 here before we get this meeting started is everything okay with you? Hello Spanish interpreter testing one two. Thank you Pablo. I don't think we need any. I'd like to ask the interpreter currently on the Spanish Channel to commence to translation of the meeting for those just joining the meeting live translation in Spanish is available and members of the public or staff wishing to listen in Spanish can join the Spanish Channel by clicking on the interpretation icon and zoom on the toolbar it looks like a globe once you join the Spanish Channel we recommend you shut off the main audio so you only hear the Spanish translation interpreter will you please respect restate this in Spanish Pablo could you restate in Spanish all right welcome everyone to our September 26 2023 Santa Rosa City Council meeting it is now 12 30 33 and we will be starting our meeting seeing a quorum madam city clerk can you please call roll thank you mayor councilmember staff here councilmember Rogers here councilmember Okrepke here councilmember Fleming here councilmember Alvarez vice mayor McDonald here mayor Rogers as it let the record reflect all council members are present we will now proceed to item 2.1 which is our closed session of the day conference with legal counsel on existing litigation madam city clerk can you please facilitate public comment on that item we are now taking public comment on item 2.1 if you are participating via zoom please raise your hand or dial star 9 you will have two minutes and a timer will alert at the end of that period if you would like to provide your name please do so first before speaking we have no one in chamber for in chamber public comment we have no zoom hands raised perfect we will now recess to closed session thank you I'd like to ask the interpreter currently in the Spanish Channel to commence translation of the meeting for those just joining the meeting live translation in Spanish is available and members of the public or staff wishing to listen in Spanish can join the Spanish Channel by clicking on the interpretation icon in the zoom toolbar it looks like a globe once you join the Spanish Channel we recommend you shut off the main audio so you only hear the Spanish translation interpreter will you please restate this in Spanish this is interpreter could you restate Pablo we lost you the how to participate in message correct correct thank you welcome to this meeting for the just arrived those who would like to hear this meeting in Spanish interpretation in Spanish will be available and members or staff who wish to listen in Spanish can join the channel to join you can click on the interpretation icon that appears in the tool bar of the zoom function once you join the channel it is also recommended that you turn off your audio primario para solamente escuchar la interpretación al español welcome back everyone it is now 133 and we will resume our meeting madam city clerk may you please call the roll thank you mayor councilmember staff your councilmember Rogers here councilmember oquepe here councilmember Fleming here councilmember Alvarez vice mayor McDonald here mayor Rogers present let the record reflect all councilmembers are present we will now proceed to item 3.1 and 3.2 our study sessions for the day madam city manager thank you mayor good afternoon members of council item 3.1 is the draft general plan senator Rosa forward if the team could calm down and please introduce yourself for the record thank you good afternoon mayor Rogers vice mayor McDonald members of the council my name is Jessica Jones I'm the deputy director for planning so we are here today I'm with joined here with Sherry Meade senior planner and Beatrice Guerrero Anna who's also a senior planner and equity and public health planner here with the city Beatrice and Sherry will be going through the presentation for you I just wanted to give a quick overview of what we're gonna be looking at today as you know the general plan process has been going on for a couple of years now we've been doing a tremendous amount of outreach with the community and also work with our boards and commissions to develop a draft general plan for the city so they are going to be going through that process that we've been through for the last two years talk to you about the general plan that has been drafted to date based on all of that input walk you through each of the chapters and then tell you about our next steps moving forward through this process what we are looking forward looking for from each of you is your comments and feedback and questions on the draft general plan that's been presented to date once we have that information we will take that along with the comments that we've received from the public and from each of our boards and commissions that we have also visited and we'll be revising that draft general plan and coming up with a final document ultimately for council's consideration of adoption so for process for today if it works for the council one suggestion and we we did this with the planning commission would be to go chapter by chapter for your comments but however the council wants to proceed with that we're happy to take all comments and questions that you've you've prepared for us so I just I want to thank the council and the public for the participation in this process as well as our city staff there's been an incredible amount of work that has gone into this and what you see today and so we also just to note we also have representatives from each of the city departments who are also here in case we've got specific questions about various topics so with that I'm going to hand it over to sharing Beatrice we always alternate who does what in these presentations so Patrice is going to get us started and here she goes good afternoon city council members major by its mayor members of the public and staff that is present here joining us for this presentation as Jessica mentioned we really appreciate the work that all community members as well as community partners non-profit organizations as well as our city staff has put on this project and as was mentioned before my name is Beatrice Guerrero I'm a senior planner for the advanced planning team and I'm co-presenting today with my colleague Sherry Meats and today we have been we're presenting to you the draft general plan since we know that we have a new a fair amount of new council members we want to go through the background on the general plan update and do a draft a presentation of the draft and introduction as well as let you know how our community involvement strategy has been implemented on the ground and who we've heard from and how and also to talk a little bit more about our partnership with the public art program and how we've been engaging youth and as well as our partnership with artists and Kim's in creative who has been part of this youth engagement process and last but not least important the next steps that we have for this general plan draft and thanks so much for spending time with us I want to just mention briefly that our presentation is going to be bilingual on the screens we know we have an interpreter on the other side of the of the of the Zoom call but we just want to make a point that more than a third of our community speaks Spanish and we want to recognize that and part as part of the policies that we're including in a general plan on community engagement we're talking about language access so a big part of what we're doing today is trying to break that language barrier and including this on on our presentation today that said I'm just going to go back to the beginning and why talking talking about why planning is a relevant matter in our community and for any community and why a general plan is relevant for us to be updated as as a city who who has been through a lot of challenges including COVID like any other community in the world but also wildfires and other things that have happened in our community so as you probably know communities are planned thinking about where are we going to locate housing where are we going to locate stores where are we going to locate parks roads schools and many other services that we require as as community members however this is not the only relevant part when we talk about a general plan update we're also talking about all the policies that will make change in our community and a big part of this requires us to think about people and revisiting how we're going to plan policies and programs that improve the quality of life of our community and that said the general plan update process that we're currently working on and that we're going to be talking about today is a process that we called Santa Rosa Forward as a branding name Santa Rosa Advanced in Spanish and this this process have been has been a process that we have worked on for the last two years and a half and the goal of of this whole process is to think about how we want to improve our city Santa Rosa and now and into the future till 2050 so that said we want to talk to you a little bit about the process that we have gone through and we are currently on the draft general plan which means we have a document that contains goals policies and actions that have been included throughout a process that started with our community involvement strategy meaning we gathered presented to city council at the beginning of a project to let you know how we're going to engage community members and we'll talk a little bit more about that process we created an existing conditions report analysis and a vision statement and what this means is an existing condition report is basically a document with demographics data about the city geographical information about the city as well as many other relevant things that we need to think about the future while while we do a planning process and particularly a general plan update the third step that we did was a land use and circulations alternatives Sherry will be talking about it a little bit further in the in the process so you know what we went through a few of you were part of this process while we presented because we came to council to let you know what were the alternatives and then what was the preferred alternative that our community has had chosen and how we worked from that step to the draft general plan which is where we are at right now after this step we will go through an environmental analysis and additional zoning amendments and then a public review induction of the general plan even though it looks like we are halfway of the plan we're more than half over the plan because this is actually the thickest part of the process and the more dense part where we are collecting community comments including city council planning commission and every board and commission in the city with the exception of two of them who we're not able to we were not able to present on but that we will be trying to include in our next round of comments that said we've been looking to to let you know that this is this is a process that is still ongoing and that will be done next Sunday the community input related to this draft so just so you know all the milestones reports that we have worked on our public and our website centerosaforward.com and as I mentioned before we have the community involvement strategy we have an existing conditions report we have a briefing book that actually summarizes what we heard from the existing conditions report and makes it a more accessible document that is bilingual English and Spanish where we tell the community in very simple and accessible language what we found in terms of our current conditions as a city and a vision statement which is the guidance that we will have throughout the whole process to understand what our community wants to be like in 2050 and what we need to get there an alternatives workbook which shows the alternatives that we had to actually accomplish the growth that was required by our not the cycle not only the cycle of housing element but the projection of the growth that we need to have in the next 30 years and finally but not less important our final preferred alternative which is the actual growth patterns and circulation alternatives that we concluded we needed to to work on to get to the point that we are at right now which is the draft of our general plan document so while we present on the general plan draft we will invite you to think a bit more about the vision that was created together with our community because we want to clarify that this process went through a very very substantial process of engagement with community members this happened during the pandemic but we made sure to have different ways to have communities input on what they wanted to see in their city on how they wanted this their city to look like in 2050 and i'm just going to read the the draft that was the the vision statement that was created for our draft so when you review the document and the policies that we're including there keep in mind that this is the thought of our community and how they wanted us to build a senorosa that is heading forward senorosas are diverse equitable and sustainable community built on civic engagement that empowers everyone to provide and support equal and affordable opportunities to obtain good housing education and jobs to enjoy vibrant cultural events and arts and to live healthy lives in resilient neighborhoods that adapt to social and environmental change that said i'm going to let my colleague sherry meets to talk to you about the next phase of alternatives that was established throughout this general plan update process thank you so much batrice good afternoon mayor roger's vice mayor mcdonald and council members i'm sherry mead senior planner and i'll just continue on with the presentation so as batrice laid out so well there was much input from the community from our decision makers in terms of where we were at developing a baseline and then developing that vision statement that would serve as a guide for how to move senorosa forward over the next several decades and one of the things that resulted from that process was developing three land use alternatives which we called preferred land use alternatives the first one was established corridors and it was really building off of the downtown stationary specific plan where most of the growth was city-centered focused on that downtown core area and then also the second alternative is neighborhood main streets which again focused on city-centered growth but also looked at areas of the community which are called areas of change i'll get more into that in a bit but areas of the community where there was already really good start to creating what's called a complete neighborhood which is somewhere that a person could meet all of their needs the services they require within a 15-minute bike or or walk so there were 21 of these areas identified you can see that in the second alternative the third alternative was called housing everywhere it was really just dispersed housing status quo similar to what is allowed in the general plan that is currently active for the city so those are the three alternatives that we took out to the public that we took to the city council planning commission and got as much feedback as we could there's a missing slide so there we developed a preferred alternative map which is actually a combination of the first and second alternative so what that did was it still kept that city-centered growth and included the 21 areas of change so all of that work all of the visioning all of the the baseline establishing through the existing conditions has led us to where we are today which is as Beatrice said we have a draft general plan this is the exciting part we take all of that information and synthesize it into a document that contains the goals policies and actions that will achieve the vision and the goal for the city over the next 30 years so the plan is laid out with a certain hierarchical strategy where the highest level are goals and the goals are the aspiration they're what we want to see the end stage of the city by 2050 the policies regulate the activities and guide implementation to achieve a goal and then actions are measures techniques programs anything intended to implement one or more policies that help us to achieve those goals those in-states like i said that we're really looking toward achieving general plan why have one well first of all it makes for good planning right it helps establish department work plans helps decision makers helps members in the community know what they're looking at in terms of land use zoning all it sets the stage for zoning all of that but it's also a requirement california requires all cities counties and jurisdictions to have a general plan and not only do they require a general plan they have certain elements that you have to address everyone addresses them you can see them indicated in the graphic in green so that includes things like land use circulation safety noise housing but Santa Rosa looks beyond that what makes Santa Rosa special is that we care about quality of life and what makes Santa Rosa so livable so we have included optional elements which is allowed by the state and actually carry the same weight if you will as a required element so anything that we include in the general plan whether it's optional or required is considered to be the same level of importance so some of the optional elements that we have included are in the existing general plan we're just carrying them forward and that includes urban design historic preservation art and culture hillside policies parks youth family and seniors but this year we're also doing some new elements that we think are pretty darn exciting community health equity climate resilience and greenhouse gas reduction it's important to note that this is the first general plan that will have an environmental justice element which is a requirement by the state but also i think we'd do it anyways because that's who we are in Santa Rosa and the draft that you were given to review and comment on does not include the housing element and the reason for that is y'all already did it earlier this year so the housing element is adopted on an eight-year cycle and the most recent city of Santa Rosa housing element was adopted in january february of this year certified by the california housing and community development department in april so it will be included in your final general plan but we're not taking comments on it because it's already it's already been acted on so now i'm going to turn it back to Beatrice thanks sherry the map that we're showing in the screen is an equity priority areas map why are we creating this map first of all because we wanted to identify the areas of the cities of the city that has have been disinvested and how are we doing this we're using part of metropolitan transportation commission methodology on equity priority communities the reason that we did our own methodology was because we wanted to be more granular at a level of census census block level instead of census track level which is a smaller size area for for our jurisdiction and specifically what are we identifying in here we are identifying areas that were disinvested due to different types of policies as well as segregation policies that come way beyond our our time as city council and and staff members however we consider that it was really relevant to align to plan bay area 2050 and there are three layers that are identified in this in this purple layer that we're showing up in in the city's map number one low income communities that shows that the 75th percentile of low income communities meaning people who live in poverty and also the largest percentage of people of color who live in this area is the reason that we are using this variable that has been adopted from MTC's methodology as i mentioned is because we know that segregation was an effect of the policies that were implemented by federal government and local governments in the past so to actually identify this areas we use those two variables and we added calen virus screen 75th percentile which means the areas that are more highly polluted in the city so those are two census tracks the ones on southwest area and that's how this map was created the reason that we created this map was to identify the areas and prioritize investment in in different types of policies but that including transportation active transportation as well as many other policies to improve the the quality of life of this areas and the health the health and environmental justice situation so the next map that was created through this process identifies those areas of change that i mentioned earlier there are 21 of them and what they represent are places where the city will focus efforts on addressing housing services connectivity transportation network and or infrastructure needs to make these complete neighborhoods and again what we're looking at here is a yes city-centered growth but also neighborhood focused growth and these areas represent places where we really envision that being possible so there are also policies called out in the general plan that address areas of change specifically okay now i'm going to just do a high level overview of each of the chapters most of the chapters actually all of the chapters contain elements that have been combined together because there's a synchronicity between the two of them in terms of how they relate to the overall structure and building of the community so the first chapter substantive chapter is the land use and economic development chapter and it looks at the ways that the city moves around it looks at roads streets it looks at how the city is built it looks at pretty much anything that relates to the built environment but it also looks at more than that it considers things like how the city will ensure that growth and change serve the community's needs protect the environment improve fiscal stability and enhance the quality of life so one of the new measures that is included in this chapter is that we require construction mitigation for any development within 500 feet of the busiest parts of state route 12 and highway 101 so that's to protect the residents from air pollution that can be caused by those strong vehicular areas and most of the areas that we're talking about especially along the 101 corridor are also areas that have been identified as having higher levels of pollution another kind of exciting thing is the way we're viewing economic development is also neighborhood centered we're really looking at ways that we can encourage growth within a neighborhood so that somebody can maybe you know work within their home or have micro and entrepreneurial spaces to combine uses like having a space that maybe is set up to be where youtubers go take pictures but also have cooking facilities for somebody that does that or a yoga studio so kind of a combined look at ways of of folks being able to start a business without a huge huge amount of investment we're also looking at approving farmers markets in any commercial shopping centers so that's another exciting part of the land use and economic development chapter oh i went too fast well that was in spanish um i keep forgetting that i need to give time to the spanish slide so forgive me chapter three circulation open space conservation and greenhouse gas reduction again you can probably envision how all of those things work together to create an area where we're moving people through the city in the most effective ways possible but we're also looking at considering how open space and conservation also can mitigate greenhouse gas reduction in addition to just providing visual enjoyment natural resource conservation like plant and wildlife habitat creek corridors hillsides and soils um the greenhouse gas reduction strategies that are included in this chapter focus on transportation and energy whereas there are throughout the general plan policies goals and actions related to greenhouse gas reduction and i should also call out that we are creating a greenhouse gas reduction strategy it's currently in the draft stage that we're working with the consultants on doing some finessing too and that's going to replace our community wide climate action plan so there's going to be a lot of measures taken from the general plan that you already see but also some new innovative ideas to how we're going to reach our climate neutral goals and also meet the state targets that are required so that'll be one of the next steps in the process too is having that document to bring forward chapter four is urban design historic preservation arts and culture this is one of the chapters that is purely optional but as i mentioned before santa rosa is very interested in improving quality of life we look at the importance of developing a sense of place and how important art is and historic resources to connecting people promoting cultural inclusion and diversity creating pride in where we live and also a sense of community plus both art and historic preservation can increase tourism so they are considered an economic driver and they just inspire people to want to come to santa rosa and live in santa rosa so some of the new ideas are focusing on allowing people that are interested in preserving their historic properties trying to make that a little bit easier identifying any obstacles that are created by the city's current processes and what that could look like is allowing entitlement for a landmark alteration permit to happen at the same time as a building permit review we're also looking at where large canopy trees could be a real benefit to the city not only just to improve streetscape but it would also help with the urban heat island effect and make it more you know what we're looking for is trying to get people out of their car so it's another way to increase the the likelihood that people will do the walking biking and rolling in other ways so that'll be one of the things that we focus on in equity priority areas because there has been a deficit in those areas but we're also looking at it obviously city-wide so and i did it again so chapter five this is a meaty one it's safety climate resilience noise and public services and facilities this chapter looks at everything that santa rosa has faced and