 Uh, welcome board members and members of the public. Thank you for joining today. Uh, I am Paul Castillo vice chair. We have member Guido Bocchleoni, Carol Juan, Carol Spence and Omar Lopez, board members present today. Uh, we also have our main host Julie Schoen and Amy Hedici. Uh, the host will coordinate the comments from the public and assist during the meeting and take notes on any follow-up needs. As a reminder to all present, please silence your cell phones. Additionally, the city of Santa Rosa is committed to providing a safe and inclusive environment free from disruption and will not tolerate hate speech for actions. Everyone is expected to participate respectfully or if necessary, the meeting will end immediately. Madam host, will you please explain how public comments will be heard at today's thank you. Vice chair Castillo effective immediately. All public comments will be provided in person or via email in advance of the meeting. There are cars located at the entrance. Please complete the card for each item you wish to speak on and place it in the basket. You will be called up by name when your item number has been discussed and it is open to the public comment after an agenda item has been presented by the vice chair. We'll ask the board members for their comments or questions and then immediately following the item will be open for public comments. You will be asked to approach the podium and state your name for the record. Once the vice chair is called for public comment, you will raise your hand and wait to be called to the podium. Even if a comment card has been completed, each public comment is limited to three minutes and a courtesy timer will appear on the screen. Any email comments that have been received by the deadline will have been included and uploaded to the agenda prior to the start of today's meeting. Emails received are not read into the record. With that, I call this September 27 2023 meeting of the board of community services to order at 5.07 p.m. Madam host, may we have a roll call? Please respond when I call your name. Chair Pitts, Vice Chair Castillo. Present. Board Member Boca Leone. Present. Board Member Cruz. Board Member Lopez. Present. Board Member Spence. Present. Board Member Quant. Here. Let the record reflect that all board members are present with the exception of Chair Pitts and Board Member Cruz. With that, I'd like to open the floor for public comments on non-agenda matters. This is the time when any person may address the board on matters not listed on the agenda but are within the subject matter of the jurisdiction of the board of community services. Our agenda reflects an email comment has been included in this agenda. Madam host, do we have any public comments? We have no public comment in person. With that, we will move to item 4, approval of minutes. Board members, are there any edits or corrections to the minutes of the August 23 2023? Seeing no hands, the minutes from the August 2023 meeting are approved as submitted. Next item 5, Acting Director Santos, please give your report on upcoming and accomplished events. Thank you, Vice Chair. As part of the attachment, you have upcoming and accomplished events. I just wanted to highlight as an accomplished event, we had a tacos with a cop, neighborhood service and violence prevention partnered with Santa Rosa Police Department on September 19th at our Apple Valley neighborhood and it was great. We had tacos and fun discussions and lots of booths with lots of information and resources for the community. It was a really good time. And then as far as upcoming, I wanted to highlight something you don't hear about that often is our other train, not the Hearth Park train but our Redwood Empire live steamers train at Youth Community Park. It's the last weekend of operation on October 7th and 8th, so if you haven't been out there to ride the train, I encourage you to check it out. End of my report. Thank you, Jen. And will you kindly provide the director updates at this time? Yes, thank you, Vice Chair. I wanted to report that we had a few things at Council recently, the Finlay Aquatic Center construction contract was approved with Water Works at Council on the 12th of September and we are in the process of scheduling the construction and working on all the details before the construction starts. We had a recreation division update at Council as well. It was very well received and went really nicely. Congratulations to Jett. I want a great job. And we also recently were approved for a professional services agreement with a Quadriga landscape architect for Kiwana Springs Community Park design and construction drawings. So we're excited to get started on that. It's been 2006 since we've owned that land, so really looking forward to getting that community park ready for that community who's been long ready. The general plan was also discussed at the Council, so the Council members also had their opportunity to provide input now on the general plan and a public forum. So we'll be working with the Planning and Economic Development Department to finalize our comments as well. And then we have a coming at Council, we have on the 10th of October, the Violence Prevention Partnership will have their five-year strategic plan available for feedback. And then just a little bit more about Finlay Aquatic Center, we will have some social media information out to the community about the closure of the pool and where folks can find places to swim and recreate in an aquatic setting soon. But for now I'll update that we are targeting November 3rd as the closure for Finlay as we prepare for the construction. And we're looking at an alternative schedule for Ridgway Swim Center from November 6th through whenever Finlay reopens in the spring of 2024. And we will be, what the thought is right now is doubling hours of lap swim at Ridgway Pool to help with increased users from four to eight hours per day. And for water fitness, looking at a nine to 10 a.m. water fitness class moving to Ridgway seven days per week. And a 730 p.m. water fitness class is moved to Tuesdays and Thursdays. And then our 5 p.m. water fitness class moved to move for Fridays. And this is always something I've heard about for at least the last 10 years now, the pool