 Good afternoon everyone. It is now six o'clock. Let's go ahead and begin today's meeting of the open government task force and who will be doing a special meeting today. Can I have the roll call, please? Council Member O'Crepe. Here. Council Member Fleming. Here. Chair Alvarez. Present. Let the record show that all members are present. All right, let's go ahead and move on to public comment. If we can have you. For individuals attending on zoom, you can go ahead and use the hand raised feature. We do have a hand raised for public comment one moment. Gregory fear and I have given you permission to unmute your microphone. Do you see the time on your screen? Yes, I do. Thank you. Your time begins now. Thanks. I just wanted to thank all of you for meeting. You know that I'm a avid activist in the city and always interested in what the city council is up to. And it's been a while since you guys had a meeting and I always appreciate when you do. So I just wanted to welcome you to the airwaves and to your pursuit of an open government process. Thank you so much. There are no other hands raised for public comment and no public comment in the room. Thank you very much. Let's go ahead and move on to item number four. I'm sorry. I remember three approval of minutes, and I will be abstaining as I wasn't present for the November 14th meeting. As well as everybody would you like to approve these minutes if you have an objection. Hi, good evening. Jeff Burke city attorney's office. So actually you don't have to have been present and if two of you weren't there then you probably couldn't take a vote to pass it. The minutes but you actually can approve the minutes if, if you trust the secretarial skills of the person who crafted it. And I have no reason to believe that they're not correct. So you can feel comfortable in voting to pass the minutes, even if you weren't present. I appreciate that guidance, sir. And with that being said, there's no objection from either council members will go ahead and approve the minutes from November 14 2022. Seeing no objection, they are approved. Let's go ahead and move over onto item four schedule items for one presentation. Open government task force simplification subcommittee overview. If you'd like to present the item please. Yes, thank you. Good evening council members I'm Daniel gardenio violence prevention program manager here today to provide you with an overview of the open government task force implementation subcommittee, and also a brief history about the open government work that the council and the city has done in the past. So next slide please. Thank you. So in 2014, Mayor Scott Bartley convened the mayor's open government task force. This task force was utilized or it utilized a process of community engagement and formal discussions and hearings from local and state leaders on subjects of communication and community engagement. It consisted of 10 members and two supporting members, and throughout the process, it became apparent with our community that there was a growing sense of mistrust with our government. And the task force itself concluded that the city, despite adhering to and sometimes exceeding the state's legal requirements still had critical work to do. Openness and engagement should become a city priority in order to meet the changing expectations of the community. So with that they compiled a list of recommendations, and they presented it to city council on December 2 2014 which the city then adopted. Within those recommendations there were four broad sets of goals. Next slide please. Thank you. So first goal were was around immediate actions for council, one being setting a council goal of open and transparent government. And the next setting three strategic objectives for the organization, including hiring a communications director, adopting a sunshine ordinance or open government ordinance and creating a mission that incorporated community engagement into it. Slide please. The next set of goals were around developing a culture that values public engagement, and this included genuinely engaging and partnering with neighborhoods, volunteers, businesses, institutions, and organizations which support our community. And establishing Santa Rosa as a leader in civic engagement with a goal of increasing openness transparency and accountability, closing the communication loop and acknowledging the value of community input, wisdom and participation, increasing opportunities for diverse community engagement and effective participation and building a strong civic infrastructure which includes education around engaging in local government. Slide please. The third goal was around developing a culture that focused on communications. So the first one being creating a communications director position. Initially they created this position as a community engagement director position, where they packed in community engagement and communications into one position. So we hired the first director in October 2015, and then the subsequent director in March of 2017. And then they, they learned from that experience that we needed to separate out the community engagement and communications component. And so in 2018 they created the communications and intergovernmental relations officer position, which is now currently being filled by long Peterson. And the last objective within that goal is to overhaul the city's website that was completed in 2017, and I believe zero is currently looking at how to better improve the current city website as well. Next slide please. My goal for focused on developing policies that promote openness. This included drafting and adopting an open government ordinance that supports sharing transparency and open government through policies that exceed minimum requirements and statutes for meeting public records. This was passed in December of 2020 and has been implemented since then. Additionally, there was an educational