could face it evaluates potential hazards it looks at how we can mitigate those hazards how we develop our emergency services responses to those potential hazards it looks at noise is one of those required elements so it we had to put it somewhere it seems to fit in best here because noise again affects quality of life and safety public services and facilities that looks at our storm water our water our creeks everything that is related to that type of infrastructure it also looks at police and fire it looks at education and then climate resilience is a new one for us this year and again it's looking at how santa rosa is going to adapt to the changing climate we've already seen that we have dealt with some of the issues related to a changing climate and so these are some new policies and ideas that will help us address those potential things we also are including information regarding just all of the city services related to solid waste all of that is included in this chapter as well and i'm going to turn it back over to my colleague patrice thank you sherry i'm going to talk to you about the last element that we included in this general plan draft and its health equity and environmental justice this element has a fair amount of policies that are new to our general plan because as sherry mentioned before our environmental justice requirement is a new one based on sb 1000 and that said we thought that health and equity made total sense to be included in the same chapter because it's very much connected to environmental justice objectives and goals and we talk about a lot of different topics including health and we know we don't have a health department that is operated by the city we have that at a council level but at a sorry at a county level however we are responsible for a big part of built environment and understanding the social determinants of health with something that the portrait of sonoma inspired us to do and this is how we're connecting the dots with the actions that the city actually has responsibility on talking about that we have a fair amount of goals connected to health to food and urban agriculture access to food and urban agriculture we also have a fair amount of policies connected to violence prevention and equitable policing we have a fair amount of goals connected to parks as well as youth and family and seniors and connected to the main new ideas that were included in this in this element we are talking about health in all policies which is a new view where we ensure that the city focuses their decisions on putting health as a main concern that we have for our community not only talking about the lack of disease but also thinking about why how can we impact the quality of life through the actions that we create through through government and specifically local government we also are talking about restrictions connected to tobacco and alcohol specifically focusing on neighborhoods that have over concentration and particularly talking about equity priority areas that actually have the largest concentration of of establishments that sell alcohol to to people also we are including requiring supermarkets as well as other other stores to sell fresh produce and we've we can discuss a little bit more about what we've been hearing from the community in connection to this because we have had a fair amount of feedback we can we also included required an additional review to chain restaurants and I want to explain a little bit more about this because we've heard community feedback from this and we actually agree with a fair amount of it we included this because we know chain restaurants are over concentrated in neighborhoods of color and low income neighborhoods and the reason that this happens is because a lot of the of the people who who leave there do not have the capacity to buy fresh produce so this is connected with the with the food desert conversation trying to address availability of produce for for communities that are lower income since as you can see on the maps that we presented on the general plan a fair amount of the of the food deserts or food equity priority areas are areas that are also low income so we're trying to address this and give different options to communities and that said we also are including policies allowing all forms of urban agriculture including rooftops indoor and other gardening options for for community members and that said it connects to some of the things that we heard from community members but particularly I want to mention the engagement work that we've been doing with youth to connect these ideas with that part because we heard a fair amount of of this environmental justice policies coming from our youth and I want to highlight this because we did a very specific focused effort to work with young community members since in the past steps of the general plan we had a very small percentage of of community members who were under 24 so after our preferred alternative engagement we decided we were going to start engaging with younger members of the community in a very focused way that said we have a community involvement strategy that came to council at the beginning of this project for this state for this stage of the of the general plan update process we did five particular methods to gather community input first we hosted bilingual community open houses and pop-ups five of our our open houses were a workshop style event we hosted one on each quadrant of the city plus one that was a partnership with the county and the food system alliance that let us talk specifically about food access and urban agriculture which were two topics that were coming from the community we actually had some ideas about including the policies but they were very actively guided by community members and non-profit organizations we also had a one virtual workshop that had been on zoom and we went to ten different events and hosted pop-ups throughout the city where people were already gathering at and we presented maps and all the same information that you're hearing from us today was presented to them in a way smaller space and and period of time so people could know about the project and also get access to our online survey which is the second method of collection of information that we did this survey is available on our website senderosaforward.com both in english and spanish and we will be closing this survey next october 1st so sunday would be the last day to provide information on this online survey after that we also created a conveyor app this is a city platform that lets us host the whole document in each piece of the each chapter of the document for review for those folks who want to see the document and provide very specific input on it and we're collecting this till october 1st too so whoever wants to provide a very specific and targeted review can do it in this in this app in relationship to other methods that we used we also received comments through email senderosaforward at srcd.org and all the emails of planners we have been collecting all these comments as well as comment forms that we have on our website which is senderosaforward.com last but not least we're waiting to review all the demographics and data from the collection of information that we've been doing with the community and the same way that we identified that young people were not responding as much as the percentage of young people that we have in the city we're trying to see what other equity priority populations of the city require us to put additional attention to get community input that said we focused as I mentioned before youth as one of the groups that we needed to address more and to do a specific engagement and I want to highlight the partnership that we had with the senderosa's public art program and kinship creative this work was a series of art engagements that we did with seven local artists that have been helping us with expanding our participation of youth and when I say youth we're talking about five to 24 years old community members of senderosa and we were focusing this engagement on health and environmental justice to actually add more policies to our to our chapter six element of health equity and environmental justice and I want to highlight the three main things that we focused on the first one was a coloring book a bilingual one that you actually have on your on your place that we were we went we wanted to share with you because this is a something that let us get into schools in grades three to eight on the topics of health and environmental justice and was developed by one of our local artists Blanca Molina it was distributed to schools organizations nonprofits art organizations and our partners of kinship created collected the the the documents and actually we're able to gather input we're receiving a document that is a report on all the information that we gather from this event set and as you can see around we actually have an installation that has all the information on all the art processes that we had and it's up there and we'll be partnering with different organizations to bring young members of the community to watch what they have created and let them know what was included in our general plan thanks to the input that they provided for us this is a really relevant partnership because we're also bringing members to see what is happening in city council and to show them that this is a place that they belong they belong to and that they can come and provide their feedback and opinions and also we become at some point council members or staff at the city and we want to highlight that effort because we this is not it's an only engagement that we want to do once but we want this to be a long-term partnership with different organizations that are helping us address this deficit of connection with youth in relationship to an art installation we hosted four workshops that were facilitated by Erica Lutz and Brianna Hendren for high school students this data was collected through different workshops as I mentioned and you can see some of the outputs that we got from from young community members and the data collected became an art installation that we actually hosted in courthouse square and this was an art installation that reflected the dreams of Santa Rosa youth last but not least we have a song and music video connected to the general plan update how was this song and music video created we have four poetry workshops that were facilitated by Cayada Patton at Santa Rosa junior college together with the black student union and our juvenile hall the data that was collected through this method was turned into a song and a music video that reflects and uplifts the hopes of youth and it relates to the community health and well-being so it was part of the collection of information that we did for our general plan update particularly focused on our health equity and environmental justice element and I just want to show a few pictures for the public who does not have the coloring book in their hands to see what we gave to youth and some of the mapping that was done so youth can identify where in the city they leave and what's around their neighborhood I also want to show some pictures of how our youth started engaging with the art installation and also provided us input through some of the comments that they wanted to see in the city and you can see in some of the pictures we have a lot of comments connected to foot access a lot of comments connected to housing a lot of comments connected to climate change and what our youth is concerned with and this photographers are from genesis botello who was one of the artists who was also engaged in this process and I don't know if it if it's possible for me to share the video or if you are going to do it directly from from the city clerks computer I'm happy to do it anyway thank you and while we wait for that to be set up it's important to also highlight that we developed a partnership with Montgomery high school where the consultant team as well as city staff worked with two professors of geography and history to develop a curriculum that the Montgomery high school students actually worked on to learn about planning learn about the profession learn about the general plan what that means and then they did a project a self-selected group project where they would select something from the general plan and do a bunch of research and work that all culminated into presentations that were shared before city planning staff so that was another thing not necessarily art but definitely a way to reach the youth and it's something we're hoping to continue throughout the city at different high schools as we move forward and as I sit here thinking about this life reimagined in the Santa Rosa dream and y'all know because as it's curving deconstructed yo it's all for me to trust and trying to get from a to b with no exes sister buses gm o up in our lectures at the air i'm throwing punches honestly the whole thing makes me sick to my stomach and we could really talk that talk but they don't want to touch you i want to see like fatty loose so we can discuss it we can talk about it all of the tears dropped in the bucket if you pass me the whole thing me some because she thinks it ain't cosmetic or cosmetic if it ain't inclusive i don't get it she get it people striving for their lives trying to find possible ways around are they that blind to see the death rates rise needed to grow only darkness in sight as i sit here thinking it would be a slice of heaven with sustainable and the host place for our children sees the gang and gong violence just the future but we're drinking out of different cups my mental health is fine i'm flesh and blood my god i'm only human it sounds a little crazy but it's not impossible to get some rest with those working in a hospital about a shred line barricades i've been soaked in the pain but killing is a marinade the underpaid deserve a raise and upper rate the road to redemption destination happy days these days we need rest to rectify all the mess so we can do what we do best there's march 27 2023 my last day in jail it is a long day and my mood is happy and nervous if you are reading this you are hopefully a free man i hope you're living in a house with a little yard i wish your mental health will be better and that you're able to be treated when it isn't i hope that you're married with two kids i really hope that your family is happy i wish for the well-being of santa rosa with better mental health services do black voices matter brown voices matter queer voices matter do all voices matter young voices matter poor voices matter do broken voices matter hurt voices matter do the voices matter stories written from sorrow but we desire laughter when you receive an action plan what you're gonna do after emotion bring light to the hopeless come down to our city blocks so you can see just how we rock how we deserve the best give me liberty and life because it's vital for our survival we need change it's a piece of the bond i want to know thank you so much for watching the video with us for us it was important to show you what our artists had worked on but also how our youth feels about being included in wanting to participate more on the decision-making of of the city and we just wanted to bring this to you and and make it a way to close how we did on engagement and what else we're expecting to keep doing to close this presentation we want to let you know that when we close the the outreach next sunday we will summarize all community comments and feedback including the comments that we get free from you today and we will include this input to refine the general plan so we are welcome we're welcoming all the comments and questions that you have and things that you want us to provide more attention to and after this we will provide the the greenhouse gas reduction strategy which is the document that chair was mentioning early on connecting all the dots of our of our g.a.g. reduction policies and this will have a public review and engagement process then we will continue what our environmental impact report public review and present the final general plan and environmental impact report for adoption and including the your eir certification so that'll be the end of the process and we are ready to respond to any questions and comments that you have today thank you so much for hearing the presentation and walking with us through all the process thank you so much for the presentation and also for your diligence and love for our community to really go out there and get answers so thank you are there any questions from council members council member rogers well first of all thank you so much for all of the effort and i know i've had a chance to talk through some of this with you as well but if you'll indulge me i think that there's some good questions and i think it leads towards what we are trying to accomplish with a general plan update first of all i wanted to thank the community for participating as well and you do see the touch points as we go through this first question i had for you was really about the environmental justice element and i know sherry you highlighted how excited we are to have that in the plan and it's new for us and it's new required for the state we obviously have done a number of efforts through the seed collaborative and have we had an opportunity for seed to evaluate our environmental justice element of this general plan and how does it dovetail with broader city goals we have not checked this document with the seed collaborative team but we are actually very excited to do so and we will check in to see if their project includes providing input to this but we'll try to do it as soon as possible and we'll send that that email today after this meeting thank you so much perfect and i know depending on what the timeline looks like for bringing this back for final approval whatever the final amount is we could potentially have our equity officer back in hired at that point and so perhaps that person would be able to evaluate it as well on action 2-1.9 there's a and i think i need the the city manager for this so i'll come back to it in just a minute for action 2-1.20 you it says that we would update the the ugb so that it is coterminous with the city's sphere of influence my understanding is that that's backwards that's exactly right it for some reason whoever typed this had a moment where they just reversed it so it's actually in process now lafga will be updating that for us but the policy as written is reversed and we will definitely fix that in the next iteration perfect action 2-2.10 it says that we will maintain our priority development areas my understanding is that the priority development areas come in partnership with mtc how do those priority development areas aligned with our wildland urban interface particularly given the council's previous stance on not putting high density housing into high fire areas i'm checking to see if we have one of our fire representatives on the call can't see that we do it appears that we don't have someone there i do know that fire looks at any development proposals that we get and reviews everything against obviously the general plan and zoning but also the community wildfire protection plan which is updated every five years and you guys will get you know annual reports on that but it's definitely something that we can have that bigger conversation and make sure that anything we include in here is is accurate i do see uh chief westrope i think oh is he on great yes if we could unmute or promote uh chief westrope good afternoon i'm on and uh fire marshal lowenthal is on as well if we can promote him please there we go so uh good afternoon council uh mayor rogers members council scott westrope fire chief um thank you council member rogers for your question i'll have uh car marshal lowenthal jump on and answer that question for you thank you very rogers and vice mayor mcdonald members of the council for the question uh we are actively looking at the perimeters of our current wildland urban interface but we're not just looking at the wildland urban interface we're also looking at any potential changes to the very high fire hazard severity zones within our community so there is the potential that our our existing wildland urban interface fire area could change based on some of the recommendations that are coming out of the board of forestry and california state fire marshal's office through their process and one of the things that we're also looking at is the potential to analyze and evaluate the risks associated with whether it's high density housing or different types of occupancy uses within our wildland urban interface fire area as something that we'll be exploring as part of the the general plan great thank you so much for action 2-3.1 i was hoping that in a future iteration we can add to it and historic character that's the section that talks about having respect for the the basic character of a neighborhood and also i want to make sure that it includes our historic districts action 2-3.5 says that we will essentially require the medium and high level of the density for each site that we're developing why don't we just make that the floor then is my question yes thank you council member for that question so this is actually a policy that was included in our existing general plan and has been carried over to the current general plan it's something that we require of any project in these areas unless they have certain exceptions as to why they can't meet the midpoint and it's something that to my knowledge and my time here at the city has not been an issue with development in these areas and something that we wanted to continue forward in order to you know to gain that higher density but still allow lower end as necessary depending on site development but should the council want to make changes to that we're happy to do that great thank you for 2-5.7 it calls out identifying gaps in broadband we also lost a number of cell phone towers in the 2017 wildfires and have quite a few cell phone gaps as well not just broadband so i'm hoping we can add cell phones in there as well madam city manager if i could ask a specific question for you in action 2-1.9 it says prepare a specific plan for the south Santa Rosa avenue annexation area one of the proposals that we've heard is for a planned development uh is the have we determined whether or not a specific plan is required and if not would it be premature to put that into the general plan just based on the level planning that goes into a planned development already thank you for the question we have actually discussed that we will move at the direction that we receive from council because i think that's technically a policy decision we just need to know whether or not you want a specific plan or not i have talked to the developers as well and i did talk to the executive team about it so we're ready to go with whatever direction you want us to proceed okay i don't have a set direction that i'm offering today i'm just going to be asking about whether or not before we finalize our general plan if we can make that determination i'd hate to add more time to the development timeline without an added benefit so i'd want to better understand what do we get from the specific plan versus the way that it's been laid out so far yeah thank you and i would also ask for additional clarification from staff on what that means for the general plan as a whole right for action 2-5.12 it evaluates procurement i'd love for us to have something about our local preference in there to make sure that we are strengthening and investing in our own community with the purchasing power of the city and then i apologize it's a long document i think this question might be for for rachel specifically we have had an opportunity to evaluate some on-demand services for transit specifically related to paratransit and spark there's an entire section that calls out the delivery of service for paratransit which we know is more expensive per capita and might be better suited both for the budget as well as the needs of the community with on-demand is there anything that we've gleaned from that that we can pull into the general plan i would just say that you know we could certainly highlight that more directly within the general plan is something we want to explore i think the circulate circulations section has several actions related to evaluating different types of services and there might be something we can expand on within that section i'll just comment that that is an active inquiry through the sinoma county transportation authorities integrated service plan among the bus operators were specifically looking at microtransit applications in sinoma county where they might make sense and so i think that effort is also reflected within some of the actions in terms of the integration work so i think we have that covered more generally but if it would be valuable to point it out a little bit more explicitly we can do that i think just a nod to other forms of delivery of service would be really effective for us again it's a general plan i don't need to get too specific but i i did highlight in that section great thank you we received quite a few emails from folks about what i think is policy three dash one point one really centered around establishing specific targets for vehicle miles traveled reduction and i'm wondering if there's an opportunity for us to be a little bit more direct in what we're trying to achieve there we read the emails and also the letters and we received from plenty of organizations as well as residents who were supporting the policy and we're working with our transportation team to adjust that bmt target just to clarify i think the the understanding that we had established a very low bmt target was based on an image that we have on the on element number three that element was not establishing a target it was just a projection of what we would have with within the year 2050 to clarify we we're trying to do that and we are already working on some policies with the transportation team since we know bmt is 60 coming from from transportation so that said yes will we addressing that we are currently working with the with the transportation team