temperatures at both pools are a little bit different. So we've looked at a compromise between the cooler pool which is used for our competitive swimmers and the little bit warmer, just a little bit warmer swimmers who prefer it for our recreational swim. So we're compromising between 79 degrees and 84 and settling on 82 degrees. So just wanted to put that out there. It's always a point of interest. And I want to announce to the board that I will be bringing back a discussion topic for regarding the Southeast Greenway in October in conjunction with our Southeast Greenway partners so they can get an update on what's happening out there. There was also requests from the board at the last meeting to know more about how to report graffiti. And so one of the ways that you can report graffiti is the Public Works Mainline. The Public Works team are the primary responders to graffiti everywhere, including parks. And that's at 543-800. You can also call the Parks Mainline. If you see parks in a graffiti, you can always call the Mainline at 543-3770. And we'll get it handled. We'll work really closely with Public Works and we'll make it happen. And just a brief update on park naming has come up at the last couple meetings. We are still holding on bringing forth any new park naming requests at the request of the board so that we can update the naming policy as a city-wide naming policy for parks. We recognize that it needs to provide a little bit more direction to citizens, to staff, to board members, to council members. And we're looking forward to updating that policy once the board ordinance is finished. So we have limited staff, so we're looking at completing that one first and then we'll start the naming policy hopefully at the beginning of the year. And last but not least, well it's not last either, we're working on what's called an Integrated Pest Management System and that's how we work with herbicides and parks versus mechanical means. It's an integrated system and staff will be at the Climate Action Subcommittee discussing the Integrated Pest Management System that will be a city-wide Pest Management System for the entire city including parks at the October 4th meeting and it doesn't look like I wrote it down. Oh here we go. At 4 p.m. in the city's chamber building at 637 First Street, park staff as well as staff from Water and Fire will be there to talk to the Climate Action Subcommittee about that. The other thing was there was a request to understand a little bit more about what the Parks Department is doing about the beetle that is infesting oak trees and can be cause a lot of damage. It's moved into the Sonoma County area and definitely here in Santa Rosa and so we've had some trainings it's still early in the trainings and the industry is still looking for best management practices but what we're hearing early on is that treating with fungicide and insecticide is an effective method for more getting beetles out of the area when we recognize that. There's a recommendation for leaving infected trees and branches on site for a minimum of a year after they're cut if we know that they're infected with the beetle. Chipping, burning and masticating in place is also recommended and we are looking at ways of implementing those processes and coming up with some more best management strategies in the industry. We'll keep the board updated as we know but this is part of the environment now in Sonoma County and we are addressing it and these are the things that we'll be implementing as we move forward and that is leading to my report. Thank you, that was a great report. Thank you. Now we'll move on to reports from the board. Board member? Board member Quad? May I ask John a question regarding the director updates? Oh of course, yes. Regarding the Family Aquatic Center having read the supplied public comment letter and listening to other members of the public, they assume that the JC swimming pool is just waiting for us to ask if we can use that. Has that been expressed? Yeah, I would invite our recreation deputy up here to address that. Thank you. Good afternoon, Jeff Toast, deputy director of recreation. So yeah, we've been reaching out to a lot of partners. There's actually elements that already took place with the JC coming in place that allowed us to accommodate as much as we have. For example, master swim used to take up morning portions out of Ridgeway. That program moving allows us to bring in some of the laps one that we've done so there's some of it has been proactive and so now that this project is finally taking place it looks like well why aren't you doing things? Well some of those things happened a year ago in preparation and again not just the JC but we have a list of pools that it will be providing to the public as well and we've been reaching out to those pools that whether they offer lap swim or they offer water aerobics classes, water fitness classes that will be providing a list with contact information for the public as well. We realize there's still going to be an impact. I want to applaud the staff for the work. Again, they've been working on this for over a year and looking proactively at how we accommodate. The reality is there's going to be an impact of going from two pools to one pool. A lot of people are telling you that two pools and Santa Rosa is in enough so I think the long-term benefit of having some ADA work done at Finley, replastering the pools, having a new splash pad feature there for many, many years, 30-year-old infrastructure there to have that updated. We're aware it's going to be about a six month or so impact on our participants but we really want to do the best that we can in realizing that these are Santa Rosa features where there's not family pool and rich white pool. It's Santa Rosa aquatics and so we want to do the best job that we can to Santa Rosa accommodating our public and yes if some people feel like this is an ideal for me for whatever the reason is, the pool's more crowded, the temperature pool whatever those are than providing what else is available in the community that might be a better fit for them during the time of instruction. Great and following up on that, was there communication from the city to this individual? I know they were seeking a response. Was that