation of agendas, the Spanish language interpretation of our council meetings, meeting requirements for the order of business that had to do with taking public hearings earlier in the agenda and making sure that the public was well informed of any changes to the order of the agenda. We also discussed broadcast requirements, public access and comments, public records and data and our efforts to educate the community on the availability and best methods for getting involved in our public hearings and in our other efforts. And then of course also gave an update on the enforcement provisions. Next slide. In that March study session, staff also reported on the cost estimates to that date again to the date in March. And at that time, the costs included were really focused around translation costs. So it's a translation of agendas at about 2,400 a month, translation of meetings around 2,000 a month, provision of closed captioning in Spanish for about 3,400 a month. There was also costs incurred in connection or anticipated in connection with the citizen's guidebook that is underway and getting close to being done. Again, the ordinance effective date was set for July 1st. Next slide. Staff though does, back at the March meeting the staff did report on some of the difficulties that were being faced and particularly in connection with the early agenda requirements. And we come back today to provide some further updates and to recommend certain adjustments to the ordinance. We do continue to face challenges in the implementation, particularly of the early agenda postings. Our experiences since March have given us additional data and some better clarity on what the issues are. We had been hoping that after a couple of months things would settle down and become a more routine and indeed that has not materialized. We also recognize now that there will be additional time and resources that are gonna be needed to complete implementation of the ordinance. Under the current effective date that would be all go into effect as of a couple of days from now, but we do have a series of elements that have not yet begun. So next slide. So this is really just a reminder of where we are on the agenda deadlines. Before the open government ordinance was adopted, our agenda deadlines were as follows. The preliminary agenda was required to be posted nine calendar days before the council meeting. Sporting documents were posted with the final agenda and the final agenda was required to be published 72 hours before the council meeting. In fact, as a matter of practice, the calendars were posted on the Thursday before the meeting. Under the ordinance and new deadlines, the preliminary agenda is to be published 12 business days before the council meeting. Supporting documents are to be added to the preliminary agenda as they become available. And then the final agenda is to be posted for business days before the council meeting. Next slide. Those agenda deadlines from a staff's perspective are also impacted by the translation needs. So all of the agendas, both preliminary and final, are translated into Spanish. And that translation takes about three days, three business days. So from a staff perspective, the preliminary agenda language must be completed and submitted to the city clerk 15 business days prior to the council meeting. That's three full weeks, assuming no holidays. And the final agenda language must be submitted to the city clerk at least seven business days prior to the council meeting. So one and a half weeks before the meeting, assuming no holidays. Again, that's the final agenda language. Next slide. I'll just mention that the staff have faced significant challenges in those early agenda requirements. And I'm gonna hand it over to the city clerk to talk about what her experience, her office's experience, as well as the experience of some of the staff from departments. Thank you. The city clerk's office has come across some challenges and the area of impacts that we have is the inability to respond nimbly to emerging issues and current events that council and the community may want to respond to. Because of our agenda publication dates, those cannot be submitted in a timely manner to make the prelim agenda for publication. Also grant opportunities, there's usually a short window for applications to be submitted and agenda materials based on the initial estimates of grant applications or awards are subject to change. And when information is changed, then we need to revise the agenda language that is posted. Related to contracts with ongoing negotiations and revisions to reflect evolving terms also requires us to republish the agenda. When language is changed or information is added and that's after the initial publication of the prelim agenda. And then collaboration and partnerships, the inability to respond quickly to partner initiatives. And then it also appeals that are outlined in the ordinance, the general exception provided by ordinance appeals are addressed. Next slide. So with all of that, the clerk's office has had to repeatedly republish the preliminary and final agendas to respond to changing circumstances, new information, revise documents, new documents. And what is happening, it's creating a burden because many times the agenda packets have to be published anywhere from two to maybe 10 times as documents become available. So just republishing the agenda has become a full-time job. And it's not just the republication, but it's also sending out notifications through delivery to all of our subscribers that new documents have been uploaded or changes to a particular item have been made. And then there's also been an increase in the number of times that council has had to make findings of good cause to add an item to the agenda. Prior to the open government ordinance, this relief was used occasionally, but since the intervening six months, council has used to, county tonight has had to use that eight times in the last six months. And then, and so that undermines the purpose of the early publication requirements because those items are not showing up on the pre-limb, the public doesn't see it, and then it's showing up on the final agenda. But what that does is in the translation, we cannot get it back to the translators to translate that new agenda item language in the Spanish translation. So then, so that's creating another obstacle in equity in the information that we are giving out to the public. I'll see you take it from here. Sorry, and I will note, as the city clerk mentioned also, the republications not just are a very significant burden on the city clerk's office, but also with it being new documents being added, documents being revised during that three-week period for the public and for the council, it means that you have to be alert to the notices of new materials. You may have already read them before, now you're gonna have to read them again, so it does create some disruption and potential confusion. I'll also note that under the current open government schedule, the final agendas are published on Wednesdays and the preliminary agendas are published on Thursdays. So for the city clerk's office, not only are they republishing frequently, but they are having two separate days of publication of just primary agendas. The three-week, in particular, that three-week advance submissions for the preliminary agenda have caused a lot of concerns and