to do that all right i appreciate that and yeah we did an analysis through scta that almost 80 percent of trips are under five miles round trip san francisco in one of their climate elements actually did a really interesting analysis where they looked at what percentage of individuals would they need to shift onto bicycles pedestrians or public transit to meet their vehicle mile traveled reduction goals and so that might be interesting for us to see and to update periodically as well item action item 3-1.2 it says require an analysis of projected vmt as part of the environmental review process for projects with potential to increase vehicle miles traveled but then action item 3-1.3 right after says to come up with a screening tool to determine which projects need to have that same analysis done it seems either redundant or conflicting and i'm not quite sure which so we're fortunate enough to have our transportation planner terina excellent and she's going to come down and address that for you far more eloquently than i could try good afternoon terina wilson transportation planner um we agree and we've already provided the comment that we would like to remove um action 3-1.3 so that'll be removed and then we have a number of other edits to the um policy 3-1.1 section because we're we already have an adopted or a draft vmt threshold that we've been using for the past several years i think it was june 2020 when we started using that and it's worked quite well um and so we'll end up having that adopted as part of the general plan so there's a formal adoption process and then a lot of the other actions that are under policy 3-1.1 we're already working with scta pretty closely um and so some of them are redundant and would end up being complete probably within a year year and a half after adoption i love it when uh i love it when somebody already has a fix to questions that i have thank you so much for that i'm wondering if while we have our transportation planner down here do we want to maybe consider grouping the questions if anybody else has one rather than have her have to get up and down are there any other council members that have questions okay thank you so much solves that question thank you rogers thank you um and i also i just want to really call out how much i appreciate the transit section uh in particular for the climate action subcommittee that we have it reads like a road map of things that we can start to work on i particularly like the employee tdm program i like the evi infrastructure a new development program uh and i'll come back to that one in a few minutes uh i wanted to call out uh and appreciate that jason nutt found a way to slip the farmer's lane extension back into this one that's actually item 3-1.19 fighting the good fight jason i appreciate it um for action 3-1.27 which looks at traffic calming i want to make sure that we clarify in their bike and pedestrian friendly traffic calming and uh when jess and i were talking earlier the example that i use is some of our speed bumps don't have the grooves that allow bicyclists to keep going through typically it's not bicyclists that we're worried about with the with the speed bumps and so i want to make sure we call that out for action 3-2.5 our vision 0 i want to make sure that we add in a rapid response component it's actually in the vision 0 plan that we talked about that when a collision occurs at an intersection we put up a temporary but quick invisible fix for folks so that they don't get completely off put from utilizing other modes of transportation i'd like to build that into our plan uh action 3-2.2 really through 2.26 are all around standards for bike lanes and i just want to make sure that we're riding it in a way that has class 4 bike lanes as the preferred default that we do and force the discussion back the opposite direction don't prove to us that a class 4 is safe prove to us that if you're not going to do a class 4 that you've got a different alternative that is also safe but i want to make sure that we are deferring to what's going to get folks out of their cars and make that transition we talked a little bit about in the plan preserving our critical wildlife habitats and i wanted to call out specifically we hear every year about bird nesting season on west third and i would love to see some acknowledgement in the general plan of that we do call out other areas that have nesting season or that have other types of critical wildlife interests and so i just want to make sure we put that in the plan as well and i apologize everybody i'm almost done policy 3-4.4 talks about reorienting buildings onto the creek i want to make sure that that's reflective of creeks and greenways specifically with the approval of the southeast greenway i want to make sure that we have in the general plan a requirement to keep eyes on that that gem as we build it we've seen sort of what's happened on the prince memorial greenway by allowing people to turn their backs to the creek and it just makes it a safer and more usable environment so i want to make sure we build that specifically into the plan action 3-4.34 it says eliminating retail drive-thrus is that going to include fast food restaurants pharmaceuticals is it intended to be everything for drive-thrus as written it is everything it's all inclusive that's a great question we're obviously you know ready to take direction if you feel that we should exclude certain uses from that but as written it would eliminate all new drive-thru uses all right great thank you for action 3-4.33 it says get all new developments ev ready but then that conflicts with action 3-1.16 which would require ev infrastructure and new developments so i'd like to eliminate the ev ready in exchange for having ev in the developments as at least the discussion that we have policy 3-5.1 is inconsistent with our net zero energy goals and i mentioned this already to sherry it looks a little ridiculous in the document that you have an overarching goal that says carbon neutrality by 2030 regardless of how difficult that's going to be for us to get there and then literally the next bullet point is that we'll get 85 percent reductions by 2045 i think we stick to what our climate mobilization strategy and our climate emergency resolutions say and even if it's an aspirational goal that we keep that consistent action 3-5.14 i want to remove the word consider let me so it currently reads consider updating the zoning code to require use of low carbon construction materials we're far enough along in this path of having a discussion and really trying new technologies that i don't want to just consider them i want us to actively pursue them there's nothing in our plan about reduction of plastics and so i would love for us to whether it's in the environmental justice section or in one of our other elements around open space health there's plenty of tie-ins for plastics and specifically and i was saying this earlier i know jennifer berke will will kill me to keep saying this specifically plastic turfs that then lead to an exacerbation of the heat island effect while also putting more micro plastics that break down into our waterways you do a really good job of addressing later in it the heat island effect i think that we've got some really good plans but i would like to see a little bit more on i think it's section five dash six point one eight which talks specifically about uh or excuse me five dash six point five a cooling strategies for outdoor workers we know particularly for farm workers and others who are working outside all day that in the in the summer we need to have strategies in place as we see the impacts of climate change on them so i like that we call it out i just like a little bit more uh for our arts section i love a nod to our neighborhood organizations some empowerment for them to be able to do community art in their neighborhood rather than just having all of it rely on the arts and public places committee but really whether it's the west end neighborhood group the jc neighborhood group give them tools to be able to do their own artwork or to participate in their own artwork and i'll call out specifically we had neighbors did the crosswalks uh over in the Burbank garden area with flowers and it just it looked wonderful and i know that that was uh an effort from the city i want us to prepare for bi-directional charging infrastructure when we talk about evies and uh last thing that i'll turn it over to my colleagues i'd love some form of a nod in our community engagement section to participatory budgeting to better engage our neighborhoods in how we're spending some of our city resources but again thank you so much it's a really good plan uh i just wanted to make sure that those things were highlighted councilmember okraki thank you very much first uh thank you to everyone who participated in this this was a very i don't even know if heavy lift is the right word it seems like a herculean task at times um and the amount of outreach that you've done is is spectacular um at all levels including the outreach to high school students uh i'd like to see some of our higher learning institutions copy that as well um that was a not so subtle comment to my colleague at the other end of the dais um but uh real quick um a couple of things can you go more into the um the uh further review that you intend to put on chain restaurants um while i understand and i completely agree with the socioeconomic socioeconomic challenging areas being a heightened um target for those kinds of institutions i do think there is an opportunity for um to look at those in in corridors that are heavily traversed and pass through through our community for those that can get it's basically easily get on and off of one on grab some food and go i'd rather have them get that that here than in one of our neighbors uh cities can you describe that a little bit yeah we can describe a little bit more on uh the specific additional uh revision uh basically what we with the policy says um adding a conditional use permit to the to the review and it would be for restaurants that are that have more than uh nine um more than nine restaurants in the bay area that's how we're setting the threshold the threshold what we've been hearing uh in terms of the comments from business owners is that we need to increase the the uh threshold because there are some local uh restaurant owners that are that have more than uh than than six or yeah more than six restaurants so uh we that's that's the reason that we set up that number and it would not be a banning process like all their cities have done it would just be adding a conditional use permit and we're talking about companies that have a national um a national number of restaurants so we would try to be providing a benefit to local owners if that makes any sense and and connected to the over concentration of of fast food we are also reconsidering out of what we hear from the community and we're happy that you're addressing this topic uh how do you want to see concentration because uh we can think about specific buffers and as you were saying maybe there's some areas where it does make sense specifically talking about highways however when we're uh talking about BMT reduction too uh we we need to do some balance on what what are priorities in terms of do we want to provide businesses with the opportunity to have local chains that people would visit coming out from the highway and also reduce BMT kind of like thinking thinking and prioritizing what what we want to address because having both might be a difficult combination and i think we don't have to choose we're just adding an additional review to this to this restaurants but if you have an input on that we're we're happy to also consider that and we have Raisa, Dela Rosa in our in our Zoom connection if in case you want the input from our economic development deputy director too. No i think that's good and i appreciate that i appreciate the balance between our economic and environmental goals that we have as a council in the city so i do appreciate that i uh i share my colleagues sentiment on South Santa Rosa and the plan developments um specifically you know i i would agree with the i'd like to see the benefit of a specific plan versus incorporating it into the overall plan for the plan developments that are down there i'd also i'd also like to see that area incorporated or identified as an area of change if we are talking about all of these opportunities that we could have for housing or or commercial aspects i think that should be identified um then i have one clarification on item 2-1.21 um can i just get clarification is that is that removing the the PD special purpose zoning district i just want to get clarified that that is that is still it's a little vague as to what the purpose of that is are we keeping the plan development designation yes so that would thank you for that question um the the PD section on our zoning code would remain um we have a lot of plan development districts throughout the city some small some big some that have been around for very long time and some that are are really vague don't have much information at all so we have to refer back to our our standard zoning districts um and some that require more regulation than our current zoning code allows um and are very hard to uh to enforce and and help our residents to do changes to their property as they as they need to do so what we have tried to do with a lot of our specific plans and you know areas where we're already working in them is to take a look at the plan development districts is there a need to keep it for any particular reason and if there is not to look at rezoning to a standard zoning district so that's what this policy is really trying to get to is to where we can bring those into compliance with our current zoning district to go ahead and do that um and to help with facilitation of development in those areas okay so the intention is not to get rid of it to see if it's necessary anymore is that yes so for example the fountain grove area has it's a very large plan development district the policy statement for that is extremely complex you know so looking at those to see not necessarily that we're going to change fountain grove to a standard district but to look at them to see if it would work better to do that to provide clarity for residents and to help with the administration of those zoning standards but it is not to remove the potential for plan development districts from the city that would remain in our code okay thank you very much council member phleming thank you and I only have a couple little things I think um the council members who preceded me said most of what I think we ought to consider going forward but um just wanted to ask about um having a specific goal as we talked about earlier before this meeting to reduce vmt's if that's something that you all have considered or would consider absolutely I mean that goes along with what we're looking for in this plan which is to to really work on multimodal transportation so yeah thank you great well that goes along with the second thing around creating the alternative networks so um the other thing I wanted to dovetail on is um around the retail drive-thrus and just asking um for for my identification in that of the public do these current uses require a minor use permit or anything that could be revoked if if they abuse these drive-thrus like how we see in some areas where people are in the streets all day long idling their vehicles in the public right away yes thank you for that question um yeah we do have a section of our zoning code that provides for revocation of use permits if properties aren't adhering to the code aren't meeting their conditions of approval and their permit and those types of things so it is a process that is laid out it's a public process laid out in our code for that and so we would certainly look into any particular sites that are are an issue um and then the other thing I wanted to um to highlight is just that I I'm wondering if staff has done an analysis about the impacts to persons with disabilities and families with very small children on the potential of of retail pharmacy not being permitted to to use this we haven't done any specific analysis except for talking amongst ourselves in the planning department and we find this pretty controversial ourselves so we understand that I think that it is worth looking at your direction of course whether there are some uses that absolutely should be kept as allowable drive-thru uses including possibly pharmacies or you know vaccination clinics that type of thing the overall goal here was to reduce vehicle idling so um I think we're open to suggestions on how we can refine that right I mean I'm really torn on it on the one hand you know when I was you know had a tiny baby it was a lifesaver um at times on the other hand uh you know I don't want to see vehicles idling so I would be interested in sort of a splitting the baby approach like perhaps having um one in in each you know area but not having many many of them I mean there's lots of places where you'll see like there's only one 24-hour pharmacy or there's only you know just really reducing it and having a permit associated with it where um you know there's signage required to ask people not to idle their vehicles so that we can sort of balance our VMT goals and also our commitment to persons with disabilities independence to clarify on this on this feedback that you're providing thank you so much for for doing so would uh we're talking about new approvals so would that be um analyzing the current existing ones or would you like us to approve just a few on each district connected to pharmacies or specific services that you're mentioning yeah what I think I'm saying is that um while I'm not a big fan of drive-thrus I think that that we need to have a little bit more nuance to it than just saying no drive-thrus okay thank you that's that's it for my questions thank you thank you vice mayor mcdonnell thank you mayor I have a few questions and then some comments for you as well on page three item 2.2.7 could you just explain to me what require compact development that includes services within one half mile walking and biking distance of residential neighborhoods how are we going to require that their services within a certain area for development I'm just curious about that one thank you for that question so that would likely be through uh I mean our our zoning code already has development regulations for areas within you know for example our our transit oriented areas so our downtown around our our north smart station for ensuring that we've got services nearby and so with this particular one we would likely want to take a look at our zoning code and in particular as it relates to areas around these areas of change to see if we need to change our regulations to require certain you know distance to retail and and such to make make sure that we're providing a walkable area great thank you for that explanation I appreciate it and then on page eight under item 2.5.5 it specifically says works with Santa Rosa city schools but because that's an actual school district the language should either be local schools or school districts within the city of Santa Rosa so it doesn't just relate to the one district versus I believe there's 14 of them within our city so I'd like to just change that language to make sure it's inclusive of all of our schools we serve and then on on page nine item 2.6.4 would you mind explaining how we will allow larger grocery stores in the downtown area but not in the outside areas um that could impact that and how we would mitigate that as we would look at somebody who maybe would have an idea to put something and I'm just going to use my area but in Oakmont if there was a desire to put a grocery store out there and there was one in the downtown area is there a mileage that we use or or what are we accomplishing just by that I'm just curious so we don't have a specific thank you for that question we don't have a specific distance requirement it really is I think through if there is a new grocery store that's coming in in the vicinity of the downtown area so Oakmont would probably not fall under that category but you know if there was one that was coming in let's say in Montgomery Village a new grocery store and we want to make sure that it's not going to have an impact on our downtown and preclude and you know make it so that there is no market for a new grocery store in downtown we would want we would work with that applicant to look at market analysis to determine and work through our economic development division to ensure that bringing a grocery store in that location is not going to create a situation where there is no market anymore for a downtown location thank you and then under item 3.3 on page 17 I know I spoke to you earlier about the concern for EVAs and evacuation routes and I'm not sure if it fits under that item or under safety there's a few different areas that I don't see EVAs being talked about as far as safety when we're looking at development specifically in the areas where we are very worried about the wildland urban interface so I don't know if where it would be appropriate to put inside this document or if I mean for my preference it'd be all the areas when we're looking at development that EVAs are required and that we're looking at those places that are currently under consideration in the general plan for changing areas for development there was some of them I had noted in you know area 2012, 11, 1 those are all areas that have been hit by fires in the past so as we go back and redevelop or look for new development I'm not sure what would be best for staff where it would be best to put it in there but I have a few different pages and markers that I could send over to you separately for safety and perhaps fire also has a preference of where to put this into their public safety officers as well so I'm open to wherever you want to put it as long as we get that in there and then on page let's see 45 I just have a question for you under 6.1.7 it looks like we specifically call out having a staff member in the general plan to address the needs of that and I'm just I don't think I see anywhere else in the document where we would call out specific that we maintain a staff member in a long-term plan like that so is that consistent with what we've done in the past or is this kind of a new thing for this specific person I can take that question we actually have a couple of places where we included staff and it's not connected to adding staff to our current teams it's just connected to having someone that addresses specific topics that we need to be included to accomplish the purposes of this plan part of it has also to do with the fact that we require specific tasks to be performed within different departments including climate change related measures and ghu reduction so those two including planning to are very well connected to the implementation of policies but we have one additional one that we talked about earlier with police staffing that has also some connection to the number the time that police has to to react in so yes we have a few of them but if you have any advice on that we heard this from consultants who have been working on different cities trying to let us know what strategies work well for us to be able to implement what is required on our plan for now I just want to make sure we're consistent in the document that was one that I had has seen in there so I just want to really thank staff for all the tremendous work on the outreach to the community I've been at events where you had pop-ups and I appreciate that I appreciate the survey online and zooms and everything else that's been held I know it's been a long time and this is just another iteration of what you've been working on but I just want to say thank you thank you for all the attachments and I appreciate everything that you've done to to get us to this point council member stat thank you madam mayor and thank you for well I think to yesterday as well but thanks for a wonderful job what a what a big task this was and I just have a few a few items that will tag on to those of my colleagues and you've received a few other comments from me yesterday and as well I'll thank my planning commissioner representative Karen Weeks I know that she submitted you know quite quite a few comments so thank you for considering those the theme of my comments I guess is flexibility you know we we're trying to move in so many wonderful directions in this document but I do want to be careful that we're not unnecessarily hamstrung hamstringing council and as two of my colleagues mentioned with respect to the the planning processes down in South Santa Rosa and the possible annexation there if we can leave open different options for you know if if and when we decide to to annex that that property if we leave open different different options to make that happen and potentially save us some time in the process that would be that would be great council member mcdonald also mentioned the downtown grocery there she asked that question again leaving open options for us there as with the drive-throughs I mean we're clearly trying to to work towards a an admirable policy end there but if we can leave ourselves and our and our local merchants flexibility in terms of how we how we address that policy and then there were a few other a few other budget items that were mentioned or that were that were listed that required or there were a few other items that were listed rather that required budgetary commitments from the council these included 2-4.14 2-5.4 I think you have some of these in your notes so I'll just list them off quickly 3-4.38 6-1.7 to the extent that to the extent that we're not requiring budgetary commitments in this document leaving leaving council open to decide how best to pursue those particular ends and then two two final points one thanks for the highlights of the bus stops those are all those are often overlooked but having having bus stops in the community that are both more noticeable more protective more enticing that can make a difference in the city and then finally especially for a for a table