received? Did someone reach out? Not yet but we definitely will follow up with that person. All right thank you for that, thanks. I wanted to report on the merit award ceremony that happened two weeks ago. I had about 100 people right here at Finley and we gave out 14 awards and it was very, it was a wonderful program. If I do say so myself, it's a really good committee. We worked really hard, put a lot of hours in and it has, it turned out even better than we thought it was going to. Thank you to my members who were able to come. We appreciate that very much and we had city council people there and everybody was pretty darn excited to get a lot of photos taken and so that sort of declares what I did for the last month. I was going to ask you about the certificates. I had not seen those before. Who, you choose those certificates and how do you go about getting them because they're not local recognition. They're statewide recognition. Right, right. We talked to our state rep who gets them for us. They offered them. And they're from whose offices? From Senator Mike McCoy. But we've had them for the last four years. I just never saw them Oh, okay. Got it. Yeah. It's very exciting to get to. What is he afraid? Yes. Is what we say. Very cool. Any dislodings? So I wanted to give a shout out to Jen who suggested that the rural cemetery nominate one of the volunteers who ended up getting an award. And she, this is Ruth Norman, who's a very humble volunteer who's been preening for the last couple of weeks and we gave her a standing invitation the next day. Just wonderful to see people who go unrecognized, being recognized for things that they do selfishly over not one year but many, many, many, many years ago. Those big people had 3,500 dollars. And think about that. The woman from the Jewish Community Center, the nurse. Yeah. Just 24 years. So it was counting. Yeah. Yeah. I agree. So I was able to participate in a couple of volunteer events. One at Olive Park, which was a joint effort between Parks Maintenance and the Creeks and Stewart program. And that was lovely to see different branches of the city and the public working together. And also a neighborhood group who did some IEP removal and native plant planting at North Park. More neighborhood parks that could truly be phoned by the neighbors keeps them cleaner, keeps them healthier and frees up some staff time. And also I was able to spend way too many hours at the rural cemetery where we had 16 sold out night time tours. Is that only last weekend? Yeah. Last weekend. Wow. Wonderful. Thank you. Whatever a little bit. I just want to, I as I look at my, I've been taking care of my cousin a lot recently. So I've been taking her to a lot of new parks and exploring them with her. So she's been really enjoying it. We went to five different parks. I have the list and I lost my list. So I will follow up on that list of you, but I got like four or five different parks. It was one every week with a bonus one on the second week. So it's been really fun. It's been a really good excuse for me to get out with these parks and sort of getting to share them like this. And she has some food. She's fine. Oh, that's going to be great feedback. What do you remember about the other? I was at Southwest Community Park again, and I took some photos of the enormous crowds there on the weekend. And the park just blows my mind. It's, it's beautiful. I had one little problem with it. And I notified Jen and the next morning I went by, I was, oh, it's coming in. It's already done. The grass was all cut down on the parking lot and everything. So now you can actually see the whole facility. It's beautiful. And it's being kept up really nice. Good work again. Wonderful. Thank you. I don't have much to update. What's the strawberry park again? Very cool park. My kids enjoyed it. Have a great time with the coffee park as well. Another great park. Very clean. Great work staff. All right. Then with that, we will go to scheduled items. Looks like our first item is 8.1, 8 amps at work experience. Having us here. My name is Ron Beal, recreation supervisor. This is my first summer actually getting to oversee the camp program and the work experience program as well. And I'm actually not going to be doing the presentation. I'll introduce the staff member who's going to, but I just want to give a just real quick kind of a summary of what I got to see and go out there and for these camps. And again, be my first summer going to these camps and seeing how many smiling faces and kids that were just having such a great time. But more so, the staff that were having such a great time with these kids. And it was such an amazing thing for me to see how many of these temporary staff just, just eating up what they're doing out there. Just loving the job that they're doing. And that to me brought a lot of excitement, honestly. And then I, so in my process, I talked to a lot of the staff members asking them, you know, what, what got you into this? And I was shocked at how many said they were campers at one point. And so it was one of those things we were trying to do some research and see how many, you know, we had our campus campers that became CITs that became staff members. So hopefully in the future, we'll have some of that information. And I'm not sure if we ended up pulling that a little bit of information. All right. So Ryan, I'll share some of that later on. But again, just wanted to share that. And, and then in the process, too, is like as I'm the Recreation Supervisor, I kind of oversee these programs and everything. But I want to give a shout out to Ryan Shepherd, who does the majority of the work. And again, I can't take credit for it. I just get to oversee it. And he should get the credit for everything that's done in those programs and stuff. So with that being said, I'd like to introduce Ryan Shepherd, our Recreation Coordinator for many years over this program. He'll do a little presentation for you over here for questions afterwards. Thank you. Good afternoon, Ward. Thank you for allowing us to share our programs today. I appreciate it. My name is Ryan Shepherd in the camps world. My name is Mr. Bay. This is my 35th year working with the day camps programs, traditional day camps programs, working with