frustration at the departmental's level as well and difficulties in coordinating that foreign advance having, as the city clerk mentioned, having the, if we're working on a contract, if we're working on a real estate deal, those kinds of things where things are evolving, certainly over that time or under time constraints to try to get things moving really has affected our ability to be nimble in what we're bringing to council and to put a little examples to the emerging issues and current events in the last few months. We've had instances where we wanted to be able to respond very quickly and have the council take a position when there was violence against our AAPI community and also the council's desire to be able to respond quickly when there were sexual assault allegations against a public official in the region. And those kinds of events are not conducive to that three-week lead time, nor do they easily fit the criteria for the good cause exception. So with that, we would ask that the council consider whether the council would be interested in adjusting those time frames for the publication of the preliminary and or the final agenda. Certainly you have a variety of options. You could keep the current deadlines. You could shorten the timeframe for one or the other. You could shift to calendar days rather than business days. That gives also a little more certainty in terms of when the publication is gonna happen. And for example, if we shifted the publication of the preliminary agenda from 12 business days to 12 calendar days, that puts us back to publishing the preliminary agenda the Thursday, a week and a half before the council meeting that meshes with the original recommendations of the open government task force and actually also corresponds to our prior practice. You could align the final agenda with the county. The county is now publishing, it does not publish a preliminary agenda, but it publishes the final agenda eight calendar days before the meeting that's on a Monday, but they do provide exceptions for certain types of matters. And in particular, any matters related to COVID are published the Friday before the Tuesday Board of Supervisors meeting. The other thing that you might consider whether you're moving the weeks around just to align the publication dates for the preliminary and final agendas so that they're occurring on the same day so that the clerk's office will be less burdensome on the clerk's office to have those two publications going on the same day. And the next slide. We'd also like to ask the council to consider an extension of the ordinance's effective date. Although we have been working diligently as a council's well aware, we've had a lot of other issues on our plates during the last six months. And so although we've made good progress, there are many elements that are still to be set in place. And that includes the shortened timeline for completing meeting minutes, the annual reporting for public records, establishing a complaint and appeal process for public records, consolidating the web portal. This is the idea that we're gonna create a single web portal with all the city data to be available. That's gonna be a significant effort. We have begun on education and training, but that is not fully onboard yet. And the citizens guidebook is well underway, but it will take a little bit more time to finalize that guidebook. Again, it is nearing completion, but we have a few more steps to go. And then we have not yet established the forms and procedures for enforcement of the open government ordinance. So we are feeling that we need additional time and resources for the transition. And next slide. So in our staff report, we have included a recommendation to give a six-month extension with direction to continue our implementation with the expectation that the ordinance would be fully implemented by January one next year. Of course, there are a whole series of alternatives. You could do the six-month extension with a three-month check-in, just as we did the first time. You could provide just a three-month extension. You could provide a partial extension, extension for only specified elements. You could say there's no extension and it's gonna go into effect on the first. I will note that we are not asking for any of these measures to be taken as an urgency measure. We didn't feel that it met the standards. So in fact, the ordinance will go into effect on July 1st, whatever action you take tonight. But whatever action you take tonight, we will bring back for a second read if you decide to move forward. And so for a period of time, the ordinance will be in effect, but then it would be, then the effect of date would be extended at that point. So a little bit of a curiosity there, but workable. So happy to answer any questions. Next slide. All right, thank you so much, Madam City Attorney. My first question is just sort of a simple one and it's for both you and our city clerk. You listed a number of different amendments that we could look at, including going back to the way that we had it or having the preliminary agenda have a different date, but keeping the final, do you have a preference in terms of both balancing the demands that are on your offices and also trying to maintain the community involvement and public input that the council values? Oops. My recommendation, the recommendation that we have reached collectively is to have the preliminary agenda published 12 calendar days before the regular meeting of the council and then to have the final agenda published five calendar days before the regular meeting of the city council that will align them both to a Thursday. We would also propose that all of the agenda materials be posted to the extent feasible be posted with the preliminary agenda. So we're currently, there are some agenda materials that are posted with that three week before, but most are not published now until with the final. Some are published midway, but most go with the final. It was our expectation going into this that the things would be published at least by the 12 calendar days. That also well meets our requirements under our settlement agreement in the Sierra Club case. So, and I invite the city clerk to weigh in on that recommendation also. I concur with everything she said it with. We would continue to publish documents even with a changed publication to nine calendar days prior with the prelim agenda documents would still be published that were available to be published and making the publication of both agendas on the same day is also very efficient for our office to be able to create those packets for council and the public. I appreciate that. And so council, I did ask that staff bring this item straight to council for discussion. We did upon implementation say that we would do a check-in before the implementation date on the first. And obviously we did have our check-in in March. I will say I've seen the impact on staff and you all know that I value community engagement above most things. But I do recognize that on particular days Dean is here until seven o'clock, eight o'clock at night waiting for documents to be able to upload them to meet our requirements. And I recognize that there's been a significant impact for our department heads as well. So I'll see if there are any additional questions from council members before we put a motion on the table and go to public comment. Council member Sawyer. Just comment. So I'll just withdraw my name until we're ready for comment. Thank you. Okay. Council member Schwedel. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. And just in the second thing, I think you staff recommendation for the extension, both of you would concur. You would like a six month extension with ongoing implementation efforts. Would that be accurate? Yes, yes. Apologize for not addressing that, but yes. All right, thank you. All right, we'll go to public comment and I'll start on Zoom with Gregory. Well, first I want to apologize. My name is Gregory Farron. I was an active participant in the open government task forces subcommittee, though I wasn't on the open government task force, but many of my friends who have been following this were, and I went before this meeting back through the same history that Sue has just given you. And it's clear that we have made progress, but the progress from what I remember starting the conversation with four years ago was as Sue has described, we who are trying to understand what you're doing and you when we talk to you were frustrated with the fact that at Thursday at four o'clock before the Tuesday meeting was when we got the real information, there was real staff reports and we could then dive into it. Now, half of the staff don't even work on Friday. I mean, there was no one to talk to about what was being published. So we had from Thursday at four o'clock until Monday morning, before we could really even figure it out much less try to lobby anybody to present their points of view. From Monday morning at nine o'clock or eight o'clock until 430 when you're asking us to put in our voicemails, it's not a lot of time to be able to actively participate in government. So we said back it up one day. We were trying to get you guys to do it by four o'clock on Wednesday, on Wednesday for the preliminary on Wednesday for the final one day. Now, I apologize for whatever this 12 business days stuff is. Nobody I've pulled ever asked for that. And if we did, it was our confusion in trying in not following up what was actually in the ordinance because the ordinance says 12 business days. I can see the city clerk and city attorney going bananas over the preliminary. I understand and totally understand and support moving the preliminary back to the 12 calendar days. But it's the final that we have, you know, basically we're being asked if you approve this to go back four years and just accept the fact that it's gonna be Thursdays again. And that's unacceptable. I mean, you can solve this by making it Wednesday. Just, you know, make it like six calendar days and 13 calendar days instead of five and 12. One day, that's the least you owe to the citizens of Santa Rosa to give us a chance to really understand, read and comment on what it is you're doing. It's not a lot to ask. And I again, apologize for whatever this 12 business days is because I can understand from what they've described how really crazy making that would make. So solve their problem with the preliminary, but don't shortchange us on the final. Thank you. Thank you, Gregory. The only hand that I have on Zoom. Do we have anyone in the chamber? Mr. DeWitt. Dwayne DeWitt from Roseland. I would ask that you not do this now that you continue the item through and wait until the next six months to see how it worked out with staff. I believe it is a good thing to have 12 business days. And I did attend most of the meetings of the open government task force when it first started up. I also was in touch with Dick Day and the Sierra Club members when they filed suit to get the city to be more responsive to public involvement. It's not a matter of whether or not staff has too much work to do. I can appreciate that everyone has work to do. They're good workers, they can do a lot of things. I would ask that you basically keep things as they are with the business days in there. Don't model yourself on the county. The county is not tuned in to good public involvement and they don't care about public involvement. You folks are trying to do a better public involvement and an authentic community engagement. With that in mind, some of the stipulations are important at one-10.030. See that letter. It states hard copies shall be made available at the front counter in the city manager's office. That policy needs to continue. The last couple of days I would go into the city manager's office to get information and I was told hard copies weren't going to be available. They were gonna use the little computer tablet and try to have that be the public approach. That's not the best way. Having a binder with the hard copies with all the information there for people to look at at each and every city meeting. That's really important. That's what helped to cause Mr. Harris to be pushed off of the housing authority was when I came forward and pointed out that information was not being made available to the public in a timely manner. People were putting things in late and getting to go forward with that. The planning and economic department does that all the time. So we're nowhere near getting to that open government approach that you and others have advocated for because each little department has its approach and that fiefdom runs it their way and they don't necessarily care. By having this ordinance in place we the public are protected and that's what this is about is a good involvement for the public. So keep it as it is for another six months. Let staff step up to it and it'll all work out. I'll bet when you say it's gotta be done people get it done. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. DeWitt. I'll bring it back. There was Gregory's suggestion moving the preliminary agenda to calendar days as opposed to business days but maintaining that additional one day for the final. Would that work for staff? I'm gonna defer to the city clerk because it really affects their workings. Certainly moving the preliminary up a week makes it much more feasible for the departments. It does. The only concern that I would have is the time required for translation services in order to do that. As it is we have our agenda review meetings on Monday and we need to get that to the translation services by early afternoon Monday so they can get it back to us. By Wednesday morning for publication. And then the final agenda is Thursday to meet the 72 hour. Sorry, let me clarify that point. As it currently stands we send our final agenda to the translators on a Thursday. So we have it back 72 hours which means we would have it back no later than end of business on Tuesday. So we can publish on Wednesday with the English agenda. For the prelim agenda we send it to the translators Monday afternoon as soon as we can after our agenda review. So we have it back for the preliminary publishing on Thursday afternoon by one. So it's a very tight turnaround in its current formation. All right, council member Alvarez you have this item so I'll have you put a motion on the table and then we'll open it up for discussion. Thank you, mayor. I would like to introduce an ordinance of this council of the city of San Rosa amending section one dash one zero dot zero three zero of the San Rosa city code and postponing the effective date of chapter one dash 10 of the San Rosa city code open government to January 1st, 2022. Second. John, you had a comment? I do thank you, mayor. You