and a room filled with cinema state graduates I was surprised that in 5-9.2 cinema state university wasn't listed along with with senator was a junior college as being an educational an educational partner for the city so I thought I'd throw that out there just for consideration and those are those are my thoughts thank you thank you councilmember alberus yes thank you my question is very general and and was there anything that really stood out from the information that the that was provided from the from the from the public in regards to whether it be safety or the infrastructure I know in district one it's definitely safety and infrastructure but I'm wondering what information would feedback is received from the rest of the city it's ever isn't I would say some of the themes that we're seeing that's a great question and thank you for asking it relate a lot to bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure climate historic preservation and safety very well and a more specific question in regards to this district one or rosalind in regards to the development are we seeing any changes or any any of our specific plans being affected by the general plan another good question so the general plan is the overarching document it's basically like the city's constitution and all other documents are if you will feeders into it so we don't anticipate any immediate changes but we are always looking to ensure that we have consistency whether that's through zoning or specific plans and would make those adjustments as necessary over time and even a higher view question being that that district one is divided by 101 such as other other other districts with with highway 12 are we seeing any drastic changes in in the even in 2050 or any of our plans moving forward I'm not sure I understand the question I apologize no I'm sorry because it's actually that's part of the problem being that we're divided by 101 my understanding is that for example the school district you have a district that falls on both sides of of 101 and I know that for example we have the road square specific and we have the rosalind specific and again a higher view of the of the general plans is there anything that that causes concern or anything that that we should be focusing on in regards to the future developments of both road square rosalind south park and how it could be affected by the general plan even more of a confusing question I know anything that really stood out I think I would mention a few things that our policies included on the general plan that could affect the neighborhoods and the areas that you're mentioning and I I understand that your concern connected to the highway might be connectivity in between both sides so if that's the question there's a fair amount of projects including in the in the transportation area where a chapter of the of the general plan where we talk about connectivity and also we're talking about equity priority areas and focusing investment on those areas and you mentioned actually three of them that are actually included in the general plan more connected to the specific plans I don't think we expect any changes but there's a lot of policies that will trigger change if that makes any sense not necessarily connected to plans that we are planning to to to develop except probably for south centrosa specific plan which is a plan that is on the process of being started if this is the decision that we hear from council but more than that I think it will be the policies themselves okay thank you for answering the question there's the one project that comes to minus for example the silos that exist in office of gospel road but yet they pertain to the railroad square or at least the changes in the development zoning so just that is a specific project that came to mind but thank you for for clarifying that all right when no additional questions or comments from my colleagues thank you very much for the presentation and also thank you for all of the staff that are in chambers and all of the staff that are hanging out on zoom thank you for your collaboration on this project and we will turn it over to madam city clerk for public comment sorry thank you mayor rogers just a quick comment i know there's been comments by a few of the council members about the policy regarding a specific plan in south centrosa so the policy as it's written is is similar to what is in our current general plan which is that a specific plan needs to be developed prior to annexation of this area and development can't occur until annexation happens so a couple of things i just wanted to mention one as the council is aware the city received a grant from mtc for 1.2 million dollars to prepare a specific plan and an associated environmental impact report that would provide for direction of future development in that area and the eir that is going to be prepared as part of that is going to be a programmatic eir that will help streamline development so future development can use that eir as a basis for their environmental review that process is underway we an rfp has gone out the city has received proposals and we are in the process of reviewing those proposals and the plan is to start that process in january of 2024 and it is a two-year process we anticipate it to be completed in january of 2026 there was talk about the potential to do a plan development district for the area the 2010 or todd creek area a plan development district can be done in the area there is a difference between a plan development district and a specific plan the plan development district is really looking at the zoning regulations and internal circulation within that particular area it's not looking at the broader area and connections and you know developments and services and infrastructure within the broader area that's what the specific plan is going to do and is really necessary for this area because it has not been looked at in so many years one thing that could be done is a development project can be submitted concurrently a development project of the size that is being proposed for the todd creek area is likely to take time to get through the process and could potentially you know be done at you know along the same lines the same timeline as the specific plan so they could submit now and can go along with that process and you know again because the eir is being done with a specific plan that is going to give them the environmental analysis that they're going to need for their project so we could process this concurrently and potentially have a development project moving through and be completed along with the the specific plan in that two-year period councilmember albergue first of all i want to thank my colleagues for having brought up the the south area project is there an expiration date to the grant that's being provided for this it's a great question and one that i have asked mtc i believe right now that there is i don't specifically know what it is it generally goes pretty far out my experience with working with these types of grants i've done a few of them here at the city we have always come within the time frame so right now the timeline of two years is really our timeline that we have set we would have more time beyond that through the through the grant but we're wanting to move this process through and again in my experience in doing specific plans here at the city an 18 to 24 month process is generally what it takes this is a much larger area than what we have done in the past but what we're seeing from consultants is that we as long as we continue to move through the process we should be able to complete it within that 24 month timeline thank you all right madam city clerk good afternoon this is just a reminder before we start public comment that council meetings are a limited public forum which that means what that means is that there are rules for how we provide public comment and those rules are that comments on an agendized item must relate to that item comments on non-agendized items must address matters within the subject matter jurisdiction of the city the public comments that we'll be hearing now are on an agendized item and they must relate to this item if comments do not relate to this item the city will move on to the next comment madam mayor with your permission i would like to to the extent possible assist in identifying comments that are not related to this item permission granted thank you we are now taking public comment on item 3.1 if you are in the council chamber and would like to comment please make your way to the podium if you are participating via zoom please raise your hand or dial star nine you will have two minutes and a timer will alert at the end of that period if you would like to provide your name please do so before starting your comment speaker go ahead when you're ready thank you mayor rogers vice mayor mcdonald members of the council my name is ken mcnaab representing property owners in the todd creek area in southeast santa rosa i didn't plan on starting with a comment related to the comments miss jones just provided you but i feel i need to make a couple of important clarifications one your current policy does not say prepare a specific plan for this area it says prepare a plan for this area prior to annexation and i'll just simply say following some of the comments from the council member we think it's in the city's interest to be flexible on the type of plan that can be prepared i don't want to eat up all my time by going into the reasons why we think an alternative to a specific plan can be just as effective but would say we'd love the opportunity to sit down with your staff to talk through that with respect to the general plan itself we want to commend staff for their work on this it's a fantastic document it really breaks from the traditional general plan format in a new and progressive way and it's great we do have a few comments and i'm going to be quick because my time's running out area for figure 2.5 areas of change we request that this figure be modified to include the todd creek area as an area of change inclusion of this area and the general plan would provide a policy basis for moving forward with its annexation and help to create a more complex neighborhood for the residents of approximately a thousand homes that exist in the south santa rosa area our second comment is related to action 2 dash 1.8 disadvantage unincorporated communities we recommend that this policy be modified to include language that calls for coordination between lafko and the city on annexation of disadvantage unincorporated communities this coordination would focus on an approach that achieves the objectives of sp244 and lafko but does not create on do you have you submitted those in writing or can you make certain that we have those in writing yeah it will make certain that the council gets a copy of that as well any additional speakers in chamber make your way to the podium seeing no one we will turn over to zoom comment once you receive the request to unmute please begin speaking oh yes my name is uh roel and um i just wanted to address the council here and say that um you know america is under a massive crisis and we're having a huge problem here you know that problem being um our country is being overwritten and undermined and subjugated at every level by the world's greatest parasite known as the is this related to the item yes ma'am okay well sir you have 10 seconds to get back on track and relate your comment to the item being discussed if not we will move on to the next commenter okay yes sir i would just like to say that um the holocaust never happened but if the jews wanted to you know they're doing a good okay we can disconnect thank you all costs never happened but six million more you have 10 seconds to relate your comment to the item being discussed or we will move on to the next commenter hey dole fitler was right white fucking okay we can disconnect thank you jews did not 11 gtv flyers dot com going tv okay we can disconnect thank you you guys hear me can you hear me kai we can hear you go ahead okay um i just uh had a few concerns you know about your guys's plan i think i have a better plan you know we just round up all the niggers and jews and send them all right kai we're going to disconnect sorry about that yeah yeah brother white fucking power white power white fucking power hi my name is adrian covert um wow what a uh unfortunate turn but anyways uh i am a representative from santa rosa yinbi uh local homeowner uh and uh speaking on behalf of uh all volunteer group for uh affordable housing and livability in santa rosa i wanted to commend city staff for putting together a really good general plan in total you know we like the plan especially like the plan's narratives on the circulation element and the land use and economic development descriptions um we've there i sense a little bit of a divide between the narrative objectives of the planning documents specifically around eliminating or reducing vehicle miles traveled for single passenger vehicles which are the city's greatest source of carbon emissions and some of the actions that are taken which some of which are not in the service of accomplishing that goal and several other actions which would actually further complicate efforts to accomplish those goals and a general lack of ambition to accomplish the good positive goals laid out in the narrative of the elements so we did submit a letter yesterday that pointed out about 10 or 15 or so examples of this in the actions towards the ends of each of the elements so respectfully request that council take a look at those and just get back to staff and ask for a couple specific things including a real specific vmt reduction target and a pledge to not pursue or include any projects in the plan that would increase vmt's any further than they are thank you for your comment for allowing me to provide comment is this the time to ask why we tolerate jew's second baby penis you have five seconds to get back on topic or we will move to the next comment okay next comment we're going to take a short recess at this time and we will be back shortly thank you so much i'm sure you do if jews don't love it they can leave this country i tell you what okay everyone thank you so much for your patience we will now resume our meeting madame city clerk may you please call the roll councilmember stapp here councilmember rogers still here councilmember okrepke here councilmember fleming here councilmember alvarez this proud mexican says president vice mayor mcdonald here mayor rogers president let the record reflect all council members are present we are going to continue with our public comment on item 3.1 which is our draft general plan for santa rosa forward madame city clerk continue with our zoom comment once you're asked to unmute please go ahead and speak hi can you hear me yes we can yeah it's i'm still gathering my thoughts i'm just so shocked at those other calls i want to apologize for that um you know antisemitism and hate have no place in our society and it just reinforces you know i've listened to the meeting tonight uh hearing how you guys include diversity inclusion and equity and and just about every everything you do so i want to thank you for that and remind you that diversity means fewer white people inclusion means excluding white people and equity means stealing from white people you have five seconds to relate your comment to the agenda item or we will move on next speaker please go ahead you've been asked to unmute please go ahead when you're ready next speaker please go ahead um hello yeah so uh you know we're at the dawn of a race for and you council members need to decide whether you want to be on the side of righteous harry and victory or you have five seconds to relate your comment to the agenda item or we will move on mute them thank you we have no additional callers on zoom thank you we will now move to item 3.2 madame city manager item 3.2 initial study results for water supply alternatives plan please come down and introduce yourselves for the record thank you thank you very much uh good afternoon mayor rogers vice mayor mcdonald and members of the council i'm calling close senior water resources planner and i'm joined today by katie kohl from woodard and curren she is the project manager who has assisted us with this effort we also have uh zavier iris joining us he's the technical expert that helped lead the feasibility study that we'll be discussing today if we could get assistance with the presentation i apologize we're not sure how to bring that up i should have asked earlier my apologies thank you thank you very much for your assistance so this afternoon we'll be discussing with you the feasibility analysis and the portfolios for the water supply alternatives plan that's all right thank you so much so today we'll present to you the evaluation and the draft portfolios and we would very much appreciate any questions or comments that you have and an expression of whether you support the study results and the draft portfolio approach to this effort so the water supply alternatives plan is an effort to enhance our water supply reliability and resiliency you might recall in july you adopted a water supply assessment for the general plan that water supply assessment indicated that we have sufficient water supply in normal and below average rainfall years for our growing community all the way out to 2050 except we do expect shortages in severely dry years so this plan this effort is to address those periods of time where we could have a severe dry period where we might have a water shortage and the approach was to assess a wide range of water supply options and to look at what might be a best fit for santa rosa so there are key questions that have been driving this effort as staff we began asking these questions in late 2021 it was to look at how much new water supply is optimal to address drought and to provide for a catastrophic event should want to occur what supply options should we consider how do we assess them how do we know if they're a good fit for our community that's the study that we'll talk to you about tonight and then of the feasible options what are the best mixes of water supply options that would help us meet our resiliency goal those are the portfolios and we'll share those with you tonight as well and then to look at an adaptive plan you'll be seeing that plan in october the project initiated officially back in 2022 on april 28th we met with the city council and the board of public utilities liaison subcommittee and we asked them if they would support this project concept and support having the board of public utilities oversee this effort and there was unanimous approval for that in may of 2022 the bpu approved issuing a request for proposals and their support for the scope of work and the approach for this project in july through a pretty competitive process woodard and kern was selected and in august of 2022 the contract was executed and katie and i began working about a week or two later on some early planning steps the work that we have been focused on has engaged stakeholders every step of the way and you'll hear more about that in a moment again big important piece of this was setting objectives again how much water supply is appropriate for our community how should we assess those water supplies which supply should we study again we had lots of input from our community on that and then the feasibility study was conducted we'll share the results with you tonight and we have shared those results previously with our stakeholders and gotten their input as well developed draft portfolios and then developed that long-range plan so all of this has involved lots of stakeholder input the water team has included about a dozen folks from different backgrounds and expertise with dozens of years of experience under the belt of each of the participants so we had a good interdisciplinary team and led by director burk and i was the project manager our stakeholder group involved leaders from business and economic interests community services and social justice organizations regional recycled water users environmental and climate interests and resources agencies we brought them together in person for four three hour working sessions and we got their input in great detail they also did quite a bit of homework in between so i want to thank all of those participants at this point for all of the time and energy and input the great questions and suggestions that they provided us they made this a much better product than it would have been without their input we also held four interactive community webinars on zoom where our community was able to hear about this project get full transparent information about what we were doing and why and they also provided their input on the goals and the targets on the study and they got a sneak peek at the early draft of the plan we had live Spanish interpretation and our web page has recordings of those meetings as well as other publicly noticed meetings with the board of public utilities it has slides and the meeting schedule and it actually has the draft i'm sorry the technical memorandum the study that you're going to hear about tonight is posted there as well and of course we met with our board of public utilities they've had two very extensive study sessions on this as well you'll hear a little bit more about that later additionally there were some community interests that reached out to us and asked if we could attend their meetings and tell their groups more about this so we attended some general plan open house events the sub regional technical advisory committee sonoma county alliance santa rosa metro chamber and santa rosa plain groundwater sustainability agency meetings to provide additional information and get their input so with that background in mind what i'd like to do is turn it over to katie colgan the project manager from the woodard incurred inside to update you on what has been completed to date super thank you callin so this timeline that you see in front of you is kind of a visual representation of the work that we've completed over the last just over 12 months we started last fall as callin mentioned with establishing our planning foundation so that included looking at the goals criteria methodology and supply options we then moved into the feasibility and analysis and portfolios that we'll talk to you about this afternoon the draft plan has been drafted and is currently under review by the water team and our stakeholder group and we have received comments on that you will see that plan next month at our meeting in october as callin alluded to there have been many hands that have touched this work in the ultimate plan beginning with the water team which is the internal city group there were five working sessions throughout our time they provided input on the study parameters the results the portfolios that you'll hear about today and the early draft of the plan as callin also mentioned the four community webinars similar input on the study parameters portfolios our stakeholder group held four working sessions in november december may and july board of public utilities as callin mentioned looking at contract award updates on our progress and the two study sessions and finally woodard incurrence work related to stakeholder engagement and preparation of the deliverables so now i'm going to talk about the feasibility analysis so the first portion of our work related to developing supply resiliency goals there's really kind of three sub goals the primary goal being on the left side of the screen looking to diversify and increase city supplies to reduce dependence on sonoma water particularly during sonoma water supply shortages or any other disruptions and delivery we've broken those goals out kind of into these three sub categories so looking at mitigating droughts by producing 30 percent of the city's water demand with city supplies this equates to about 7500 acre feet per year in 2045 an acre foot is roughly 325 000 gallons it's roughly equivalent to filling a football size field with one foot of water the second component mitigating disasters and catastrophic events looking at producing half of normal domestic or indoor water use with city supplies it's about 9 million gallons per day in 2045 and finally mitigating what we call peak day demand looking at producing 30 percent of the summer average peak day demand so those really high use days with city supplies that's again about 9 million gallons per day in 2045 these resiliency goals were put in place with input from the water team and the stakeholder group as well as some community input our study methodology is visually represented by the flow diagram on the bottom but i'll walk you through that there's three main components the first is this pre-screen where we looked at all of the supply options to identify any infeasible kind of those no certainly no-go options or any duplicative options that we had that wouldn't make sense to look at twice we then screened the remaining supply options we used two key criteria to do that looking at a high-level assessment of cost effectiveness and scalability scalability refers to the ability of a supply option to produce more or less water in the future depending on needs so looking at kind of turning that supply knob when we did that screening we documented our reason for why certain supply options were advanced for further feasibility or not what this ultimately gave us was a manageable short list of options that we could do a detailed analysis on once we had that short list we used defined metrics that for each of the criterion that we had for scoring certain weights were assigned to each criterion to inform the scoring process and i will go through more detail on each of these steps in the coming slides so this is the list of the 18 supply options that we began with you'll see they're broken out into these six categories we had five options under ground water six options under purified recycled water or potable reuse one non-potable recycled water option two desalination supply options three surface or stormwater options and one option looking at increased efficiency or demand reduction so these supply options represent a