the city of Santa Rosa and that whole time has been with those programs. I'm going to talk about today our traditional day camps, our work experience program. Next slide, please. And there we go. And in the traditional day camps, we're going to talk about kind of what we did this summer, what we do regularly, a couple of our specialty camps and something new we've got cooking up. So we're excited about that. Next slide, please. So the three main camps that I oversee during the summer are our Crown Jewels Camp Wattom, started in 1958, Elton Howard Park, serving 1,100 kids a summer. Camp Uchi over in Youth Park, I had the pleasure of getting that started in 1996 and serves about 480 kids a summer. And Doyle Adventure Camp, which is in Doyle Park, serving 540. Next slide, please. We're starting Camp Wattom. So Camp Wattom, we get 130 campers a week out there. We have 21 staff, about 40 volunteers who are putting in over last summer, about 15,000 hours of community service, helping with the camps programs. Monday through Thursday, camp runs from 9.30 to 3.30, or 3 o'clock, pardon me. And on Thursdays, the campers arrive at 1pm. So we bring their stuff up the hill. They do a parents' night for a big show for the parents with skits and songs. We get our t-shirts back, which are stolen every week. We have to figure out what happened to them and figure out how to get them back. In the morning, we have breakfast and the kids go home at 10am. The staff leaves at 11 after cleaning up and evaluating the week, getting us ready for the week after. Song, skits, games, crafts, archery, lots of pretend, dodge ball, swimming at Spring Lake. We hike over there every Tuesday. That's a great respite for everyone to get out there and do something new. And as I mentioned before, the parents' night program. Wattong runs for nine weeks during the summer. Next slide, please. Join the venture camp was started in 1992. And the idea behind the camp was to provide a better option for working parents. If parents use the extended hours there, their children can be in camp from 7.45 in the morning until 5.15 in the afternoon. It's Monday through Friday, explaining our hours. They have about 60 campers per week, about 11 staff, and about 15, 16 volunteers that work there each week. Another idea that we had an establishing dual-adventure camp was to send it around field trips. And in doing that, we wanted to utilize the city bus transportation system. Teach the kids about city bus, teach them the importance of public transportation and how it can help with the environment. So they do about four field trips a week, two to the pools. One is steam-related. If it's arctic antique weeks, we'll go ice skating. And then they go to Wattong for one day during the week to share the wonderful amenities we have there, such as archery, K-land, canoeing, and the special guests. Next slide, please. Then we have Camp Uchi. As I mentioned, we got that started in 1996. For the first about seven, eight years, it had an overnight that didn't prove to be viable. We also had more need for working parents with a camp option on the west side of town to provide an option of daycare for parents. It's kind of a hybrid between Camp Wattong and Dual-Adventure Camp. They go on three field trips a week. One is steam-related. For pirate week, they'll go out to the beach, et cetera. Hours are the same as Doyle for working parents, 7.45 in the morning, till 5.15 if they need it. They swim twice during the week at Finley Pool. And they do steam-related field trips and have special guests as well. Next slide, please. So some programming challenges. You'll see that they've changed from the last time I did a presentation, which is great. We addressed some of them. One of them is the aging infrastructure, especially at like Doyle Clubhouse. We really need that as our hub for protection against the elements of the weather, a place to meet, et cetera. Some things there aren't viable anymore. Maybe even some of them are unsafe doors that are hard to open. Window screens falling off and fridge replacement. Other aging infrastructure things that have been there for a long time. We're having that a little bit at all of our camps, which we're going to be to address. The weightless problem has gotten better, and we've done some things to address that. One of the things that we did is institute 25% refund fee, which dropped our refunds by about 80%. And if people are wondering, why is that such a problem? What would happen is the parents would wait until the last minute to withdraw their children. And we'd have a weight list of literally 100 kids, but couldn't hear back from the parents in time. So 20 to 25 kids a week were missing, I can't experience, because we couldn't find them to get them in sooner enough. That new system that we have with the refunds definitely helped and really made that easier. And then of course, inflation is everywhere right now. The increase in costs, especially with security, field trips, minimum wage, requires us to push our fees up every year, but I'm sure that's something that's happening everywhere. Next slide, please. Unfortunately, we did get our survey monkey out. The responses are trickling in as I'm a teacher of psychology, Dr. Rancher-Katati, the last 30 years. So I do understand that 45 responses is not the best sample size, but the good part is the data we are getting is similar to what we've gotten in the past, and it's very encouraging. And I especially like the stat at the very bottom that even though inflation is happening, even though we have to keep raising our prices, we're able to be very competitive and 97% is amazing. That feels that we are appropriately priced. Next slide, please. Some other specialty camps that are responsible for during the year. One is Winter Camp held right here in Finley. We do two weeks and we pretty much rotate those weeks around where the holiday falls, both New Year's and Christmas, because we know we won't have attendance on those. So sometimes we have a three-day week. Sometimes we have a four-day week. We do as many indoor activities as we can. All sorts of fun games, songs, t-shirts still get stolen. We're able to integrate some newer activities like baking with Big. That's a young Mr. Big there on the left. And