 Welcome everyone to the city council meeting of October 2nd 2018 welcome to our study session on structural deficit strategies Mr. McGlynn. Yes fiscal year 2018-19 budget reduction strategy Chuck McBride chief financial officer presenting. Mr. McBride welcome. Good afternoon Mayor Vice Mayor members the council. We'll spend the next two hours talking a little bit about a existing deficit that we have long-range structural deficit and the initial proposals that we've made to kind of take a immediate step to cut some of our spending. However this is just just a half step we'll be back at the beginning of the calendar year to firm up these proposals and then we plan on coming back at the next fiscal year budget adoption and making some longer range adjustments to the city budget. And again this proposal as it sits right now is if if the voters continue to give us some time to create transition as of November 6th in absence of a quarter since sales tax measure the conversation in January will be a lot starker. You're going to see a proposal that is primarily vacancy oriented as we've known this has been around for a long period of time. We've held positions in anticipation that we had to get into this conversation. But I want to make it clear that this is that proposal come November 6th if we don't have a quarter-cent sales tax measure for a short term to allow us to actually right-size the organization long-term that January February conversation will be very different and and require a lot deeper cut to services and employees because remember 80% of our step of our budget is employees centric. So this is this is a proposal that's been I work for a period of time now but I want to make that that statement really clear at the beginning of this conversation about this proposal and the its nexus with the election the the vote on November 6th. So I'm going to start off and give you an overview of the the existing budget deficit issue and then we'll kind of go into each of the departments in turn and talk about what their proposed cuts were. We're also joined by department directors from throughout the city. So if you want to delve into a little bit deeper dive on individual department we have subject matter experts here. So start off here this is a picture that you've seen before you saw it during budget adoption you saw it during goal setting and essentially what we essentially what we have is a long-range structural deficit. So going back to the previous budget year 1718 we had deficit of 5.9 million dollars we dipped into the reserves to cover that and then for this year 1819 we projected a 14.9 million dollar deficit that you can see up there in the chart and we plan on on depleting our reserves again so that by the end of this fiscal year we'll be be down to six and a half million dollars in unassigned fund balance and the general fund which is which is what we refer to as our reserves. Keep in mind council policy is to keep 15% of minimum reserve in the unassigned so we're obviously well below that and part of the problem that we're seeing here is that this not only are we are we expending more than more than our revenues but the trend lines aren't converging. So over time this problem is is likely to get worse and not better and that's what you're seeing in this chart you see that that annual deficit grows from 14.9 million dollars in the current year and it keeps growing throughout the 10 years the long-range forecast. We are very conservative in our forecasting especially on the revenue side however I would not say that this look at our long-range financial position is extraordinarily conservative. We have very low growth rates built in for salaries probably unrealistically low we grow salaries in the out years at 1% given our given our history that may not be a realistic assumption. We also assume after 24-25 that we don't have any additional growth in the unfunded liability for PERS and we'll get more into that in a moment but that's the reason that we that we flatten that after that year is because PERS only gives us a look out to 24-25 we don't we don't know what they project after that. So the other thing that I don't have built into this model or that our finance team doesn't have built in is any recession. We know that probably there's some sort of downturn looming out there. Do you read the governor governor's most recent budget he thinks that we're going to have recession sooner than later. So we're probably going to have some some kind of downturn probably not what we had in 2008 but but we don't have that built into this model and then you see that the revenues it's kind of hard seeing this slide but in 2526 and out you see revenues flatten a little bit there and we had what was previously known as measure P that's when that expires. So our assumptions are that that just sunsets. Mr. McBride I'm going to encourage the council to ask questions as we go go through this. Absolutely. I'm going to start with the first interruption if you don't mind. What I what I had hoped to see in in this presentation was a chart similar to this with the the cuts that we're looking at today included and the potential of additional revenues from the from the measure on November 6 ballot. I don't believe you have those right now but at some point I'd like to see what that looks like as well. Absolutely mayor and as I as I mentioned the first slide our plan is to come back in early January having taken into account what the council gives us advise us tonight and then we will know whether or not that that sales taxes passed and at that time we'll build all that into the into the model in the interim. What we'll do is we'll develop that model so that the council has it in front of them as they they talk about the city's fiscal situation between now and the election. So we'll try to get that out to you in the next week. Thank you and I'm assuming that with the cuts that we're looking at right now that that would would change the orange line to bring it closer to the blue line but there would still be that the same type of of growing gap over the years. That would probably be a fair statement. Mayor I will say part of our thinking in what we're going to show you tonight where we're going to show you roughly $7 million in cuts. Our thinking was that we if the if the sales tax course and sales tax passes and we have those $7 million initial cuts we've kind of closed that $15 million initial gap and then we can work from there to to further bring down that expenditure line. So Mr. McBride so we have measure P would run out in called the 2024 election to be the last chance to reauthorize it before it runs out. Can you remind us when the current measure O that's on this November should it pass? When would that run out as well? Yeah and if memory serves measure O will be a six-year temporary measure so that would start in April of 2019 and go for six years after that. Right so I guess what I'm getting at is in terms of long-range planning when we talk about the measure O that's this November it really is a short-term measure otherwise we'd be having to ask the public to reauthorize both measure P and measure O in the same election in 2024. That's that's a fair statement. Thank you. Yeah this goes. In it I'm asking a question about the suppositions that are in this model. Is there anything in this model that shows our current unfunded maintenance deficits for example I believe that we don't pay sufficiently for road maintenance right now. Is there anything in here that indicates unfunded maintenance as well? No. Thank you. Please proceed. So very quickly and again we're just focusing on the general fund here and this is probably a chart that you've seen before also but as we kind of delve into this expenditure issue and start to tease it apart we kind of got to look at what our budget is composed of so primarily what you see is that 76% of our budget is in personnel costs okay so when we go out and we ask the department to start cutting we realize that we're going to have to look at personnel. There's maintenance and operations that 20% portion there that just doesn't have as much in it and what you usually see with cities and I assume Santa Rosa is the same is that a lot of that MNO cuts were taken when we hit the recession so what we found is that there's there's not a ton of fat there to be cut so we really have to look at what our personnel expenses are and then you have that last little section there's just transfers and that's really not part of the budget you think of our budgets $169.7 million dollars the transfers of $7.8 million dollars are kind of on top of that and those are things like transfers for debt service on courthouse square transfers that we make for homeless shelter appropriations and things like that. So personnel like I said is really where the story is and I just kind of broke apart that 76% of personnel here in the general fund into these components and you can see on the bottom there that blue bar is salaries and that's growing as I mentioned earlier moderately over the years not really a big problem that orange bar there that starts at $28 million in 1819 that's CalPERS that's that's the the pension cost just for the general fund employees and you can kind of see how that is growing at a much more market scale okay that grows by over 12% just in that first year in 1920 and that that rate of acceleration keeps on going for several years and I'll break that down here in a moment the bar above that that gray bar $14.3 million dollars in 1819 that's your health health costs health insurance costs that's growing also at about 6% a year and we we forecast that kind of looking backwards over the last several years and we average that it has been maintaining about 6% per year so it's it's a large increase but it's predictable and it's you know in the grand scheme of things manageable and then that final line above is just all other things things like uniform allowances health or dental vision things that we don't fit neatly into those other boxes. So here's kind of the problem that we're dealing with is the city of Santa Rosa and this is the problem that I think every city in California or every agency in California that has a pension to find benefit pension or as a member of CalPERS to find benefit program has and that's that we have this unfun of liability so just kind of a quick background on the way that PERS works so you've got two components to our annual costs so we have our annual required contribution that we have to make to PERS that's basically our payment to PERS so this breaks down what's going on just in the general fund so in the year ending 2019 you have a normal cost of $14.1 million and you've got an a unfund of liability of $13.9 million so you combine those two things and that's what we pay for general fund employees $28 million so you look you run your eyes along the normal cost and the normal cost is just what it costs us for an additional service year for an employee so that assumes that all the assumptions that the actuaries make are they hold true so they get their required rate of return mortality rates are what they predict growth and salaries are what they predict all those things hold steady and that's what the cost is for an additional year and again as you run your eyes over that it's not really growing at an alarming rate you know there's our single digit expansion in the normal cost where you're getting big rates of growth is in that unfund of liability and you hear that term thrown around everywhere now and unfund of liability is a big issue so you kind of kind of put it into terms of magnitude for you City Santa Rosa we're about $750 million in net assets our unfund of liability is $338 million and we've had a couple of years where we had really good investment returns on the part of PERS it's still about $338 million okay and that puts it at a funded status of about 70 percent so what our concern is in finance is watching that unfund of liability grow now that number on the bottom is what the annual required contribution is on that $338 million there's a couple of reasons that that number is going up markedly one of them I assume you've heard about what CalPERS is doing with their discount rate so CalPERS one of the assumptions they have to make is how much interest they're going to earn on the money in the fund and it's a mature fund so that's you know you think about an employee working over 30 years 30 years of interest is a big deal their assumption was seven half percent however to hit seven half percent over decades they have to take on a lot of risk in the portfolio so they're investing in commercial real estate rates they're investing in equities they're investing things that are creating a lot of volatility so some years they'll have returns well in excess of that seven half percent target and some some years they'll miss what they're realizing is that that's not sustainable in the long term so they're essentially trying to take the risk out of that portfolio and thereby they're going to bring down the discount rate so over three years I think the last year is next year they bring that rate from seven half percent down seven percent again half a percent reduction in the rate of return doesn't sound particularly alarming but when we look at our numbers here for the City of Santa Rosa one eighth they did this one eighth of a percent the first year one eighth of percent the next year quarter percent next year a one eighth percent reduction in that rate of return the effect of that is 20 million dollars to the unfunded liability that's what it adds to us so it also puts upward pressure on these annual payments it also puts a little bit of upward pressure on the normal cost so what PERS is doing is they're trying to de-risk their portfolio that's increasing the cost to us and that's putting a lot of pressure on our budgets and everybody's budgets who who's in PERS in California what we're watching though is PERS is taking a number of steps to kind of make this plan sustainable they're very very worried about the long-term sustainability plan you know you think back to 2012 they introduced PEPRA pension reform they have introduced this risk risk strategy they if you remember they bumped up over five years the rates that all cities in california were paying and it increased our rates by 30 to 50 percent they've done all of those things in that funded status really since the recession when we hit about 70 percent actually a little bit under 70 percent really hasn't statewide gone up much so PERS is really really trying to get this thing under control and what it's doing is putting a lot of additional pressure on us financially and like i said PERS has got some other tricks up their sleeve one of the things they've done is every year when we miss that targeted rate of return of seven percent which it will be next year what PERS does they take that and they amortize it well they used to amortize it over 30 years now they're doing over 20 years that just means that now you got a 20 year mortgage it's over 30 year mortgage so your annual costs are a lot higher now for the losses and then the other thing that they're going to do is once they get that assumed rate of return down to seven percent they're not done they they've also adopted a risk mitigation strategy which means that when we have good years where we exceed that seven percent rate of return they're going to bring down the assumed rate of return incrementally so that that's going to continue to put upwards pressure on our costs the long and the short of this is that i don't see these PERS costs this unfun of liability issue going away any time in the next decades i think this is going to there's a long term strategy by PERS and i think this is going to keep pressure on our annual costs i have a question here absolutely it looked like you wanted to make a comment i can if i may for those who may not know uh we are in this system and not in the national social security system for retirement with the problems that we're discussing here can you explain for the public to understand why we would stay in this system and not buy our way out and go into the social security system uh yes council member cullum so um what would we have to pay to buy our way out it would be enormous and i don't honestly have that number but it's larger than what the 338 million dollar unfun of liability is it's probably on the order of about a half a billion dollars thank you i wanted to make that clear and the difference between the the cost to buy out and the cost to stay in and i believe that the community that most recently bought its way out which was san diego is in litigation about that still um that's my understanding is that there's been some continuing litigation in in san diego which has done that i i do want to point out that last year at about this time i actually went in in front of the purrs board um to express concern about what we're seeing um talk specifically about how at the time i phrased it the slow strangulations of cities was taking place with this because again it's going away from services it's actually going to pay this this obligation um and um we were asking to see some information um to to help us help help to have a collaborative conversation about how what adjustments we can make um to together um while purrs has has has been supportive of the dialogue they weren't willing to give the league of california cities and the city managers who asked for it the data there has been some work i will make sure that the council has the the current white paper that is out that was worked on by the city managers around this topic as well if you don't have it already mr mcgride mcgride um do these numbers reflect or i should say do they include employee contribution to to purrs or is this all city contribution this is just my apologies this is just city contribution this is just the employer contribution so the employee contribution is on top of on top of this yeah thank you yeah go ahead mr mcgride you mentioned pepra the public employees perform act uh as you alluded to the savings of that are long term as new employees enter into the system in a different tier can you give us a little bit of an update on how many of the employees are a percentage of the employees here in santa rosa that have moved into that are the pepra lower tier since the past in 2012 yeah so it's it's a little bit in excess of 300 employees about 25 percent of the 1300 ft workforce so it's actually um uh surprisingly high that those those tier three employees is that because we've had a higher than expected turnover or is this pretty consistent with most cities that you've seen um it's consistent with the city that i came from i can tell you that much yeah yeah mr schweidham jiff's i think that's very helpful to have a community conversation about because many times when i'm out in the community they talk about why don't you guys just leave purrs the the other piece so we heard that figure so if we came up with a half billion dollars we can leave purrs the other thing is um i think some people don't realize my understanding was that city san rosa joined purrs in like 1945 is that does that seem accurate i know you've been here how many months uh but is that a ballpark idea that it was in the 40s when the city san rosa made the decision to go with this retirement system uh councilman i can tell you you've been in purrs as long as i've been here i don't know what the uh i don't know what the inception date was i'm sorry i can find that out for you though that'd be helpful because again as we're having community conversations uh some members of our community so why don't you just leave and you know did you guys want to make the decision to start this path and it's one of those things like and i've been very open if someone's got a suggestion how do we alter these numbers what i'm hearing the city of san rosa as an individual entity doesn't have many options outside of pepper that we've already been doing to actually adjust some of these numbers till i hear that would that be a fair characterization i think that i i think that's a fair characterization councilman i i will say um you know one of the things we're going to do these are what we're talking about today are short term cuts that are kind of giving us a little bit of breathing room when we come back next year to talk to you about the annual budget um i actually do want to address some ways that we can address that unfunded liability there there are ways to do it but you um you normally need some one-time money so i mean one of the things that you can do is is start going after that unfunded liability and it's it's it's a owner's task to go after a three hundred three eight million dollar liability but like i said it's the liabilities made up of line items upon line it's like having a bunch of seconds on your house you can start going over after some of the the less expensive ones and bringing down your annual cost and if you do that year after year over a number of decades um there's you know you can have a substantial impact on your on your long-term ongoing cost so i think there are ways that we can we can affect our affect our costs great thank you and just a point that should be noted is that a couple of years ago the long-term financial committee was was talking about doing exactly that when we had reserves in in excess of what the minimums were uh it seems like a very long time ago that we were having that conversation um we're obviously not having it now go ahead i apologize one more one more question the long-term finance committee has had the the benefit of having gone through this already but i found it really helpful to hear a little bit of the history of when santa rosa was last at 100 funded as a way to sort of understand what's changed in some of the challenges so if you could help us out with that yeah and i think when we when we spoke to the long-range committee of and i'm going totally off memory here but i think it was 2008 it was it was within the last decade that we were i think at 102 funding so our our fund status went down very rapidly especially the recessions what really hit us and that caused a lot of problems for per person in general with not being able to meet their their investment goals absolutely turns anyway absolutely all right go ahead please all right so kind of um kind of uh turning our tack here a bit so now what we'll start delving into um some of the actual proposals that we're going to have for you for the cuts and just keeping the back of your mind i i probably should have put it in in the beginning slides here but again our kind of overarching plan here is to get a revenue measure in place it'll give us nine million dollars additional general fund money ongoing for that six-year life of it and then on the other side we're trying to close the gap with with budget cuts so we went our target number was about seven million seven million dollars and the way that we did that is we went out to the department city-wide and we asked everyone to give us 10 percent general fund cuts it wasn't very methodical we just asked for everybody for that and then we started paring it down from there so that was something that i think is um uh more acceptable we did go back and look at the at the council goal setting themes from the july meeting and uh well uh all the different council members had a lot of different ideas it was it was hard to kind of encapsulate them all into a number of bullets i get a shot here one thing that we did here was um avoid affecting uh filled fts so in this plan we're going to show you a cut of about 50 fts but for the most part i think i think i don't think we cut any that are filled we cut some that are pending retirements and then most of them are going to be vacancies so that's uh that's what we went after in this round of cuts um so we don't anticipate at this point layoffs or anything like that um we also uh are going to look at examining potential outsourcing options and again that's not so much part of this short-range plan is is probably part of a longer view when we come back to discuss the annual budget um and then uh deferring capital maintenance i think we're uh i think we're already doing some of that and um and then we want to maintain our focus on tier one priorities and those are kind of the big things that we that we heard from council so with that we're going to kind of jump into the individual departments here and like i said um we've got subject matter experts here so if i if i can't answer your questions i'm sure there's somebody uh before you go on um i don't recall seeing the uh current number of employees in the organization in this presentation you mentioned 1,300 i think it's probably something less than that right now does anybody have what that number is yeah and i'm just going off the budgeted numbers from the annual budget we're 1,300 it's like 1,302 or 1,306 i think it's right around 1,300 we'll get the exact account for for council thank you and mr. mayor is it alright if i ask a question thank you um mr. mcbride going through this process i when i was reading the presentation of my packet i'm recognizing a lot of departments that currently have unfilled fte positions and while still maintaining decency around this process would it be possible to let us know what is either an fte expiring through attrition um that is unfilled versus filled in or if you don't want to go there because i get the delicacy of what the what i'm asking could you then at least email it to me so i can understand what this looks like for city well again it'll depend on if it's a personnel matter or not or where we're at we may have to be making switches within the organization we can definitely tell you the vacancy number versus the non-vacancy number and i think that that's illustrated in this conversation but some of those other conversations might bleeding to personnel matters and actually switches within the organization to fill because not every vacancy is is up for this conversation because we may need to be doing some movements within the organization um to to sustain the presentation today okay okay so we will look at that if you could just then share because i missed that number either when we get to it i'll hear it pointed out or shoot me an email but i would be curious to know what what is natural attrition and unfilled positions versus the alternative thanks so councilmember and i think i can address a lot of that as we go and and actually in the staff report uh i believe we actually spelled out what most positions are so i'll point those out as we go and and we kind of we uh we mark them in the aggregate it within the presentation here so we'll start off with the uh with the city attorney's office so what we gave you here um is just kind of a dashboard again or our focus today is on the general fund uh i don't think within this presentation we have any cuts to the enterprise funds what you will see some internal service fund cuts because those affect the general fund um but it's it's the this discussion is focused around the general fund so the first thing you'll see on all these slides if i forget to point it out is um what their general fund budget is within the department and what percentage that is of the overall uh general fund budget so three and a half million dollars for the city attorney is 2.1 percent of our overall 169.7 million dollar general fund budget uh proposed reduction you'll see there by department and then what the number of tees are within that department so for a city attorney their proposed reduction out of a three and a half million dollar budget was 237,500 dollars the preponderance of that came in personnel savings from a vacancy so this is a uh system city attorney that was added uh to support um the work that would be brought on by uh by our change to cannabis regulations uh so that's eliminated uh to save us 207,000 dollars and then that that next line that you see non-personnel um that's just a lot of the ancillary costs that go with that uh with that city attorney and then there was also some uh professional dues that uh that the city attorney's office got rid of so in total they got us to 237,000 dollars and where you see there that that uh column there to the right up to your reduction v is just vacant f is filled position so i'll i'll point out which ones those are as we kind of walk through this okay mr. Mcbride um i have a question for miss gallagher but when you start up again would you pull your microphone more in front of you than off to the side absolutely um miss gallagher the staff board and and mr. Mcbride just mentioned again that this was an assistant city attorney position this is sometimes i get confused between deputy and assistant uh there's also a deputy that's vacant right now we have um slightly different nomenclature than many of the other departments so um we actually have two positions vacant currently the chief assistant which will be essentially the number two person in the office um that recruitment um uh is out and that position is not affected by this this is an additional assistant our order goes there'll be the chief assistant the assistants and then the deputies so in our opposite deputies are the actual most junior um this was an additional assistant city attorney as mr. Mcbride identified um this position was going to be funded through the cannabis revenues um and was going to be slated to do primarily cannabis related work but also um other initiatives that the council has talked about such as um a potential rental inspection program and other um other programs like that that was what this attorney assistant was going to do and that has never been filled that has never been filled no we have uh in fact kept that open uh recognizing that we were facing some budget cuts so um again we're we're comfortable with that cut depending upon what other programs and initiatives the council might decide to undertake so mr. Oliver's thank you mayor uh ma'am city attorney as i see your from my perspective yours is a very critical department to the city and i know that over the past several years at least we've been looking at opportunities to enhance the the the the actual department from a variety of different perspectives so i guess my question is how does this impact that if at all and and with this cut considering that not just the cannabis but all the other potential assignments what's what's the worst-case scenario not just your department but to the city in a hole with this cut yes what this affects and what that position was intended to do was really to help us enhance our legal services better our turnaround time be