broad diversity of supply options they include both city and regional partnership efforts as i mentioned it also includes aggressive efficiency incentives to reduce demand over time so not only looking at additional supply but what can we be doing on the demand side of the equation the list also integrates input from the water team our community during community meetings and our stakeholder group so five options were removed during the pre-screening process you'll see those on your screen now two groundwater options along with their reason for removal in most cases it had to do with regional efforts being already underway and something that the city is committed to continue participating in in the case of the purified recycled water option and the first surface or stormwater option it had to do with lake ralphine not being able to function effectively for the amount of storage that we would be looking for six options were then removed during the screening process again that screening process looks at cost effectiveness and scalability so further three options from the purified recycled water list the non-potable recycled water option and the two desalination options so the rationale for this screening what ultimately the the list that is ultimately part of our feasibility work retains options that rank higher on cost effectiveness and scalability or two criteria it also maintains and kind of keeps options in the mix that further diversify any portfolio we would move forward with such as stormwater and satellite purified water it includes both city and regional projects and it maintains the efficiency incentives to reduce demand over time and as with the the prior list it integrates input from the water team community and stakeholder group before I move on I do want to make a brief note on stormwater and desalination as options two of the three stormwater options did not advanced to detailed analysis and the reason behind this those options would require the construction of a treatment plant as attractive as it may be to just think that we can capture stormwater as it's running down the street it does require significant treatment before use and so we would need to construct a treatment plant in order to use that again quite costly the other reason that those options did not advance to further screening is that of all of the options the yield of the stormwater options would need to undergo further analysis to solidify the amount of water that we could actually use so before the city could commit to that cost that available stormwater would need to be confirmed for desalination neither of those options advanced to detailed analysis significant permitting and environmental challenges exist with desalination um turn down capacity is not ideal for our use so in our case or in the city's case um they we only really need water in certain types um in certain year types which is not really conducive to desalination as a supply which works better when it's used consistently one of our desalination options um looked at a regional brackish facility um that option in and of itself does not reduce reliance on Sonoma water as it would rely on a transfer and ocean desalination would require extensive infrastructure um you know we might think that we're close to the ocean but when you draw a pipeline it's it's a pretty significant length of pipe and cost associated with that so because none of the desalination options moved forward we did want to look at some triggers that might help us understand when we may reconsider desalination as a supply option so keeping track of technology that would reduce baseline operating costs that's that improved turn down capacity so currently plants are required to operate at about 30% of capacity if that number comes down that would allow Santa Rosa to um quickly ramp up production of desalinated water that would be an opportunity to relook at that supply less expensive energy prices um which would again further reduce operating costs any project configuration that would yield direct water to Santa Rosa and any technology that would improve water recovery so currently there's um significant loss associated with um removing salts from brackish and ocean water so after we underwent the pre-screening and screening seven options were advanced to further analysis that's GW1 which looks at adding groundwater extraction wells GW2 which would convert the city's existing emergency wells to full-time production wells GW3 which would add aquifer storage and recovery wells or ASR ASR refers to the ability of a well to put water into and take water out of the groundwater basin PR2 is satellite direct potable reuse PR4 regional direct potable reuse at the Laguna treatment plant SW1 stormwater storage in the aquifer and E1 increased efficiency programs so this table shows the criterion that were used to evaluate each of the supply options how they were assessed their weight and the score multiplier the score multiplier refers to um the basically the math that would get done in our excel spreadsheet to add additional weight or additional points to um any supply option that's scored um on that criterion so this table shows the results of these qualitative scoring um in this case a higher score is better all options were scored on a zero to two scale I do want to draw your attention to the bottom two rows the total unweighted and the total weighted rows so the total unweighted refers to basically the raw score if you were to sum up all of the values in that column the total weighted score refers to the final score of that supply option when the weights of each criterion on the prior slide are applied so what you'll see is there becomes a greater differentiation between supply options when you apply those weights for example if you look at GW1 and GW2 both scored a 10 and unweighted but when you add the weights there becomes um a bigger difference in their final score so now I'm going to move into our draft portfolios but before I get into that I want to talk a little bit about the rationale for portfolio development it uses a variety of themes to capture different outcomes you'll see four portfolios geared around these four themes least cost fastest implementation most water and most flexibility it uses options that score well in multiple portfolios so you'll see efficiency and converting emergency wells in each each of the four portfolios it also includes options that further diversify the portfolio so you'll see storm water and satellite purified water appear as well when we talk about portfolios we look at various implementation logic for portfolio components so not only how or what is in those portfolios but how would you implement those and it integrates input from the water team community and stakeholder group so here are the four portfolios portfolio one most economical GW2 and E1 are included in that portfolio portfolio two which is fastest implementation just adds GW1 portfolio three looking at maximizing the amount of water that the city could provide is the same as portfolio two but adds PR2 which is the satellite direct portable reuse and it also looks at considering SW1 that storm water storage portfolio four is the most adaptive that's why you see most um considers in that column and I will get into what that actually looks like when you look at implementing that portfolio so as I talk about each of these four portfolios you'll see two slides you'll see a slide that looks like this and a slide that looks like a timeline so I'll walk through each of those for portfolio one this graph shows the cost and yield performance for this portfolio the dotted blue line represents the estimated acre feet per year yield of this option the blue band represents the range of potential acre feet per year so as much as we'd like to look in our crystal ball we don't totally know so we've represented it as a range the red line is cumulative capital costs how much is it going to cost to construct this and the operating burden represented by that dark mustard or yellow line on your screen portfolio one's implementation concept is pretty straightforward both of the options in that portfolio would begin concurrently and move on their own timelines we'll now talk about portfolio two here's the cost and yield performance curve for this portfolio the again the the dashed line here represents the estimated acre feet per year represented by the range the cumulative capital cost and the operating burden more significant than portfolio one given that we've added a supply option to this portfolio implementation concept very similar to portfolio one with the addition of gw one which is the supply option that's been added to this portfolio this option would begin concurrently with the other two and move along its own implementation timeline portfolio three this is the cost and yield performance curve for this portfolio more significant cumulative capital costs as you see by the growing red line each step or bend in that curve represents when costs would come online because some aspect of the project requires requires it either with sequa or permitting or construction the implementation concept for portfolio three a little bit more complicated now that we've added some additional elements to the portfolio want to draw your attention down to the bottom there sw one stormwater capture and aquifer as i mentioned earlier the stormwater options would likely require additional analysis to determine how much water is actually available for use so in this portfolio work on sw one would begin with planning studies and modeling and would pause while the other options advance once those other options reach their operation phase and the city understands how much water could be gained from those options sw one could advance through design construction and operation portfolio four most adaptive so this is the performance curve for portfolio four i'm going to show you several scenarios for this portfolio given that is our adaptive portfolio and there's certain pathways that could be considered so for the baseline scenario e one g w two and g w one would all begin concurrently as with the planning studies and modeling for sw one for pr two the direct portable reuse this portfolio recommends pausing on any work while the regulations from the state continue to work through g w one work the original the initial siting studies would begin and then work would pause while e one and g w two advance once e one and g w two reach a point of operation g w one would be sized to meet the remaining need for water after those two projects have been established so you'll see those arrows coming down into g w one at that point g w one would continue with sequa and a regulatory process pr two would have had planning studies completed at this point but would pause while g w one advances sw one would also pause at the point that g w one is better understood that would feed into sw one and design construction and operation could could further for that option once g w one is complete pr two could move forward based on the remaining need for water in this scenario i also want to draw your attention to the plus signs behind g w one and pr two in these cases and this was as a result of comments we received from our stakeholder group in the case of g w one plus means that those wells would not only be extraction but they would look at aquifer storage and recovery as well and that's why you see that connection between g w one plus and sw one looking at how we can utilize storm water to recharge the groundwater basin and use in with g w one pr two has a plus behind it because it was really important to our stakeholders and water team that we continue to look at regional partnerships for those efforts so an alternative scenario for portfolio four again begins very similar to the baseline scenario in this case g w one would be sized as it is in the baseline to meet the remaining need for water but in this scenario the portable reuse option and the storm water option do not move past the initial planning stage because g w one would provide the remaining water needed this is the cost and yield performance for the alternative scenario so you see much much less cumulative capital required in fact it's quite similar to portfolio two so a different variant to that alternative scenario what happens if sw one can provide water to g w one plus what would that look like in this case sw one planning studies and modeling would feed into g w one it would be determined at that point that water that storm water could be provided to that option and then design construction and operation would move concurrently between g w one and sw one with water from sw one being provided to g w one another variant what happens if g w one plus is not able to provide the needed water in this case pr two would continue along its implementation timeline with sequa design and construction and would be sized to remit the city's remaining need for water in this case sw one would not move past the initial planning stages because perhaps it was determined that there was not sufficient water to achieve cost effectiveness so this slide shows a comparison of all of the portfolio cost and yield performance curves so you see portfolio three would maximize water but certainly be the most expensive portfolio four similar but when you look at the alternative where you see costs more in line with the water use that would be needed i do want to point out that you may have noticed some of these portfolios have water yields that significantly exceed the stated water supply goals we haven't forgot about those goals the analysis considered the full potential of each of the supply options and certainly that's why we've included portfolio four and its variants to recognize that the city would not over build or look at securing more water supply than was needed i also want to acknowledge that there are groundwater projects in each of these four portfolios as we know sigma past in 2014 has had significant feedback into how we manage groundwater santa rosa is very committed to and involved in the gsa and its gsp and will continue to do so and implement those projects accordingly as colin mentioned we have presented these portfolios to the board of public utilities and i just want to summarize briefly some of the feedback we heard from them they were supportive of the study and portfolio approach several of the board members requested more information about why the two desalination options did not advance past the screening step and what changes in the future may trigger the city to reconsider desalination as a city water supply so to address those comments the study reports now includes additional information and an appendix on desalination so it provides more information about its suitability as a supply and triggers that may cause the city to reconsider it in the future portfolio four will also be updated in the plan to identify when and why the city may reconsider desalination as a potential supply source this memo that is an appendix now will be appended to the study technical memorandum and the plan and now i'll turn it over to colin who will go over next steps thank you very much katie appreciate that so here is a timeline showing you what we've accomplished from inception to this point today a lot of work has gone into this probably over 70 75 individuals have provided input into the effort that we've brought to you today so we're very proud of all of that engagement we're here before you in september october 5th we will go before the board of public utilities and bring them the draft plan and then we'll come to you october 24th with the draft plan once the plan has met all of the expectations and interests of the governing bodies we'll go ahead and finalize that and begin work moving forward with some studies and sqa compliance and that sort of thing so those are the next steps in front of us so at this point we're very interested in your questions your comments your concerns we're particularly interested to know if you're supportive of the approach that we had to this evaluation the engagement the way we were able to integrate feedback from all of our stakeholders and whether you find this approach of having a multitude of portfolios and alternatives as an effective approach for this work so thank you and looking forward to your questions well thank you for the presentation you guys did a wonderful job looking at council are there any council member for me thank you i am thank you for this tremendous body of work and i think that diversifying our sources is a good thing and i like that you're considering uh different things that will come online in the future i'm just curious to know one thing i didn't see which i've been hearing a lot about is potable reuse and i'm wondering if there was any discussion of that and if so where did it factor into this report yes um in fact i might ask katie to go back to that slide and and we may want to share the screen again if that's possible um we do have that particularly in portfolio four and the alternatives so what we look at is are there particular points in time where we look at what can we do effectively with groundwater while maintaining sustainability in the basin we have to have that weighed out can't just extract water we need to make sure we're recharging the basin and staying in balance and is there a point in time where we're looking at potable reuse as an effective method for addressing let's see if i can find it here so for example here you can see direct potable reuse is still under study and then depending on what the other water supplies i'm sorry i'm on slide 41 i apologize we're not sharing that but um in the portfolio four i'll just say yes it is considered but katie maybe you can address that a little bit more sure the way that we've captured it in the plan um we it's really coined purified recycled water it's another way of saying potable reuse but seven of the options that underwent detailed feasibility analysis were potable reuse one was a satellite facility um and another i think was a regional facility both were direct potable reuse not indirect great um i i appreciate it and i think just that to the degree that we can begin to socialize that um you know even if we're not ready to do it now i think that's it's really great that it's part of the dialogue yeah thank you so much for the question and for the comment and i'll just mention that our stakeholder group included calpine who's one of our major customers of our existing recycled water as well as doug borreta from the farming community he has a dairy farm as you probably are aware and he did write an article that we included with your packet supporting this effort and he felt that um his interests and concerns were included and as you can imagine direct potable reuse would affect potentially the farming community and could potentially affect calpine but they were at the table and they know that their interests and concerns were integrated into this process and so um we absolutely believe that you know that could be a potential in the future great thank you so much to all of you any additional questions from council members okay thank you again for the presentation it was great and we will now hand it over to madame city clerk for public comment we are now taking public comment on item 3.2 or if you are in the council chamber it would like to comment please make your way to the podium if you are participating via zoom please raise your hand or dial star nine you will have two minutes and a timer will alert you at the end of that period if you would like to provide your name please do so before starting your comment seeing no one approach the podium and we have we have one caller on zoom please hi council can you hear me yes we can just a quick reminder that juse did 9-11 okay thank you we're going to ask you to keep your comments to the item or we're going to disconnect seeing no additional hands raised on zoom that concludes public comment thank you oh we have one public comment in the chamber yes we can't hear you hold on just a moment it's not on oh here we go my name is John Kosovsky I live in Santa Rosa the question is to what extent do you include population increase in your study what are your projections on that that's all I want thank you okay um and because we do not engage with the public I will ask you um his question yes thank you so much for the question we looked out at our 2045 projections in our urban water management plan so it does include about a 30 percent increase in population in addition to more schools governments more jobs more housing more dense housing all of that growth that's anticipated in the urban water management plan was considered thank you very much for taking that last question seeing no additional questions in the chamber we will now move on to item councilmember rogers thank you mayor my apologies I know you asked whether or not you were on the right track with who you're speaking with and what the plan is looking like I just want to say yes from my perspective as always the department doing an incredible job of taking a very difficult and complex topic and turning it into an asset for the city I think that your list of stakeholders is right on it's the folks that we typically hear from the most and I think it's helpful to hear questions from the public that we're not just making housing decisions based on anything but that we actually make sure that we have the natural resources to sustain that as well so thank you for that and I think yes right direction any other council members want to make comments okay seeing none and I would like to correct myself we do engage with the public but we do not engage when people ask questions during public comment but I wanted to make sure that your question was answered thank you very much thank you guys for the presentation we will now move on to item five which is closed session and study session report out so madam city attorney good afternoon madam mayor and council and community closed session was had on the item on the agenda and no reportable action was taken madam city manager being as though we just completed our study sessions I'm going to assume you don't want to report out on those thank you just wanted to clarify all right madam city clerk can you please facilitate public comment we are now taking public comment on item five if you are in the council chamber would like to comment please make your way to the podium if you are participating via zoom please raise your hand or dial star nine you will have two minutes and a timer will alert at the end of the period if you would like to provide your name please do so before stating your comment seeing no public comment in chambers we have no hands raised on zoom thank you moving on to item six point one our proclamation for the evening which will be read by council member step my pleasure madam mayor I like it that we've got a number of water themes for the evening so here it goes whereas water is santa rosa's most valuable resource and without it our community and the economy could not thrive or expand and whereas we are extremely proud of the role santa rose of water plays in delivering safe and reliable drinking water collecting and recycling water for beneficial reuse capturing storm water to prevent flooding and protecting our watershed and the environment and whereas thanks to our highly skilled team of water experts we are ensuring a safe and reliable water future for our community and whereas our community's drinking water is regularly tested to ensure it meets all drinking water standards and whereas santa rosa water operates and maintains 1200 miles of water and sewer infrastructure and whereas our team operates the laguna and the laguna treatment plant that recycles millions of gallons of wastewater daily and is nationally recognized for beneficially reusing nearly 100 percent of our recycled water and whereas the santa rosa water team maintains 340 miles of storm drains and cares for 100 miles of creeks and whereas santa rosa santa rosa's water professionals work 24 7365 24 hours a day seven days a week 365 days a year to maintain repair and upgrade our community's water systems and whereas santa rosa water invests 135 million annually to improve the resiliency of our public water systems and whereas the 278 water professionals at santa rosa water are dedicated to protecting our community's water future now therefore be resolved that the city of santa rosa rosa hereby declares october 7 through 15th 2023 water professionals appreciation week and extends our sincere gratitude to our santa rosa water professionals i would like to invite the representatives that will be receiving director if you would like to make a comment please do thank you you all hear me thank you thank you mayor rogers and council members i would like to ask all of my water team members who are here in the chamber say if you could please come join me up at the podium i want to thank you so much for honoring the santa rosa water team with this proclamation the water team greatly appreciates this your recognition and our water professionals help ensure our community's quality of life every day during california's water professionals week santa rosa water will be appreciating our water team members for their dependability relentlessness and their talent this week and beyond will include sharing stories and it well the week it's not this week the week will include sharing stories and employee spotlights of our teams and their accomplishments as well as highlighting the vast array of exciting opportunities for careers in water your proclamation this evening goes a long way and not only recognizing the efforts of santa rosa water but all water professionals and the critical jobs they perform for our communities day in and day out california water professionals do the work to provide safe and reliable drinking water treat and beneficially reuse recycled water regulate our storm water systems protect our water resources and the environment so thank you so much mayor rogers vice mayor mcdonald council members for recognizing these efforts and many thanks to our santa rosa water professionals and other california water professionals for the important work that they do thank you