they come in there on the first day of the week and we make a sweet treat. And we kind of introduce them to the kitchen and the kitchen rules. And then every week at the end of the week, we have pizzas for lunch and the kids get to make their own pizzas and then we eat our own pizzas. And it's a lot of fun. Again, we run that for two sessions for working parents. It runs from 8 to 5.15. If they need it, they can get extended hours. Spring Day Camp is pretty much like Camp Wattong Light held during spring break. It's exactly like the regular program except for no overnight. Hours are 8 to 5 with extended hours for working parents. Finally, I'm responsible for Camp Kennedy, which is a camp for our differently abled population. We run this for one week every summer during the end of July. It's a great program. We have 25 participants. We get tons of volunteer and tons of staff that beg to work it. We almost have a one-to-one ratio when we run that camp. Hours are a little short. We try to kind of consider ourselves camp experts and we work with UCP of the North Bay who are the differently abled experts and they help provide us with expertise and some funding. And we help provide them with use of power for their camp, camp chaos the following week. So we're also providing, helping to provide another week for our different abled population in the city. Next slide please. Something we're super excited about. We've noticed there's a need. One of the, we don't get a lot of complaints for Camp Wattong, but one is, well, why can't my four-year-old or my five-year-old go there? Currently, the rule is they must be entering first grade in the fall following the summer. That's because of all the issues that happened with younger children and the intensity and how much fun we're having at camp. So we came up with this idea of Camp Wattong. We're going to hold it in Howard Park. We're hoping to get it started summer 2024. We've already began planning. Next slide please. And if you look, I know it's kind of small, but hopefully you can see we're going with three groups of 10 kids, three volunteers, and two staff in each group that'll give us a nice two to one camper to staff ratio. We're aiming our target age is four to five years of age. We're going to shorten the hours of camp a little bit just to make sure because we're not going to, we're not really in the business of providing enough time and those types of things, especially with the facility we're going to be using, which will be the gazebo. We're going to focus on a lot of our similar activities we do at all our camps, songs, games, skits, and really gearing those activities for the appropriate age level. It says archery and quotation marks because we're not going to be doing archery, but we're going to have some kind of projectile fun. We're working on it. We're working on something that'll be fun, be similar to archery, but also get those kids engaged and hopefully maybe even help them help them when they graduate to Wata and they are doing archery. And of course we need to work out a swimming situation. We want to integrate field trip special guests and also of course got to have the parents afternoon program. So we're super excited to get that started. We definitely have models to work with and we're doing a lot of research getting that ready for next summer. Next slide please. The second program that I'm responsible for in my duties is the work experience. Next slide please. And so work experience is a program we've always had volunteers for the city of Santa Rosa, but then when we started focusing on team volunteers for our camps programs and our other areas we thought how do we make this a better program? How can we give back to these kids that are giving us their time and give it back to their community? And we came up with the work experience program and what we're trying to do there is give them that experience that will help them get their first job. As you see it's for kids 13 to 17 they do pay for a fee and when we get that question why am I paying the fee to volunteer? It's for the training, it's for the uniform, it's for the field trips they go on and the food we provide the campers we also also provide for them so it's a really unnecessary fee that we have to have. But again we had 267 participants with people wanting to register late so we feel like it's a pretty fair deal. Annually we're getting 25 to 30,000 hours of volunteer service every summer we got over 26,000 last summer we're very appreciative for all our teams for doing that and it's a program that helps us stay out of trouble they are around good teams they they want to be like those teams they have those role models they're getting practice with the interview and application process which I'll elaborate on in a moment and it really beats back that that catch 22 that we all remember when we're getting our first job I want to go get a job but I don't have the experience to give that job but I can't get a job to get the experience so I'm stuck not getting a job we bridge that gap we give them the experience we also we're going to next slide please also going to teach you how to fill out an application etc so here again we have some of the things that we're doing in the work experience program one thing we're proud of we now are using a PDF fillable app so they can email to us one of our goals is to get everything online so that we're not taking any more paper forms we're working on that we want to keep the model that we're using saying we're going to get you a job current with current business practices so we're trying to evolve this business evolves the kids get on the spot feedback not only do they evaluate the programs they're in but they get evaluated each week and before their evaluation they get a here's how you're doing and at the beginning of the week they get to say what their goals are so we have a better idea of how to tell them how they're doing with their goals and of course again I've been a teacher at Rancho we have a 40 hour community service requirement for a graduating senior so it's it's everyone's winning from this and we'll talk about that in a moment too next slide please if you break down what we do into the different programs which we'll talk about in a moment you can