able to provide more proactive legal services to our departments to all the city departments this will dampen those efforts we certainly that is our our goal and our you know where we're our focus is right now is to making those improvements and we'll be making those improvements with our existing staff and some streamlining within our office and then with the addition of the chief assistant but yes the this position was intended to help us with those efforts so it will slow those efforts thank you i'm really delighted to hear that the chief assistant position is still on the books i am trying to understand what i thought i heard with regard to the intent and purposes of the other position would this affect code enforcement beyond the rental inspection program no we currently have two attorneys who spend a good part of their time not 100 of their time but a good part of their time on code enforcement they their positions are secure in this budget and they will continue this position again was really in anticipation of the added workload that's with that we anticipate in fact still anticipate from the the growth of the cannabis industry in san rosa and also very much hoping that this position would also take on any additional new programs that the council the council or the departments might might bring forward again rental inspection program was an obvious one that is going to need additional staffing from would need additional staffing from our office there were others as well so if if the if the programs remain in status quo then i think we're you know we're able to move forward without this additional position should the council or the departments decide to proceed with instituting a variety of new programs or initiatives then that will that that will make it difficult and will make it difficult to make the improvements that we're hoping to make in our office and i think and i just want to reiterate what the city attorney is saying is that a lot of these cuts for a lot of the agencies are going to be about slowing down processes not necessarily impacting you know the total service element but these were positions that we were planning to hire to expand capacity and that means that capacity gets curtailed across the organization as we don't fill these vacant positions so i i i just want to agree you know say that that's that's an issue that the city attorney is going to face and that's an issue that each of these departments is going to face is curtail capacity to meet need yes i'm sorry and i would very much agree that this is the same kind of slowing down that that all the other departments will face with these reductions and i also recognize that as there is a there is a balance between since our office serves all of the different departments there's you know one line of thought that says well when staffing in other departments goes down your work will also go down and in fact that's not the case it's often the opposite in that more burdens get shifted into our office recognizing that i i also recognize that we're all in we're all in this together and if we have to make cuts this is this is where i would make them in my office i i want to appreciate and not second guess you trust your judgment i am asking a couple of questions so would the fees associated with a rental inspection program pay for this position or part of this position we we don't know i mean we don't know theoretically could theoretically could but that that um that program is it doesn't exist it doesn't exist yet it has not been okay formulated and it's not not in front of us today when the time comes we could revisit this if there were funds yes as you you move forward and are there options sometimes not all the time but sometimes additional staff that is not a full-fledged attorney can be of assistance in legal services right that sometimes can cost less but obviously can't do the same work um was that explored in this as a as an option yes we explored a couple of different options we explored um paralegal assistance administrative staff assistance we also looked at part-time i've been in offices that have had a significant number of part-time attorneys we looked at those options but in order to reach the level of proposed reduction that this was the most sensible way to go um the part-time attorney didn't give us the the amount that we were of reduction that we were looking for and um and frankly near nor did the other options but those those were all options that we did look at we also looked at sending more work to outside council i was going to ask about and um that um that's an interesting proposition because it's much more expensive for the time being in the long run what you save is is the retirement costs um but we uh chosen not to go that direction we did look at cutting um and i'm believe this 30 000 includes some cuts also to outside legal services um again it's a it's a balancing act because outside legal services tend to be significantly more expensive than having in-house to do the work okay um i'm very reluctant and would be interested in what our other options are um simply because i'm really aware that there's a lot going on and a lot coming yes so thank you thanks mr. mayor what follow-up question to that sir sue from your perspective uh both on a positive and negative sense what what would the proposed reductions in other departments how would those impact your department um the proposed reductions in from other departments and what the impact is um much of that will still be they have to be seen um as it comes forward um my experience uh in previous positions when departments were cut um often that work got shifted to us either directly or indirectly in terms of you know our review of work product if there is not enough staff in the in the the department that is sending it forward you don't have the same ability to you know same quality that comes forward again and that is not to disparage it any way i have the highest respect for all the staff in the departments um but sometimes that does get shifted to our office um on the flip side when there are less staff in the other departments there can also be much there can be significantly less work that comes our way you take stent that um projects are slowed due to um lack of staff in the departments those projects are not coming to us as quickly um so it's very much hard to estimate what the actual impact will be from the cuts in the other departments thank you miss galger i appreciate your your um your comment about us all being in this together and um obviously that has to be mr mcbride noted that departments were asked to come up with 10 percent across the board cuts um i i appreciate that effort and i know that that's not an easy thing to do uh but i also appreciate that that's kind of the thoughtless way to go about cuts um but what i'm asking for mr mcglenn is that as we go through this that you give some kind of an indication for each department why what the thinking is behind either above or below the 10 percent level um three and a half million dollar department with the 237 thousand dollar cut is less than 10 percent even a journalism major can figure that out and i just um if you can help us as we go through this i'd appreciate that well i think for this this department i think it's exactly what the topic of conversation that the council has had i think that a lot of this is going to be self-evident and i don't want to this first pass is about what is vacant within the organization taking that first direction that the council gave sort of a preserving fte's but being conscious that this department supports so many other parts of the endeavor one of the places that were really difficult to struggle on are cannabis you know the the total impact of what that's going to do to the organization is unknown well i will note is that the council does have next year within its authority the ability to adjust that rate of taxation on that particular industry so i will just point that out to the council that as we go through this exploration together we may in fact discover that there's a tremendous amount of work from this particular industry but you do have a remedy to address that particular work what we're doing right now is since we don't know and these are vacant these are things that allow us to go through that process to learn together and if i if i may add as well i like all departments i did come forward with a full 10 proposal and i will say i very much appreciate the work in collaboration with both mr mcbride and with miss hertado in in evaluating those additional cuts the additional cuts that were on my list i had very serious concerns that those were going to be harmful to our operations and not productive counterproductive to our to where we're trying to go so i very much appreciate the care that they took and i know with my department and i know they worked with other departments as well these are difficult these are difficult decisions and i know difficult decisions for all the departments so that's one more question before we go to leave the city attorney's office so i know you came from another organization that built the hours a little differently than we do here and i know private you know law firms billable hours what impact about changing our whether it be staffing or billing system would that have on our current budgetary challenges any at all the organization that was previously with had a number of billable client billable departments because of the way they are set up where they those departments or agencies had their own income stream we have very few of those enterprise funds so we certainly would not be able to bill enough against those to to to keep our office functioning i we could certainly it in my former position we build all departments both general fund and enterprise we worked with the departments eat at the beginning of each fiscal year to set up a budget and then that budget again with a general fund it was not they were not paid but that was how we set up the budget my concern with that kind of a setup is that decisions and allocation of legal resources get based in part on the budgets budgets that were set at the beginning get set about who's billable and actually bringing in new monies versus a shifting general funds and it's my feeling that our obligation is as the legal office our obligation is to serve the best interests of the city to prioritize our work according to the priorities of the council and of issues that arise through the departments and that that should be the deciding factor for allocation rather than who still has money in their budget great no i appreciate that i just you know if we're gonna have this conversation let's get it out in the open so i appreciate your comments yes and and there are there are opportunities for revenue that aren't just from one department to another but things like at cost processing was very significant in my prior position that puts the burden on applicants that are going through the planning process or the building process so there are some opportunities even for legal services to build that out but those are those are policy decisions that you would you would have to face great thank you so the next department that we're going to look at city manager department and these weren't put in a particular order they're just an alphabetical order so city managers has also got a relatively small budget 1.8 percent of the general fund their proposed reduction was 366 thousand dollars actually in excess of their 10 percent so the reductions the city manager were done totally through personnel savings one position was a vacancy and say senior administrative assistant that was that was eliminated and then the full-time position is a field deputy city manager position there is a proposal to realign the way that services are provided within the city and reassemble some of the functions within the city under kind of a different structure different hierarchy i won't go too much into that because later in this month you're going to be receiving council action to take on classifications and salary schedules that will kind of address what what the thinking is there on the part of the deputy city manager yes and this will be a recurring question as far as worst case scenario and how do the other reductions proposed reductions across the city impact the city manager's office when we lose capacity in the city manager's office we we lose the capacity to do a variety of things i will just say that's why we're looking at structural realignment corresponding to this particular issue you know the deputy city manager has been instrumental in moving forward this particular process in the midst of a recovery process which has occupied a considerable portion of my time additionally moving through a series of other projects including but not limited to the the new waste hauler contract so it is a considerable a considerable impact but we're looking at ways to maybe at the same time create more capacity within an organization but also maybe create more promotional opportunity within the organization at the same time so we're looking at that that's a longer event horizon conversation but again we've all got to chip into this endeavor and we've all got to figure out how to to make do with with less and this is one of the actual filled positions being offered up as as a reduction within the organization so the next department is mine we have a general fund budget of $11 million our proposed reductions about a half a million dollars and we did this all through the elimination of vacancies so i will be honest you know i'm calling these vacancies to get our savings i'm in the in the midst of kind of looking at the department strategically and seeing how we can realign things i i think we can do it part of what this is is eliminating a revenue manager so i'm not sure if that's going to be a long-term elimination or if i'm going to realign that to get to to find savings further down the line but i'm looking at that division right now to see how we can rearrange it another thing that we eliminate here is a vacant payroll supervisor that one i'm i'm pretty comfortable with i think the way we're structured right now in payroll we can meet city needs without that supervisor position i have a manager in that in that division so i feel confident there and then i also eliminate a vacant accountant and and then for our administrative section i've currently got two admins who support me we're we're going to go down to one and again i think that will cause you know a little bit of a service impact to those of us in the admin section but again in light of you know of the budget savings that we need i'm very comfortable doing that and of course the impacts to other departments would how do you foresee that um council member i don't think the impacts in the short term will be great we've been working especially in our payroll section which would be my highest concern not just for personal reasons that would uh we've been working without a payroll supervisor for quite a while and it seems to be the work seems to be done there may come a time and i'm looking at if i have an additional need for compliance issues so we deal with perrs as far as payroll goes um and uh there's a lot of compliance there that i may have to have some outside help on but i think i can get a get a get along long term without that position uh the revenue manager i'm a little more concerned about but again i need a little bit a little bit more time to look at that and see how to realign that that that division thank you and any other potential impacts of reductions in other departments to your department um again i i think the overarching theme here with all of these reductions first of all i keep in mind most of these like mine are all vacancies but i think especially where you see filled positions being being eliminated i think the overarching message here today is that you're going to see some slowdowns in service and that may be serviced to the internal customers but um you're definitely things are things are going to happen slower yeah and i'm making assumptions that we may have slowdowns because we have vacancies now i i assume we have those vacancies that we we had wanted to fill them so they did serve a function uh so this will actually impact that even more yeah you're correct council member and it will um i will say what you'll see with a lot of these vacant positions in the departments is um a lot of these were being held in anticipation of this budget reduction so thank you i have if i may have sort of a process question we keep hearing there may be a slowdown there may be a reduction in service i understand the extent of what that means how do i understand how much slower how much is that going to affect the ability of a department to get its job done how much is that going to impact both the internal and the external customers so we're worse i mean you know i citizens i you know i i'm not i'm not trying to be flip i mean i think you think that we were planning to go through a process with council before the fire that would really care try to carefully consider and articulate some of these concerns to build the measurement systems necessary to actually track what you're asking for is difficult what i can say is i'm looking for a guess about what it means i think because we're hearing it thrown out there but i think i think the guess the guess is is we don't know what what cannabis holds for the overall organization in terms of workload there were some guesses that it was going to require additional attorney work some additional work in planning but we're working through that and we've been able to sustain a level of activity um what what our concern is about is how do we do that long term and is this something that is going to manifest itself long term i wish i wish i had a clear answer but what i can say is the organization has taken steps to adjust to these vacancies to try to preserve service levels the nearest we can what i think we'll be able to see a long range impact on how people can stay in their jobs i'm not just i do i'm not disputing that i think that these are some of the questions that we're going to have to tackle because then it becomes a real question about whether we can sustain some programs is it simply adding resource to hire more staff or some of those other programs sustainable this is this is where we sit at this particular moment in in time as i said we need we're going to go through some structural conversations at the beginning of the year um but right now what we're doing is bringing through a proposal and saying we're providing service levels right now it's unclear what those long term impacts and we've got things like cannabis hanging on the horizon but we're curtailing those those service levels as they are because we held those positions open because we knew we had a structural issue i understand that new programs may be directly affected but will will you also be clear when the slowdown and reduction in service is going to come to existing well i think we're going to see some of that in the the benchmark measurements that we have as we track those benchmarks between last year and this year and we'll be able to see some of that articulated as we go through the report outs of performance metrics we're hearing a study session so there's not a fixed decision that will be made today um when this comes back will we have access to the proposed new organizational structure so that we can make some judgments with that's what the goal is is we've got a we've got it we've got it we're holding these positions open to meet the current need which is the seven million dollars um that's what we're doing and we want to get um you know not a formal action tonight but we want to understand if the council's continue comfortable with us continuing so we can get to a january-february conversation in january we'll come back have a specific conversation about some of the restructuring again i want to put a codicell out there that conversation could be very different depending on what happens on on november 6th and then what we're contemplating right now but that structural realignment that would then would bleed into the um uh conversation uh the goal setting conversation in that we typically have in the february time period to help work on those things together i appreciate that the staffing levels of 2008 were not set in stone are not necessarily the perfect staffing levels for our city but i am aware that some departments have returned to those levels and other departments significantly have not um will that come forward as well we can supply that information thank you mr tibbetz thank you mayor um i'm sorry i you may have just said it but when when is this going to come back i recognize it's a study session now but when will this come back formally for some sort of adoption so so this this we're this is the beginning of a process so that you understand what we're doing is an organization to meet the need um unless i'm hearing that there's great consternation we're going to continue on this pathway to hold these vacancies open for the organization to meet its deficit situation which is considerable then in january we're going to come back with restructuring realignment for the next budget conversation that deck then intersects with the conversation about goal setting which typically takes place in february which where we can talk about realignment and particularly restructuring the organization to meet some of these needs long term and again the only thing that i reserve council member is some right to look at what happens on november 6th and say that we we need to either i i'm not sure we can speed up that conversation but it certainly will influence the scope and nature of the conversations that take place in january in february thanks go ahead mr budd so the next department we looked at is fire um and fire as we said you can see they have a 40 million dollar budget about 24 percent of the overall general fund um their proposed reduction as a percentage is relatively small and we again kind of going back to what we heard from council and goal setting our reductions for the for safety both police and fire were were relatively small as a percentage fire was able to give us nine hundred fifty thousand dollars in reduction and that was totally through vacant personnel so the the three quarters the 0.75 that you see there that's an existing vacancy and an admin assistant so they have an admin section of 4.75 fte's that position won't get filled the service impact will will be that that remaining staff is going to have to pick up that work but the other personnel vacancies were six firefighters they're held vacant so a couple notes on that in the short term impacts from that is going to be fire currently use those positions for a couple of things they use it to the salary savings to balance overtime budgets so they have unforeseen vacations sick iod things like that they have some some budget there to address that they also use those six positions for overfilling so if they know that they're going to have a vacancy in the future they can overfill a position one of those six vacancies and they can prepare that that person to move into the position that'll be opening up in the long term the effects are probably going to be that we won't have fte's available to as firefighters that we will probably need so if you go back to the 2016 standards of coverage it indicates that we're going to need more stations within the city of santa rosa so one engine team is nine fte's so this is two-thirds of that that we're getting rid of vacancies so the reason i tell you that is that although we're eliminating those vacancies now and getting those short-term savings and giving us some time to kind of play in the long range there's a thought that in the long term we'll probably be back in front of you again at some future date asking for additional firefighter fte's so can i have a question okay start down here mr oliver's thank you this will be for the fire chief please chief i heard a little bit about how the the current vacancies are being a little bit of a benefit to the department but my question is with these cuts in the long term what is the worst-case scenario for santa rosa and then of course the impacts of other proposed cuts to the departments on your department and vice versa how cuts on your department impact others as well well these vacancies we try to keep all of our vacancies full and when we have retirements we have people to move right in other to those positions when we don't have retirements and those vacant that vacant those firefighter positions are filled when somebody takes vacation they're sick there are an industry over to injury then those positions fill backfill them so there is no overtime so that's where the savings comes in with the overtime at this point there's seven vacancies in the firefighter slots so that doesn't impact our day-to-day staffing what it does do is does not give us any depth for any retirements because as you know it takes a long time to recruit go through the background get somebody on the line it is a nine month to a one year process so that's once we get the constant staffing which is about 40 people a city our size we run 10 engines and two trucks and with one battalion chief that's 40 people our standards covers clearly states we need to move some stations and add some stations and mr mcbride is right one engine company's nine people so in the long term we will be back when there is that availability to move stations and build stations another thought is that you know with these firefighters we're able to upstaff when we need to and we just don't have that ability without overtime now so when the positions are vacant that helps backfill some of that overtime need as far as service cuts you know the citizens should not see anything different it's going to be harder on my personnel they're already working a tremendous amount and it's not getting any slower so it just we just rotate through some people and it's you know it's all anecdotal at this point but the less people you have the harder you work them the more sick they get the more injured they are and that's just something that we have to deal with and so we deal with that as we have to so in the long term it's we won't be able to staff those new stations when we need to or upstaff a squad when we need to or another engine when we need to it'll all be based on overtime and and did you look at what potential impacts may be with with the proposed cuts to other departments on your department you know I really like the city attorney said we're all in this together so we we're all working together to try to make sure the city is able to function as as good as we can knowing that there are going to be some impacts throughout that's going to impact us and just like we might impact some other departments we're just resigned to the fact that this is the way it's got to be and we'll work through those so I haven't identified anything that's you know these are the items that we need to to look forward to but we are in this together and we're trying to do this together yes and that and that is very true but your department has also been impacted significantly with having to provide resources to fires around the state and I don't see that ending just suddenly stopping so that will continue to be so I'm again from a public safety perspective not just here locally but also with the rest of the state I have concerns about that so I wanted input on that so we before we had when the positions are empty or filled we send resources out to help fight fires in other communities just like they came to us we've always done that we will continue to do that we've been sending out equipment regularly all year to other fires throughout up and down the state so it's that does not impact us what impacts us is there there comes a time when we just can't give anymore so well we used to put be able to send out four engine companies at a time that's a lot of people when we send out an engine out on a strike team that's four people not three so we add an extra personnel and so that means we have additional overtime that we have to hire back that gets paid back by the state but that's hard on the department because that's more people if you're gone there's more people here that are working overtime just to fill the vacancies when we send an engine out we always backstaff so we're never down equipment and what do you see as the as the greatest public safety worst case scenario with with not filling these positions it's just going to be hard on the department so we're already working a tremendous amount up and down the state as well as we're up staffing ourselves during the red flag red flag warnings and so it's just it's a continual rotation of overtime where people sign up they're not signing up anymore because they're getting mandatory we are mando mandoing people to stay at work you will stay at work and this is what we're doing so that's the dynamic that we see and that's hard on families that's hard on employees that's hard on the system for us i will tell you nobody's complaining everyone's working hard and doing that but you know at a certain point the less you have the the sooner you break thank you mr schwedhill thank you thanks you on that same line because i had some similar question about the mutual aid aspect of it but i know with the emergency preparedness you know this department and you've been very active in being proactive you mentioned red flag warning um because now we're trying to anticipate certain weather events and we want to upstaff will these cuts have any impact on our ability to do that no we will still upstaff okay and and then when we um having lived through this back when we did the cuts back in 0809 uh the the chief of the time suggests we do the brownouts have you examined that you know what point would you offer that as a strategy to deal with the budget cuts and back when we did do that as the fire department measured or have metrics here were the impacts of those brownouts yeah so with the elimination of the the six vacancies that money goes away so there that money does not go into any overtime pay when we upstaff right so i expect overtime to go up a little bit and it won't be able to be balanced out by the the positions that are vacant so if we're held to a line of we got 2.8 million dollars and in our overtime line budget and we're starting to go over that aside from the strike team assignments that we get backfilled for the only way to stop that is to downstaff equipment it's not appropriate in