component around this including creating a guidebook to participation in local government and a series of civic one on one videos to go along with that guidebook. Next slide please. So that was the mayor's open government task force. Then, at some point along the road I believe was in 2017, no 2018, the Council's current subcommittee was created. That subcommittee was created to specifically take the open government ordinance that have been drafted and see it across the finish line. That was about two years worth of work where we met on a monthly basis with city clerk and the city attorney to get the ordinance to where both city staff felt comfortable with it and then also receiving public input and making sure it was reflective of what the community wanted. After taking it to council in December 2020 and having it implemented the subcommittee then received updates on implementation and also discussed the city's lobbying ordinance, the campaign finance regulations, and then the various outreach tools that we developed to go along with the ordinance including the guidebook and the civic one on one videos. Next slide please. I just wanted to point out to alignment with other city plans. So the 2014 report of recommendations was very robust and does align with quite a few of our other city plans that have been created and implemented since, including our community empowerment plan, most specifically around creating an organizational culture that values public engagement with all community members and increasing access to public engagement opportunities and our commitment to diversity equity transparency and access. Next slide please. And then finally, alignment with our Santa Rosa equity plan. Aligning. So a couple points from that plan city aligning its mission vision and values to include the principles of diversity equity inclusion transformation, bridging and belonging, developing and implementing structures and standards includes including policies processes procedures to foster a culture of language access and justice and communications and public participation decision making processes. Next slide please. As well as implementing re examining and empowering equitable and effective city wide external communications and engagement standards and policies. And, in addition to that proactively identifying and responding to individual and community needs complaints and systematic challenges through listening empathy honesty and collaboration. Next slide please. So with that, I know that was really quick and a very broad overview. And now that the open government ordinance has been adopted and implemented, along with some of the educational materials and tools and the implementation of a variety of other city plans. What is the next steps for this subcommittee what is your vision for how we use this time here. Thank you. Thank you for the excellent presentation. Do I need to use this for the AV. Okay. Otherwise, I think you could hear me talk. It's a little weird. Does this subcommittee function as per the charter or ordinance. So it says stop. So it's at the pleasure of the mayor. Correct. Okay, so my question would be what goals has the city council set in our last session. We just did our goal setting. Yeah, I don't have we set that could be implemented, if any, through this task force. And if there are none, perhaps, then bar in the community coming forward with something then perhaps the subcommittee is no longer needed in an active state. I don't have the current goals in front of me. I'm sorry. Yeah, and to follow up on council member Fleming's comment if we're serving in this capacity at the pleasure of the mayor has the mayor expressed any goals or or thoughts about what this committee should accomplish. Not that I'm aware of and I think it's up to this subcurrent subcommittee to figure that out. I do share the concern of the idea of what is the actual need of this committee if there's a need at all, and how can actually adjust the messaging that we're going to be producing if we see the need for this committee moving forward. What needs are within the community and how can we implement a message that's actually being heard by the target community. I think for me, if we're going to ask the question of what is the goal is to formulate a plan and assist them where we can actually engage the community at their level, opposed to what we've seen in the past of just developing a message and kind of seeing where it sticks if there's not an emergency or something that is a great concern to the greater wide city of Santa Rosa. And I'd be particularly interested in the public whoever's attending hearing from them if they have any goals for us. And then suggesting that if they don't that we wait for the direction from the mayor or the council at large or the community. I do agree and I believe we do have an opportunity for a public comment on this item. Unless we have any other comments. Yes, sir. Yeah, I was just going to concur with council member Fleming. I think we just recently got a draft version of our finalized goals. And I think once that is finalized maybe either all of council or maybe starting with the mayor can can whittle their way through that to figure out what exactly we can accomplish here on this task force and then maybe we have some direction outside of obviously the the public's input. Yes, absolutely. So it sounds, I think we're on agreement that we do need some direction from our mayor to really formulate or actually give us a reason or reason of existing and how to formulate our energy here. So it's an agreement with the council as a whole. And with that, unless we have any other comments, please. I just wanted to say that one thing that we've done with other subcommittees in the past is sometimes the chair will look at the goals. So, if we're unable to come up with something today, and in the future you see something that you think that we should