know, when we were back meeting with the open government task force and dealing with the sunshine ordinance, et cetera I think that we tried our best to accommodate as many of the changes as we thought we could. And we did have conversations around the possibility that we wouldn't be able to make all the changes we wanted to make and that some of the changes we might make wouldn't necessarily hold because of certain practicalities and realities of what we do as council members and what our staff does to keep the community informed. So I see this as a compromise and I very much respect the situation that our clerk finds her office in and agree with the clerk and our city attorney on those changes that they feel are necessary to enable them to most accurately do their jobs. So, and letting it go for another six months, I think is smart. We took this amount of time to find out where the holes were, where the gaps were and where the difficult parts of the document that we came up with originally. And we, and like I said, we knew that there may be some sticking points. So I'm more than happy to support the needs of our city clerk and the city attorney's office when it comes to making these changes. And I support their recommendation as the subject matter experts in getting these agendas to the community and the challenges thereof. Vice mayor. I just wanna say it is not my desire to burden any of our staff, but it is my desire to be transparent for the public. So I am on board for finding a compromise so that we can get both things done. And I think by allowing the staff to have additional time to find that nice, comfy compromise is a good idea instead of rushing into something that we really don't have the manpower to fulfill and continue. I don't think that that has the desired effect. I agree. And I think shifting from the business days to the calendar days on the preliminary is going to relieve a lot of stress for staff, particularly on the preliminary. I am gonna offer a friendly amendment and see if we can't find that compromise from what we're hearing from staff and what we're hearing from the public to have the preliminary agenda be calendar days and then have the final agenda still have that additional day so that it gets published by close of business on Wednesday. Cause I do think that the point that was made by the public of having time to interact with staff and council members is important. And in my experience working with our city clerk and our city attorney and city manager over the last six months, it does really seem to be the preliminary agenda that is of the most concern, more so than the final publication. And if maintaining that one day for the final publication doesn't work, ultimately, we have another six months to muddle through it and we have an opportunity at that point to have that honest discussion with the public. But so I'll make that as a friendly amendment and see if I can get a second. I'll second that. Or if the motion maker will accept it, sounds like he has. Council member Sawyer, would you accept that? You were on mute. My Jesus. Yes, but is it necessary that we wait six months? I mean, if we really find that they're tearing out their hair in the clerk's office because of something that we think is doable, they're asking for a change. They're asking for a little bit more relief than we're offering them. I'm sure they can do it if we tell them to. But I would like to know in three or four months how it's going. I don't think I wanna wait six months. If that's okay with you, Mayor, to kind of bring it back to us again without waiting a happy year, would that be reasonable? How about a happy compromise, council member? How about if staff finds that this is unworkable, they'll bring it to the open government subcommittee to be able to discuss and ultimately bring to the council? Perfect. I accept your friendly amendment. I'll second that friendly amendment. Okay. Vice mayor. I have a comment. Our staff are so awesome. I kind of feel like sometimes getting them to say that we have asked them to do something doesn't come that easy. So you're saying that if they find that they can't do it, but I think that they just kind of, like John said, get things done. So I would just like them to check in with us in three months, regardless, just to let us know because my goal is to support them as much as we can. So if we just have the firm, they check in in three months and we go from there. And as a point of clarification, do you mean us as in the full council? No. Or us as in the open government? Open government works for me as long as they have a point of check-in. And that's fine by me. Any other comments? Okay, let's call the vote. Council member Schwedhelm. Aye. Council member Sawyer. Aye. Council member Fleming. Council member Alvarez. Aye. Vice Mayor Rogers. Aye. Mayor Rogers. Aye. That motion passes with five ayes with council members Fleming and Tibbets absent. And that collective sigh that you hear is from staff far and wide. Let's go on to item 15.3. Yes, thank you very much. Mayor remembers the council item 15.3 as a report item regarding the adoption of a stage three mandatory 20% reduction in water use of the city's water shortage contingency plan. Jennifer Burke, our director of Santa Rosa water and Peter Martin, deputy director of water resources will be presenting the staff report this evening. Thank you and good evening, Mayor Rogers and members of the council as city interim city manager, Colin mentioned we are here this evening to recommend implementation of stage three of our water shortage contingency plan. If I can have the next slide, please. Just by way of background and a reminder for the council and the public Santa Rosa derives approximately 94% of our water supply from Sonoma water, which is the wholesale water supplier for the region. Sonoma water has the right to divert, store, and re-divert water from the Russian river. This is governed by a state, state water rights commonly referred to as decision 1610. In addition to their ability to divert water, decision 1610 also governs the amount of minimum in stream flow, or in other words, the amount of water that needs to be released by both Lake Minasino and Lake Sonoma in order to maintain certain flows in the river. As most folks are aware, last year was one of our driest years on record. It was actually the third driest year on record. And this year, unfortunately is shaping up to be potentially the driest year on record. We have been following water supply conditions very closely, as well as rainfall. We have been coordinating very closely with Sonoma water and we have been preparing for the potential implementation of drought conditions. Earlier this year in February in recognition of the rainfall not materializing over the winter, Sonoma water did petition for reduced releases from Lake Minasino to try and preserve supply in that reservoir. We go to the next slide, please. Although we have been messaging and following this closely since December of last year and recognizing that it has been a dry year, coordinating and collaborating with Sonoma water, as I mentioned, when the rainfall didn't materialize, we realized that additional action needed to occur. So on April 21st, the governor declared a drought emergency in Sonoma and Mendocino counties. Sonoma County followed suit very quickly after. And at that same time, Sonoma water, working