our size that we we need that overtime budget to maintain service but if it becomes too much the only way to save any appreciable money is to downstaff equipment and i'm sorry is downstaffing what i'm making reference to the brownouts of fire stations yeah that's correct yeah so then going back to since we did do that here in santa rosa have we looked at the impacts that had on the community you know the loss of life buildings burn what were the impacts of the brownouts the last time we experienced that you know as you might remember we we rotated station 10 on the southwest side and station 11 downtown meadow and steel with closing down stations so what happens is all the other engine companies around that become very busy so it's hard to say well this fire happened because this engine was not here or it took longer for this engine to cure because of that there's some anecdotal stories it's just much harder on the system we're very busy we're running over 27,000 calls a year for service and anytime you take a unit out of service that goes to all the other units so during red flag warnings for instance we will stop all normal training it's red flag so we're out patrolling we're out talking to communities we're not we're not training at the tower we're not doing anything above and beyond it's just all about the emergency and reaching people out in the field so i don't have any hard numbers i can just tell you that the call volume goes up and uh it's hard on the community and the department when you shut down a just one piece of equipment it makes a big difference and i really appreciate that chief i would just ask either you or the city manager they'd be very helpful from being one of the seven up here to actually um it's kind of like i need one of your arms but you know i i need my right and my left no we need one of them because we're no one wants to do what we're having to do through go through now and i would just offer that since we experienced the brown out having some metrics what were the impacts of using that strategy and should we do it again because yes no one likes it it's a pressure on the whole system but if we don't have any data about what worked last time do we want to repeat that or should we try another strategy i guess that information would be helpful for me to have okay and then in regards to training and i know some departments have it at different levels because not all training is equal you know i know this body's talked about mandatory essential and desirable training from the fire department perspective have you delineated those different levels of training and since i see this is all personnel costs are you looking at the training that your department receives in prioritizing those mandatory trainings and maybe not doing those desirable trainings we we're continually looking at our training program i will say that the reason why we had so few injuries the night of the emergency was because of our training program and how we treat it and when you talk about reducing staff training is the one thing that i'm not willing to cut because that's what makes us so good out in the field so while we always prioritize we have a ton of mandatory training that has to get done on top of all the nice stuff and so sometimes the nice stuff doesn't happen for us you know but we make every effort to provide that opportunity inside the training budget to make it happen if you know if we can so i don't have anything specific for you right now i can i can get that to you but we have a mandatory training is difficult to stay on top of it as busy as we are right so now we're we're not even training during red flag warnings because we're we're doing other things so everything every time you stop doing one thing it affects 10 other things somewhere else and so we struggle with that because we are busy and it's difficult to get it all done and i get that here what you're saying and again i'm in no way shape or form suggestion we don't do the mandatory training i just also recognize not all training is mandatory and we get to choose to do that certain level of training and if we are again no one wants to go through this process we're going through my interest to be well that desirable training that is not mandatory or essential and again those are my words you may use different words but what did that other one um whatever that other level is especially if as the city manager said if november doesn't pass we have some other difficult cuts i you know that not that i want to catch training but there might be a little window of opportunity to save some funds from that desirable maybe so i'll give you a little example when we trench rescue confined space uh rope systems that's not mandatory training as soon as we stop sending people to that training and people start retiring we lose that ability we just so we have to maintain a certain level i totally hear what you're saying we're always taking a look at our budget and trying to figure out what makes the most sense another item is hazmat training do we put everyone through you know as as people promote up or move on retire we lose people and it's expensive to train people to be a hazmat technician but it's something that we provide so if we don't provide that then we're going to have to start talking about all right do we need a hazmat team and that's that's a difficult conversation as well so we are looking at all of those because as i said earlier you take one thing away it affects 10 other things downstream so we're continually looking at that and we will continue to do that and i would stop and say like hazmat that it's um high liability but not very frequent sometimes looking at a regional approach for that specific type of training might make might make sense and it sounds like it might make sense and what what i'm hearing is the county may be coming to us to ask us to help them so you know it's uh i totally get the regional and i'm i'm good with it we just need to figure out how we're going to operate great thank you chief mr rogersen thank you mr mayor so chief a couple of questions here one you mentioned up staffing during red flag warnings and a little bit of pre-staging that goes on we just saw dollars passed in the the state's budget for pre-staging of fire personnel is there any ability for us to tap into that if we are already doing some of that anyway we are tapping into it now there's 25 million dollars made available in the budget for the entire state the guidelines that they're using for the upstaffing criteria to cover the whole state right yeah for about six days so it's it's the the qualifications or the quality to upstaff are very high we met both of those qualifications the last two red flag warnings on top of that we we in Sonoma County we upstaffed one additional strike team or task force that the county is back filling pay for so while we had resources up available either the state or the county is paying for those due to the red flag warning that's great when we send folks out response teams elsewhere strike teams is that a net positive neutral or net negative on our budget overall it's a net positive so we not only do we get backfill for the overtime they pay a 10 percent admin fee and they pay rental on the fire engine if you will so every year we see a little extra money that goes to the general fund that goes to the general it doesn't come to us it goes into the general fund i think last year we had over $500,000 in these types of monies that that went into the general fund last year was an expensive year the year before it was a little bit less year before it was a little bit less than that but every year it's a little bit more and that all goes into the general fund great thank you mr. McBride i noticed the fire the cuts to the fire department it's 2.37 percent of their budget overall this is more of a global question about fire and police we're seeing 4.08 percent in reduction of our total general fund so again 4.08 total 2.37 percent of fire and then for police it's 1.69 percent of their budget as well how does this reduction affect our measure o baseline numbers we're already in compliance with with the measure o baseline and when we assuming that all these cuts are made then our measure o baseline goes down because our general fund decreases so we'll still be in compliance with measure o yeah i guess in particular my question is the reduction of the overall general fund is bigger than the individual reduction within both police and fire and i seem to remember during the budget session that fire in particular was very close to that measure o line yeah i don't have a good answer for that uh councilman i died i'd have to find out on that okay if you could take a look yeah thank you mr. Coles thank you following up on that um when you come back with that would you let us know how far over measure o baseline we are in any departments that as we go through this process look like they're going to remain over measure o on the assumption that we won't fall under the measure o baseline and um you mentioned um chief first thank you um and i have appreciated the alertness of the red flag warnings so uh thanks for very much for that you mentioned we had 2,700 calls or thereabouts um how many of those are medical calls it was 27,000 calls and about 70 percent 69 percent are medical so we run over 27,000 calls a year i'm sorry 27,000 calls that's all right my mistake and about 69 percent of those are medical related okay and the positioning of stations throughout the city for the five-minute rule that's driven if you can clarify for me is that driven for the five-minute rule for a medical call or is that driven because a fire needs to be responded to in five minutes and i appreciate fires need prompt response but my understanding is the NFPA regulation has more to do with medical conditions so i i wondered if you could clarify that it's NFPA 1710 it's for both so we look at single engine response whether it's for fire or EMS we want to get there within four minutes of travel time so you get a minute for for dispatch and in four minutes for travel that's where we come up with five minutes we do that for EMS so if there's you know a stroke heart attack yeah right you want to get there so you can provide oxygen medications so the brain doesn't die or the heart doesn't die conversely with structure fires structure fires when they start they they burn much faster and hotter than they did years ago do all the plastics and the special fabrics that we use in houses these days and there's actually there's the five minute for that but then we have the effective fire force where we want three engines a ladder truck and a battalion chief on scene within nine minutes so we can all do what we need to do to keep that fire as small as possible so they're a little bit tied together but it's it's for both EMS and fire okay and um one of the concerns that i've had that i think you're aware that i have has to do with our ability to provide the community with community preparedness neighborhood preparedness resident preparedness services i think we all learned from the fires and have assumed from the earthquakes that we would need preparedness within ourselves within our own homes within our own neighborhoods does any of this staffing affect our ability to move forward with an additional program that involves community preparedness because i know we've had sort of a real rollback in that community preparedness leading up to the fires yeah yeah we have had a rollback and that is due to personnel so anytime we lose it's yeah it's there's going to be difficulty in providing that level that we should or need to right so for us we lost a community outreach person a number of years back due to the budget cuts in 2009 and 10 and uh we've never been able to recover that so that falls on fire prevention and largely a lot of the the chief staff and the office to go give presentations we are still given presentations where we gave two last week we gave gave one three weeks ago we're giving one next week and it falls the same as a developed community preparedness program i appreciate that you're trying to fill gaps in what i think is something that before we have amnesia regarding the fires and before we have the next earthquake i'm really concerned about using the current opportunity to to uh to get the message to folks about how to be prepared to be self-sufficient for a period of time and i'm not seeing us able to do that right now in the context of severe budget cuts so so um i will also add that this is part of the reason we're trying to have a larger conversation about um where this resides how we do this across the board and and to tap into the conversation there earlier in a regional effort um there are other places around the state specifically san diego which has a very specific relationship with the san diego public utility and that provides a platform for a lot of these conversations one of the conversations we're enjoined in right now is to help us develop some of that i think first we need to really look and we're trying to take a closer look with our our neighboring jurisdictions in the county the format and the structure under which that can be launched i think we take inspiration from some of the work that's been done um and that was highlighted last week on the um uh the the revision of the management around homeless services so i think i think that there's a similar sort of effort underway councilmember but you're absolutely correct there's a lot more work to be done here but i think it's a work that has to be not just santa rosa specific it needs to be a regional conversation that helps the neighborhoods and our community do better in order to have that kind of conversation go forward have we cut our ability to take part or to be instrumental in that in the terms of slowing services or reduction of services all things will slow down i can't i can't i can't emphasize that enough you know we're at capacity for delivering the programs and services we're trying to deliver right now um you know and at the same time wrestling with the biggest disaster since the 1906 earthquake i wish it wasn't dual tracks that we're running on at this particular time but it is and we're trying to find every opportunity to address some of these things collectively but it is it's a huge it's a huge it's a huge lift there's tremendous successes i tried to communicate some of those successes earlier today some of them seem really small but are actually huge as it relates to to our ability to address our needs and the collective needs not just of the city but of the state and maybe of the nation later on but i will say it is a challenge but we need to approach some of these issues we can't do this alone we need assistance from our other jurisdictions and our colleagues and we have to band together to capitalize on economies of scale not just from the public sector we need the support from the private sector as well yes i i strongly agree with you my concern is that if we make significant cuts now we lose the ability to pursue those partnerships so i want to make sure that we aren't cutting that opportunity out as well thank you so i'm sorry the the vice mayor and council member combs had a question on on the measure of baseline i should have known that my budget manager was way ahead of me here so she had calculated the cuts so for the fire department they'll actually exceed the baseline by four hundred thousand dollars so thank you thank you chief so the next department is a housing community services one percent of the general fund budget proposed reductions were about a hundred thousand dollars they eliminated two halftime vacancies one of those was a community outreach specialist that had been put in place for the neighborhood revitalization program they also eliminated a senior admin assistant point five fte that supported code enforcement those are both vacant positions questions council yeah i'll have the same questions for mr quine thank you david again just the worst case scenario with with your read potential reductions and any anticipated impacts based on the proposed reductions on other departments and vice versa yours on others sure thank you for the neighborhood revitalization program nrp we would have to sit down with the office of community engagement and be very specific with their capacity to work out a work plan and budget to provide some outreach services to our nrp neighborhoods we would we have yet to do that but that would be something i would suggest we do and i can have clues speak to any impact there so capacity review and then for the position in code enforcement that was contemplated to be sponsored half with the new cannabis tax half with general fund thus it's being offered and again if we get a complaint into code enforcement that was regarding those subjects it would go into the queue we would investigate it as time permits and treat it as such yeah thank you mr quine can you comment on on um the level of cannabis complaints that you've been hearing since uh since legalization yeah um we have that information i don't have it at the tip of my tongue we are getting an increase and when we go out to look at what i would call their illegal grows and so it's it's more than just the number of plants the property owner is growing it's how they're growing them so it usually leads into some electrical concerns running wires back and forth inside a garage or a vacant building plumbing bringing irrigation to the plants other other in other modifications i was going to say improvements other modifications to the structure that are illegal those are the type of complaints we see so um have we started to to realize proceeds revenues from the cannabis taxes yes mayor so for um for the year that ended 1718 we had four hundred and sixty thousand dollars in revenues just from the cannabis industry tax i think for the current year we had we had budgeted 2.5 million dollars i don't have any numbers for this year because our first quarter that just ended september i won't have those numbers for a couple weeks so if we're cutting positions um the city attorney's office and in housing and community services they were dependent upon those revenues is it fair to say that we're using those those revenues to backfill other general fund needs that don't have anything to do with cannabis i wouldn't say we're they don't have any to do with cannabis because the workload remains what we're not doing is we're not funding the additional positions out of those proceeds but staff has to work on those issues so they're we're asking them to prioritize that within their workload so to yes we are the proceeds are not going to cannabis dedicated positions the issues have not gone away and we continue to to prioritize that work through normal processes okay fair enough any other questions here thank you Mr. Cohen so the next department is human human resources uh general fund budget is two point four million dollars about one and a half percent of our overall general fund the proposed reduction was three hundred and forty three hundred and thirty four thousand dollars i should note the hundred and fifty thousand dollars there in non-personnel savings the reason that has an asterisk is it's non-general fund that's an internal service fund that's charged out most of that charge out however goes to the general fund so they eliminated a hundred eighty four thousand dollars in personnel costs by eliminating the vacancy that was their employee services manager and they've restructured their department so that the employees that reported to that person now report the HR director so there'll be a larger span of control for the HR director and then the non-personnel cuts that hundred and fifty thousand dollars came about by getting rid of the miscellaneous employee wellness program so it's not the safety employee program just just for the miscellaneous employees so that's a contract service it affects voluntary programs for exercise and nutritional education it does not affect the employee assistance program the city's eap program now there still will be some wellness initiatives available to miscellaneous employees through their individual health insurance plans. Mr. Olivares who's speaking for this department. Mayor Horsey and members of the council for the clerk's record i'm charlie wilson i am providing service to the city in the capacity of a consultant i work for a municipal resource group mrg a friend that you are familiar with i've had the pleasure of meeting five of the seven of you and i work under the direction of the deputy city manager and interim human resources director gloria vertothal your question sir thank you charlie and again i see this as a vital department not just for the hiring process that we do constantly but also for the employee wellness aspect of it too but again from your perspective worst-case scenario not filling this position to the to the city and other departments of course. As was mentioned there is some restructuring going on basically we are eliminating a manager position that supervises nine employees and replacing it with a supervisory level employee that supervises eight employees at a previous council meeting you approved the creation of a supervisor position classification within human resources which facilitated this reduction okay and any significant impacts to providing employee services from your department with his cut. From my position none there are some efficiencies that can be initiated and the other restructuring in the department will also lessen the load for those in the employment services division. Good to hear thank you. Am i correct though that the the wellness program for non-safety employees will go away with these cuts? Under this recommendation this contract service would be eliminated the $150,000 contract basically services 30% of the miscellaneous employees 300 so the unit cost for those who actively participate in the program is $500 per participating employee. Thank you miss combs. I'm in a rather awkward position with this one because I think I made excellent use of this program and have very much appreciated its existence during the period of time that I needed it the the miscellaneous employee wellness program I'm assuming that I can talk about it even if I used it because it was available to all the staff. We know that this program is effective for public safety that for police and fire who are using this program we see cost diminish in other areas do we have and I asked during our meet pre-meetings on this topic if we had any data with regard to this program for the miscellaneous employees we have no measurable data we have anecdotal information that the employees who participate really enjoy it and some like yourself derive a wonderful benefit from participation we do not have access to utilization statistics from our health insurance organizations that we sponsor employees through to look at a direct relationship between wellness initiatives and utilization do we see any relationship with um I'm blanking on the word workers compensation for the miscellaneous we do not see a correlation in the safety for safety we have identified some correlation it's still developing over time and it goes back to a previous point by councilman who about training for safety while wellness programs for safety is not training it does serve as a measure to make them healthier for injury prevention and of course recovery from injury roughly what does it cost per person in public safety in public safety the contract covering both fire and police is equal to that of miscellaneous 150 000 so the unit cost would be by the number of fte's of those two departments and divided into 150 I do not have at my hand the total number of fte's do in police and fire can someone get us that so we can see the relative the relative cost absolutely our employees in public safety required to use the program uh in a way their memorandum of understanding provides for their participation it's my understanding that they are expected to I would defer to your chief of police and fire chief so we're we're not dividing by a person that are opting in because everyone is opting in in that department in those two departments it's involuntary in public safety voluntary miscellaneous right in the absence of data it's really hard to know what to do but I will again say that I have personally experienced a remarkable consider this to have been a remarkable opportunity as mr. Mcbride expressed the miscellaneous employees still have the opportunity to participate in their health insurance wellness programs I understand it's not the same correct I did both okay thank you I'm really sorry to see this program be cut and it feels a little bit unfair to provide a cut to a program to some employees and not to others mr. Rogers thank you mr mayor I actually directly related to that and I've been operating under an assumption that I think I should actually directly ask with that program and some of these other reductions that have been proposed where have the conversations been with the employee representation and how much of this has been bargained into their contract and what are the steps forward on that front have they been a part of this process so so this is not a collectively bargained part of the contract this was an offer made it was painful for me I was one who actually champion bring this program into the conversation for the employees it's painful for me to have it put on the on the offering we're more than happy to go back and have a conversation with employees about this but it's not a collectively bargained item okay I appreciate it if we would do that and also if there I would assume in the presentation and if you could point out if there are not or if I'm incorrect that none of the reductions that we're talking about here require changes to what's been collectively bargained with our employee groups though I do know that you've had an opportunity to speak with some of them as well I can respond to that the management rights provisions allow the city to proceed with staff reductions however it's required under collective bargaining law that we need to meet with the employee associations and unions to bargain over the effects of the reduction it has that taken place they have been communicated to previous to this session about what this presentation entails and the focus being on the elimination of currently vacant position or anticipated to be vacant positions how would you characterize those discussions it was informational it wasn't a dialogue no so vice mayor I should probably jump in here since I had the conversations we did meet with the bargaining units last week and we're having a follow-up meeting tomorrow and a follow-up meeting we're having a meeting tomorrow to catch those who weren't able to attend last weeks the the discussion was animated we kind of showed them in aggregate what we're proposing to you what the cuts are we didn't get into into this level of detail but they were very animated discussions yeah and that can say that's the reason we're starting so early in this conversation because it is going to be a difficult conversation for everybody within the organization as we do as I repeated before work on multiple fronts and multiple issues yes great thank you other questions thank you mr. Wilson thank you mr. McBride so the next department's information technology and information technology you'll see has no general fund budget it's an internal service fund that's charged out to the departments about 75 percent of that charge out roughly goes to general fund departments so the information technology department cut to filled fts one of those is a planned retirement coming up the other one will be vacated through attrition one of those is a senior it tech the other one is an it tech the the service impact to the organization will be internal so the the main impact from the reduction the it tech will be that tickets that are currently serviced within four hours will go to next day service so so the the the service will be slower and then there was four hundred thirty seven thousand dollars in non-personnel costs and those ranged some of that's deferring it infrastructure which will likely have a long-term impact to the organization they also had some savings that were realized through internal development solutions or some things that they're able to do in-house instead of contracting out and then some of the savings just came by going to going to cheaper solutions and i don't know if we have a representative from it questions do we have somebody from it miss combs has a question on the human resources item excuse me for for bringing up the human resources item a little late i just noticed my my note on it in the past we have had conversations about combining resources with particularly medical benefit type resources with other agencies other municipalities within the county have those conversations stopped are they continuing to go anywhere is there a possibility of of funding reductions or have we explored any possibility of cost reductions by looking at combining human resources or providing human resources as part of a larger group so those conversations have ceased i mean in in in formality i mean that you know there's the as you saw before while it's not the largest driver of cost that is the considerable driver of costs those are going to take longer conversations to get into those two directly relate to bargained conversations we we're going to need to get in those conversations as we go through the longer event horizon about our health care and health care abilities to supply but right now we're the the department's looking structurally at what they can do today okay to help alleviate the immediate concern in the shortfall i just wanted an update on the status thank you okay and on to information technology thank you mayor i think we can all agree that we have become very reliant on technology and at some points maybe over relied on technology can give us a perspective on the worst-case scenarios with these proposed cuts to the organization yes so my name is christie bartlett the it operations manager cutting two techs so right now we have four it field techs and they're stationed in departments specific departments by cutting two technicians we would have to consolidate those those techs to work in a pool instead of being outsourced to each department also our service level agreement is four hours or less right now and and cutting those two technicians would then require us to be probably next day support we still have help desk staff so you could call if it couldn't be resolved over the phone then