see they're getting all sorts of different skills almost all the positions give the kids customer service skills some of the skills are starting to work some of the positions are starting to learn the skills of handling money etc the swim aids junior lifeguards are learning pool deck set pool and deck supervision and then anyone working with the younger kids that would be the swim aids the junior lifeguards the LITs and neighborhood services at Howard Park they're getting positive discipline working with the campers as well in camps all the CITs have to make a 45 minute planned activity each week which they lead and they have to write out a paper that says the supplies they need what the role their role will be what the campers will be doing to having fun and what the staff will be doing to support them so they get to be on top and see this is what it would be like to be a counselor so to get that practice and planning activities and of course the valuable work experience next slide please so who benefits from work experience I like to make the argument next slide please that everybody's benefiting so win win win situation next slide please parents are winning because their kids aren't at home playing video games making a mess complaining about being bored doing nothing getting into trouble they're out in a supervised environment they're safe they're having fun they're learning skills the kids are winning because they're having fun plus all the things I mentioned from the parents parents and we know they're having fun because they literally beg for more hours and it's kid driven not parent driven on can I have more hours because you can see the genuine disappointment when they can't get more hours and then our programs are winning those kids are our eyes and ears they make our program bigger than it is and in a simple way of saying it they increase our staff to participant ratio without CITs we'd have 15 campers in a group with two staff with CITs we have 15 campers in a group with six pairs of eyes on them helping them all be next slide please so these are the steps in the work experience program program the first one is they're going to apply using that application then they're going to get a note from us saying an email from us saying hey you need to schedule your interviews now they're getting practice calling someone in an uncomfortable situation setting up their interview then they come in for their interview after we hear their interview choices and they go through their interview we place them in their first or second choice then they come to orientation orientations where we first all come together and meet each other they meet me they meet their program supervisor they get their schedule for the summer they get their work uniform they get their work manual for the summer any of their in-person questions that they have will be there we also tell them hey you guys keep great in your applications here but here's some ways you can improve on your applications so that yours will be put in the yes pot we also go over some common things that they did very well in the interview as well as tips for doing a better interview in the future to make them more viable job candidates and then all the programs have trainings including camps and training competing we're from two hours during the week where camps has as much as 26 hours for the week because there's so many different things next slide please so what programs do we offer next slide we have CITs counselors and trainings at all three camps those camps are responsible over about 19,000 hours of community service this summer next slide please in aquatics we have swim aids who assist the swim instructor in teaching swim lessons we have junior lifeguards who assist the lifeguards in deck supervision we have concession workers who help with the sales of treats and goodies at the pools next please we have leaders in training in neighborhood services and they're doing kind of the same things that the camp CITs are doing except for they're doing them for neighborhood services at different schools in the neighborhoods helping kids who can drop in at their leisure or sign up as well next slide please we also have three programs in Howard Park we have the boat house for the assist on the dog and help with customers the concessions and amusement where they're learning money skills learning customer service skills and I want to take a second on animal barn and just talk about that program there they're learning animal husbandry they're learning how to take care of these animals they're learning how to clean up with for these animals learning how to feed these animals learning how to show these animals to the public safely I got a special spot in the animal barn and that's because I have three children two of them were CITs I tried to steer my daughter to be a CIT too she said no way I'm working in the animal barn she had three years up the animal barn that inspired her to go to Cal Poly she just graduated last uh June in Anglican Lottie with a degree in animal science she went off she found friends in South Carolina went off and now runs an animal shelter in South Carolina so that the program I felt the benefits myself and all my boys loved it too next slide please so again 14 is not a great sample size it's unfortunate we have so many um participants but such a low response rate we might resend it we might look at ways to get a better response rate but the day is amazing uh 100 that's still up so no everyone knows that I'm being on the level here 100 said their team benefited from the program that many said they recommended another family and most of all they're all enjoying the program next slide please and that's pretty much my presentation thanks for listening listening if there's any questions happy to answer nice uh thank you Ryan thank you Rob any questions from the board oh my I have one question one comment I think the PDF we got had any missing about last slide was missing or had the wrong one on our site okay oh we have the itty responses 2023 okay um that is this guy's phone um and that's because we were waiting for the data I was waiting for the data to come in I'm like where is it and finally came in and yesterday I found it and just entered that and that's