with their water retailers, decided that they would petition the state board to allow for reduced minimum in-stream flows in the lower Russian River, meaning that would allow less releases from Lake Sonoma, which is the water supply for the contractors of Sonoma water, including Santa Rosa. And in doing so and petitioning the state for this reduction, they also committed to reduce their diversions from the Russian River by 20% compared to 2020 levels. Next slide, please. To help support the efforts of Sonoma water petitioning the state, on May the third, the Water Advisory Committee or the WAC adopted a resolution urging all the water retailers and members of the Sonoma Ren Water Saving Partnership to reduce their water use voluntarily by 20%. On May 18th, we brought this recommendation forward to the city council and thank you to the city council's leadership. You adopted a resolution requesting 20% community-wide voluntary reductions in water use. Next slide, please. At that meeting, we had also indicated to the council that if the temporary urgency change order was issued by the state and there was a required reduction in diversions from the Russian River, we would be back in front of the council recommending a mandatory stage of our shortage plan. And that is where we are tonight. On June 14th, the State Water Board issued a temporary urgency change order in essence allowing Sonoma water to release water as if we were in critical conditions, meaning they were able to keep the minimum in-stream flow requirements at 25 cubic feet per second in the upper Russian River and reduce the minimum in-stream flows in the lower Russian River from 85 cubic feet per second to 35 cubic feet per second, saving precious water supply in late Sonoma. In addition, as anticipated, the State Water Board also requested that Sonoma water reduce their diversions from the Russian River by 20% compared to 2020. And this requirement starts July 1st in just two days. Next slide, please. In response to this reduction in diversions, Sonoma water now has a water shortage. Section 3.5 of our agreement for water supply outlines how Sonoma water will allocate water during a water supply shortage. This section of the agreement does take into account demand hardening and water conservation implementation by the retailers, but this section of the agreement also provides that the WAC by unanimous vote can determine an alternate allocation methodology. As I mentioned earlier, we have been coordinating and collaborating with Sonoma water, as well as the water retailers for many, many months on this and this potential drought. And on May 3rd, the TAC, the Technical Advisory Committee to the WAC, brought forward a recommendation for a temporary allocation of water deliveries this summer, assuming that we would be in drought conditions. The WAC unanimously adopted this temporary allocation, and that is what Sonoma water is using to allocate water to all of the water contractors, including Santa Rosa. These allocations vary from month to month with the maximum reduction in any one month for Santa Rosa being 20% less than what we purchased in 2020. Therefore, to ensure that we meet this supply shortfall, it is appropriate to trigger stage three of our water shortage contingency plan. Next slide, please. And now I'm gonna turn it over to our deputy director of water resources, Peter Martin. He's going to go into the details of stage three of our shortage plan, what it requires, and how we will support our customers to achieve savings. Peter. Good evening, Mayor Rogers and members of the council, as director Burke mentioned, I will be walking you through the actions being considered today for adoption and how we plan to roll out various response actions over the next few months to address the water shortage scenario. So first, you've probably just recently seen this slide, but what is a water shortage contingency plan? This council is uniquely familiar with the water shortage contingency plan as you recently adopted an updated version of plan alongside the five year scheduled update of the urban water management plan on June 8th. However, I just want to highlight the function of the plan, which is twofold. The state-managed plan helps the city be prepared for water shortages, like we're experiencing right now, by defining the levels of severity of the shortage and the corresponding stages of action. Our plan happens to have eight stages with each stage anchoring a commensurate level of reduction needed. The plan also identifies the corresponding response and actions needed for each shortage stage. Our plan identifies a variety of demand reduction measures and efforts, including outreach and education measures, prioritized customer service and assistance, and of course, prohibitions and restrictions to meet the necessary reduction in water supplies. The plan outlines how we'll institute compliance and enforcement objectives and how we'll monitor or report out shortages and drop measures to regulatory agencies. Next slide. So you can go ahead and advance the slide a little bit more. Perfect. As I mentioned in the last slide, the plan has eight stages. Given that we now know the allocations and shortage scenarios, Director Burke just briefed you on, we're recommending the Council and Act mandatory stage three of the water shortage contingency plan today, consistent with an up to targeted 20% reduction in community-wide water use. I do want to make sure that it's understood that this stage includes a community-wide target reduction that will be achieved with various demand reduction activities collectively and does not place targets on individual customers or households use. We will be proposing to ask all of our customers to comply with several prohibitions and restrictions and strictly adhered to various water-saving behaviors that they may or may not be already instituting in their home or business to achieve 20% savings target. Next slide. So stage three of the water shortage contingency plan has several prohibitions and restrictions on water use that are necessary measures designed to help the city achieve a 20% reduction in water use this summer. Of course, our waterway ordinance is always of an effect which prohibits leaks or breaks in the customer's property and has explicit prohibitions on irrigation overspray and runoff from the customer's property. This is always enforced whether we're in a shortage or not but stage three has several important prohibitions that will need to be communicated to the public should the Council proceed with the actions proposed today. Those include strict limitations on irrigation between the hours of 8 p.m. and 6 a.m. to reduce watering times and evaporative losses. And all outdoor hoses must be outfitted with shutoff nozzles. We happen to offer those to free to customers. No washing of hard surfaces like sidewalks and driveways unless required for public health and safety. And restaurants are to only serve water upon request. Hotels and lodging establishments will need to message their guests about washing towels and lens upon request and pressure washing with potable water is also prohibited with limited exceptions or with a variance issued by the department. Next slide. So the water shortage contingency plan also outlines ways that we enforce the prohibitions and restrictions in the plan. Our strategy is very simple. We take a progressive approach