we'd have to send somebody else out next day to fix the problem and how does bringing those folks in-house impact the departments they're they're leaving a lot so the departments rely on having tech staff there it's very nice for them to come by to the desk and say i've got a problem and get immediate attention this way they'd have to call in put a ticket in we'd have a pool and then every day we would look at the tickets and then give handout work orders basically to the techs that are available and in that process when it's handled through your department is it prioritized or is it first come first serve it would be prioritized yes okay yes thank you okay i had a question about the non-personnel costs a couple of council meetings ago we had a conversation on a consent item as like an over million over a million dollar funding and i know we had approved a two hundred thousand dollar contingency for some other software that may or may not be coming and this may be a question for the city manager so for that four hundred thirty seven thousand at some point would the council have the specificity about what actually is being cut because at the time i knew this was coming i thought well it's kind of odd we're approving a two hundred thousand dollar contingency when we're going to have this conversation and how do we actually how does council make the decision saying yes we want to find a contingency when are we just going to be cutting it in january i i guess the specificity is the information that i'm interested in understood and i i'll make sure that that's that's dealt with but we we review it in january we would have more information about what the impact so yeah okay thank you other questions on it thank you very much okay the next one's a smaller department uh office of community engagement nine hundred seventeen thousand dollar budget their proposed reductions fifty thousand dollars uh they didn't reduce personnel it was all in non-personnel savings and what that was was the reduction of the choice grants so it's currently budgeted 193 thousand dollars general fund they took that down by fifty thousand dollars and that uh it looks like usage patterns for seventeen eighteen they used a hundred nine thousand dollars of that and then sixteen seventeen one seventy six so yeah i'll have some questions for uh who's here is a clue clue is here thank you clue it and you know i guess my question is related to the cuts to the choice grants i see this as a part of our violence prevention strategy public safety strategies as well so i guess the question is what are the impacts i know we have had recent upticks and in gang activity within santa rosa so looking at long-term impacts on on this and how will this uh reduction impact other departments throughout the city um kalua barns office of community engagement and actually i wanted to share that in this particular case just as this um direction was coming to make the reduction we learned that one of the cycle nine choice grant grant recipients likely won't be operating next year and so that actually creates um we will lose that service it's actually california youth outreach but um their ceasing service isn't really impacted by art making this reduction so likely that's a balance they have a grant that would have been renewed next year for a hundred and twenty thousand dollars and so that actually leaves seventy thousand that we might put into other programs but at this point the the loss isn't so much about the reduction than their ceasing services their ceasing service but their ceasing service of a very viable very vital service in santa rosa which is an area that is difficult to fill in really addressing those youths and young adults that are actually impacted or engaged in gang activity so that it will continue to be a problem so i can see impacts then continue to the departments including the police department you're right councilmember alvarez and essentially what we need to do now with this being such short notice is actually find out where opportunities exist where we might reprogram the remaining balance and we don't have that answer yet thank you other questions thank you miss barton next department is planning economic development general fund budget of thirteen point eight million dollars on their proposed reduction was six hundred twenty seven thousand dollars and that is all in the reduction of vacant personnel so uh at least three of those positions are cannabis related presently vacant so the building inspector city planner and program specialist would be eliminated under this program also an associate civil engineer and then um they had previously added a development review coordinator into the budget that's for the expedited permit process program so uh that program obviously would go by the wayside if that vacancy was eliminated this color verse thank you going to call you down there you are i think you've heard the questions david may have addressed us as well as far as the worst-case scenarios that impacts the rest of the city sure of course uh thank you so the positions that um cfo mcryde mentioned uh for those are cannabis funded one is not i'll talk about some numbers i think just to put it in perspective so as you've heard the the volume won't go away what's going to happen is that the existing staff is going to take on the workload of the volume coming in so from a cannabis standpoint we have 42 approved applications that have currently been approved by the city that's been through the planning process a lot of those still have to go through the building process so that's going to be an impact on the building department um we also of those 42 i believe we only have about seven of those that are actively up and running three retail sites a couple manufacturing sites a distribution site so the revenue that you heard earlier is from a small handful of active commercial cannabis sites in addition to the 42 that are coming that have been approved they're going to work their way through the process then ultimately go into production we have 82 that are pending so those 82 are going to be working their way through the system as the cannabis subcommittee knows that they're starting they see um just the the retail retail component only that are the conflicts um city planners are pulling those together their review and the applications putting together the materials presenting that to the subcommittee um once those are through that process again city planners have to pull together the packets to take the planning commission to go through write the staff reports and get those approved through the planning commission we we laid the schedule out we have two going per planning commission meeting for the next six months so two two every other week for the next six months to try to get through that on top of all the other business and so those planners will be doing that plus housing projects and commercial activities so in terms of activity that's what we talk about um volume and the impact this has by reducing the volume so we're looking at consultants and other ways to try to achieve that is um to try to get through that process and will will there be other impacts to other departments i know that when we started this process we had a technical team for example made up of other departments how does how do these cuts impact those departments yeah so uh primarily while i'm going to flip it first i think uh cuts um that are going to happen say in the attorney's office and others we work very closely with attorney's office um the attorney's office is heavily involved in all that like obviously cannabis activity we do but also the housing elements we bring forward to the politics to to committees so um that would have an impact on us in our production availability um in terms of our impacts basically it's uh we we probably have less of an impact on the attorney's office if we were to slow down our what we're pushing through on the process right now um so i believe the biggest impact probably from us to another department would be the attorney's office thank you mr rogers thank you mr mayor director you and i know uh when we talk about your department oftentimes when we're talking about slowdown we're actually talking about added cost to whatever it is that we're talking about it it's either developers who are trying to get their projects through or with cannabis i know a lot of folks have been holding properties for a long time while we worked our way through in particular one i wanted to make sure that we acknowledge that that what we're actually talking is shifting some of the costs for the department into potentially longer turnaround times for folks but i want to ask specifically about folks who are trying to rebuild their homes and will this production of these five vacancies it shouldn't increase the time or the costs for folks trying to rebuild their homes is that correct you're correct yeah we set up a separate system with a separate office to deal with a rebuild and that has its own policies and process and program and funding source that is dedicated to that rebuild great thank you so much this calls thank you um we've been doing such great things you have been doing such great things in this department um you know we've seen increases in clarity of what's needed in the predictability certainty for folks coming through the department and we've really seen what i'm hearing are improvements in time turnaround time and i'm very concerned that we need to continue in that direction um we have a couple of large planning projects coming forward the downtown specific plan review and the general plan in two years which we are I'm guessing are getting ready for now to say nothing of all the other planning stuff that is going on will any of these spots affect the turnaround time will it cause slowdown on any of the planning processes that we're talking about so from the advanced planning side which you're referring to which are the specific plan update the general plan update these positions would not affect those areas as much and and you bring up a good point i think the other area that will affect other departments and the work we do is the general plan as you can imagine it's going to take every department to be part of that process and resources from every department and so that's something that's going to be coming next year the the way what will affect on the advanced planning side is priorities so when we start talking about priorities it's housing it's homelessness policies but then you get into the second tier priorities that we've talked about during council goal setting those could potentially suffer as things slow down and we have to take staff from other other areas to cover and so i think just being aware that anything on the tier two could have could slow down and have an an adverse impact on those projects and as the legislature in the next year increases responsibility in cities for i mean i'm working on the cost so i'm very aware of housing construction regulations shifting and changing i would think that would greatly impact you and the city attorney's office both as the legislature makes changes in policies okay i see nothing in non-personnel is there something that isn't going forward because we don't have the resources in non-personnel for example the conversion to electronic formatting for plans review or i'm just guessing that there it isn't just what is cut but what doesn't come forward to to move forward we have that was the electronic plan check was put in the process before the fires that was put on hold during the fires on the flip side of that we've been able to test it out during the fires and we're using electronic plan check for that and we're getting lessons learned but the intent is to try to implement that as quickly as we can after we can get some breathing room from from the rebuild the breathing room that we're not going to see so that's not being cut and it is moving forward it's at this point it's not being cut thank you mr tibbetz thank you mr mayor director gein do you mind sharing with us what these positions are that these vacant positions that you're hoping to fill mm-hmm yeah we have a city planner we have an associate civil engineer a building inspector a program specialist in economic development and a development review coordinator and i and i didn't talk much about that that was the development review coordinator as mr mcbride talked about is the position that was appropriated last budget cycle and that was to create and carry forward the expedited permit process i will make one correction our goal is not to let that stop us we're obviously we're trying to figure out every way we can keep these things moving forward but we're going to be having to look at how to make things work with our existing staff levels we do realize the value of time to people trying to build but we also need that people to develop so we can have that revenue back to the general fund so that is one that hopefully over time we can show the value and the revenue and if we can charge a fee for that figure out what that cost is maybe that could be a solution in the future but at this point it's unfilled and we needed to put that up okay i just want to go on the record saying that i think we've made well first of all in the cannabis ordinance we created what was dubbed i think a national example of how to implement cannabis policy and now we have all the great advances being made in in planning and economic development around housing construction and as you point out pd is is a revenue generator for the city if we're doing it right i mean if we're looking at those high-density projects consistent with the p3 and not the p3 analysis the urban three is the other three is that it actually returns money to this to the city so i just want to say in front of this body in the public that that i think we need to think long and hard about um not trying to cut these particular positions um i would be reticent to do so another question that i had was about the cannabis side of this i know that a couple of these positions were supposed to be funded by cannabis mr. McBride had you know shared with us that we really came under our projections the taxation simultaneously i'm hearing from people in the cannabis industry that it's it's difficult right now to get to get plans through i mean we are we are focused in a lot of areas i think housing has to be the priority but we also want to again created this great cannabis plan this nationwide example i think it'd be a failure on our part not to provide ourselves with the tools and resources to actually implement that plan successfully so i see that leaving us with basically two choices we we don't fully implement the plan or it moves along more slowly because we don't have the resources to the people power to do it or we increase the tax on cannabis to try to you know fund those positions and continue growth in that industry so one question and idea that somebody raised with me was is it possible to apply fees specific to cannabis to support the cannabis industry so that way it wouldn't necessarily overlap with with housing and other efforts but that industry could still move forward or that run amok of i think it was prop 219 and 26 because you'd be levying different fees for service i think we have looked at a potential let me call it essentially cannabis processing fee we would need to establish a nexus for that and do a study for to make sure that we're the fee is appropriate so that's something that we have looked at as a potential we don't have that in place it would take a little bit of time to put that together you know i think that's when we went as the city manager mentioned we need to be looking at revenue generators as well as as cuts so i think part of that will be in this next round as we leave this is what what can we do to try to bring in the revenue and does that mean a position or does that mean additional consultant support to take on that role to get those through but at some point it does take staff to develop the staff report to kind of go in front of the planning commission get those things through the system and that's what we're trying to find that balance and and i i don't mean to continue to be the broken record or the or the squeaky issue is that the squeaky person out here is that again all this is contingent on november 6th getting the public to continue to allow us to move forward in our recovery and and stabilizing our financial situation outside of that we're going to be in a very very different conversation in january well thank you both of you and david thank you for that the analysis on the importance of staff i mean i think the consultants are tremendously helpful and if that's the only available resource we have to continuing the success and the progress pd is made i'm all for it but i would i do hope that we can maintain a few of these positions to meet our economic development and housing goals in the city particularly a planner and building inspector i've heard from a few folks that you've done a tremendous job of freeing the bottle necks and other parts of the process but now we're starting to see it on the the check final point in the process and i will say that i think look i'm glad to hear that you're thinking about developing that nexus study between cannabis and and having kind of a group of people or quasi department if you will dedicated to just implementing the city's cannabis ordinance i just want to to reiterate or reemphasize that we're working on priorities here and and you know one of the first slides of this was to to um comply or at least be in alignment with the council's priorities housing is our number one priority and i i understand that it's it's a difficult time uh an industry is being born here in this city uh and we've all supported that but housing has to be the priority at this point and when it comes down to it uh there's no question in my mind and i hope there's no question in staff's mind that that's that's where the the um the emphasis asked to lie this comes yeah complete agreement with that statement i ask at almost every budget hearing that we have uh for the number of inspections per day our inspectors are doing because i'm hearing that we're cutting one and uh they were already significantly overloaded so if you can tell me again roughly the number of inspections per day we're thinking folks can do and i i don't have those numbers off the top of my head but we are tracking that and we have been using consultant inspection support to help bring those numbers to a manageable level um we were in our department where we heavily use consultants um we use consultants on the planning side inspection side and also the engineering side so but it is a number we track and i can get that number for you thank you in some ways having in-house inspections uh really makes a difference so i appreciate that there are things we can consult out but at some point there has to be a fundamental level of in-house inspection as well thank you any other questions on this item thank you mr good thanks next department's police uh another department's a substantial portion of general fund at 59 million dollars 35 percent of the general fund proposed reductions overall for the police department is one million dollars um as with the other departments their primary reductions were in a number of personnel they reduced eight personnel i had two of those that were filled um actually uh since we did the uh since the writing of this there's actually another vacancy so there's not now only one filled position that's a planned retirement that's being eliminated um and that would be a a police officer they'll be retiring in december uh my understanding that's a background investigator part of what police did with the elimination of this position was took some of those personnel savings and applied 50 000 dollars in contractual services to to address some of that background investigation um capacity uh the remainder of those positions are vacancies um one is a police personnel supervisor that retired uh primarily responsible for recruiting duties and management of the various leaves that uh that the police department has um so those uh those will be pushed off to other staff members um we also eliminated a number of vacant cso positions one of those is in the graffiti abatement program so i think that there's some idea to consolidate graffiti abatement right now it's spread out a bunch of numbered different departments we also have two patrol cso's so what that's going to do is it's going to decrease response times non-emergency calls that may mean that some sworn officers are going to have to respond to some non-emergency calls which is which is again going to be have a bad effect on uh on response times some of the other positions that were eliminated there was a vacant police sergeant also a vacant research and program coordinator that was responsible for analyzing reporting grant data and a police tech in records um and one of the reductions there would actually be to reduce uh lobby hours for the police department and then the non-personnel savings of 36 000 dollars were the elimination of a vehicle within the fleet and elimination of some graffiti graffiti abatement services that went along with that uh with that vacant cso position chief again to you uh looking at this uh your assessment based on positions being eliminated worst-case scenarios for our community the impacts of these reductions to other departments and any potential impacts of reductions in other departments to your department as well sure uh chief angstreeter police chief the positions are throughout the department some of the positions are directly related to staffing the department which is one of our biggest priorities currently we're in a staffing problem right now that we're working our way through um it will cause us to reorganize how we do it a little more consistent with other city departments with our hr function being under the aso also leaning a little more heavily on the hr side for some of the leave balance and questions related to that the other area are positions that serve the community directly in terms of our cso's that provide reports for cold calls to the department either a burglary report a non-injury traffic collision a variety vandalism reports these types of things may have to be heavily handled through our online reporting system and in other ways may also impact patrol officers in that keeping in mind that you know keeping patrol officers available for the priority one or the highest priority calls for service for protection of life and property and then kind of working down so we will see probably an increase in the time it takes to get to our priority three calls over the last year just staffing issues alone have caused some uptick in this area so we are working through that additionally the police department staffs using a very complex staffing model with data regarding the calls that we respond to and we staff heavily when we have heavy calls for service and we staff light when the calls are lighter we are in the middle of doing that staffing study with one year's data from the rosalyn annexation so i have a feeling in the long term we may see some issues with our staffing model that we're going to have to address again the staffing that we have currently we've had to rearrange in our special services divisions already and as we start hiring we'll start reassessing what that is for other city departments sometimes it creates kind of narrowing the role in what the police department can provide instead of a broader context or work product instead maybe relying strictly on what we do in terms of the enforcement component additionally in our community outreach and areas like that we're having some difficulty getting enough staff to a variety of events that are important to both us and the community and i think it's important to note that for example the creation of the cso positions they've been in existence for years and the intent of that was to reduce or to help the officers and not having to respond to lower priority calls and taking reports so that's going to continue now and how will this put you in a position of having to make decisions in perhaps making service level cuts in saying that we're not going to be responding to certain types of crimes within Santa Rosa particular property crimes and we know that property crimes have been a significant issue across the state with recent changes so i'm interested in hearing about that yeah so our staffing study when we complete the staffing study should be done the early part of next year will help us be able to make some of those decisions because when you make though you can actually use the data sets in the staffing study to determine which calls are causing the highest causes the most staff to be tied up ultimately what you're looking for is the cso's to help with officers not being tied up more than a half hour out of every hour if they're tied up more than that it requires sometimes us to cross dispatch across different beats throughout the city extends priority one calls for service and things like that so we will see some of the effect of that i think the staffing study will help us make a lot of determinations on which calls we have to prioritize yeah i mean i i do have concerns just related to public safety and again we all know that we've had some upticks as well within as far as street crimes related to gang activity recently it's hard to predict that but i also believe it's important to talk about the fact that it's not just responding to crimes i think to do the police job effectively you have to work very hard at prevention as well because if we don't then it could explode at the other end so those are some of the concerns that i have is being able to maintain that also recognizing that it takes a long time to recruit higher and process people to come to work at the police department especially for those who are in short positions so i worry about some of these long-term impacts to the community yes it's going to be uh when you talk about narrowing what our role is it's exactly what you're talking about sometimes we have to narrow it down to what our core services are and some of our core services aren't necessarily what's in line with the community expectations core services may be enforcement and focusing on the enforcement aspect versus the prevention aspect we have to rely heavily on some of the other groups within the city to be able to help with that we have a portion of it i don't think we can do as much heavy lifting in that area in the future thank you other questions thank you chief so the next department is is recreation parks 16.4 million dollars are about 10 percent of the general fund and their proposed reductions are $834,000 so part of the thinking on recreation parks is that it was contemplated that parks maintenance could be taken off of recreation parks and moved under transportation public works which is the next department we'll get so we'll have to kind of talk to those in in conjunction with each other uh personnel savings uh were by the reduction of eight positions one of those that was filled and seven of those that were vacant uh the filled position is an application specialist that is will be vacant in january and uh that that individual um tends to the uh recreation maintenance system so that'll result in and decrease support for that system um there were also the elimination of four vacant groundskeepers positions so if you recall those positions were frozen in 2018 uh those groundskeeper positions were moved up to uh the incumbents were promoted to maintenance workers and right now those maintenance workers are performing some of that work that was done by the groundskeepers like garbage pickup restroom clean those type of things the park superintendent is another vacancy that will be eliminated under this plan and as i mentioned the parks maintenance function is going to shift to tpw so that'll eliminate that vacant position there's also senior maintenance worker that will this vacant will be eliminated and this is going to increase reliance on contractual services specifically for tree trimming and then there's also a vacant admin secretary that will be eliminated um and this means the department will have to do things like implement auto attendant uh to answer their phones and there's going to be slower response times to customers and and two departments i didn't mean to assume that i was going to go first mr american uh similar question to you as far as the overall impacts to the rest of the organization the community uh even though we have a number of our parks are closed because the fires doesn't mean the work went away there's still a lot to to do so you give us some perspectives on some of that sure first i'd like to actually start by saying that the couple of the vacancies the positions that are recommended that are encumbered one of them is a retirement that happens next week the other position that we thought will come vacant next year the it's actually one of our employees who experienced the fire and had relocated to i want to say south carolina we've since been notified that he's taken a position and so his resignation is actually effective next week that position is a department application specialist it supports both the recreation and the parks part of the organization and initially there was a fair amount of anxiety about it but since that time this the staff has actually already started to develop some some problem solving and created kind of a working group and is starting to kind of parcel out the specific areas of the of the package that they use and start to and develop some internal expertise also while on dylan was his name while he was in the position there was actually another employee a recreation specialist who was also kind of shadowing and actually hoping at some point to actually have this opportunity so he had been kind of the application space specialist in waiting and so he's still part of the team and is helping us formulate a strategy to to deal with that reduction the retirement of the park superintendent is one that we actually see the opportunity in the recommended integration with with transportation and public works and that position actually has she has a great deal of expertise in the area of tree maintenance and she's going to hopefully before she leaves actually give us a draft plan for ipm integrated pest management as well but it's it's going to be a loss and so the goal really is to look at the the maintenance staff in tpw look at the staff that's remaining in the parks maintenance