so much thank you i must say prior to being on council and being on the water advisory committee i did not know very much about water i knew it came out my faucet i knew i could flush my toilet i knew i could water my grass prior to the drought prior to the drought so there was very little known and you guys have been doing a great job bringing awareness so thank you so much for all your work are there any other comments from council members seeing none madame city clerk may you please conduct public comment in following public comment we will ask all of you to come down and take a picture with the council we are now taking public comment on item 6.1 if you are in the council chamber and would like to comment please make your way to the podium if you are participating via zoom please raise your hand or style dial star nine you will have two minutes and a timer will alert you at the end of the period if you would like to provide your name please do so before speaking i'm seeing no one in chamber and we have no public comment on zoom thank you would you guys like to come on down and take a picture with the council all right moving on to item seven we have no staff briefings for the day item eight madame city manager and city attorney reports i have nothing to report out this evening thank you i also have nothing to report thank you now looking at council for statements of abstention by council members seeing none we will move on to item 10 which is our mayor and council members reports council members that three quick items for me excuse me with the first one again pretending to water so i sit on the ground water sustainability agency for the center as a plane and we were one of three groundwater sustainability agencies to receive 15 million dollars in funding so center was a plane uh pedaluma and and uh sinoma valley and it's worth pointing out that pedaluma and center was a plane we kind of joined together to help out sinoma valley a little bit so they can get their funding but then in the end it all came in so we've got 15 million dollars to implement our ground groundwater sustainability plans which is which is great news for the area then two other items on september 18th a lot of us here we're celebrating the center was a merit awards which was just a really fun evening and and and uh shown a spotlight on some folks doing some really good things in the community um and then on the 20th uh vice mayor mcdonald and i were were part of the violence prevention partnership meeting um and i'll let the vice mayor go into greater detail about that meeting but one highlight that i'll share is that there was a great exchange for a while between rosalind university prep um and our police department because they'd commute they had partnered in an active shooting drill several months ago uh and the and rosalind was effusive about their um the benefits that they saw in partnering with with s rpd um and then from our side we we saw a lot of benefits as well and so a good portion of the meeting was spent discussing um the the value of that drill and what what all parties had taken from it um and it was a it was a memorable meeting and with that i'll turn it back over to you mayor thank you councilmember o' crepeke thank you mayor a number of events um over the past few weeks some to shine a light on um i as well attended the merit awards great event shining um a light on some community members doing some great work many of whom most of us did not know we're doing that great work so um getting that spotlight uh to those individuals is important um last week we also had uh taco with a cop at the steel lane community center over in apple valley a phenomenal event um meeting the residents of that area uh playing with the kids trying not to throw frisbees over into the smart tracks um but it was a great time and uh a great event so thank you to the police uh department for helping organize and the parks department and the rec department and the vpp i mean all of these uh organization parts of our uh city uh participated in it it was great um then on saturday i was honored to be asked to speak at a fundraiser that was um quickly organized uh by um our firefighters here in santa rosa to benefit firefighters in mawi a number of whom lost their homes and um it was a great event uh up at um paradise ridge beautiful beautiful view because it happened at sunset and um it was really great to see them uh raise especially uh for their their their brethren 44 000 dollars for those that are uh helping to heal the physical and emotional scars of what they endured and then lastly um just a heads up on october 25th just to give fair warning that will be the first public safety subcommittee official meeting of the year uh with a uh fairly lengthy agenda um but with some good stuff on it so uh for those of you that are interested please mark that on your calendars thank you thank you councilmember fliming yes thank you um uh couple of things let's see the enhanced infrastructure finance district met for the first time i'm the interim chair until the full board is seated and we will be meeting next month on october 19th uh 19th uh normally we'll be meeting i believe the second thursday of the month but next month we're meeting the third thursday and this is a great opportunity for folks to come and talk about what kinds of infrastructure and what kinds of financing they'd like to see come to the downtown as we begin our negotiations between the city and the county that'll lead to greater prosperity for both entities and uh two weeks ago wednesday and as well again tomorrow the bay area housing finance authority um is meeting to discuss the various policy points for the housing bond that will likely be on the ballot in november we're going to be really interesting discussions the public comments that we've been getting have been really high quality and i want to thank everyone who's here who's been paying attention to this and i invite continued participation and then the renal enterprise district hired a new executive director and i was trying to find a bio of her for you guys but i'm going to wait until next time so i can properly introduce her but thank you to everybody who applied and um it's great that we have someone else at the helm and i want to sincere thank you to michelle whitman for her dedicated service she turned this entity which was really just an idea into something that is now housing units that people are going to be moving into it's pretty exciting thank you vice mayor mcdonnell thank you mayor um a few things i just want to say thank you again to the mayor at awards committee to carolina spence who was the chair this year it's really inspiring to be able to go and hear about the stories of what people are doing to support our community and so it was an honor to be able to attend that uh we also attended the annual cal cities conference last week in sacramento we were able to go and have some professional development and hear what other jurisdictions are doing around the state so that's always interesting for us to be able to go i attended the firefighters fund razor as well as council member o'crapkey and council member alvarez um and i want to say thank you to them for putting that on i had just recently been in mawi this summer and and i want to say thank you also to paradise ridge winery for hosting that great event and i'm happy to hear that they made that much um at it i left fairly early so we could get to the other event that was in the downtown um courthouse square and i just want to say thanks to the i believe it was our cities who put on that event and it was great to see so many youth out um in the evening time celebrating and and being together and and so i was happy to go to attend that as well and um the last thing i'd like to talk about was the vpp meeting we've talked about the strategic plan which i believe is coming forward to council for consideration in the next month or so but in addition to that we're breaking down what we're going to be doing for the violence prevention program um by years and so we're starting with year one and one of the things we've been able to do is do outreach to about the 40 different groups that participate within this committee to ask them how they see themselves fitting into our strategic plan to help us reach our goals with the community and the youth in the community so i want to say thank you so much to danielle for all her work for for the work that she does her entire team i want to say thank you to everybody who's attending those meetings and um we're ready to get started and roll up our sleeves and get things done councilmember alberus thank you madam mayor i too attended as as you heard just a little bit ago the event at the at the paradise wage winery and i do want to thank councilman crappley for for the words of of both of your experience here and that support must continue to be given to the survivors not only of san rosa but those of hawaii and how imperative it is to their recuperation that's just not when the and and i quote you or paraphrase you when the news teams leave the site it goes much further than that and that was from a person who's experienced that it was very important to hear and be reminded of so thank you sir afterwards i attended a courthouse event that was faith-based and i must can really just compliment the folks out there for the amount of youth that they incorporated madam mayor please the amount of youth that they incorporated into the programs it's definitely a lesson that they can can share with us how to involve the youth into the civic process i definitely said they have a strategy book which i'm definitely paying attention to i did attend a soups meeting last week in regards to hazard pay for agricultural workers and i bring this up on this platform just because it affects all of us here in sonoma county and i do want to commend both supervisor coursing and supervisor goren for understanding the the difference between right and wrong so definitely um kudos to both of those individuals i did attend ram's school and checked out their brand new gym as well as took a tour of their campus i'm happy to see the amount of technology that's being implemented into our schools in the southwest area i was i was very happy to see all the technology that i wish i had when i attended the schools there and uh lastly i did also attend the first of i believe chief cregan for the first of five weeks the the program that was being held at the boys and girls club and the the the initiative there was to incorporate the community so so they can both have the interaction build relationships and see what the daily operations are of our centers of police department so i'm i'm happy to see that the boys and girls club is now being used as that hub that's been so sought after in our community where the community can can build the relationships not only with our centers of police department for other branches of our of our government and also in in in the in the situation that where an emergency might arise so we do have the library now and we also have the boys and girls club which i'm very happy to to recognize thank you thank you any other reports from council members okay seeing none um on 9 14 the long term financial policy and audit committee met we were able to review our revenues specifically our tax revenue and how it's been affected over the years also on 9 14 um i was able to attend the lime foundation gala and i must say i go to something like every weekend so sonoma county has the most nonprofits ever but i think it is great because we are giving back to back to our community so i was able to participate in clean santa rosa and we were on sabastopol road and i made a note to know when i crossed over stony point that i was going into mr alvarez's district and i picked up quite a lot of trash so i just want to let you know that i was out there picking up trash in your district so next time i hope we can see you out there and and i hope we can get more participants uh from the community i was able to meet with uh s rpd detectives and um as some of you know because of my reports i've been trying to go to all of the departments and meet the staff that we have um in our city because they do such a wonderful job but they allowed me to ask questions um and really to get to know the units that they work in um and what exactly they do and i was able to thank them for their service to the community and extend my gratitude and appreciation to their families for supporting them for doing such a hard job um this group of detectives deals with everything that the rest of the community does not want to think about or address until it happens to our family members or someone that we know um so i was very thankful for the the job that they do and i wanted to to pass that on to them um i too attended the league of california city's annual conference in sacramento and i was elected as the second vice president for the league of california's uh city's north bay division so did want to report that and i'm not sure anyone reported the annual housing champion celebration at me telltale food park which was uh fun and it was exciting and we do have some champions in the community um so we wanted to celebrate them and thank you to gen h for putting that on and allowing us to celebrate um i attended the 14th annual south park day and night festival honoring uh the late fence harper which was great and had a lot of resources for the community and a lot of fun um 923 i attended the chops team club fall gala so that was a lot of fun because i've been on a lot and i won so i like to win um and lastly on 924 this is our city um it was a movement of generosity in our city um they had live music food trucks and family fun and this is the event that i believe well they were both talking about it but when you said there was a lot of youth there yes there was definitely a lot of youth there the event was a collaborative effort um but it was organized by new vintage church so just wanted to thank them for getting everyone out into the square and having a fun time and there were people there that had no faith people there of all faiths but we were out there having a good time and congregating together so that was great um and i wanted to announce the town hall that we have coming up on october 11th um at 6 p.m the spring lake middle school so i hope everyone um in the community is going to be able to come and um participate in the town halls and we will continue to have them around the city so with that being said madam city clerk can you please facilitate public comment we are now taking public comment on item 10 if you are in the council chamber and would like to comment please make your way to the podium if you are participating via zoom please raise your hand or dial star nine you will have two minutes and a timer will alert at the end of the period if you would like to provide your name please do so before stating your comment we do have one speaker in chamber sir please go ahead when you're ready are you wishing to speak at the podium sir no thank you we have no colors uh via zoom thank you we will now move on to approval of minutes we have one set of minutes september 12th 2023 council are there any corrections to the minutes seeing none madam city clerk can you please facilitate public comment on item 11.1 we are now taking public comment on item 11.1 if you are in the council chamber would like to comment please make your way to the podium if you are on zoom please raise your hand or dial star nine you will have two minutes and a timer will alert you at the end of the period i'm seeing no comments in chamber and no public comment via zoom thank you we will adopt item 11.1 as presented moving on to our consent items madam city clerk can you please read the consent items item 12.1 is a resolution professional services agreement approval data instincts public outreach communications and community engagement services 12.2 is a motion work order number a 010139-216-29 approval coffee park and fountain grove neighborhood road disaster recovery construction management and inspection services 12.3 is a resolution appropriation of cdbg-dr grant funds and contract award coffee park and fountain grove neighborhood road disaster recovery 12.4 is a resolution authorization to execute joint standard agreements for the affordable housing and sustainable communities a hsc program and a separate implementation and mutual indemnity agreement for the roseland village housing project 12.5 is a resolution re-adoption of city of santa rosa policy 200-20 and policy 200-21 regarding the provision of priority water and sewer service to residential developments with affordable housing units 12.6 is a resolution approval of blanket purchase order with bmi imaging systems incorporated for microfiche conversion services of planning and economic development department records 12.7 is a resolution approving a professional services agreement with quadriga landscape architecture and planning to provide landscape architectural design and engineering services to prepare design and construction documents for kawana springs community park in amount not to exceed 603,763.60 12.8 is a resolution extension of proclamation of local homeless emergency thank you bringing it back to council are there any questions council member rogers thank you mary i have a couple of questions about item 12.1 i'm not quite sure who to actually address them towards good evening madam mayor my name is james jensen i'm the deputy director of engineering services for transportation and public works great thank you so much my main question about this is how this position would this contract would interface with future communications and community engagement positions especially i know it's an 18 month position but 260 let's see 236,000 when we just eliminated a position that was i think less than that all included in terms of benefits and whatnot so my question is really i guess between the two of you wouldn't we be better served to actually hire the position we eliminated than to bring on a contract position it's a it's a good question in terms of this particular contract it's an on-demand need the reason that we're using this service in this instance is the depth and breadth of the project it's a large-scale project covers a lot of ground and it's a fire recovery project and we're really looking to go the extra mile on being proactive with public engagement it's not a service we would typically use at this level for for every project so it's hard to say that we would have that that consistent need for all projects that would justify keeping a full-time staff on board and i do understand i i love mark i think mark does great work and worked with him when he was on the council up in winsor just wanted to flag this it also says in the fiscal analysis that it doesn't impact the general fund and i was hoping the city manager could kind of explain how or why or whomever assistant city manager not you want to talk about the funding yeah thank you councilmember jason nut assistant city manager this particular project is being funded by a series of of grant funds and allocations made by the city council in prior project years for example the community development block grant mitigation and infrastructure funds that's the lion's share of the work of the funding that's going in but we've also identified gas tax funds funds that were from the pg&e settlement have gone into this particular project and so all of those components are being used to fund the three specific actions we're asking council to take tonight but no general fund specifically described as general fund reserve is being used pg&e settlement fund is a component of the general fund but was identified during the 2021 budget year as separate and delegated in a specific manner with this project being one of those in an amount about four million dollars so for the grant funding in particular is that flexible funding that we could use some other way in our recovery or is it prescribed specifically for community engagement so we worked very closely with the state department of housing community development on what constituted an infrastructure project that would qualify to use the cdbg infrastructure funds and while there is a there is breadth in the description this was the project that most closely fit our need and the scope that they were looking to fill with the funds you're asking if that funding source could go to other projects and and what i'm saying is we spent three years working with housing community development this project was the best and most close fit to what they were looking to fund in our recovery effort we did look at other projects there are other projects identified through the process that are receiving cdb gr funds but when it comes to the infrastructure component this was where our largest hole was in order to recover our community from the 2017 tubs fire okay what's the hourly rate for the contract because i know that this is a not to exceed that it sounds like it's based on whatever our need is over the next couple of years for 18 months for the project what's the hourly rate for the consultant yeah the average hourly rate was about $170 an hour okay i'm fine with moving forward and approving it but would like city leadership to take a look at whether or not there's a way for us to supplement with what i would assume is cheaper city staff to do some of this outreach and engagement work that we have a department for um particularly given our tight budgets that we're expecting next year and and council member i'll say over the last four months we've been coordinating with uh the communication and intergovernmental relations team on this issue they did identify that they didn't have capacity to take on this large of a project and we worked collaboratively in order to go out and solicit for this particular uh service um there will be tight coordination between the contractor and our internal team not only from the standpoint of consistency of communication but yes if there is something that we can do that we don't have to utilize the consultant with we will okay and last question is there any urgency to us approving the contract tonight we'd certainly like to get this project rolling i think the community has been very eager to see us get new pavement on the ground and the communities that were affected especially considering the counting came in two years ago and completed their project from the standpoint of the communications work um we think it's better to be at the beginning early on so that we can start the communication before the contractor actually rolls into the community with 33 miles worth of road being reconstructed well being resurfaced it's it's a sizable impact to each of the communities that will be affected no i absolutely i don't want to come across like i'm not supportive of the project projects long overdue it's the 170 an hour to have somebody do community engagement for us that i have heartburn with but i appreciate it thank you councilmember rogers you're gonna leave that one on you're not pulling it you're fine i'm fine and i can follow up with the city manager and assistant city manager i think having the contract approved as a not to exceed but then talking about how we keep constraints on the contract so that we get the best bang for our buck in utilizing our existing staff i'm fine with it as supplemental for sure um but we definitely want to make sure that we're keeping an eye on it looks like your point is well taken by staff thank you um are there any other comments councilmember roger yeah on the same subject um might it be useful to go into more detail on what kind of outreach that might be um that would exceed the capacity of our um our team's ability um i i'd suspect since we're talking thousands of homes being uh told they can't park on their streets and and whatnot that that would be fairly intense i'll hand it over to our project manager flea shong hi my name is flea shong i am the assistant manager for this project and the capital projects team um so the services that data instincts will be providing is that they'll be providing media for two community meetings to inform the public um there you will be preparing notification letters and door hangers um and they will be creating and maintaining a project dedicated website and establishing a and maintaining a hotline for residents to call in with questions and concerns and they'll be providing translation services and providing digital outreach notification thank you are there any additional questions from council regarding the consent items all right seeing none we will now go to public comment madam city clerk we are now taking public comment on item 12 or if you are in the council chamber and would like to comment please make your way to the podium if you are participating via zoom please raise your hand or dial star nine you will have two minutes and a timer will alert at the end of the period if you would like to provide your name please do so before starting your comment okay our first speaker go ahead when you're ready yes you at at the podium okay 170 something dollars an hour that's an excellent point council member a tight budget roads falling apart parks look like they've been abandoned and you're going to bring someone on part time for 170 something dollars an hour i don't think you're meeting your fiduciary responsibility a word i've always wanted to use by the way your fiduciary responsibility to tax payers of this city now this is a mindset of the bureaucracy that i've seen it's not our money it's federal money state money settlement money it's free money ain't no such a thing it's free money and that makes a very good point and whether you call it the general fund or this special fund or that fund or whatever fund it's all our money and this person is worth 170 something dollars when the problems we have in this city i think you're making a big mistake here a big mistake an expensive mistake thank you we have no additional speakers in chamber and we have no speakers on zoom thank you vice mayor mcdonnell would you like to make a motion thank you mayor i'd like to move items 12.1 through 12.8 second motion made by vice mayor mcdonnell and