to enforcement and work to educate and alert customers to issues and provide them with information or resources to address problems as they come up. When an issue of non-compliance is found staff typically follow up promptly by a letter or phone and sometimes hanging what's called an oops tag at a residence or business that opens the door for education and resolution of the issues. The vast majority of the time the customer is appreciative and works well with staff to resolve leaks or water waste. Often they don't even know that an issue is occurring. However, staff can progress the issue warnings and assess enforcement measures including penalties and later stages of the plan or also up to suspension of service of the customers uncooperative or unresponsive. Also do want to note there are variance procedures for customers that may have a health or safety need that's specific to various prohibitions and restrictions in the plan. Next slide. So I do want to point out too that the water shortage plan identified the council can institute a 7.5% water shortage charge which could be applied on the customer usage charge that being the amount of water per 1,000 gallons on each billing cycle. The water shortage rate structure including the water shortage charge was approved by city council at the rate hearing in May is meant to address budget shortfalls associated with loss revenues due to reduced sales. Also as outlined in the city shortage planning pursuant to policy 57, Santa Rosa water reserve policy catastrophic reserves may be used to offset revenue loss due to mandatory water use restrictions. Although Santa Rosa water will experience revenue losses due to anticipated reductions in water sales from this action proposed by the council we recognize during the year that the drought was a possibility and begin planning for the possibility of reduced water sales. Santa Rosa water thus incorporated forecasted 10% reduction of revenues for fiscal years 2021 and 2022 and our designated fund balance partially established to ensure rates moving and emergencies is forecasted to be ample enough to address that short-term revenue loss. Therefore, in recognition of the challenges our community is still facing from COVID and additional challenges from the drought Santa Rosa water staff are not recommending the institution the water shortage charge at this time. Santa Rosa water staff are recommending the council authorized the use of catastrophic reserves through this action proposed today if necessary to address additional unforeseen revenue shortfalls for the water enterprise fund that will occur from reduced water sales. Santa Rosa water will use these catastrophic reserves funds only if revenue and undesignated fund balances cannot cover the cost of operations due to reductions in water use. We will of course continue to watch revenues and operational fund balances closely and we'll return to the council to consider implementation of the water shortage charge if it is deemed necessary. Next slide. So I just wanna kind of talk through some of the actions that are already ongoing and how we'll continue to proceed with a lot of our outreach over the next few months. Outreach is without a doubt the most important cost-effective tool we have for ensuring our community achieves targeted savings. We continue to work with our 14 partner agencies and the snowmower and second water partnership to execute our drought is here, save water regional drought campaign. This campaign is configured around a goal of helping customers achieve immediate savings in their home or businesses throughout the region. The focus is gonna be on simple changes that can help our community save water immediately including spending or reducing outdoor irrigation, finding and fixing leaks and replacing non-efficient water fixtures where possible. It's by no doubt that you've probably already seen the high visibility signage popping up around Santa Rosa in various multimedia, radio, digital and print advertising that will continue throughout the remainder of the year. Next slide. And also something we're most excited about is the recent launch of our new WaterSmart portal with the recent water meter upgrade project completed and all 53,000 water customers connected to advanced metering infrastructure. Customers can now track and analyze hourly, daily, weekly and monthly water use including creating customized notifications for high usage and access various water saving tools. You may have already seen a postcard in the mail from Santa Rosa water this month encouraging customers to sign up. Registration is very easy and to get started, all our customer needs is their customer number, account number and last bill them out from their water bill. More information is available at srcity.org slash WaterSmart portal. Next slide. Of course, we continue to offer a wide variety of over 20 rebate programs, residential and commercial, industrial and institutional and irrigation customers. We're currently messaging our customers to take advantage of our rebate programs by encouraging them to swap out that less efficient clothes washer, upgrade the irrigation systems, perhaps install a gray water capture and reuse system and also rainwater harvesting systems and maybe even going further and perhaps swapping out that lawn for a water efficient landscape. Many of these programs do require applications and pre-inspections and our water use efficiency team is ready to help people save water in their homes and businesses today. We also offer free shower heads, faucet aerators, hose and nozzles, dye tabs to find and fix toilet leaks and replacement toilet flappers. Next slide. We also continue to offer other technical resources delivered by our very talented water use efficiency team. Customers can request a free DIY home checkup kit. We continue to offer this as a virtual service until we can return to entering customers' homes. Customers can also request water saving devices and schedule an outdoor in-person visit by one of our WaterSmart technicians. When customers make these requests and audit their homes and businesses, we use these customer introductions to pair our customers with various rebate programs and more. Next slide. We continue to use our drought specific website as sort of a catch-all to direct the public to the latest information on the drought, restrictions and prohibitions and other resources. That webpage is srcity.org slash save water. And we'll just continue to ramp up our presence on social media, radio and digital media. We'll continue to cycle through content and keep it fresh and make sure our public stays engaged. We've utilized and we continue to utilize direct mailings to our customers, along with information on bill envelopes and inserts to get the information out about the drought and program offerings. We too have been leveraging our employees as a resource and asset and educating and encouraging them to do everything they can to show our community that we're also doing our part to save water too. In addition to giving them the tools to respond to customers and the public as we move forward through this critical drought situation. High visibility banners and signage are currently being spread throughout our entire city. And we're seeing a significant increase in our online waterways reporting page and hotline. We're also leveraging partnerships with the Metro Chamber of