part of recreation parks and really be more strategic in how those staffs align so that there is some opportunity to actually feel some of the voids that currently exist in the parks out of it the administrative secretary was a person who got promoted to another position and already we've developed a plan of working on an an automated attendant protocol so that some of the calls can actually be offloaded with some standard information and then fewer of them actually get to the employee but ultimately i have to say you can't take these kind of reductions and there not be some impact and so even as we've held vacancies open we've already already started to experience additional calls from the community about complaints about kind of the condition of landscaping and some of the maintenance areas and it's it's the realities that will will need to kind of adjust expectations and be able to be as responsive as we can with the new teams thank you mayor i don't know if that was part of the exercise with this but looking at fees is is that something that was considered for this or something we can talk about later as far as potential exploring potential fee increases within departments like recreation we're looking you know again we're working on overtime to get these things in front of the council and get the conversation started with the community we're open to any suggestions so that when we come back in the january-february time period we can start to look at those more holistically so revenue is always an option if there is a willing for us willingness for us to look at the fee structure we can look at the fee structure as part of that conversation thank you mr tibetz thank you mayor i think the big question is is what's going to happen in excuse me in november and what's going to be the outcome of measure m do we know what a rough dollar figure is for our share of measure m under that funding allocation yes the answer is a little complicated the estimate is about a million seven per year however one of the concerns that we have that we've not been able to clarify is the extent to which that formula would be would reduce the revenue to us based on reductions in our maintenance of effort so that's the only kind of caveat but the it's a it would be a pretty healthy infusion of revenue for the parks department mr rogers yeah i apologize and that actually was going to be right along my question was did measure m end up building in a maintenance of effort that we would qualify as an as an exemption from given our circumstances around the budget and around the fire or would we have to maintain our funding levels prior to 2018 in order to be able to access those funds the the language of the measure is not entirely clear and we have been trying to get a little better clarity from those that were involved in drafting but i think at the end of the day whatever statements were able to get from the drafters the measure is written as it is and so there is going to be some question in terms of what is our obligation for our maintenance of effort i think the confusing part of this conversation is once again there's a there's an ordinance and then there's a guidance document and the guidance document references things such as a committee of city managers to determine something which i don't even know what how that happens so because there's not a formal city manager group that meets on this issue so there's there's a series of assumptions built in the guidance document that but clearly in the measure itself there is a level of effort requirement in the measure and so it is unclear how they and how once the the measure is instituted and the citizens oversight committee is created what the expectation will come from that yeah i appreciate that and i i care far more about how the ordinance is written than the document after the fact is the baseline set at 2018 or was it set at a prior year it is set at 2018 there's three year measurement and i don't have that language right in front of me i apologize and even if you had it we still wouldn't be able to answer that question we actually sat down there were a team of staff from both the county and the city and we there's enough confusion that i think we'll we'll we'll solve that problem when we are faced with it it's just not very clear i appreciate it i know we have a more in-depth conversation on measure m later in today's agenda perhaps we can try to get a little bit of that information for that but either way i and i assume that that does not actually play into this reduction for staff it's as clear as mud that's what i was saying on this one right and i i will get more information before the item a little bit later but even with that being said that there is not clarity any you're exactly right in terms of what's going to govern is how the measure itself is written and it's helpful to have guidance documents it's helpful to have the interpretation of the drafters but at the end of the day it's going to be the way the measure is written great thank you is there not also reference to extraordinary circumstances there is reference to extraordinary circumstances and that's something also that i can bring back a little later that there is language in terms of the burden the threshold to get there can raise some concerns as well thank you yes miss combs thank you i i'd like to just provide a comment more than a question and thank you for for allowing that i don't know if we've collected any data or how we would have collected data on this but it seems as if investment in parks and recreation services provide sort of like upstream investment and that it causes us to not need to make greater investments at other times so i am really concerned as we reduce parks and recreation services or fund or maintenance that we are looking at paying more in the long run that we don't in fact realize cost savings it's not clear to me how we measure that if you have ideas on how to measure that i would love to see them in particular i'm keenly aware of finding that park maintenance having a person providing park maintenance also provides an element of safety in the park and that we don't need to have as many calls for service from somewhere else because we have a maintenance person who knows folks who gets to know the people who are in the park who is providing a variety of services to the public beyond the fact that they are providing direct maintenance so i don't know how we take that into account as we look at this budget i know that we have to take an action immediately now but i i'm aware that we've just recently got within the last few years six park maintenance workers and now it looks as if we're reducing them again maybe they weren't positions that we filled knowing something might come but it's a real shame to not have folks providing tree maintenance providing grass cutting on a regular schedule that is timely and just providing eyes on a park so that everyone in the park feels comfortable thank you any questions thank you miss parts next department's transportation public works 21.3 million dollar budget about an eighth of your general fund budget i propose reductions of 1.3 million dollars and i will say transportation public works has been leaning forward on this and planning this for about 18 months they cut a number of positions you can see 11 total five of those that are filled and six of them that are vacant and again this is in line of moving that that parks maintenance function under transportation and public works some of the main service impacts by these reductions of the 11 personnel that you're going to see is is response to traffic increase signal timing stop sign evaluation those type of things are going to be are going to be impaired slowed down customer service inquiries are going to be are going to be slower and there will be an elimination of field services support for special events so to kind of walk through some of the filled positions there's a deputy director that will be retiring and in the consolidation will occur with parks and the deputy director that is in parks will come over and fill that position under tpw skilled maintenance workers retirement that'll eliminate hours for special events and for the banner program and there's also three civil engineer texts that are filled right now one's a retirement the others will be absorbed into vacancies and that will drop survey crews down from three teams down to two teams and then the rest of the position those remaining six are vacancies there's a senior admin assistant this has already been implemented and as the wrecking parks director talked about tpw's already gone to automated phone service they're also realizing slower customer response times city surveyor this vacant will be reduced there's also a senior maintenance worker this vacancy that will be eliminated and this will this will reduce their ability to address roadside and roadway conditions there's also a vacant street crew supervisor that will be eliminated the existing asphalt crew that's under that supervisor will consolidate with another crew so there'll be a larger span of control there there's also a vacant skilled maintenance worker that will be reduced and this is going to result in more triaging of building maintenance issues and then civil engineer tech that is vacant that will also be reduced this child of ours thank you mayor jason i think your department probably impacts every square inch of the city and somewhere another what do you see here as some of the worst-case scenarios with your with your reductions yeah i'm jason director of transportation and public works we will have an impact around the around the the organization the significant changes we'll be making in traffic engineering will ultimately result in probably an increased workload in the attorney's office as well as a passing of inquiries between police and traffic as we try to figure out how to do it realistically where we've already suspended our speed hunt program our traffic calming program the position has been vacant for about six months and in anticipation of this type of work so we've already started to take actions to try to reassign and readdress work in our facilities section and we provided information this summer to the council about the state and condition of our facilities this will reduce the number of employees from eight to seven to maintain the 114 structures that we have here and it's just a function of trying to do our part within the operation in order to make the positive impact we need to for the city's citywide budget when it boils down to it we spent the last almost 18 months as as mr mcbride said looking at a strategic methodology for addressing budget cuts in this organization we evaluated what our core services were we spent a lot of time trying to determine in each of the divisions and sections what they were responsible for as a base premise of their job and then we tried to identify those those services that may have been on the ancillary as we looked at it some of those things that we've identified as ancillary services we've been informed are now core services for us such as we've had an increase in debris removal costs we provided a higher level of support to our homeless services team that's taking away from time and effort that we're putting on the street to do street and road repairs further reductions in the staff that you've seen here that we're proposing with two employees that will reduce that will further reduce our ability to respond to complaints and requests to do improvements in the roadway and sidewalks that that we we do our best to mitigate major issues from the administrative support standpoint as mr mcbride said we have implemented already a an automated phone system on that position again it's been vacant for about six months so we've already taken action to try to address that that has been beneficial to some extent however there was a customer service component that we enjoyed in this town when you make a phone call a live body picks up the phone unfortunately as good of a customer service team as i have we've had to move to this automated phone tree in order to be able to deal with the volume of calls coming in as we're looking at our survey section we did find that we have had a reduction in the type of work going on and it's become incredibly seasonal and so with three current survey crews we felt it seemed reasonable for us to reduce one crew one full crew we were able to absorb the two employees that are not slated for retirement into the engineering team as the engineering team is a fully recovered team it has no impact on the general fund and therefore we are carrying vacancies there that allow us to move some individuals from one division to another division and that's been very helpful in an effort to reduce the impacts of potential layoffs the deputy director position as was mentioned as we look to consolidate we've done the work within the organization to try not to to not to reduce from bottom up bottom up reductions are never the most effective tool those are the folks that everybody sees out on the street not the folks at the top those are the ones usually in the offices so it's important for us to look at this when you think about the hierarchical triangle you're actually shrinking the entire triangle and not just bringing it up from one from the bottom to the top and so when we think about having to redesign and redesign staff we're going to change how our direct reports and how our sections are within the operation to consolidate and reduce one of the deputy positions as the two teams come together so we will have impacts across the area we'll have slower response times for the public we'll have slower response times from planning and economic development and their development review processes we will be eliminating programs that we are not that that we just simply can no longer afford to support all in all we've organized this program this way so that we because we felt it was something that we could legitimately do and we felt that the benefit cost of doing this was going to be reasonable so as much as I'm you know I can complain about the about seeing the employees lost it is the right thing to do given the opportunity of the budget or the budget requirements and the team has made this decision as a whole this is not a decision I made by myself my 25 person management team helped me make all these calls so I'm happy to to discuss it further that's where we're at as far as our impacts organizationally you mentioned some impacts I believe in your cuts the impacts on the city attorney's office what other departments will be impacted by some of these cuts to yours as we're increasing our to be honest as we're increasing the amount of work that's going and planning on economic development it's very difficult for us to try to keep up with the pace that they're at we don't have the personnel or the staff to be able to do that as the police department reduces their ability to look and respond to calls more of those calls will come our way for engineering solutions we really don't have the personnel and the resources to respond to those either all of that will ultimately result in in either potentially things getting missed during the development review and and the city at taking on products that are going to be more difficult for us to maintain over time or resulting in potentially additional claims relating to incidents that occur out on the street and are out in the public right of way that we just simply can't afford to mitigate or can't provide the response to mitigate when we get the when we get the initial calls that would be my next question is what what do you anticipate or guess would be some of the major public safety impacts as far as reductions to your department I mean at this point we're going to be slowing down how we're responding to pothole complaints how are responding to trip and fall complaints on city on sidewalks tree issues have already started to slow down in and around the areas that's a that's work that that's being jointly done between rec and park and public works depending upon where the tree lands quite literally and I might my issue and then it's the review and response of of traffic incidents we get a stop sign complaint I can't necessarily afford to have staff spend the amount of time to go and do a research project to determine if that stop sign is there we may actually have to make a definitive statement quickly saying this is the intersection of two residential streets there's no reason for it to be an always stop I apologize we can't move forward so so we're going to have to make some very distinct solutions we're losing 30 percent of our ability to respond to customer complaints at this point in the traffic engineering team is it and and it's it just is what it is it just means our our ability to respond is going to be tempered so we can probably even expect to like other programs we have like my Santa Rosa to almost become pretty much ineffective it's not going to be ineffective it's just simply going to our response time is going to take longer as we start to implement city works my Santa Rosa will integrate with that and that'll help us be able to log and track products better it also help us be able to clear some of those products quicker because we'll have a more detail information up front less research less less need for detailed investigation early on so the hope is that the more technology we get the better we'll be able to respond to and investigate situations with the the lesser staff thank you mr rogers thank you director two of the things that we are eliminating in the non-personnel one specifically is support for events putting up the barriers have we looked are we concerned about the impact that that'll have on people actually throwing events as we add another barrier for them to actually get them up and running i mean part of our challenges were that that's not a reimbursable cost so it's a cost that we were taking above and beyond our current departmental issues and we we were having a difficult time providing staffing for it we have found some of the models like the grand fondos a great example where they've come forward with a general contractor that contractor provides all of the support for the event for traffic control we will still continue to to have to evaluate and approve their traffic control plan that's way we make sure that what they're implementing is a safe method of providing traffic control for that type of event that's something that we will continue to provide throughout we just simply won't be providing the staffing to go and deploy that type of traffic control for those events will it be an impact it will be an impact to some events yes and the elimination of the annual pedestrian ramp project what type of an impact will that have in madam city attorney will that potentially open us up to ADA litigation so this is a a program that we started quite a while ago when we had a significant increase we had we had many more employees realistically what we're what we're removing is the part of the program that we just simply don't have the resources to to spend it doesn't impact what we set up following our department of justice case that program is still operational it's a separate program running our capital improvement projects team this is part of our operations staff and with the limited resources we're just we're just not able to to deliver that much project so we felt it was reasonable and appropriate to to give those funds up okay that makes sense thanks other questions thank you mr nut thank you the last department's uh it's stormwater and it's just the general fund portion of the water department the elimination here was $58,000 and that was simply moving half of an admin assistance time over to the enterprise any questions on this one good job thank you the citywide statistics just to kind of wrap it all up so the total cuts that we proposed in what we just showed you were $7.1 million primarily general fund cuts there were some of those internal service fund cuts that we showed you in in hr and in it but most of most of those about 75 of those get charged out to two general fund departments personnel savings that 49.75 fd reduction that we show there saved about six million dollars non-personnel savings were $1.1 million and just kind of to take another look at the fd eliminations 10 of those were management personnel non-management personnel were 31.75 and eight of those were sworn two of them in police and then the six firefighters that we proposed in this plan so as we mentioned earlier this is kind of a short-term look this is just to give us some room while we kind of look longer term at the organization for next year's annual budget process some of the places that we will be looking is the organizational structure and we'll be looking if there's ways to restructure and get efficiencies there internal services we're taking a long look at some of those so things like fleet where we have the potential to eliminate ghost vehicles and maybe improve or reduce the amount of fleet that we use within the city we're looking at things as minuscule as how much we're paying for phones that we pay for employees or what our laptop policies are so we're trying to look at everything it's been brought up revenue solutions we are looking at those the biggest one being the quarter-cent sales taxes going in November we can go and look at fees you think about things like development related fees there's a opportunity there to look at the cost of service and see if we can bump those up I would just caution there though that it's it's difficult to reduce your budget and then increase your fees because a lot of times the way that those fees are developed especially the development related is based on the costs associated with those and then another area where I'm very interested in looking is at our reserves as we mentioned we're well under our council policy reserves of 15 percent I think we might have you know if we can find an opportunity to develop one-time sources might be worth looking at developing reserves for things like infrastructure replacement or just care of our infrastructure one of the ways that you can address your PERS issue especially when we're dealing with volatility in our annual PERS cost is to set up reserve for PERS and there might be some opportunities to do that but again you have to find that one-time money to establish those those additional reserves but that's definitely something that we're going to be looking at this time that concludes concludes my presentation and we'll take any feedback that that council has. Yeah go ahead Mr. Rogers any further questions. Yeah thank you so much Mr. McBride I know this was quite the process that everybody's undertaking to try to come up with the the cuts that we're looking at here again to reiterate sort of what you said in the beginning every department brought 10 percent across the board cuts and then had a conversation about that reduction ranging from it looks like 1.69 percent to the police department all the way up to what ultimately was a 13.92 percent reduction for human resources as the largest department to take a hit I'd be interested on the long-term finance committee to see what the additional cuts that were proposed up to that 10 percent was before it was reduced down for each department again just to channel my inner city manager this is the easy part these are the vacant positions that we're eliminating and if measure O doesn't pass in November we'll be looking at additional cuts twice this but with filled positions instead that's the part that is really going to be a bigger challenge I think take a little bit more work I did have one additional question if measure O were to pass that's nine million dollars that we're expecting this cut that we're looking at right here is a little over seven million that is an additional 16 million we're looking at I think it was about a 15 million dollar budget shortfall that additional one million in excess that we would have based on those two factors to plug that hole do we have we had any type of a conversation yet about how that'll be allocated and in particular I'd like to put a plug in for as you talked about reducing the pension obligations right off the bat some of the risk mitigation funds that we were talking about earlier so as you well know council member one of the things that before before the the the disaster of last October the long-term finance committee had actually talks very specifically about some of these items and I think where our plan is to bring those back into consideration and and find where the one-time money is to start to do this and one-time money potentially on an annual basis so that we can we can depress some of these costs long term so it absolutely is in the in the conversation and we'll be we'll be revisiting those topics in the near future I appreciate that and I wanted to specifically put that flag in related to the amortization conversation around our pension obligations because right now I think it'll be really easy going into next year to try to rely on that additional million dollars for some of the other city's priorities when we know that long term that's actually going to have as big if not a bigger impact than some of the other priorities that we're spending dollars on so I just wanted to make sure that we flag that as well thank you for the presentation other questions yep thank you mayor first thank you very much and I I really want to thank all of the staff who I think are are aware of the difficulty that we're in and have have done quite a yeoman's job in bringing us even this far I agree with my colleague that it's important for us to see the the rest of the documents so that we understand what might be coming if by chance we are unable to convince the public that we really seriously do need the the measure o that is coming forward on the ballot I'm and in light of that I'm wondering what is the community engagement process for explaining these cuts for explaining what the slowdown is likely to be and why so that the community isn't surprised that this is happening do we have a discussion going on with regard to the community engagement around these service reductions I'm hoping you all will spread the word I mean we're trying to meet as many as folks as we can that the challenge is is that unlike in past ballot initiatives we weren't wrestling with the ongoing issues of a of a disaster and a recovery process so I I'll say we've had some open houses they around the community community advisory board I mean in the past they had been attended by folks they're very few I would say there's an incredible amount of pressure on citizens right now to attend a variety of informational and input sessions there's one going on tonight around the state housing and community development is somehow timed a conversation about cdbg dr to correspond with a city council meeting it is a lot we're trying our best there's been a tremendous amount of information going out we we would be willing to go and have conversations with anybody that you are able to identify as a council staff is would make themselves available for that but we're this is part of the process is laying out this particular going through this process is is we're we're planning to move forward with these reductions thank you I have two cards from folks who want to speak to the budget reduction strategy here nick caston he'll be followed by adrian lobby all right thank you mr. mayor and city council members this is obviously a difficult time to be in your positions I want to preface my comments by saying that you know as a resident of san rosa I definitely want the police department to be able to respond if we're in an emergency if I have a medical emergency I want the fire department to respond and I always want to be able to go to my parks and have them clean so my comments are not intended to be against any of the other departments but instead to share my experience with you as a land use consultant and a registered advocate within the city who works with the planning and economic development department quite extensively planning and economic development department services are fee-based a lot of our clients give money to the city for those fees I would highly encourage you to look at that budget and not filling those positions not just in the context of the budget savings but also in the opportunity cost lost from not being able to get those fees into serve our clients and our clients include cannabis companies we're working with housing developers that want to take advantage of some of the recent cuts you've made and the other opportunity cost is how quickly we get these businesses and housing units up and running one of the biggest delays is the cumulative delay between the planning department and the engineering department and traffic department fire and getting all the comments in on a project in order for us to then be able to respond to them and get our consultants working and running if you don't have this engineer position if you don't have this development coordinator if you don't have these positions those delays will add up and we'll have weeks upon weeks of additional services you know additional delays and getting the projects up and running that's very significant when you consider the retail cannabis projects going forward not only do you receive sales taxes including measure o if it passes in november from those sales but you also have a three percent gross receipts tax on each of those sales in those retail outlets you only have three operating right now there were 37 currently going through the building process that is a significant opportunity cost for every month they're not open so when looking at these cuts i would encourage you to ask to see both sides of the ledger typical accounting practice what is the revenue we're going to miss by not having this fee for service employee on staff what is the revenue we're going to miss from the delays that will go into these projects coming up and running and what could those have funded there's a significant amount of cannabis revenue coming in from less than 10 operating businesses in the city right now are what got us to that 496 thousand dollars imagine what will happen when we have a robust industry as you've envisioned as regional center for this industry that is going to be revenue that will be an opportunity lost with these proposed cuts and i'd encourage you to insist on fulfilling those positions thank you for your time adria lobby thank you for the time i've been watching uh for a while now and it's extremely