seconded by councilmember o'crapkey madam city clerk may you please call the vote councilmember staff hi councilmember rogers hi councilmember o'crapkey hi councilmember fleming hi councilmember alvarez hi vice mayor mcdonnell hi mayor rogers hi that motion passes with seven affirmative votes thank you moving on to item 14.1 graffiti abatement pilot program madam city manager item 14.1 is a report graffiti abatement pilot program if the team could introduce themselves for the record please thank you lou kirk assistant chief building official jessie oswald chief building official and gay bosburn interim director of planning and economic development and please bear with us for a second until we get the presentation up give me one second gentlemen all right good evening mayor vice mayor and members of the council um actually very excited to be here today to present this program and i'll just give a few of those elements that i'm excited about before i handed it over to mr. kirk to dive into the presentation when we talk about private property graffiti abatement and really what it means to do that i think it really speaks to the mission vision and values of our code enforcement team it's very easy to get caught up into the enforcement side of code enforcement in the punitive side and code enforcement but there really is a very significant education partnering collaboration component and we really look for voluntary compliance and this program speaks to that so it's really grounded in that concept the second element is it's an area where we have identified a gap in our service delivery and we're looking at creative ways on how we can close that and we're presenting a pilot program today which is we're going to try it we're going to navigate through that we're going to better understand the community's needs and we're going to adjust so what you'll hear today is as many of the foundational elements that we've been talking about but the phase one in this process is to really understand the needs of the community understand that universe and then understand a strategy for how we respond to that so there is going to be some ebb and flow to the program and if we're properly responding to the community what we start with may very well be where we don't end because of the challenge of being able to adjust to their needs so i just wanted to lay that framework we'll do our best to answer questions but there will be a lot of just attempting to approve the program long term and what we start with may not necessarily be where we end because it's really adjusting to the needs of the community so with that said i will hand it over to mr curt and he will dive into the program thank you game good evening mayor rogers vice mayor mcdonnell and members of the city council staff is here tonight to present a proposal for the establishment of an 18 month graffiti event pilot program excuse me there we go there we are thank you this program recognizing the realities of limited funding sources aims to address several key objectives these include the generation of visible reductions in graffiti prevalence restoration of aesthetic appeal and fostering of community pride as a proof of concept this program would rely upon limited term staffing and interdepartmental support to lay a strategic foundation for the long-term goals to address graffiti abatement for both public and private properties thereby also establishing the infrastructure for upwardly scalable future program this initiative would seek to contribute to the city's economic health to create safer communities to support development and to enhance the vitality and resiliency of the city of santa rosa these benefits align closely with council goals and priorities representing a proactive approach to graffiti control before diving into the specifics of staff's proposal i would like to take a moment to supply some context over the years our city has implemented various initiatives and programs to combat graffiti notably in 2003 ordinance 3601 restricted the possession and sale of graffiti tools while in 2005 ordinance 3270 3729 excuse me strengthened debatement efforts emphasized the importance of prompt removal and introduced other additional provisions including parental responsibility for minors involved in graffiti and penalties for offenders in 2007 a grant program enabled the creation of a civilian graffiti coordinator position within the police department this grant funded program ran through 2014 in 2019 graffiti abatement duties fully shifted to the city's code enforcement program and was absorbed into its complaint-based general enforcement caseload in recent years code enforcement has seen an increase in graffiti vandalism and its impact to the city's aesthetic appeal and community pride turning to staff's analysis of the structure and components of the proposed graffiti abatement pilot program the overall concept is to establish two core positions supported by an interdepartmental team comprised of additional key personnel the first of the two core positions proposed is a full-time equivalent limited term housing the community services slash code enforcement technician this position will play a crucial role in communicating and enforcing anti-graffiti regulations ensuring swift removal of graffiti through their field presence the second position is a halftime limited term community outreach specialist this role will complement the efforts of the hcs technician by focusing on community engagement needs assessments and the mobilization of resources for graffiti prevention the goals of the proposed program include an acknowledgement of the potential for disproportional impacts within certain segments of the community in recognition of this staff will seek to maintain an awareness of and a sensitivity to the capacity of individuals to self abate graffiti that is found upon their properties we aim to raise awareness of the harms created by law and graffiti to remain and to emphasize education to prevent its spread by fostering an interdepartmental team environment we will strengthen our ability to address this issue we also seek to explore alternatives to enforcement through the efficient utilization of available community resources creating a cleaner more vibrant community within our city through a variety of well considered and consistent approaches in terms of the fiscal impacts of this proposal staff is requesting a one-time funding appropriation of two hundred and eighty five thousand two hundred dollars this includes two hundred and seventy one thousand one hundred and sixty eight dollars in direct staffing costs and fourteen thousand and thirty two dollars in incidental material costs importantly there will be no direct fiscal impact on the general fund it is important to note however that the program will automatically sunset in the absence of sustained funding after 18 months to move forward with this program we require council approval for this funding appropriation once approved our next steps would include solidifying the program framework and refining the composition of the interdepartmental support team we would also initiate the hiring process for key positions upon filling the position staff would commence outreach and engagement activities with the community and conduct regular progress reporting and evaluations in conclusion we recommend authorizing the city manager to appropriate two hundred and eighty five thousand two hundred dollars from contingency funding sources to establish an eighteen month graffiti abatement pilot program this program will include the hiring of one full-time limited term code enforcement technician and one half-time limited term community outreach specialist by taking this proactive step we can work towards a cleaner more attractive city while involving the community and addressing graffiti related challenges in a strategic and sustainable manner thank you for your time and consideration of this proposal we believe that this program will not only make a significant difference in graffiti reduction but also contribute to the overall well-being and pride of our community staff stands ready to answer any questions you may have at this time thank you thank you for that presentation looking at council members any questions vice mayor mcdonnell they're pretty easy question for you can you tell me how the public would contact you if they saw graffiti or how the system works is there a number that they contact or an email they would be able to use our existing infrastructure for turning in complaints to code enforcement and we would put out as part of our initial outreach additional information reinforcing that that would be the number and email to use so that they would be able to get to us and we wouldn't need to create any new technologies to have them get in touch with us so they contact code enforcement yes okay thank you council member okraki yes two quick questions first would this program include properties that run along the smart tracks that tend to be extremely susceptible to graffiti and are also the first impression many people who are taking the smart train see of our beautiful city they would include those properties and i'll add that those particular properties pose a unique challenge for us one that we're working on currently i've been in communication with representatives from smart they are reluctant to have just anybody enter onto their right of way for purposes of removing graffiti and they have a process an application process for the public that in my mind is expensive for the average homeowner to engage in it's almost as if they're being doubly penalized first they get graffiti on their fence and then they have to pay for a permit to go on to the right of way to repair their own fence so we're looking at options there i don't have a clean answer yet as to how that's going to play out but we're definitely going to find a way to address those areas thank you i appreciate that continue definitely continue working on that and try to find a solution because that's something i think i can all of us have would have a concern about since that's a large first impression my second question is what kind of i appreciate the the rapid response uh note in here however what kind of interdepartmental communication would there be between you and if i can interrupt chief cregan up there for a second uh in terms of i mean i think we've all heard in terms of the the graffiti when it comes to gangs and crime to kind of tell a story is there going to be some interdepartmental discussion so that that's not removed too quickly before the police can respond it's it's absolutely going to be an interconnected effort i've i've been in touch with the chief and others at the police department and other members of staff throughout the city and everyone is very excited to contribute to this program and support it in terms of rapid removal you're absolutely right it's it's critical uh the idea behind successful graffiti abatement is to uh remove it as quickly as possible take away the benefit of it being there for a period of time and having it be seen uh so with response to that again this being a pilot program we have so many opportunities to create something that's very specifically tailored to this city uh and i imagine one of the scenarios might be that when we're out taking photographs of the graffiti we're sharing those with the police department so that they can keep track of those monikers through their own system and and find a way to perhaps find the person responsible for it as a separate enforcement issue they could handle the criminal aspects of the graffiti being placed there while the rest of the team is working on the rapid removal i appreciate that yeah definitely uh keep a uh an open source of communication between the two departments i think that'd be huge if i may uh add to the conversation just to expand on the efforts uh i was not being rude earlier when i turned my back to the council i was speaking with chief cregan earlier about this very specifically uh he had the the delight in educating me back in 2018 or 19 about the former graffiti program that was very robust and it contained all of the elements that you're probably envisioning not just with the collaboration between police and or other agencies say code enforcement there are numerous other agencies that we've met with already and we really strive to mirror and and certainly improve on that program that was very successful back through through that period uh i was i was uh well educated i spent a good hour and a half or more with chief cregan on that matter a few years ago prior to him being the chief and he he really had a lot to say about it is very intimate with it and and i really want to take take the opportunity and learn from what personnel in the department still have we actually still have contact with the original manager of that program who is willing to speak with our team on how they did that and did it so well along with the collaboration and connection with so many of the other departments and divisions within the city including gang violence violence gang task force violence prevention public works so many in in our our partners in the community as far as the uh the uh um not-for-profit agencies that are also really very willing uh as the mayor so well pointed out earlier to to do uh work in the community so there's a lot of ideas out there that we hope to really leverage and and again i'm going to echo what my uh my boss said earlier super excited about this program because i want to give us the opportunity to prove it out and show how successful it can be with with this effort moving forward so thank you yeah and if i may add to that because i think it's an incredibly important point and i think it gives some framework to the policy you have to understand the difference between what would constitute typical street art and what has a violence prevention component to it right so there's an understanding about it and then there's two different paths potentially to the resolution and i think as jesse mentioned we have to be in lockstep with other departments on what that looks like so really from an educational standpoint um what we're really looking at is a singular point of contact that can assist people in the resolution um and what i want to be incredibly sensitive to is obviously we have a lot of people in the community that are just dealing with this and they're not letting us know and they're getting frustrated by it so there's that outreach component and then that's there's that singular point of contact that can get in touch with other departments and if it's on private property we handle it if it's in the public right of way we have resources for that um so this will help be that singular point of contact to help and to guide people through the resolution any additional sorry i do have a list councilmember alberus thank you madam mayor understanding this pilot program give us an idea of your determination or how do you determine if somebody's able to pay for the fines if it goes to that point or if you understand that that homeowner is unable to do so do you have an idea of what what the metrics were absolutely well we're going to be responding to the property first of all and we're going to talk to them we're going to find out what their story is and that's that's something that code enforcement does in every case we we get to know the people that are involved we find out how we can best help them uh and if people are able to take care of this that's fine if they can't that's where the community outreach component is going to come in um while the while the technician is out in the field documenting graffiti and making field contacts and enforcing where necessary the community outreach specialist again supported by our interdepartmental team is going to be looking uh to our big box uh hardware stores our service organizations other community groups that are willing and waiting in many cases to help the city and they just need some direction and we're going to we're going to go out and beat the bushes and find those organizations and individuals and and sponsors and and be able to bring resources to people that just can't take care of it themselves uh and again we don't want to penalize them twice they've they've already been penalized by having graffiti we're not going to issue a citation on top of that we're going to find a way to help them uh now on the other hand if people can take care of it and just don't want to we have the enforcement component available and just i believe this might have been on the tip of your tongue social justice and i'm sure it's one of the things that you might have uh had a conversation about i know that the original director was very heavy on the social advocacy program and i'm wondering if that conversation has been had in regards to uh the implementation of of this current program councilmember absolutely and that that's a key component of the underlying uh foundational element to this that we have talked about from from day one it this this opportunity was presented to me early on in our city manager's tenure here it wasn't presented to me it was just a we need ideas to help the community and this is one of those things that i i knew existed out there that we were just unable to really drive towards and our team the code enforcement team uh they are very in tune with the community and those especially the areas that have more of the the problems so to speak and the people that are in those communities so that's why again i'm confident and excited about this to just give our team a chance to shine at doing that type of work for social justice for the betterment of the community overall so thank you for the question no i see it on your face i i can see like the great the great asset that it is to the community taking a negative and turning it into a positive and i do appreciate that that i see that being the direction um my last question how are we going to collaborate with the blue shirts that i see removing graffiti downtown is going to be a joint effort um and what does what does that mean for not only downtown san rosa but let's say another economic powerhouse such as rosalind uh how how can we work together i love this i love this yes we're we're we have great ideas and i i would love for the team to share and i think that's an incredibly important point it really is the concept that i know gets overused but it takes a village um right and and the more we can identify resources and the more we can partner with the community whether there are there are eyes and ears on the ground whether we workshop this with them and we come up with ideas together um i don't think any ideas off the table which is really what has us so excited about this program um because it it does have really constraints with the funding right we're looking at a pilot concept we're going to be looking at how we really scale this in the future and what does it really look like um and it may very well be if we we have that singular point of contact that singular point of contact is engaging with a variety of different community groups a variety of different organized groups to propose concepts into workshop ideas so i think that's incredibly important to this success of this program and thank you for bringing that up because i think it's a very critical point but i would love to hear from the team because i know they have great ideas as well i was going to say exactly what he just said i'll just add to it again i'll refer to my brief conversation with the chief earlier um being not uh maybe appropriate we have when chief and i have conversations about issues and and how to address them we we have very similar thoughts and we're typically very aligned on what that means for the community or the instance but also on how to execute it in the appropriate manner that supports our community um the best i could do at the moment was give him a pat on the back and say watch this we're going to do really great things if we'd have been in his office reminded i probably would have hugged him famous famous last words watch this right no but we have the right people for the for the for the for the jobs and i appreciate that for that that the whole staff and team is putting into it thank you councilmember rogers i just want to thank you guys for your work on the the program uh as the city manager is painfully aware uh i like using graffiti cleanup as a tool for organizing our neighborhoods and i hear in particular from downtown folks west end folks along the greenway when they have substantial graffiti uh one of the shortcomings that i see and i'd like to make sure that we address is uh have the resources accessible to community groups or council members to really go out there and organize people to do some of the work and uh there seems to be a constant sticking point about the issue of public space versus private space and in particular what i see when i go out there and we had on west ninth a couple of weeks ago not only did somebody tag the fence line but they were tagging the actual houses and we put in uh we had staff go out there on thursday friday it was public spaces so that they didn't take care of it monday came around and over the course of the weekend everything had been tagged even more whereas if we had just had something in place to help people perhaps that could have been avoided so i'd like to see a component and oftentimes we're talking about the back of somebody's fence especially right there on west ninth they don't see it as their property they see it as the part of the fence that abuts the public spaces right and so i'd like to see in this program uh a way for us to address those issues as well that it's even if it's graffiti in a public space but it is abutting the public space actually private space but abutting the public space we provide resources and we provide help and i understand the equity concerns about some people could potentially pay for it some people couldn't i'd say if your fence uh the back of your fence is in a public area and you don't address it will help you address it it just might not be the same color paint right but i want to make sure we get that covered sooner rather than later so that we don't get more tagging and in this case it was uh three separate times that gangs were tagging over gang symbols no you're you're right on point with that i think there will definitely be a grassroots component to this and again we've got the opportunity to tailor this so i'm listening to everything that's said tonight and this will go into the mix as you're aware tpw already removes a great deal of graffiti from public property and again that'll be part of this collaboration is you know when we see something on private property there's an adjacent public component we can let them know they can reciprocate and we're going to have that communication and again that's centralized effort to allow us to respond quickly and i think we're talking about the same thing i think i think so and i just want to make sure that we're developing this in a way where we're partners with folks and i know a lot of folks get disenchanted because they did take care of it and then it came back and they took care of it again and it came back i want them to not feel like they're fighting the problem on their own potential property by themselves but actually part of a team that is trying to lift up the entire community and that is our goal as well absolutely great thank you vice mayor mcdonnell i just wanted to say a couple things chris really did most of it and so did eddie as far as making sure that this is not just a public it's also private property and how we're going to collaborate and i want to say thanks to the current team that takes care of all of our public property i know they are really good about getting right out and making sure that the graffiti abatement is taken care of within the city so i'm happy to see that this is extending onto the private property as well i still want to go back to my original comment i'd like to make it easier for folks to get a hold of us when there is a problem and i'm not sure that it's natural for people to go i should contact code enforcement for this so i don't know if there's a way that we could put it on our website or through communications of how to contact somebody because i would say that that's just not what i would normally have thought of to contact anyone and maybe already have that in place i think we're certainly able to do that we uh we did that for short term rentals we put it on the website we created a hotline number i'm sure we have the ability to do that and um that's definitely something we'll we'll deeply consider as part of our formation of this program and i think i'm sorry i think i could take that probably a step further and commit to that um i think we have my center as a app we have a few different ways where we can engage the community but i think some general concepts of spinning up a dedicated website spinning up a dedicated email address um those are really simple things on our end that mean a lot to the community um so i can commit to that today um we'll build that out with time but i think that's great feedback as well and and we will include that in our initial phases thank you so much all right any additional questions seeing none madame city clerk can you please facilitate public comment madame city attorney madame city clerk we are now taking public comment on item 14.1 if you are in the council chamber and would like to comment please make your way to the podium if you are participating via zoom please raise your hand or dial star nine you will have two minutes and a timer will alert at the end of that period if you would like to provide your name please do so before starting your comment seeing no speakers in chamber we do have one zoom speaker please go ahead when you're ready hi council i have a comment on the graffiti but just real quick did we skip public on agenda items and entirely agenda number 13 we'll go back to that item okay thank you um yeah i just wanted to mention you know i think we should take a hard line approach on the graffiti i think we need to be contacting all the paint vendors you know home depot all the small paint