Commerce, Hispanic Chamber of Commerce of Sonoma County, Visit Santa Rosa and other business oriented memberships to get the word out and also provide resources to those folks as well. Next slide. I just wanted to point out we had a recently a very successful regional drought drop by event on June 12th with Santa Rosa water staffing at location at the county fairgrounds and other Russian river water agencies hosting 15 other locations throughout Mendocino, Sonoma and Marin counties. This is our second drought giveaway event we've hosted this year. As you can see from this picture, Council Member Sawyer rolled up the sleeves and pitched in along with many others to hand out more than 1500 drought kits on that day. We have two more events that we're planning for the summer and other parts of the city and we'll be announcing further details as they become available. And next slide. As far as targeted outreach, our teams are currently reaching out to our commercial, industrial and institutional interrogation accounts to inform other potential restrictions and water use targets. We'll continue to focus on outdoor water use because that is where the most impact can be made quickly this summer. We've got plenty of resources. We are offering on how to reduce watering times without impacting the customer's investments and permanent landscapes. And we're directing our larger customers to our green exchange turf replacement program and other large landscape rebates. Our water waste patrols are getting a lot of attention in the newspapers. You can imagine and we've been out in the community since May can provide that service and getting out on the streets. We also have a whole series of workshops coming up through the remainder of the year that continue to focus on implementing low water landscapes and outdoor irrigation improvements. I just want to point out all this outreach has resulted in an enormous response in the community. We've seen a 500% increase in weekly volumes of customers requesting a variety of assistance and pre-approvals for rebates since March. Our Wadi's Fissions team is very busy and the department is of course pooling our resources to continue to deliver excellent customer service and resources. Just as we're kind of closing out this presentation, I just want to note that we've been here before in previous droughts and the playbook has already been written with regard to community educating with our community. We of course are grateful to our community for their previous commitments to water conservation as evidenced by the fact that we have one of the lowest gross gallons per capita per day in the region. We're confident that we'll be able to continue to execute our plans this summer with the help of our residents and meet our targets for Wadi's reduction targets together. And so next slide. So with that, we have the resolution for the council's consideration today. Santa Rosa water is of course recommended that the council by resolution, one declare a drought emergency, two adopt stage three of the city's water shortage contingency plan, three direct staff to implement the water conservation program as defined by stage three to realize a mandatory community wide Wadi's reduction of 20%. And then authorize utilization of the water enterprise catastrophic reserve funds only if necessary. And last slide. Of course, I just always like to close and point out that we're here to help folks save for water smart resources. Folks can visit srcity.org slash water smart and for the latest drought updates, you can visit srcity.org, save water. That concludes my presentation. All right, well, thank you so much, Jennifer and Peter really appreciate the presentation. And I'm sad that we are at this point but you had messaged us pretty early on that we might be, what I do know is that Santa Rosans when they're asked to conserve have come through historically extremely well and have met the challenge. You had a data point at our last meeting that unfortunately I can't remember it exactly but it was since the early 90s, Santa Rosa has doubled in population and has only increased our total water usage in actual water usage. I think it was 15% Peter. It's actually decreased by 14% despite a doubling of population since then. I've got it a little bit backwards which is just incredible. So this is a community that's gone through this before it is a community that is incredibly efficient. And I know folks are tracking that. If we do not hit the 20% reduction for our mandatory reduction, then what happens? So a great question, Mayor Rogers. We are working very closely with Sonoma Water to have as much data as we possibly can. So typically we get monthly data. We are working to have data on more frequent increments so we can know exactly how we're doing in comparison to our allocations. And if need be, we'll take additional actions, additional outreach, additional calls for customers asking them to suspend irrigation. So we have a number of plans in place on what we'll do if we're not seeing the savings we need. As we continue to go throughout this summer, if we're not achieving those savings, we may be back in front of the council with a recommendation for a higher stage of our shortage plan. As we go higher in our shortage plan, our restrictions and prohibitions become much more severe and austere. And so we're really hoping that our community will be able to respond, save water now and help us achieve this 20% so we can make it through to the winter and hopefully see some rains return and then determine what we will need to do to get through this next year. Okay, thank you. Councilor, are there any additional questions? Go ahead, Vice Mayor. So I think I have been speaking to you guys a little too much because my husband's green grass is now hay. And I've been telling him about this cash for grass, but it's not grass anymore. It's hay because we just totally jumped on board. What happens with community members that have already started their preserving of water and not doing the outdoor irrigation? Is there anything that they can do in order to still take advantage of programs like that? Should they start watering to get a little green or like? No. Great question, Vice Mayor. No, please don't start watering again. We really appreciate the fact that you've suspended irrigation. We can look back at irrigation patterns. So what we would ask is if folks are interested, we have ways that we can determine if there was healthy watered grass before. We can tell them what the requirements are for participating in the program and then help them with what they need to do to qualify and get the rebate once they permanently remove that turf and replace it with low water use alternatives. Thank you. Cause I just think it's so important not for people to wait to get involved in programs like that but that we just really try to get ahead of this and save water where we can. Council Member Schwedhelm. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I feel compelled to start my comments with drought is here, save water. But I do appreciate all the work that San Jose water has done, including your virtual background, Jennifer. And I wish, I think I know where that is. I wish it wasn't from our area. This is where it's happening elsewhere. And also I do appreciate, I saw with some of the state language, they're calling it critical because I remember Jennifer, a couple of several weeks ago, I asked you, how would you describe it? And I think that might have been the same word that you describe where we're at. So I know in May I've looked at drought is here, save water more as a suggestion. And now it's more almost like a demand. We need to do this together. So my question for you, I've gotten some comments from community members about ongoing construction. I have a lot of housing units. What is the plan and how does this mandatory 20% reduction impact any ongoing currently under construction projects? Thank you, Council Member Schwadhelm. That's a great question. And we do get questions about development. One of the things that you saw not too long ago, Council was our water management plan where we really take a look at the projections and the needs for water supply to meet the needs of our general plan. In doing so, we do recognize and state very much in our plan that we have water supply under normal conditions and even under relatively dry conditions. Under single driest year conditions, though we do have a shortfall and we use our shortage plan to ensure that we get through that timeframe. Right now we are on a 20% reduction. It is incredibly dry. I will also note though that Lake Sonoma is a very big reservoir and we do have enough water for multiple years. We're not down to, you know, this is just one year. So that's why we are at a 20%. In higher stages of our shortage plan, we do require new development if they want to continue to develop during times of water supply shortage to completely offset their demand in essence be water neutral from stage three which is 30% and above. So it's a one to one, two to one, three to one and a four to one offset of their new demand on the system. I will also note that new development is required to be incredibly efficient. So new development has to comply with what's known as our water efficient landscape ordinance which is a very minimal landscaping allowed and pretty much does not even allow any high water use plants including turf to be installed and also has to comply with the Cal Green Building Ordinance requiring them to be 20% more efficient than basically the high efficiency standards. Thank you for that. One other question I had just regarding city facilities specifically city parks, what happens to that turf in those locations as a result of this, if we go in this direction? That's also a great question. I know Peter has been working very closely with the parks department. So I'll ask him to talk about what we've worked out with the parks. But I do think you're gonna see that Brown is the new green. Peter? Yeah, yeah, we've been in contact with the parks maintenance folks for several months now. They are well-prized of the new restrictions and they are a customer just like anybody else. So the goal is for them to reduce their water usage as well. So obviously they're gonna do their best to try to preserve those things that provide the most benefit. But I leave that up to them to decide but we're working very closely with them to help them work out budgets for all the areas. We continue to provide that service whether we're in drought or not. So we definitely have a great relationship with them and working closely with them. Great, thank you. Council Member Sawyer? Thank you, Mayor. I just wanted to tag on to the cash for grass program in case people were considering it. There's one hitch. There's not a program to replace your lawn with fake turf. Then there are a number of really good reasons why they can't do that. But it really needs to be a low water use landscape but not fake grass. So take that off your plate if you were thinking that that will work in the program because it doesn't and there are, like I said, real logical reasons why they can't do that. I just wanted to cover that base because it did come up with one of my constituents. Any additional questions, Council? Okay, we'll go to public comment. Start with Zoom and see if anybody is raising their hand. Seeing none. Also don't see anybody in the chamber who is giving public comment as well. We have any voicemail public comments on this item? We do not, Mayor. Okay, then I will bring it back and Council Member Schwedhelm, this is your item. Emergency adopting stage three of the city's water shortest contingency plan, directing staff to implement the water conservation program as defined by stage three, requiring customers to reduce community wide water use by 20% and authorizing use of water enterprise fund financial reserves and waive for the reading of the text. Second. Motion by Council Member Schwedhelm, second by Council Member Sawyer. Let's go ahead and call the vote. Council Member Schwedhelm. Aye. Council Member Sawyer. Aye. Council Member Fleming. Council Member Alvarez. Aye. Vice Mayor Rogers. Aye. Mayor Rogers. Aye. That motion passes with five ayes with Council Members Fleming and Tibbets Absent. Great, thank you so much, Peter and Jennifer. All right, let's move on to item 17. Yeah, item 17, we have no written communications. We'll go to item 18, our public comment, our second public comment period for the evening. I'm looking to zoom. We have one hand and that's Gregory. Thank you, Mayor. Following on a conversation about hoping it was gonna rain or hoping it will rain, I can't help but advise you all to look at the budget that was passed last night by the state because from my point of view, the state made it rain last night and the trailer bills that are coming up today and Wednesday, Thursday are just gonna add to it. I usually, as someone once referred to me as a sort of a hope thermometer, that when I'm hopeful that they should be or that they should be prepared for some money showing up somewhere. And I gotta tell you, my thermometers as hot as my hot tub right now, there are a lot of new programs that this legislature agreed to do, which zoomed my mind. I know Mayor Rogers, you worked in the legislature closely with Senator McGuire. I worked with Peter Bayer 40 years ago and I've never seen a legislature that is taking as much risk as this one did last night. So I hope it shows up. They're all talking about, you know, finding counties and cities and putting it in the locals. I hope they do that. I hope you guys continue to work with the county in the continuum of care because it's gonna take all of us to be able to figure out how to do this right. And it's a chance I don't want us to miss. I have confidence in all of you. And I just wanna let you know that it's coming. Thank you for those comments, Gregory. And I will piggyback on them for a quick moment. Gregory is absolutely right. There's a substantial investment in community programs in particular in homelessness in the trailer bills that are working their way through Sacramento. And in particular, I also wanted to do a special shout out that a chance to talk with council member Alvarez about this yesterday, that our members of the delegation have also been able to secure an additional million dollars in the trailer bills for the Roseland library, which is obviously something that we have discussed at this council day quite a bit. And it's one of many things that are positive coming out of Sacramento for us to continue to thank our legislators on and to continue to work on it and push here in our local community. On that happy note, we will go ahead and adjourn tonight's meeting and we'll see you all soon.