painful to and i i apologize or i feel sorry for all of us who are sitting here seeing the kinds of things that are going to have to happen uh it's a major budget deficit there's just no way to make it nice but i do notice that there's quite a bit of discrepancy between the police and the fire department cuts and the cuts to the other departments and i'm not going to labor over the point but i this is a study session so you're not making decisions and i would encourage you to send the staff back to make these cuts be more equalized there are many important uh staff positions and functions and roles that are going to be cut if this goes forward and i think we need to share the pain thank you thank you i'm going back to the council i just want to thank the staff um all the staff for the work on this this is never easy but i think that the the material that's been brought to us today reflects a lot of creativity and thoughtfulness it's very measured and and to the public i want to say that don't mistake the lack of tearing our hair and and wailing and and uh and lack of emotion here for lack of pain we understand that we're talking about real jobs real paychecks and real people uh and though we're able to look at this in the context of of primarily vacant positions the impacts are very real and not just on internal and external customers as we call them but on the people who are are left in those jobs to take up the slack and to the employees of this organization and and to the managers of this organization i hope you'll take back to your employees the appreciation of the city council we know that this is tough on everybody in in in this city government it'll be tough on on the citizens as well but the the employees are going to bear the brunt so i would i want to thank you for this effort any further comments from the council mr. Sawyer thank you mayor and thank you for those words um very truthful i don't think we can overemphasize the severity of the challenge this before not only the the council in the in the months to come but also the city center rosa and its residents depending especially on what happens in october we've been talking about rightsizing our organization for quite some time now actually and this is an opportunity although forced upon us to do just that and in essence we are redefining how the city of Santa Rosa's organization functions and we will be redefining what means what core means what is a core service uh to us and to you these things will change we will what what we consider core services may very well become luxuries time will tell these are painful discussions but they are necessary and doing anything other than having this kind of conversation and having to right size or redefine our city anything other than doing that would be being dishonest to you and to our organization and to the employees that we depend on so much so that we have difficult days ahead we i remember going through this in a way uh during the the recession and i have a fear that this may actually make that look like a walk in the park assuming we have parks to walk in after this very difficult conversation so hold on to your hats it's not going to be a pleasant ride and get the word out regarding the election in november it's very very serious and we could absolutely use that nine million dollars for the next six years it will make the pain less but it will not eliminate it thank you Mr. Oliver's thank you mayor uh i would echo councilmember Sawyer's comments related to the recession that we went through because we did make some significant cuts then uh did some recovery but not full recovery so we're still uh even smarting from that time uh and again uh going back to the city manager's initial comments about the dire times that we are in this is uh truly a crisis probably in the verge of an emergency for us here in santa rosa and it's not going to be easy and it's going to hurt you know and it's true uh what the city attorney said about we are all in this together and that includes the community it was good to see some community members here i know more are here for the four o'clock session and i hope that many are watching at home to see how serious this really is but i also don't want to minimize the value of the vacancies that we currently have we have them we have those positions on the books for a reason there are tasks associated with those even though they're not filled at the time the pain will be a little bit less but the service cuts are still going to be there and and i i'm hoping that we don't continue on and i know there's been some adjustments to that that it's not going to be just straight across the board 10 percent from all the departments i think that there will be varying degrees of consequences and making these reductions as that's why i ask some of these questions because really it's it's it's it's a lot and i think more than ever we as a council we as a city need to maintain a high level of transparency as we go through this process to make sure that the community is engaged and informed and we cannot we cannot look at this solely by the numbers it comes down to looking at how we critically examine our core services here in the city and and this includes maintaining public safety infrastructure other things are very important we also need to recognize and i i would hope that when this comes back that we have some information related to the number of 24-hour departments that we have you know we are not an eight to five city and we forget about that there's a lot of departments besides police and fire that are out there doing things after hours as well and i think it's going to be important for us to understand what that is and you know and our personnel costs are high but again we're not an automated system system you know it happens because people are out there working some of the things that i think are going to be important coming back is to really and i asked them the questions today but i think we need to have more thought in this and discussion within the departments is what are the worst-case scenarios in making these cuts it's important to understand what's going to happen and the public needs to understand that it's and we've already heard some what are the impacts of making these cuts in one department to another department and vice versa this can be very important because i looking at the numbers it's not going to if that's our projection it's not just about that because there's also going to be overtime cost we have overtime costs now related to staffing shortages and service needs so we need to find a way of of addressing that tracking that and projecting that because we will be reducing some cost maybe services but there could be some essential services that will continue that will result in overtime it will so i think it's important for us to look at how we're going to be able to track that over time and you know clearly it is easier to staff some departments and others based on how the turnaround time in hiring so i hope that we do look at doing more study even within the organization as far as staffing you know again we're lean but and i and i hear reorganization but we need to continue to look at that uh and and let's not lose sight of course of the fee increases that are potential out there and also fee losses based on what we do what are we going to lose by not doing some of the things we're going to be doing so we have a lot of work ahead of us and i look forward to this coming back to us with some more critical thinking thank you anyone else yes miss coles thank you mayor and again i want to agree with my colleagues in thinking staff for bringing this forward this is a difficult conversation and it will be more difficult if the measure in november does not pass um i dread having that conversation where we must make reductions that are twice this this set of reductions if not more um i'm finding it really difficult to to call this right sizing um we have some departments that are anorexic that have not ever recovered from the cuts of 2008 and um doing additional cuts or failing to provide those services um i don't i don't feel comfortable calling that right sizing um we talk about we are having a conversation about core services but it is clear that we are eliminating services that provide prevention uh prevention of provide activity for example as we cut the parks department we are cutting activities that cause folks to want to move here cause quality of life services so we're going to stimulate our housing construction have higher density it becomes even more important for us to have parks in order to prevent some of the criminal activity or to prevent or to bring in the opportunity the job opportunities that we're seeking um in addition we are not filling maintenance concerns we are putting those maintenance costs on the future generations um every time we don't pave a road it costs us seven times more to pave it in the future so um we are far from lean we we are seriously in trouble and uh it's very important that we do many of these cuts but we cannot see them i think as coming into alliance with where we should be as a lean department we are significantly cutting to the bone in areas where we are just postponing feeling the costs um i am sorry to have to be doing this as i'm sure all of our staff is too and i'm sure my colleagues are um and i very much hope that we can express to the community the the need that we have to be funded fully for several years and that we can convince the community to support the measure that would provide the six years of revenues to make up for some of the cuts that we haven't discussed yet so again thank you staff for bringing this forward thank you um mr mcglennan i i just want to like to thank the council for allowing us to have this conversation today but i really want to thank my colleagues which are all the employees of the city of santa rosa i get to stand on some pretty wonderful shoulders uh every day um and i i have to tell the community this is an incredibly inventive creative dedicated team they are pulling extra hours to make sure that the community not only advances but actually recovers fully in ways that i think we'll be able to start to talk about more fully in the future but it is it is a incredibly dedicated resilient group of people um that i get to work with and i just want to take a moment to thank them thanks all right um with that we'll conclude our two o'clock study session we are running about three about an hour behind no more than an hour we're gonna have to run another 10 minutes behind because we need to take a break to reboot the the media room and the technical system so we're going to take a 10-minute break thank you for your patience and then call the meeting back to order and uh we'll start with our regular calendar as Gomez would you announce the role please let the record show that all council members are present with the exception of council member combs and vice mayor rogers okay we had no closed session today and um our study session i think everybody was here for that on to uh proclamations and presentations and mr. Sawyer is going to read this one thank you and carmelita and cecilia you want to you can either have a seat or i'm just this this new environment so whereas the city sanarosa has proclaimed the second week of october as code enforcement officer appreciation week and whereas code enforcement officers provide for the safety health and welfare of citizens of the city of sanarosa through the enforcement of local state and federal laws and ordinances dealing with various issues of building zoning housing animal control environmental health and life safety and whereas the code enforcement officers have challenging and demanding roles and often do not receive recognition for the job they do in in improving quality of life for residents and businesses of local communities and whereas the role of many code enforcement officers has expanded in recent years with jurisdictions increasingly relying on the expertise and training of code enforcement officers in their communities and whereas code enforcement officers are dedicated highly qualified and highly trained professionals who share the goals of preventing neighborhood deterioration enhancing communities ensuring safety and preserving property values through knowledge training and application of housing zoning and nuisance laws and whereas code enforcement officers often have a highly visible role in the city of sanarosa and regularly interact with the public and a variety of federal state county and local officials in their capacity as code enforcement officers and whereas the city of sanarosa wants to recognize the honor the the code enforcement officers that serve our community and acknowledge their role in leading the way to improve quality of life within our community now therefore be resolved that chris coursey mayor of the city sanarosa on behalf of the entire city council to hear about proclaim the second week of october 2018 and annually thereafter as code enforcement officer appreciation week in the city of sanarosa and calls upon the residents of our city to join in recognizing and expressing their appreciation for the dedication and services of the individuals who serve as our code enforcement officers assigned by the mayor on this date congratulations good afternoon mayor coursey and members of the city council my name is carmelita howard and we are here today to be one of the cities in california that recognizes this week as cold enforcement awareness week our very own cecilia civillia who is a member of the board of directors in charge of education for the california code enforcement officers association we'll talk about our code enforcement successes they've impacted the health and safety of the city this year good afternoon mayor coursey and members of the city council i would first like to thank you for the opportunity to sit before you on this very important day for code enforcement my name is cc civillia and i'm one of the many code enforcement officers that serve your city along a hardworking and dedicated team of code enforcement officers as i already mentioned or as already was mentioned i am a board of director with the california association of code enforcement officers and i'm tasked with ongoing training of code enforcement officers throughout the state of california so that we can effectively equip all officers throughout the state and provide much need of training to execute inspections to safeguard health and safety of the communities we serve code enforcement is and has been a vital element of cities and counties throughout our nation our department's overall goal to safeguard the community that we serve by protecting the health and welfare of the constituents of the city of san aroza is demonstrated in many successes from our department some of which i will share with you today the astro motel located just around the corner from our offices was plagued with substandard conditions putting at risk the health and welfare of its occupants and the public in a combined effort with srpd and srfd the astro motel has most recently had a new facelift as you may have already seen bringing the building to a healthy state and no longer creating an attractive nuisance 550 richmond drive has been a known property for over 20 years in the city of san aroza this was a severely substandard residence with heavy foot traffic that included drug abuse and directly affected the neighboring properties and residents of that street following a drug abatement core order and in a combined effort again with law enforcement and the city's legal team we were able to go to court on an abatement order and clean up that property which is currently being rehabbed that has in turn lifted the health and prosperity of that neighborhood allowing for those neighbors to feel safe and secure in their homes the tubs nuns fire is one of the biggest topics for all of our city and coming up on the anniversary of that next week it hits close to home for all of us the code enforcement team played a vital role in the assessment of damaged properties caused by the horrific fire a certified safety assessment evaluators through the governor's office of emergency services or cal oes the code enforcement team quickly and swiftly responded to aid our community in assessing properties for damage and safety though it was a daunting and heartbreaking task we came together to help our beautiful san aroza as you can see there is no task too small no job too big for your code enforcement team lastly we would like to thank you mayor and members of the city council as well as our fire police building and legal departments for the continual support as we work alongside all of you for the betterment of our community thank you thank you miss howard this is the all the members of the code enforcement team move on to item seven staff briefings item 7.1 fire recovery and rebuild updates we're going to have a brief presentation led by david gewin thank you david gewin director of planning and economic development we have two quick updates for you tonight first i want to introduce to you leo de pala he is the new permit center into permit center manager for the rebuild office steve jensen who i mentioned a couple weeks ago retired leo came to us from as the former cd director and building official for the city of chico he's we were very fortunate to have him here running our rebuild center it'll be working and reporting to jesse our chief building official he's already jumped in is getting up to speed on everything and i think he's going to be a great addition to that rebuild center as we move forward into year number two and the second thing i wanted i'm sorry he is here and thank you thank you he's over here thank you so he just started on monday so he'll be up at room six running that center the second item we have i sent to email around last night to the council about rebuild now that we had our first reign of the season how that's going to affect the rebuild and we've been working jesse's been working with our stormwater team for the all day to with the regional board figure out what the process is going to be and jesse has an update on that good evening mr. mayor and council members so david's update yesterday pointed out some potential restrictions that were impending on on the rebuild specifically the general restrictions that occur this time of year they they are in effect from october 1st until april 30th every year and this is under our what we generally refer to as our ms4 permit and what it's really is it's the it's our permit for national pollutant discharge elimination system also known as npds and what it really is it's about protecting our waterways fish and wildlife and the the discharges that local jurisdictions have into those systems so the issue that arose and does every year is that generally we're not allowed to grade on any slopes over 10 so you can envision what that means essentially for the effect on the fountain grove recovery so we had some discussions with developers early on in the week and we've been reaching out to them through through actually the last few months but it came really to fruition in the october 1st deadline through that we've immediately embarked on some discussions with developers and present and former members and executive members of the regional water quality control board and through those discussions that have been ongoing we proposed to the board to look at our restrictions in the area through a different lens with our co-permittees which we have about eight different jurisdictions including the county that are all part of this permit and looking at how we view grading so to speak as defined in our permit so with our proposal to view these sites as not really not literally grading but their preparation and restoration to previously used and approved heights and locations on lots for reconstruction of homes the proposal also included in increased monitoring inspections additional measures sampling and public outreach not just to contractors who have control of sites but also homeowners luckily about an hour ago i received communication through our storm water management team from the water quality board that they're accepting of our our approach and are agreeable to the definition of grading in that our operations here do not constitute grading so we'll be able to continue to work through the winter any questions i'll answer them and any more good news i was here to basically give bad news but that's great news for us i believe and i can answer any other questions that is good news thank you questions thank you jessie and david anything else on staff briefings today mr mcglenn nothing else any yes miss combs i i had thought we would be hearing something with regard to manufactured home parks it's been requested a couple of times and i just thought it might be coming um i will make sure it is brought forward next time i was not aware of that request but i will make sure it's brought forward and i do have one card is john allen here mr allen good afternoon mr mayor and members of council i'm john allen chief operations officer for apm homes our company is currently rebuilding homes in uh coffee park and fountain grove for fire survivors it is with the most sincere felt gratitude that i wanted to personally thank you mayor corsie for your outstanding leadership during last year's october wildfires when our community was suffering a devastating disaster you and members of the city council provided the support and leadership that this community so desperately needed in the wake of the fire the city and county immediately went to work addressing the needs of its residents with the help of many others a mass rebuilding effort was forming i am extremely honored and humbled to be a part of this effort and it is this effort of rebuilding homes in our community that the council has been fully behind in supporting city staff i would like to give special recognition to a few who have gone above and beyond in their efforts to make this rebuild effort a reality david guin, gabe osburn, bob oller, jesse oswald, brian baybine, Karen lazata, deb laine, vicki england, scott moon of santa rosa fire, ian heart heartage of santa rosa fire, tina franklin of santa rosa fire all of those in room three of planning and economic development and all of those in room six of resilient city and as well as the county board of supervisors it is because of the commitment and dedication of those and let mentioned that apm homes will be able to deliver a home to a fire survivor before the one-year anniversary while attending the heroes of october event last sunday i saw a little sign in a restaurant that read santa rosa is not just a city we're a community i again thank you all for your continued dedication and resiliency as our community moves forward after last year's fire thank you thank you mr allen moving on to uh item eight mr city manager any report nothing to report and miss city attorney uh yes i have before you um quarterly report of settlements and active litigation um we'll acknowledge that this has actually um been delayed and so this is the last three quarters um i'm going to just give a quick summary um exhibit a our settlements um that we have already discussed previously i won't go over those those are just two of them exhibit b is pending litigation we have 32 cases total i'm going to give just a broad summary of the numbers we have three receivership cases these all arise out of code enforcement it's been a very effective tool in bringing properties into compliance where the property owner is either absent or not able to address um the property issues so three receivership cases we have two of those have been resolved we have five land use cases they are all rid of mandamus cases two we've obtained judgment for the city each of those cases both of those cases were appealed and we got uh affirmed the judgment for the city affirmed on appeal as well three of those cases are still active and still pending other matters all include civil rights claims personal injury wrongful death negligence labor and employment matters and some other issues and claims in six cases we've obtained negotiated dismissals complete dismissals of the case most of those were with a waiver of costs so it costs the city nothing um no additional payment those were civil rights cases and personal injury cases one case we resolved in the city's favor through demur that's very early in the process it's by motion we've had two trials um obtained judgment for the city in both cases um one of those was a five-day jury trial jury came back in less than half an hour with a judgment in favor of the city we have upcoming trials set in five cases those trials the first of those is set for december um then it runs all the way through june and that also is a variety of cases including civil rights claims labor and employment matters personnel personal injury i'm sorry and wrongful death and then we have 10 remaining cases in active litigation in various stages of litigation some early in the in the proceedings on pleading some motions others in the discovery process others getting ready to move towards a trial setting and that includes the city's action against PG&E which is um as we're moving along is taking more and more of our staff time of our two attorneys that are assigned to that absorbing a considerable amount of their time we also have in exhibit c 25 new claims that have been referred to our office and again a variety of claims um same civil including civil rights dangerous condition of public property personal injury wrongful death and then a number of fire related claims and we're monitoring those and working with the risk manager um to resolve those and address those so that is the quarterly report happy to address any questions thank you council any questions thank you very much any statements of abstention tonight mr mayor i think you're going to be voting on one of the uh library uh positions uh one of them will be ours i was not present during those interviews i will be abstaining from that vote and i also was not present in those interviews so i will be abstaining and uh mayors and council reports who wants to go first mr olivaris you you are leading the way tonight i'm on fire tonight but you know what this was uh uh we a little neglect on our part we've been kind of like this last month i know we were way at a conference but we had a very significant birthday celebration here last month and we forgot to acknowledge here at the council so uh thank you to everybody who came out for 150th birthday celebration in court out square uh very well attended a lot of great activities and i think it'll be a very memorable moment my uh grandkids were there and i hope they're back there 50 years from now to unveil that time capsule and share it with their siblings relatives and whoever else is around with them but it was a fabulous event this is soyer thank you mayor to mirror the words of of councilmember olivaris regarding the sesquicentennial with a group of us just met last night to do a recap on the great success that it was not only for the community but everyone who who participated both here on the council and in courthouse square that day was very memorable and for the all of those youngsters that will be able to look back when they are 60 something and remember that remember that afternoon i'm sure it will be something that they will never forget and it was a great event for those who were able to participate mr rogers thank you mr mayor uh last week we had a chance myself councilmember squad helm city staff and board of supervisors had a chance to sit down with housing and community development to talk a little bit about the unmet need dollars that are going to be hopefully coming into this community and really sort of hear their first plans for how they'd like to dictate how those dollars will be spent will be i'm sure having a much more robust conversation about it was very interesting to sit there and have them turn over to us a plan as if it was settled rather than a negotiation or a discussion with the entities we also had the final planning meeting for our one-year remembrance as a reminder to the council and to the public it will be a two-day event the kickoff will be at six o'clock on the eighth in courthouse square there will be a couple of poems that are written there will be the ringing of the bell from the firefighters remember the lives that were lost during the fire and then there will also be kicking off chalk squares on the square where anybody can come and check out the chalk and fill out their own square whether it is thank you picture depiction a gripe about how the rebuild is going the really will be an opportunity for us to turn our city center into a living entity where people can really express how they're feeling one year out from the remembrance so i hope folks will come out for that both on the eighth and then all the way through the ninth we will have grief counselors on on site as well so hope to see you all there thank you miss cones i have a couple of things the the main item as i think i mentioned last time i had meeting with the cossa the committee to house the bay area in san francisco and in fact ended up with three days of housing cossa related meetings in san francisco last week i read to you all last tuesday the 17 items in the compact that are going to continue to move forward those 17 items were continued to be discussed it looks as if that's the plan but it is still in draft form in addition there was a financing conversation and in order for the region as a whole the nine bay area counties to meet our very low and low housing needs it was determined that we needed on the order of 1.68 billion dollars as a region to move to move housing again only at the low and very low affordability levels forward so there was much conversation about where such funds could come from and a series of shall we call them buckets were identified each of them with a 100 million dollar payout so that there were all these buckets and could we do this and get 100 million here and could we do that and get 100 million there it was an enlightening conversation to say the least and it would be interesting to see if any of those would pass the buckets were sorted out by whether it's the general public developers philanthropy there were a variety of categories in addition some areas have been selected for special consideration within the compact as sensitive communities Santa Rosa and Sonoma County has some of these sensitive communities this is similar to communities of concern but Santa Rosa often