stores etc and like i said just take a hard line approach and just ban all mexicans from being able to purchase we have no additional comments on zoom with no additional public comment uh and seeing no additional questions or comments from the council council member albarez can you please make a motion thank you madam mayor this mexican with great honor would like to present this resolution of the council the city of san rosa accepting and appropriating 285 200 from the sonoma county landfill settlement agreement funds to establish an 18th month graffiti abatement pilot program and amending the city classification and salary plan to add one full-time limited term housing and community services co-enforcement technician and a half time limited term community outreach specialist for a period of 18 months in the planning and economic development department and way further reading of the text second we have a motion made by council member alvarez seconded by council member rogers and is there any additional questions or comments saying none madam city clerk may you please call the vote council member staff i council member rogers i council member okrepke i council member fleming yes council member alvarez see vice mayor mcdonald i mayor rogers yes the motion passes with seven affirmative votes all right thank you it is now after five o'clock so we're going to go back up to item 13 public comment on non-agenda matters madam city clerk we're now taking public comment on item 13 non-agenda matters this is the 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 if you were in the chamber and would like to comment please make your way to the podium if you are participating via zoom please raise your hand or dial star nine you will have two minutes and a timer will alert at the end of that period if you would like to provide your name please do so before starting your comment if we have more than 12 public comments on item 13 the remaining speakers will be afforded an opportunity to speak on item 17 non-agenda matters if yeah you can line up at each podium i'll start um i'll start with this one over here on the right you're being unmuted all right right all right all right okay thank you yes got it good afternoon mayor rogers city manager smith and council members i'm joanne jones with the country home mobile home park we really appreciate all that you have done for us and it was a step in the right direction to protect the affordability of senior manufactured homes but we can't stop now and we need your help more than ever senior housing zoning overlays are an urgent matter for santa rosa petaluma and katati actually across the country park residents are finding their homes at the center of a bullseye when large investment companies come in to buy up the parks the owners will apply anywhere from 50 to 100 percent rent increase and at the same time make new rules by imposing the cost of extensive alterations to their porches awnings or driveways making it pretty much impossible for the residents to keep up if they're not able to comply with the new requirements they're issued an eviction notice were forced to leave their homes actually this happened at the brookwood in santa rosa over a driveway compliance issue several months ago the resident was served a seven-day eviction notice i saw it actually for insisting that the owner fix the park driveway which belonged to the owner the intent is to force the seniors out so that the park can then be turned into an all-age park and increase the rents so we are asking you to start the process for the senior parks under rent control to be designated as senior housing by using zoning overlays to protect their designations from being changed to all-age parks the carriage court is in the process of doing this now so please put this on your agenda as an urgent matter thank you so much okay speaker at the next podium go ahead please oh hi my name is sydney cox i'm director of the emf safety network and safe tech for santa rosa there are some dangerous bills in both the state legislature and the federal congress the in the state there are ab 965 and ab 1065 ab 965 allows telecom to batch applications above the 50 or more for a city the size of santa rosa ab 1065 um a bit of background there are billions of dollars authorized by the feds and the state to lay fiber networks along public right-of-way it's called the middle mile but now wireless companies want those free dollars to build out their networks which is is not nearly as robust as the wire fibered connections and it uses up to 10 times more energy than fiber 1065 ab 1065 allows wireless companies to compete for those dollars that are supposed to be for wired connections and this further perpetuates the digital divide we're asking new some to veto they've already passed all the hoops and now they um now they're on the governor's desk for a possible veto but there's another very important bill that must be opposed and that's the federal bill hr 3557 i believe you've all gotten this stop big government takeover wireless deployment postcard that we've sent out and also there's a new double-sided handout called the fatal constitutional flaws in hr 3557 hr 3557 is really really bad i'm also providing a letter on the subject it will basically make all telecom ordinances meaningless the most important thing we are recommending for santa rosa to do is to harden their zoning laws now they're building codes the fire codes the electric codes and even the aesthetics thank you yes next speaker please go ahead my name is tom lapena i'm the president of the santa rosa manufactured homeowners association to add to what joanne said the petaluma council will be voting next week on senior overlay zoning to protect their senior parks the votes are scheduled for october 2nd and october 16th i'm asking you to help my members and all the residents living in rent control parks two issues continue to have my membership living in fear the parks we live in are the last affordable housing for seniors and Hispanics in our city number one i'm asking you to once again to please direct city staff as soon as possible to start the process to create overlay zoning for the 12 parks that are designated senior parks in santa rosa number two please remove from the rent control ordinance the in-place transfer petaluma has none in their ordinance this is just another phrase for a rent increase or consider lowering to four percent the the current 10 cap to match the four percent cap or please work with me to find a lower rate more acceptable than the current 10 percent in place transfer amount which will eventually make the rents unaffordable and destroy affordable housing in our city let's work together to keep santa rosa's rent control parks affordable we started this journey together a few years ago and i have always said that i trusted this council to do the right thing and i know you will again thank you we have no additional speaker speakers in chamber and no speakers on zoom thank you we will now close public comment and go back to 14.2 madam city manager item 14.2 is a report approved refuse rate increase effective january the first 2024 set by recology as consistent with solid waste collection services agreement and authorized city manager to negotiate and approve a fifth amendment to the collection service agreement between the city of santa rosa and recology santa rosa yes and recology all right good afternoon council members jason nut assistant city manager with joey henowitz's departure the work relating to solid waste has somewhat become part of my more active work in the portfolio and i'm just thankful that we have really great consultants to come in and provide us with more detailed information along the way so today i'm excited to be able to introduce jim howison and kerry baxter from the r3 consulting group they have been working at our request to produce a detailed rate review study and they're going to walk through that i also want to let you know that recology staff is in the room and they are also available to respond to questions and i'd like to take the opportunity to introduce our new assigned senior general manager logan harvey from recology who is in the room as well should we have any questions more directly related to the services being provided by recology that are associated with the detailed rate review we're going to cover so with that i'm going to pass it over to kerry and jim and they will go through the presentation good evening mayor and council members and thank you jason again my name is kerry baxter with our three consulting group and we've done a detailed rate review and been working with the city for a number of years so we got quite a bit of background on on what's been going on with your solid waste and recycling services prior to recology joining signing a new agreement in january of 2018 you had rato services being providing those services and at that time the city had chose to go out to bid do a competitive procurement process with those new services came exclusive 15-year term with recology services new vehicles new collection containers all new equipment superior customer service in comparison to what was being provided previously new website new outreach and education materials and over the last five years now there have actually been five amendments that have taken place or sorry four amendments have taken place and one that we're presenting tonight for you um in the franchise agreement there are two ways to adjust the rate adjust rates for customers both options are available to be used one or the other the first option is on an annual basis the refuse rate index adjustment this is the standard adjustment that would take place and has taken place over the last five years this is based off of indices from bureau bureau labor of statistics as well as the changes in the disposal and processing fees and the second option is what is being presented tonight which was a detailed rate review so again this is the detailed rate review is taking place of that refuse rate adjustment where we look more closely at the actual operating costs and maintaining profit within the terms of the agreement and I'm going to pass it over to Jim because he did the the deep dive into those rates thank you okay thank you so the city staff requested on April 17th of this year to go in and do the detailed rate review uh in response recology submitted its application on June 12 2023 and this is where our three took over the actual analysis and the review of the application so what that actually entails is we actually do check the math make sure that the math is accurate but not only that we go line by line through the different revenue streams through the different expense lines we compare those numbers and the logic behind them to the franchise fee agreement to industry standards and we just do a thorough review to anything and our goal is to not only confirm the numbers to but to make sure that those numbers are reasonable and rational part of the other part of the detail rate review over the rri process is it allows the city and recology to reset the profitability of recology at 90% or that equates to approximately 11% profit so what happens is as there's more the point of me oh i'm sorry they have different sensitivities so as as time goes on and rates go up and costs change there's a possibility that the profitability changes as well and that differs from what's allowed in the contract so what is happening is the detail rate review allows that adjustment to come into place and we found that to be very beneficial in this case can i have the next slide slide please so the initial application that came in the request was for 7.46 percent total expenses within which included compensation vehicles depreciation things of that nature came in at 32 million dollars and based on the original application recology would have been allowed a profit of approximately 3.6 million dollars during the review of the actual numbers of financial analysis is is being conducted we proposed the following adjustments in which recology has agreed to so compensation was reduced from 14 million to 13.2 million dollars for an adjustment of 807 thousand dollars downward asset depreciation went from 3.75 million to 3.1 million and again that was an adjustment down up about 600 thousand dollars the profitability level dropped by 200 thousand and the overall total revenue based on the revised proposed adjustments went from 65 million to 63 million so what that does that equates that to a two million dollar annual savings for the businesses and the residents of san rosa now the adjustment drops down from 7.46 to the 4.33 which is actually the 4.33 is what's under consideration tonight so so one of the nature of what we do is we do a comparison of rates by local jurisdictions to kind of get an idea of where things lie and so based on our analysis the proposed 2024 residential rates and this is based against the 4.33 percent the 20 gallon carts uh the pricing for the 20 20 gallon cart for recology is approximately 51 51 percent higher than the overall county average uh 26 percent higher for the 32 gallon cart seven percent for the 65 gallon and then the final one is 11 percent for the 95 gallon cart we did a similar analysis for the commercial and multifamily customers and for one cubic yard bin the difference was 13 the two cubic yard bin was 20 percent three came in at 11 percent and the four came in at 17 percent so on this graph what i want you at first to focus on is if you go to the far right side the very last bar that you're looking at is the proposed rate for a 32 gallon cart the bar right next to that is the current rate that recology is currently charging and then all the rest of the bars to the left of that are the different agencies that came into play in the rate study so when we're talking averages sonoma katati petaluma those are the different agencies and communities that we compared if you look at the horizontal line at 29 and 50 cents that is the average but the average does not include santa rosa's numbers i just wanted to make sure there was a clarification on that so we did the exact same thing with a four cubic yard one time pickup again if you look to the far right side that's the santa rosa proposed at 817 dollars the current rate is 783 and then again the different jurisdictions and communities that we put within that survey and on average the average is 691 and 55 cents and again that is an average but does not include santa santa rosa's numbers and and so one of the things i want to highlight in there one is the information that jim just went through there is a detailed rate review memo that's attached that actually goes into far more detail as to how all of those numbers were arrived what was considered and incorporated into that data set but one of the pieces that that is important here is even though we're looking at the rates for each of these the services being provided the total combination of costs associated with each of those agencies is not necessarily the same for example we provide street sweeping services we provide large debris pickups we provide a number of things that other agencies actually aren't incorporating in their franchise agreement so i just wanted to make that clear is that there are other costs that we've incorporated into our service requirements that some of those others may not and that may be why you see the dramatic difference so this is our final slide there are two recommendations before the council one is to authorize the city manager manager to negotiate and execute amendment five to the solid waste collection service agreement between city and recology and the second is to approve the 4.33 percent increase set by recology to be effective january 1st 2024 it is not 2023 i apologize for that and okay and in accordance with the city's existing solid waste services agreement that ends our three's presentation in this area so thank you for your time and we are available answer questions and as i mentioned recology is also in the room if there are questions that are more suited to to them thank you for that presentation thank you for recology staff being present while we go over this looking to council to see if there are any questions or comments questions thank you madam mayor um so you mentioned in our services that we get um as part of our rates we get street sweeping services is that that's correct yes is there any sort of quality assurance or quality control or anything like that with the service that's provided yes there is actually recology and and i would invite them to come speak in more detail but recology does have a quality control component to it we do get regular updates from recology and the work that they do to be able to follow and track the service that's being provided and so it is it is a component of their program so the one that's giving feedback on their performance and the quality is the one that's performing the service that's correct now i will say we do receive feedback from the community we communicate with recology and recology's responsiveness has been good to date okay thank you if i could add there's also a requirement in the or a clause in the franchise agreement that allows the city to perform a performance review if there are ever any performance standards that are not being met to the city's expectations that could be reviewed and considered as well as i fall to that um assistant city manager not have we has the city done any sort of internal analysis to whether or not they wanted to go down that route uh not that i'm aware of and i'll say it in such a way that the conversation that i've had with joey to date we did start talking about doing a quality control and check we didn't have the discussion about that specific clause in the contract and so happy to consider that and work closely with recology and our internal staff to determine how we would proceed but we have been working with recology to update and improve the services that are providing with street sweeping including their online presence so that folks know exactly what day i'm based on feedback i've gotten from my district i'd like to see that conversation go a little bit further um internally before we actually do engage recology and go down the full length of that but i'd like internally for us to do a little bit of a have a conversation as to whether or not um we believe that the performance is up to snuff or that it needs to be checked very good thank you councilmember alvarez i do have to applaud the city of san rosa for introducing street sweepers into district one and they're greatly appreciated but i must also be reminded that just earlier today one of my fellow residents made the comment that she came to district one and found the amount of trash unacceptable and i'm hoping that that could be addressed and and moving forward that there is a way that we can use the metric systems to show not only ourselves but our community that we are keeping our streets and areas clean thank you since we're talking about street sleeping i think we have to move the vehicles because things just get pushed under the vehicles and i've seen street sweeping um but with no notice to residents and so it's really difficult to make sure that the streets are clear in order for the street sleeping to be effective um if there is no notice so i would like to see more notice and i know they're working on it but it's just not fast enough for me mayor if i could ask when you suggest notice um how how what what is an example of notice that that you're thinking of um like when i go to san francisco even though it's a pain they know that street sweeping on this day during this time like they prefer for you to move move your vehicle thank mayor let me ask you this question do you know what day your neighborhood streets are swept no i just okay and i only seen it once i i think this is an opportunity for us to have a conversation with recology i think each of you all know i have brought this up on several occasions um it's difficult one to implement a no parking or parking plan when the first thing our residents need to do is actually know when to sweep um i have actually conducted my own audit um and unfortunately somebody who's ran a collection service in a street sweeping department for over 10 years you know i kind of know what to look for when i walk into a city um i have noticed some of the street sweepers they don't go curve to curve um they go pretty fast i know exactly what time my street sweeper comes and i can tell you the piece of paper that i put out when he's supposed to be there does not get collected and um it's not a criticism but it's a quality of life issue for me um eddie will tell you when we walked his district i was very clear that there was not a street sweeper that came down that area i did talk to joey about it and i think a week later we did see um street sweepers so i don't want to put the onus at this time on our constituents because i think we have to do our due diligence to make certain that one the residents know exactly what day they're supposed to sweep and i think we do need to hold um our a vendor accountable you know how many hours are you streets are you sweeping how much collection are you picking up um how fast are the street sweepers going how often are you dumping i think those are questions that we probably need to put forward to um uh recology and and i'll say to that point there are specific criteria in the contract that to to the city manager's point that there is a speed limit there is a specific quality and and um methodology on how the streets we were supposed to impact and address the curb line the gutter pan and and all of that area so uh there is a methodology that's outlined very specifically one of the activities that recology did do recently and i and again to the city manager's point what had been a non-standard schedule uh historically is now a same day same same day of the month for every neighborhood listed on their website and so i think that is a a very positive step forward so that individuals can understand when their particular neighborhood is being swept and it will be the same time same day uh every month and and and that's a key um in addition i just wanted to point out that district seven in our neighborhoods we don't have a lot of parking to begin with um so to be mindful um of neighborhoods like that because people go to work at certain times so it's a more ideal time to um to do street sweeping and i don't know if you do the same both sides the same day i would think it's but i don't know where people are supposed to park i just know it's not effective the way that it is right now vice mayor mcdonnell i think you mentioned it earlier but i noticed in the staff report as well as a resolution it has as starting this effective january first 2023 is that should that be amended to be january first 2024 including in the resolution yes okay so when the resolution is on the floor i'd like to make that amendment it's already in there all right well he mentioned it but i think we have to change the resolution no the resolution has it correct the resolution says 2023 really okay council member rogers seeing no additional questions we'll now go to public comment we are now taking public comment on item 14.2 if you are in the council chamber and would like to comment please make your way to the podium if you are participating via zoom please raise your hand or dial star nine you will have two minutes and a timer will alert at the end of the period if you would like to provide your name please do so before starting your comment we have no speakers in council chamber and no speakers on zoom thank you any additional comments or questions from council members seeing none council member rogers can you please make a motion absolutely thank you mayor and i do want to call out one of our good friends and colleagues the former mayor of sonoma logan harvey not only is logan a former mayor but now working for ecology means he's my favorite has been that there is and with that i will introduce a resolution of the council of the city of san aroza approving a refuse rate increase of 4.33 percent effective january first 2024 set by recology as consistent with the solid waste collection services agreement and authorizing the city manager to negotiate and approve a fifth amendment to the solid waste collection services agreement between city of san aroza and recology sonoma marin dba recology san aroza and wait for the reading of the text i second motion made by council member rogers and seconded by council member alvarez madam city clerk can you please call the vote council member staff hi council member rogers hi council member okrepke hi council member fleming yes council member alvarez hi vice mayor mcdonald hi mayor rogers logan i am so sorry for my colleague i the motion passes with seven affirmative votes thank you we have no public hearings uh written communications are attached madam city clerk can you please conduct public comment on item 16 we are now taking public comment on item 16.1 if you are in the council chamber and would like to comment please make your way to the podium if you are participating via zoom please raise your hand or dial star nine you will have two minutes and a timer will alert at the end of that period seeing no speakers in council chamber and no speakers on zoom thank you we will now go to item 17 which is our final public comment on non-agenda matters for the evening madam city clerk can you please facilitate public comment we are now taking public comment on item 17 non-agenda matters this is the time when a new person may address the council on matters not listed on this agenda but which are within the subject matter jurisdiction of the council and if you are not able to speak under agenda item 13 if you are in the chamber would like to comment please make your way to the podium if you're participating via zoom please dial star nine or raise your hand i am seeing no speakers in the council chamber and we have no speakers via zoom seeing no additional items on our agenda i would like to go ahead and adjourn the meeting acknowledging that this month is hispanic heritage month and i hope everyone can find some festivities to get into thank you so much