probably why that happened my apologies gosh okay because I wanted current data versus last year's uh my question question was how do we promote this I recently graduated high school recently it's been a few years since I graduated but I remember um this is my first time hearing about this program and it's a great program so I was just curious and how do you promote it okay well we actually have that as one of our survey questions I'm wishing I included it however from memory the biggest um marketing weapon we have is word of mouth hey that's an awesome program I think it was around 40 percent um and I can if I I can email you the data and you can take a look at it actually says did you hear it from a magazine from a friend from you know other camps etc so uh we do have some data on that okay awesome I would like to look at the happy to share uh board member one yeah first question how is it possible that you have a child old enough to have graduated from college yeah you're not making me feel any better definitely feeling it but that's where I'm at so sugar turns 41 in a couple weeks um sugar is her daughter that was the CIT for us back when I was younger I'll take it I'll take it second question the um back in my day uh when sugar was uh at Uche there was still the overnight program and now um the two programs Doyle and Uche that essentially offer full time activities for working parents and their kids how many of the 60 campers that are accommodated at those two camps are they're pretty much every week and how do you keep it it must be challenging to keep it interesting for both the staff and the repeating kids yeah a couple of questions a couple of responses we will get is like hey maybe you could vary the activities a little bit and that's a very low level of response we do try and let parents know we're not daycare ever we get that in a pinch we could be and we actually discourage from enrolling in more than two or three weeks not only for that reason because we want to be an expert in what we do we don't want to keep branching out the things that we don't necessarily know how to do or how to provide it at a super high level the other issue is uh oops I lost my train of thought so um it was regarding you know even it's old this week kiss who came pretty much every week yeah and so um there's I think the staff do the best job at keeping that fresh because I would argue of all the activities the staff are the favorite of the campers and I know they're not necessarily an activity but the personalities the interactions the mentorship that goes on there the care I think they feel that I think that's our number one draw things or me things oh that's that's a great thank you so another thing that we do to vary it up is themes so our meal revolves around the theme that week uh it's western week got brought to a burger is the field trip costumes the t-shirts getting stolen all of the songs and skits revolved around the theme so there's another thing that kind of spices it up and makes it a little bit different week to week thank you uh board of respects you are fabulous this is a wonderful program you do look young but you assign that the program is just I can't thank you thank you so much good thank you I do talk about it because you get to hear from you and you know and people don't know about it but the people who do are thrilled so I'm saying it's going to grow in increments and it looks like it yeah it really adds and I wish um the staff here because they're the ones like doing all that work making us all look good and they they are amazing we're so fortunate I didn't mention it I'd like to mention it now one of the amazing cycles we have in our camps is all the campers come in and they look at the CITs I want to be a CIT and then all those CITs want to be staff and speaking to Ross comment earlier about some staffs I pulled my staff I had 47 of my 57 staff we're campers and I had 45 of my 57 staff we're CITs and so now that we got that work experience program and it was really amazing I know I like talking about COVID but just to mention it real quick it was really amazing when we had to shut down the CIT program and the work experience program how it hurt all the other programs because we didn't have the support and we didn't have a staff theater because we have a CIT working for you or a volunteer part of me for two or three years you know what they can do and they know our system so I kind of look at it as if anyone's familiar with baseball you're taken from your farm system and we love to do that because we know who they are we know their programs we know who the quality ones are etc thank you thank you very much I have one more question what percentage of the kids Friday morning go home sticky filthy and having had more fun than they've had I'm going to go about that 65 70% with their t-shirts back that's correct I just have a quick question because my kids are all grown my grandkids are all grown but I do have some great grandkids now and they're right at age where they could be participating in some of this we're going to get the information or boulder or brochure so what we do is all the information we do send out email blasts and then we do put information on the city web sites and reserve app.com and once you get there it'll start listing everything usually about mid-January issues when we have everything up for the following year for the following summer is there any other out there so the activity guy activity the activity guy the paper activity guy which is in all the rec centers do we mail them out anymore but they are available at the rec centers they also list all the programs that we offer in parks and rec and magazine stuff good because a majority of them live here in the area so we really love to see them. Just a couple quick follow-up questions for the CIT program you mentioned the $110 fee is there a fee waiver or hardship like sponsorship for individuals we do have some programs that help for example the LIT program is a $10 fee and that's one that they can do and they just have to go into that program and we set them up and they help at the different schools and neighborhood services recreation sensation. I'm just going to join to address that question because yeah it's such a great