is not included in communities of concern so this is a slightly different definition from what is normally used as a state definition for communities of concern I have materials that include the maps for this within Santa Rosa most of this is west of highway 101 not all of it southwest but all of it west of highway 101 within Sonoma County in addition to the Santa Rosa area there's an area in the east probably around Boys Hot Springs Agua Caliente I have some concerns these are based on census tracks and communities and census tracks are not perfectly aligned so it may be that we want to make some comments with regard to these regions in addition South Park was not included and neither was the Kiwana Springs sort of long thin area just east of highway 101 that is a food desert and it may be that we want to talk about including historically redlined neighborhoods or neighborhoods that have food desert in the definitions so that additional regions of concern could be added we are seeing moving forward within Casa strong linking discussions between transportation funding and additional special housing funding and that the linking would come in terms of progress on both Rena and on the community having in place preservation protection and production policies all three so in addition to the emerging compact we're seeing what they're calling a geography of inclusion a regional housing trust fund moving forward that would be separate from a bag mtc or in some combination with that and some interesting funding and financing plans i brought materials on all of the topics and i will leave them and make them available to staff and to us in the in the room upstairs that said i am asking a question i've i'm pretty sure we had a conversation about the non-discrimination regarding voucher holders i thought we had had at least some part of the votes to move that forward but i haven't seen the next step and i'm wondering when the next step in moving forward that conversation occurs i didn't see it on the up-and-coming meetings list or in the pending conversation and i thought i'd had a motion in a second and i don't remember where we went after that so i didn't want that to be lost i'd like us to find that i also see that the rental inspection program is listed in pending and i'm just hoping we can see a discussion of how that can come forward and how how within the context of a rental inspection program we home displaced persons who are in substandard living conditions that has come up as a as a conversation outside of the council chambers that i've had folks come and say you know we're going to be displaced because the structure we're living in is not to code but they don't have a place to go live and how do we have that conversation and i'm also wondering if the if it's assumed that we'll have the price gouging ordinance discussion again before december or if that's going to come out of a subcommittee and i'm just asking if that's coming forward or if we need to make a motion for that to come forward and i just need feedback on where we are with regard to our price gouging ordinance which will end in december but i don't think we've built the housing that we lost in the fire that made us implement that ordinance so i'm not making the motion right now but i'd like to know if it's coming forward automatically or if we need to make a motion i'm making notes on all these thank you very much i appreciate we'll get some answers to you thanks any other mayors and council reports um i just want to thank councilman soyer for his work on the sesquicentennial committee i know that uh council member schwethelm also worked on that very hard but the committee that that's been working on this for more than a year at least a year and a half did a really good job it was a nice event all right uh moving on to the board in commission appointments the library commission appointments is galger i i do have a question for you on this i was not present for the interviews i have read the um applications of all four applicants i should i recuse myself from this boat or if i'm comfortable making a choice can i do that i would recommend that you recuse yourself having missed the interviews all right we'll do then i'm going to turn the honors over to the vice mayor on this one thank you mr mayor so miss gomez can you explain the process that you'd like us to use for our ballots this evening so you have two ballots in front of you the first one we're going to go through is the joint city county library commissioner appointment we only have one vacancy so council members can vote between the four that were interviewed and that is sam mufford Sharon Dazurek Karen schneider and david cahill so i will begin with council member combs if you can please do a roll call vote really fast forward if we could for the joint city county library commissioner i know that this body saw this as a recommendation from the board of supervisors and we'd ask that it go back so that the mayor had an opportunity to speak with the chairman of the board about this appointment is there a little history on what actually happened if i may i did have a conversation with the chairman of the board of supervisors about this it is not a recommendation the board of supervisors did make it make a choice on this there needs to be an agreement with the city so if we have a different person that we put forward we will need to resolve that but it's not necessarily a recommendation they've just made it a choice on their own it needs to be resolved at some point can you remind us who they put forward as as an individual that would have been sam mcbane mofford great thank you so much so miss combs you'd like us to vote first on the joint city county once one individual is selected will then do the city's appointment is that correct that's correct great can you clarified for us i noticed that all of the excuse me i noticed that all of the names are on both lists but it was my recollection that at least one of the names was not a city resident so should not appear on both lists that is correct so sam mcbane mofford should not would not be one of your options for the city only library commissioner thank you and are we doing a countdown vote or do we offer one vote and there's only one round of voting so there could be several rounds of voting in what you have in front of you because we only have one vacancy and you have four four options for selections you can select up to three applicants and then we can round off to the next so we're not going after that then we don't necessarily vote a second round you you do go the second round if you don't get a majority so if we get a majority on the first round then we don't move forward well that'll be your selection that's slightly a slightly different process than what we have done in the past but i understand what you're saying you're saying if one person succeeds in making a majority that that stops the voting and that we don't do another round even though we had assigned multiple votes during that round okay yeah and that's the process of elimination so if you'd have a majority there's nobody it's a little different and i think outcomes can be different doing it the other way but i understand what we're doing council member soyer thank you mr vice-mayor for clarification um i remember having this conversation if we don't if we do not support the the if we don't end up supporting the boards recommended commissioner and we can't vote on someone who's not a senator as a resident and mr mcbain mufford is not a resident miss then we then we support a different person um can we and then the county ends up not going along with our recommendation is it possible that we could appoint the same person to both positions and then they they allow them to um fulfill the one that they end up with because this is it's it's creating a difficulty yes i know so if for some reason if the council chooses someone outside of who the county recommended i'm going to give them the results and then they can take it to their board and then they can vote just as we're doing and we go back and forth until okay we come to a consensus thank you mr isk can i just clarify i got something i lost we will be voting on two separate positions the joint city county one position and then city alone position correct thank you all right so just to be very clear as mud uh for the first round would you like us to vote for only one individual or for three individuals council can vote for up to three okay and if there is a majority then that individual wins on the first ballot that's correct okay great do you want to call the roll or would you like us to use our i would like i would like to call the roll councilmember combs we are voting on the joint city county library commissioner that's correct we're avoiding yes i'm going to vote for Sharon desert karen schneider and david k-hill councilmember soyer dr schneider councilmember schlett-hell david k-hill councilmember tibbetz desert schneider k-hill vice mayor rogers dr schneider and schneider has got the majority so she will move forward and i will present this information to the county great now for the second ballot uh with dr schneider as our first choice can she still be voted for in our second choice very excuse me as our choice for the city's appointee should she not move forward as the joint i have that's i don't know the answer to that question that's never come up before um you you have two representations you have one that's a joint at the library commissioner and then you have one that's just a city representative so if you elect to do that i can provide that result to them i would may i ask if i may if we select the same person for both positions and the counties accepts our recommendation then we can vote again because that position would go to the joint position and we could then later fill the city position yes um and you would have two two options in doing that one would be if you vote for the city position and she is selected for the city position as well that could be made conditional on if she is accepted by the county for the joint position she will not take this the city and you could you could have a second person in line tonight in your vote or you could decide to bring it back um at the next meeting to the county acts um and after that settled which could could go back and forth um you could do it either way so you could have a backup or you could wait and and see what how it all plays out and then didn't select so i'm going to make a suggestion to to counsel that uh first i my understanding is that sam mcbane muffered is no longer in consideration as it is a city position so let's go ahead cross that name off of our city ballot let's take a vote on one individual one vote if we get a majority we'll move that person forward and then let's take a second vote on the remaining two as a backup to send as well in the event that if that process plays out where dr schneider is chosen for both does that work for everybody great go ahead call the roll okay councilmember combs dr schneider if you could please use the mic just because i i'm sorry that i did dr karen schneider thank you councilmember soyer so we're just it's just one name now schneider councilmember schweinhelm one more time schneider oh thank you councilmember tibbet schneider vice mayor rogers dr schneider okay so dr schneider will move on both as the suggested for the joint city county position and then if not selected we'll fall into our city position let's take a vote between Sharon dessert and david k-hill for our second position in the event that we need it miss Gomez councilmember combs i'm pointing this a difficult one uh david k-hill councilmember soyer david k-hill councilmember schweinhelm k-hill councilmember tibbet's k-hill vice mayor rogers k-hill thank you great thank you so much who said that was going to be hard item 10.3 uh request for an agenda item and this was a request from councilmember tibbet's before we do this what was the and i apologize i've been out of town for a while but what was the reason this was continued on september 25th you were out of town thank you mr. mayor so i i'll just explain a little bit why i think it's a really good idea to open our community housing assistance program as we all know there is a large group of people who are experiencing homelessness in our community and the prior council in my opinion developed a really solid plan with the community housing assistance program it was basically the idea that we would allow or help present the community the opportunity to help with the temporary sheltering of homeless people and uh unfortunately though i think where the policy perhaps fell short was in i think some of the zoning requirements as well as some of the restrictions on the shelters used and it's my understanding that the california association of counties has come up with a resolution that allows communities that have the emergency homelessness declaration to look at alternative structures and i think that's something that the council should look look at but i think what we also need to look at is is there the opportunity for residential units to take say one person um rick's using residentially zoned areas along with other zoned areas um i just i'd really like to open it up because i i see the struggles that the council is going through we have our housing first policy it seems to be working but there also seems to be a lot of neighborhood impacts going on and i think that this really will help us address what's going on out there i think my colleague has said it very well and um with regard to the alternative housing options there has been some confusion i i believe it's a state agency hcd there may be more than one um that has very recently proposed what temporary shelters can look like we have a group that have created huts and it turns out the huts don't meet the requirements that the new hcd guidelines are for temporary housing and uh the tough shed model in oakland and i believe that there are some other cities that are doing some similar models um do meet the requirements from hcd from the state agencies so those requirements we need to discuss and decide whether we would accept them um and we need to change the way we have our emergency ordinance uh written in order to to ensure that we meet the criteria to use those alternative code sections um each of these uh seemed to me to be a reason for us to uh to move forward and look again at uh our chat program and at our alternative housing options that are indicated within the language of the chat program that's why it's coming forward this is um a uh item that will only decide whether to put this on a future agenda are there other questions from the council to yes mr swedhelm thank you mr mayor it actually be for staff um just as this body i think it was our last council meeting we were doing the homeless system redesigning with the new continuum of care and we know we're also continuing of care is going to have to be making some decisions about the uh the heat funding and i just want to know if we go in this direction what impact will that have on city staff because we have this other effort going forward um that is i'm guessing our housing and community services is going to be significantly involved making the assumption that they would also have to prepare the staff report for this so i'd like to know what impact would this have so i i i think we'd be prepared maybe to have a conversation when there this would be agendized for a future discussion about what the parameters we're looking for right now it's it's i i vaguely get it but i i don't have a way to respond right now and on the heels of our previous conversations about capacity um it does concern me i just don't know i i need to sit down with the team and so if it advances tonight we'll be able to come back and talk about what that means but you know we're i'm not prepared right now that to have that conversation yet um i for advances we'll we'll we'll do some analysis but that's where we're sitting okay and i can appreciate it i guess my my my concern is because that that heat money from the state the decision's going to be made in december that's like tomorrow um i would love to have this conversation because i am interesting further in the conversation maybe in july or something but to do it now because i know this coc redesign is going to take a significant amount of energy and i'm not sure this is a focus area that um i could support at this point i want to have a discussion but just the timing just doesn't work for me mr tibis thank you mr mayor one thing i want to also follow up and say is that i don't see this is actually requiring resources per se from heat that's not my my intent with the discussion maybe it goes there but but again what we're seeing out in the community are impacts to people who are experiencing homelessness and impacts to neighborhoods and i think that especially after this body developed the resilient city ordinance i'd see it as very possible and feasible and i think we have a bit of an obligation uh to be able to look at the same thing to help empower residents with property to provide temporary belief safe parking in a driveway for example uh to somebody who's experiencing homelessness which could create a diffuse solution for the folks who are unwilling to go into shelter don't have access to a shelter bed or housing um this is is merely something i i don't know how i would describe it but it's um it is not in any way shape or form meant to pull too many resources other than i recognize staff time from uh the heap and housing first conversation Mr. Sawyer thank you mayor well i just want to explain um why i'm at a vote the way i do the um what we did last week with the stoma county homeless system of care and i asked specifically if this type of issue would be dealt with in that environment and it was very very clear to me that it would be and um i would not object at all if this item this particular subject matter was brought up as a priority with that group because it is controversial and there are those that would suggest it's an easy solution i disagree i think it will create a great deal of conversation and angst in the community it is it is it is a big it is a big conversation that i think would be helpful to have in that larger environment with the county and um although i i'll repeat i would really um love to have them tackle that as their first item of of um discussion but i don't feel like i want to preempt their role and responsibility in that regard Mr. Rogers thank you mr mayor uh i actually uh with all the respect councilmember i heard the exact opposite uh when i asked that question last week about the continuum of care uh my understanding from staff was they will make recommendations uh once they look at a policy in the aggregate but that it's actually up to the local cities on implementing those policies where the the part that i think you're entirely correct on is that the funding streams will start to align to be able to be spent on that so i think in terms of this conversation particularly when councilmember tidbits is not talking about realigning how we're spending the dollars but more using our building code in a way that can try to help get us to that that more complex policy discussion i'm happy for us to have that conversation with the understanding from staff last week that anything that does come to come out of that homeless continuum of care is is non-binding and that cities will have an opportunity to make those policy decisions for themselves and i actually think it's a little bit of both of what mr soyer and mr rogers are saying i mean i i really do think that um the idea of having this this single decision-making body for the county is is the the right way to go i'm glad that we all agreed on that last week even though i wasn't here um but i do agree with that i would like to see these issues in that forum but if we need to change some city policies then that needs to be done at the city level so i i would suggest that we do put this on a future agenda we're gonna have to figure out where the capacity is when we can do it it may not be two weeks from now or three weeks from now maybe it may take a little longer but i think it's uh it's something that we can discuss with staff figure out a way to put some parameters around what we're doing and and make make it a little easier for the single decision-making body to have information that they can act on when the time comes mr swaddle i appreciate that um and i would say if this body or if it could be amended this have this as a 2019 conversation because again i'm guessing the coc board it's going to take staff resource and it's just not community development commission resources to make some suggestions as to what direction does the coc want to go with this initial amount of one time funding and to ask our staff to be looking at that working with cdc and this even though that may be part of it i'm just a little hesitant because i haven't been on the staff side that's a lot of things to process in a very short period of time so if we're the direction we give on this is that it's in early 2019 that is something i can spark so i'd like to get discussion but not given that that not being more specific than that i just don't think that we have the staff capacity right now to tackle this piece i'm sensitive to that councilman schwedhelm um but i'd really like to to discuss it with the staff rather than making that decision of whether they can or can't do it before the end of the year at this point um i think that we're ready to vote on this i have a card from mr wagger mr wagger i'm i'm not going to invite you to speak here um this is a we're not debating this tonight we're deciding whether whether to put it on a future agenda and i'd like to call the vote on it that has four eyes with three nos from council members oliveris schwedhelm and soyer so we'll get together with staff and figure out when we can get this back okay thanks moving on to approval of minutes we have two sets of minutes from june and july i was not here for the june 26 meeting so i'll stay out of that one are there any other additions or corrections to either of those sets of minutes or do we need to take those separately miss comas it's not necessary if you want to just abstain and then all right any other corrections additions all right we'll accept those as as submitted moving on to the consent calendar mr mcglenn item 12.1 resolution agreement for business tax administrative services with hdl software llc item 12.2 resolution amendment to the purchase order 154728 to creative bus sales incorporated adding components to previously purchased buses under final construction item 12.3 ordinance adoption second reading ordinance of the council the city of santa rosa amending title 20 of the santa rosa city code adding section 20-16 dot 030 e to chapter 20-16 resilient city developments measures to address waving of capital facilities housing and park impact fees for temporary housing file number rz 1808 item 12.4 ordinance adoption second reading ordinance of the council the city of santa rosa amending title 20 of the santa rosa city code section 20-42 dot 130d 3b utility connection fees to no longer require a new or separate utility connection or related connection fee or capacity charge for accessory dwelling units that are 750 square feet or smaller item 12.5 resolution extension of proclamation proclamation of existence of local emergency due to fires item 12.6 resolution extension proclamation of local homeless emergency if i may make it it's my understanding that this proclamation of local homeless emergency 12.6 does not include the language that we need and that's one of the things we were talking about earlier so i forwarded to the city attorney language from oakland for their homeless emergency proclamation this is the unchanged version is that correct this is the proclamation of local homeless emergency are you referring to the proclamation of shelter crisis okay and the shelter helping me clarify yes and the shelter crisis proclamation we have provided to the state and they have confirmed that that is adequate for for purposes of the of the statue thank you any other questions council thank you got a number of cards here that want to deal with the item on the homeless emergency and we have duplicate cards from a number of people who want to talk about homelessness on items that are not on the agenda if you want to speak on both of these you can speak on both of them now or you can speak on both of them on items not on the agenda but it's if it's on the agenda it's not off the agenda so take your choice here we'll start with tim giga followed by kathryn jurick and i'd like you to be first my name is tim giga gain minister over 20 years now my birthday is on valentine's day yesterday somebody offered me a free ticket to the anniversary of the fire storm and i almost spit my milk out of my mouth thinking about hypocrisy my birthday is on valentine's day the day of love love is thicker than smoke but all i saw was this city blowing smoke up the homeless's life wiping them out you know i'm a writer i wrote the first dictionary of emotions before i turned 30 years old and the only thing that came to mind was the marquis de sade in his practice of saddle masochism and his defined sexual gratification from humiliation pain and criminality and that's what i've witnessed from this city and i have to say i'm embarrassed that's hypocritical and it's not love thank you kathryn jurick followed by anita lafala so this this is not about declaring an emergency crisis this is about what happened on friday i went around corporate center area today to offer rides to residents who witnessed suffered or escaped the city's most recent round of evictions some people said they would come on their own others were afraid to leave their belongings a few gave me some thoughts to share with you a couple didn't have their rv toad west just turned 80 on sunday they're just trying to make it and are really anxious and afraid every time they see the police west is on oxygen oxygen and in hospice closing in on his timeline they both have small incomes from disability and social security their vehicle is registered and has current tags and is in working order but it's old there is no place they can park it in an rv park and they've tried where can we go we just want to go someplace the cops will get off our backs they thanked me for dropping by to visit them another woman wondered why do you keep kicking us out where do we go we just don't have a home otherwise we're just like you guys they dragged my mom's tent across the street and tore a hole in it now it's raining where do you want us to go everywhere i go they come and tell me to leave i have videos of them just coming and throwing everyone's stuff in the garbage they just picked up everything tents clothes everything and threw it away even if someone told them the person would be right back i was at work fortunately my friend packed up my stuff and threw it in the back of the car but then i came back and saw what happened to everyone where do you want us to go that was sort of the recurring theme thank you Anita Lafellette followed by Pat Nicholson Anita Lafellette oh i'm sorry i didn't hear you i was waiting for that name to come up after uh katharine so there's no place to go except for under the tree or back to the sixth street the law of capitalism in this materialism world means that if the rents remain high that's gouging and you ought to look at some of the properties that have continuous vacancies even though we're somewhat in a housing shortage do you know what that's about so the huts were red flagged and all these people in the rvs were kicked out so where are they going to go i think the cuts that you're talking about earlier when i was here need to consider the living structures we can't all live in castles and get cuts in our paychecks so why would you crush an rv when someone's living in it that's a place for them to stay out of the rain you're taking away someone's shelter i don't think this is a community at all i'm not going to any of your events downtown because someone is being treated without rights so listen to us and come to our program at the 12th the spiritual living center and we'll talk about alternatives to shelter because no one can live in the apartments that are available and behind closed doors the continuum of care committee with only one person who was ever homeless at some time in the last five years is somehow going to make the decision about where that money goes because if it can't be spent on alternative housing and the housing that you're building is unavailable for people with low incomes yeah i think you ought to be talking about this instead of putting it on the agenda for next week thank you pat nicholson followed by captain finnegan this would be an easier presentation if i had a screen i could access to present this but we don't so the reason i am i have five questions and i know you can't answer because of rules but i'm asking because i don't know i could guess but i don't know what your answers are so my first question is what is your thinking here second question is what is the goal or purpose or destination you wish to achieve third question over the last four years have you achieved this goal and question five is the path you have chosen to pursue your goal has that proven to work so you're the first question what are you thinking here i can guess that you thought this latest rv park in the corporate circle was not zoned for rv parking and they were messy second question what is the goal isn't the goal to get these people off the street into shelter or housing i don't know is that what you think over the last four years have you achieved this goal no and the path you have chosen to pursue to get this to work hasn't proven effective because you're still dealing with the same problem so my suggestion is that an alternative path needs to be found and implemented and it should happen sooner rather than later because it's going it's wet now and soon it will be cold and wet and if the goal is to house or shelter or get these people off the street somewhere then you need to pursue an alternative path because the path you chose didn't work because there are still folks who are in need of this help and that's how you gauge your success kathleen finnegan followed by dana bellweather good evening mr mayor and council members as you are aware the sonoma county commission on human rights recently declared that there is a systematic and pervasive persecution of homeless people in this county you have