bring forward. That's one other avenue. And then another thing that I've seen happen is that we can subcommittee can go dormant, but not cease to exist because I think it'd be a difficult argument to say that we shouldn't exist at all. There's going to always be things that are going to come up, but perhaps now is not a moment where there is one of those things. The question that arises is for the mayor who implemented this committee, was there anything that was an emergency or something that he saw at the time for the need for this committee to exist in the first place? I know there was a little bit of unrest. Yes. But I believe to add to that, there was a list of at least 10 things which the committee was addressing. And part of that was the non-citizen voting amongst other issues. And since then, we have as a council introduced a seat program or seat collaborative, which helped address a lot of some of these issues, which didn't exist when the list was being formulated. Correct. That's correct. And that's why I had shown some of those slides up there as to where we align with the equity plan. I believe there is plans for the very new future to form of, I think it's called the vibe committee, which will be an internal working group of city staff to move those recommendations forward. Very well. Since I'm new here. And from my own notification, what overlap do we have with, say, the community advisory board and the board of community services? Are there things that they would tackle that we wouldn't or we would tackle that they wouldn't? That's a really good question. They actually have on their, under their chartered scope, the civic engagement piece, community engagement and providing input on community engagement strategies. And helping to educate the community and get them more involved in our local government. For community advice board, I can't speak to the board of community services. So a lot in common. A lot in common. Okay. Yeah. And if I'm mistaken, this community here serves to disseminate the information to the community as well. Yeah. For a lot of the other committees and boards that exist. So I mean, even at that level, I see the importance of this committee, but I believe the shared feeling is we would like some direction from our mayor to see if there's a particular direction that we should be pursuing. Yes. And in that direction. There are no further comments. Let's go ahead and open up for public comment, please. So item number 4.1 we're opening it up to public comment for all members who are participating via zoom. Please go ahead and use the hand raised feature. We do have one public comment. Gregory fearing. Do you see the timer on your screen for three minutes. Yes, I do. Okay, go ahead and begin your public comment your time begins now. Thanks a lot. And it is the old. I mean, as you all remember, there was an open government task force which came up with a report. Three years ago, four years ago. And so my suggestion is that you all dig out that report and look at the many recommendations that it made and conclude either individually or through the mayor or through the chair. If there's anything in that report that still needs to be done. That's it. Thanks. Thank you. There are no other hands raised for public comment and no public comment in the room. We're bringing it back to council. Well, that's great direction. I appreciate the comment. And what I want to see moving forward is more public participation as that is key to transparency and open government. So hopefully in the future we'll have plenty of additional college, but the point was very well made and we're well received. And there's something that I hope to carry in the discussion with the mayor. The list that was in the recommendations that were made in the past. Any additional comments, please. Yeah, I do think that Mr. here on this point is well taken that if we could get some direction to finding that report it's a shame so many reports get written and we don't. And we inherit there's three people who just inherited a board. So, I'd be willing to take the time to read the report. So I can point me in the right direction. Yeah, we'll make sure to get it to all three of you. Thank you. Thank you very much for your comments. With that saying being said, moving on to the same item in a different form which is I remember five featured agenda items. Right. What a perfect segue right. Well, I think we'll move on to this item, but I think it's clear. I'm hoping that we made it clear that we do need additional guidance suggestion direction. So I think we'll move on to our reports from the past that we can definitely use to to develop that conversation. My suggestion would be that since you know no two of us can speak together that that the chair gets direction from the mayor and then through our attorneys or the clerk lets us know when you believe it would be wise for us to resume meeting. Very well. With that being said, we'll carry the conversation forward with our mayor as well as our legal counsel to develop a agenda or at least present agenda. And you're right, we can't speak to each other since she would be the fourth. But yes, definitely develop a conversation about the future direction of the subcommittee. Thank you both. With that being said, we don't need a public comment for number five million. We should write very well we'll open up public comment for feature agenda items from the public if you'd like to carry that forward. This is now the time for public comment on item number five feature agenda items. Those who are attending over zoom please go ahead and use the raised hand feature. I am not seeing any hands raised over zoom and no public comment in the room. Thank you very much. And that takes us to item six, the German. It is now 622. Thank you all for attending. And in the future, let us create more public participation and go your favorite basketball team. Thank you.