feeder for us as Ryan laid out so well and we don't want that fee to be a barrier so we've actually we're just starting conversations to roll out our recreation scholarship program for next year and we are adding that program you know we have limited funds what we do with there but we're going to add that program into it which we haven't done in the past which I don't think this guy knows yet but we're going to be including that one so that we can't address that when finances are a barrier to participating in more experience that they'll be able to. And for those scholarships as well is that available to campers in certain situations too? We have some for camps most of our scholarships go to swim lessons got it but we also have some for some of our camp programs as well. Kennedy also has what we call a campership so instead of paying the full fee they can pay I believe at 75 and then we pretty much subsidize the rest and then that is a deal we worked out with UCP of the North Bay and we get reimbursed for that so. Oh nice yeah. And then as far as the transition from the CTI to an actual counselor so CTIs go to the ACIT. CIT my apologies goes to the age of 17 and then they can become a counselor at 18 or what normally happens is they'll start at 13 to two to three years and at about 15 apply. Okay. The real dedicated ones will stay till 16 or 17 until they get that job and some move on to other things with the skills they've learned as a volunteer. But they can become a counselor so as we get 18 is that the 15 they can become a counselor. So we advertise that our counselor aides are high school aged and have at least a year of volunteer experience working with kids and we also advertise that our counselors are college aged so that's how that works. And the counselor aides do you get paid. Absolutely. Absolutely. Very cool. And I'm personally very excited for Camp Wattots I got little ones. Oh right well we're excited too. I actually wanted to chime in on Camp Wattots as well just to promote and thank the community for supporting Measure M parks for all the county sales tax we're actually using some of the money allocated to increase recreation programs to kickstart the Camp Wattots. So excited too excited for so many reasons to tell them that program but also that the community supported you know parks and recreation through through that Measure M that's going to bring them Camp Wattots. So yeah it's very cool. Well thank you all. Madam host we have any public comments on the item a point one? We do not. No public comments. All right with that next agenda item is committee reports. I have no update regarding the mayor's lunch. Let's the board member would you please provide an update on the waterways committee report. I'd be happy to. The waterways meeting was literally the next morning after our meeting last month and it was a staff presentation on of all things the general plan 2050 update. So it was a deja vu for me however because it was done by staff there was a tremendous emphasis on waterways and the accompanying spaces at the request of the board members. So it was very much directed to how do we make sure the waterways and the accompanying paths and green spaces are part of the future development of Santa Rosa. Cool. Are there any public comments? Sure. All right. The board of community services governing documents subcommittee I personally do not have an update regarding that any participating members have an update. I would defer to staff on that. I can provide a small update. We have been doing a lot of meeting and we are taking what we have so far and checking in with our city attorney's office as well as city manager's office briefly before we come back here to provide it to the whole board for consideration. So it's moving forward. All right. Thank you for that. Acting director Santos do we have any written or electronic communications for item 10? We do not. All right. Thank you Jen. Then moving on to item 11. Are there any items that you would like to see on future board of community services agenda? Yes. I would like for us to consider in the future not meeting every month but maybe every other month or if there are items that we need to go on or be informed of. We are using city resources for two people here right now or now over an hour and I think we could probably we probably should discuss that so we are not using it feels like we're kind of wasting people's time if we don't really have an agenda that we all need to dive in with. Thank you for that. Jen anything in the committee charter or anything? Does it have to be a monthly meeting? Do we have flexibility there? Do we know? The board has some flexibility for sure and we can I can discuss that with the chair. Yeah definitely. Happy great. Certainly something worth raising. Any additional board comments on that? Having been on board almost as long as you have I don't know if these meetings simply serve us but because they're recorded they're also almost a city-wide presentation program such as the camp program and how the year-long agenda which we're presented with presentations how that would be accommodated in an abridged or with some of those be dropped off as possibly not needed otherwise they'd have to be doubled up if they are needed and the future agenda item I know I mentioned this a lot but 888 4th street I drive by it every day they've got prices for how much they're going to be charging for rent an update on three month park in calendar year 2023 or is that something we won't hear about until next year future agenda item. Yeah no we should we should have an update this year. Any additional comments future agenda items? I will certainly note these and I think the idea of either condensing or perhaps moving meetings and committees certainly worth discussing to see if you know it's viable for this board for the community and if it makes sense all about efficiency so we can get it done if your meetings viable. All right with that any public comments future agenda items? Oh sorry no. All right then with that we will adjourn our next regularly scheduled meeting of the board will be held on Wednesday October 25th at 5 p.m with that I adjourn this meeting of the board of community services at 6 o 2 p.m. Thank you everyone. Thank you.