declared emergency a home homeless emergency about i don't know for some time for some time and i believe you're about to extend it and so here are some quotations from people from the apollo complex the cramp all the way indicative of how you're treating these people in crisis i took stuff away as i could to my excess storage my partner was very sick with the flu and he tried to help we came back to nothing even though our friend had been there to guard our stuff there were piles of trash around the police left alone but they took our neat piles that were obviously being moved we lost all of our clothes shoes coats phone chargers and cords speakers two laptops papers all of our pet food and gear all of our blankets and our tent i had to go to the bathroom so i went to food max about a half mile away portable toilets are forbidden by the city in that area when i returned my tent was gone and my things were all over the street a lot of people lost all of their belongings they really enjoyed doing that to us you could tell i've never seen such brutal cruelty such hateful cops in my whole life you stand there nearby and laugh you think it's so funny catholic charities when we need them are gone they could give hotel vouchers tonight there's not that many of us left on site it wouldn't have been that expensive lastly lives were destroyed today my friend is coming out of jail to nothing they took everything except what's in this wheelbrow i have no idea where i'm going i'll wander around tonight and figure out what to do tomorrow i'm worried about my friends mr blank and mr blank they are elders my friend is blank is very sick they're both in bad health and i don't know where they are for shame dana bellwether followed by scott wagner good evening i'm dana bellwether i live in santa rosa and i have read descriptions and seen pictures of the police attack on the homeless this most recent weekend and what occurred was not police work which involves policing a community it was crime it was theft it was vandalism um that's not what we pay tax money to hire police to do people some people had bought new tents so that the neighbors wouldn't be looking at old beat-up shabby tents they can't afford that but they went out and bought them anyway brand new tents uh letters from family and sweethearts photos healthcare supplies cd players everything they needed to have any kind of reasonable life were destroyed um that's not what we want people to be doing with our tax money the next time the police organize an attack like that on harmless people please take my part of the money that you would be using to pay them and set it on fire instead that would be a better use of it and please if people would not clap that would take up less of the speaker's time and not drown out the announcement of the next uh speaker um i want you to think about the empty the the long unused properties that i understand that the city and the county own and think about putting people into some of those um do please extend the emergency until there is no longer a homeless emergency maybe the emergency provisions could include uh getting the police to refrain from committing crimes against residents of santa rosa for the duration of the emergency that would be a vast improvement um there are places where homeless people could stay if they were allowed to uh you need to be creative and think of those places you know you know what they are we and catholic charities have been talking with various members of the council for years about this and if they move into tents even there are tents that will keep someone in good health even in winter thank you scott wagner followed by lilet spring thank you mayor i actually i'm speaking specifically about this line item and and and do want to have uh i'm speaking about this line item and do also want to speak about something else that's related but it has to do with homelessness not this this extension of the local homeless emergency i just want to just just want to get back to an original analysis that was done by the the city when this was set up and it reads wonderfully i mean i i really appreciate it it it does a good job of explaining the challenges that the people have out on the street and you know when thus we see this kind of dual nature of government where you know they can pass a a multiple guest test about what's going on outside and list these things uh talking about the point of count point of point of uh point in time count and going through the various challenges that we have that people reside on the streets and alleys and doorways that they're not with they don't have adequate cooking or sanitary facilities my concern is that the emergency proclamation the way that it's done now um is is is something that there there's really no movement towards say the shelter crisis which clearly states that any and all regulations can be waived to chase down this and the chap piece is is a very good example of this and ties in i think with 12.6 because chap is is basically this large tome of things that people that want to help with homelessness get handed as if you can't waive liability when you can in fact as if they have sudden responsibilities that you clearly abdicate with regard to the homeless um so you know we're tying the hands of churches who want to help with homelessness by making very strict strictures for them while we as a city enjoy the privilege of not using those strictures at all and so i'm hoping that what we can do is prepare for the winter by having a conversation around chap that loosens it up in a very important ways thanks through the pieces of it that could really provide a lot of difference because we're not necessarily talking about letting somebody stay in the driveway all over santa rosa we may be talking about letting people get into tents on a specific parking lot or uh tents in a specific parking lot that move every three months the way they do in seattle because they have a consortium of churches that that work in this way so please use this resolution thank you the spring followed by michael to tone the greatest thing that you can do to improve the lives of the unhoused population of santa rosa is to stop just do nothing at all i know there's a lot of asks up here about ways you can provide services that you have not been and those would all help but the greatest thing you can do is to stop actively attacking poor people for being poor stop criminalizing poverty if you're worried about your resources i don't know the exact numbers but i'm sure someone here does of how much money the city has spent on bulldozers and uh construct and destruction crews and police actions to destroy communities we have the list of just some of the largest evictions that have happened over the last year a little over a year sorry i have notes and um we know the funding is there too we know you're going through hard budget cuts but yeah on the way here i was i was driving between west avenue and dotten avenue on sabastopol road i saw two cop cars they weren't following anything they weren't doing anything and that's a regular thing when living in roseland you see cops everywhere and they're not doing anything except from eating donuts and using taxpayer money and we know that they're not serving the community or protecting anyone and we know we heard just today that they were honored that their purpose is to protect property rights and prevent neighborhood degeneration and i think we all know what that means because we kept keeping them in roseland where it happens to be you know the most poor and poc in the zone in the city so how long are you going to keep up the facade of pretending to care about the unhaven population i mean we kind of appreciate the facade because you keep throwing these tiny little breadcrumbs but it's clear from your actions that you actually the as a body i don't not talking about any individual like desires or beliefs but as a body you hate poor people and are actively working to destroy poor people not poverty but the poor and you need to stop that and we can tell thank you michael tatone followed by elizabeth nihlin use the microphone please no i'm gonna shout um because every time i come here i get the same request which is that people can't use the projector they can't get close so i respectfully request sorry i can't hear you would you use the microphone please i i respectfully request that myself and everybody in this audience be allowed to speak from the front elizabeth nihlin i respectfully request myself and anybody who would like to speak from the front elizabeth nihlin speak from the front yes elizabeth nihlin i am elizabeth nihlin i appreciate the young man's bravery to try to get what he wants i believe there's been about 10 000 generations of human beings on the planet and we are now facing extinction from corporate greed and i think the city of santa rosa is a corporation but anyway okay my son in berkeley was shot through the knee by a homeless vigilante that he thinks the berkeley police support yeah yeah yeah he's good he's good he's still walking he was only in the hospital like for one or two days so that's my beautiful son who was identified as a genius in the fifth grade and has a master's degree in hydrogeology from stanford a bachelor's degree in biology from berkeley he's 48 years old and he's one of the sweetest purse people you will ever meet and he will not come to the city because he was attacked by the santa rosa pd during a medical emergency a brain injury yeah that's what happened but let's get down to what's happening at the transit mall with our pay phones when we remodeled our transit mall a few years ago in the design there were four public telephones we now have zero and we do not have access to 911 service unless the downtown library is open the lobby is open where you can get in there to their telephone yes there's contempt in my voice you know i have contempt for america i have lived here since three days before i was born my mother is a socialist was a socialist from ontario canada yeah and believe me it would have been a very smart move to get out of this rotten country anyway thank you such a cheerful thing to be here and um i gotta have a whole minute left to pontificate let me think uh gee whiz what a nice crowd a lot of nice signs i made a sign that said santa rosa city council corporate lackeys you know i really feel that in my heart and okay so what would i do if i was going to help the homeless well i would get like a nice square mile track and i would put a little like spiral all the way around like from the center out i'd have a police station in the middle and maybe on a couple of the corner and then i would build these adorable little tiny houses for people that need them thank you i don't have much more to say you know um follow the money to see why these wars were not banned follow the money and then we will all understand yeah corporate greed and misery were connect to making humanitarian disasters in syria and yemen and what is happening in palestine and why are we why do we have 45 military bases surrounding iran thank you it was new question mark sir mayor i have my comment merlin davis that myself merlin davis everybody else who would like to have the freedom to speak from the front merlin davis point of order you got michael to tone off after 30 seconds because you chose to express yourself your clock is running sir i demand your clock is running myself and everybody who would like to have the freedom to speak from the front in this meeting i changed my mind this is not an emergency that is too impersonal that's like a fire that happens this is not an emergency stop declaring it one you're being hypocrites you're not treating it like an emergency this is a human rights catastrophe this is a persecution of the poor stop declaring an emergency we know what that's about it's about money and we know how you use the money it's not to help those without homes you need to spend less money you need to spend less money on law enforcement you need to spend less money on non-governmental agencies that get up in front and offer you excuses to go persecute keep the poor more on the record which is i guess why i'm on the microphone here fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you you're okay fuck you and jack isn't even here fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you thank you very that's very much that's plenty that's enough we're taking a we're going to take a dinner break myself and everyone in this audience so one second one second wait just gonna sit down here so that's it thank you okay john yeah all right we're gonna bring the meeting back to order we are at public comment on non-agenda matters mr. mayor the fact that there was a the uh here i convey is not reason to ban people from Mr. Mr. Tatone if you keep disrupting the meeting you're going to be being taken out of here in handcuffs i'm just giving you that warning now and i'm going to ask you to sit down and everyone else to speak it is time for public comment it's excuse me excuse me the um we were we had not yet completed the comment on consent items um nor have we had a vote so we're going to go back to that we're going to vote on the consent items we did complete the comment did we complete the comments yes we did there are any further questions on consent mr. rogers mr. mayor i demand i will move items 12.1 through items 12.6 and wait for the reading of the text second speech at the front if we so wish that passes with six eyes mr. tibbetz is absent at this time we'll move on to public comment on non-agenda items thomas ells may i speak public comment yet and everyone else you had your chance mr. tatone freedom to speak at the front if you keep disrupting the meeting are you going to keep disrupting the meeting i are you going to keep disrupting the meeting you get the front we used to speak at the front mr. ells it's your turn to speak oh i had a minute and 30 seconds off no you have no more time you disrupted it sit down mr. ells thought it was you thank you i'd like to address my comments to the well the extension of the existence of local emergency due to fires and to the extension of the proclamation local homeless emergency um this is a tale of two cities this is a tale of two cities it was the best of times this is the worst of times the city came out with open arms to help those people with from the fires and people with homeless emergency it's not exactly the same and i would say while housing is very much health care um it's entirely different how to address it we still call it the word triage we'd still use the word triage it's different than a medical triage shake someone who's bleeding or can't breathe and you're gonna address them first because you're gonna save that life we don't have that situation if one action helps literally hundreds of people with very little cost versus many actions which help only dozens of people with very significant costs and a torturous series of events in order to accomplish it these are two different things that you need to weigh which to do first that's the triage this is project management it's not the same exactly as as triage in a medical sense while housing is health care but you got to get the house you have to have something that covers that person so then you should probably pick the quickest most effective way to accomplish the greatest safety possible and that is what we did before which is some kind of safe parking some kind of things like these safe campaigns very important and i would recommend that and i know that the continuing care reorganization and these things are going to be beneficial they'll show benefits in the long in the long run and where you where your hearts are and coming out with helping people that that's going to be a benefit but it's still a long long way away that is a complete redesign even then anything comes out of it's just going to be an experiment it's a brand new process a brand new thing exactly how is that going to work so we don't really know but what we do know is we can solve and help the most the best with the least cost safe parking those kind of things thank you Bruce Pearson followed by Peter Stickney is Bruce Pearson here yes i'm up here please go ahead i demand that you allow myself and everyone else in this room the freedom to speak at the front if we so choose you're taking up this i'm fine speaking up here you're taking my time now good afternoon or good evening now mayor coursey and the council members and all present imagine you're homeless if you can it's starting to rain and it's getting towards dark but you have a tent until the city police threw it into a dumpster truck now you're wet and cold desperately searching for a hole to crawl in or let's to squeeze under you also have multiple health issues and you're 70 years old and a woman my plea is to arrest this inhumane cruelty towards our flesh and blood she says weeps now you see disposal personal property thank you Peter stickney followed by william maddie mr mayor i demand that you allow myself and yeah i heard i heard your demand okay to speak Peter stickney i demand that you allow myself hello uh here of coursey and the council i just want to start off thanking you for your service i know it takes long hours and uh and uh hopefully the rewards are worth it because i know the city appreciates your service i just want to bring forward a problem in our neighborhood that uh we would like to see resolved we have squatters on the private land behind us they're camped out in the grass and uh you know light fires and dispose of their human waste who knows how we feel that that's a safety hazard and uh and a health hazard the police have come out and asked them to leave sometimes they leave but then they always come back you know that i know this ties in with the previous topic here of having a place for them to go so i think that's the final solution to this but for right now we would like them to not be there they you know walk through our property sometimes to get to victoria drive where i live and uh you know so it's a certain feeling of not being safe necessarily i've uh taken some pictures and put them together and email them to to you all through the group email on the website so i'd appreciate it if you take a look at those and whatever i don't say here now you'll be able to read that but there's you know four main issues safety uh having the police enforce the laws i've personally gone around and posted no trespassing signs for the owner some of those get torn down or destroyed or bent up and uh now put them back up that was at the request of the owner of the property because he's a fire fireman and he's been busy this spring and uh anyway and just the health you know right now the field behind us would be beginning turning into a swamp it'll take more rain than we've just had but as soon as that is all that human waste will be out there floating around mosquitoes are breathing it and who knows what what that spreads that's the health problem you know part of the health problem and uh it's just the law enforcement i mean you do have uh have the police go in and clear out places you know where people have campers and all this stuff set up which i don't necessarily agree with but they need a place to go but they can't clear them out off of this off this private property they say they don't have any right all they can do is write a ticket and and those are just ignored by these people so i don't feel that the law is actually being enforced even though i appreciate the policemen who have come out occasionally when called but it's not an emergency so they don't always come out so again bottom line they need a place to go thank you thank you mr. sticky william matty can i ask a question about no william matty is he still here william matty john frohmeier mr. mayor i still haven't had my comment john frohmeier is he here i still haven't had my comment and i demand gale simons and everybody gale simons here wants to to speak from the front have the freedom to speak from the front like we used to before jacob beckman is jacob beckman here victoria yanes is victoria still here hello all right so uh i thought i was speaking on a different section but whatever here i am so uh i was here for a little bit of the budget cuts and i know i'm just talking to a wall and i know it doesn't matter but somebody has to talk right so um the whole budget cuts thing i mean we're just being squeezed and squeezed and squeezed all the money is getting squeezed out of the local community the extremely rich people are getting all the money they're getting their tax cuts they're getting their all their loopholes their offshore bank accounts y'all are probably some of them and uh that money is just getting sucked right out of the community and and you act like well this is just part of the cycle it's not just part of the cycle like capitalism is unraveling it is closing in on itself and you are just the you're just rearranging deck chairs on the titanic um and part of what you're doing is destroying people destroying people the the poor half of this country is going through something much worse than 2008 something much worse than the great depression the poor half of this country is being absolutely destroyed and you are managing it you're just sharpening your pencils and moving the paper around and oh well everybody's getting fucked um and and for how many times now the the sixth seventh eighth major eviction that you just oversaw it's it's it's an absolute human rights disaster that you are personally responsible for um so that's bad it needs to stop people camping on public land should not be uh bothered by the by these thugs that you have hired um in fact in the great depression there were little villages that grew up everywhere Hoovervilles right uh they weren't stopped people were poor they had nowhere to go there were Hoovervilles everywhere we're gonna get our coursey bills we're gonna get them um thank you victoria is victoria still here to speak from the front molly morgan miller i demand that you allow myself is molly here anyone who wants to including walley to speak from the front if we so design jeremy morney jeremy adrian lobby thank you and good evening i want to echo uh pat nicholson what were you thinking what were you thinking when you allowed the heat program to go into the rv park on friday we've had six evictions this is the sixth one and every time i've come here and i've said that was cruel that was horrible but there was something that happened on friday that was beyond beyond there was something about the way that people's property was taken and destroyed the way people were left in the dark with nothing as the rain began there was something about it that was not not even the usual level of cruelty right after we heard the judge at the ninth appellate in martin versus boise talk about just this thing saying that people have a right to their property right after the sonoma county human rights commission said there are severe human rights abuses in sonoma county what were you thinking you're thinking that it's just okay what because you have a program that's called h e a p and there's the word assistance in it that you can run over people that you don't have to care about what happens to them that you're not responsible in some way i heard in the budget discussion the public works guy saying well we we haven't been able to fix the potholes as much because we're really busy cleaning up after homeless camps and i've cleaned up after homeless camps it's a lot of work i understand that but when we've come here over and over again and said we don't have to have those kind of homeless camps we can have homeless camps where people clean up for themselves the way they do in every neighborhood we're still going out there with bulldozers well the rain is here winter's here we don't have any more time thank you thank you that's uh that's all the cards i have republic comment tonight we'll move on to item 14.1 you're done and item 14.1 report city council consideration to take formal position on november 6th 2018 ballot measures that could potentially have impact to the san aroza adria merton's communication and intergovernmental relations officer presenting here we're on another item now mr. else please mr. mayor i demand that you allow me and everyone else this man is disrupting this meeting we can't continue with him doing this we're taking the recess hold on just i'd like i'd like to join a club and beat you over the head with it well done all right bring this meeting back to order i'll reintroduce you want to reintroduce san report city council consideration to take formal position of november 6 2018 ballot measures that could potentially have impact to san aroza adria merton's presenting good evening mayor corcy and members of the council as you know the general election will be held throughout the state of california on november 6 2018 there are a number of statewide and local ballot measures with potential impact to san aroza council may consider taking a formal position of support for opposition or decide to take no action on any of the measures so staff have identified six statewide ballot propositions and one local ballot measure to be considered um the statewide ballot measures are proposition one two three five six and ten and local ballot measure um is measure m so proposition one would authorize bonds to fund specified housing assistance programs uh the proposition allows the state to sell four billion dollars in new general obligation bonds for various housing programs including affordable multifamily housing infrastructure programs home ownership programs and farm worker housing programs it also provides one billion dollars for home loan assistance to veterans proceeds from the bond sales would be awarded to program applicants such as local governments nonprofits and private developers through a competitive process administered by the state for san aroza this measure could provide needed affordable housing resources for our community's most vulnerable populations um if the san aroza housing recovery bond our local measure in was passed the local funding could be used as a local match to compete for these state resources uh staff recommends council support proposition one do so um yeah do you envision taking these as we go taking them at the end um actually what's the council's preference I would appreciate hearing from the representative of the legislative committee on the items just as a way of having input about them okay let's let's let mrs mergans go through her presentation all of them yeah okay all right so proposition two authorizes bonds to fund existing housing programs for individuals with mental illness uh this proposition allows the state to carry out the no place like home program as it is currently designed for background the no place like home program was created by the legislature in 2016 to build and rehabilitate housing for those with mental illnesses who are homeless are at risk of becoming homeless uh the program is designed to use certain funding from the state's mental health services act approved by the voters in 2004 uh however the program the no place like home program has been challenged in court opponents alleged that the program is inconsistent with the terms of the mental health services act and have asked the court to decide on two main issues one deciding whether using mental health services act dollars uh to pay for the no place like home program is consistent with what the voters wanted when they approved the mental health services act in 2004 and two deciding whether voters need to approve the no place like home bonds passage of proposition two would mean the state would no longer need court approval to carry out the no place like home program passage would mean approval uh passage would approve the use of mental health services act funds for the no place like home program which would mean the authorization of two two billion dollars in bonds to pay for the no place like home program for santa rosa proposition two could also provide needed affordable housing resources for santa rosa's most vulnerable populations um if the santa rosa housing recovery bond measure n was passed the local funding could be used as a local match to compete for these state resources as well uh for these reasons staff does recommend council support proposition two so proposition three authorizes bonds to fund projects for water supply and quality watershed fish wildlife water conveyance and groundwater sustainability storage uh this proposition allows the state to sell eight point nine billion dollars in new general obligation bonds for various water and environmental environmental projects under six categories watershed lands water supply fish and wildlife habitat water facility upgrades groundwater and flood protection the state departments may spend some of the funds to carry out the projects themselves carry out their own projects but most of the funds would be given as some grants to local governments indian tribes non-profit organizations and private water companies for specific project uses uh the proposition also changes how the state must spend some existing funding relating to related to greenhouse gases for santa rosa proposition this proposition provides opportunities for grant funding for water use efficiency groundwater and recycled water the proposition would also provide options for our partner the sonoma county water agency to to get funding for their projects uh staff does recommend council support proposition three proposition five changes the requirements for certain property owners to transfer their property tax base to replacement property this proposition amends the state constitution to expand the special rules that give property tax savings to eligible homeowners when they buy a different home eligible homeowners include those who are 55 who are severely or who are severely disabled or whose property has in has been impacted by a recent disaster or contamination the measure would allow eligible homeowners to transfer property tax base when they move to a different home anywhere within the state of california it removes the limits on how many times a homeowner can move and transfer taxable value and it allows the purchase of more expensive homes with some adjustment in existing taxable value but less than the new homes market value it also reduces taxes for newly purchased homes um so homes that are less expensive meaning if someone moved to a less expensive home the taxable value transferred from the existing home to the new home would be adjusted downward um the state's legislative analysis stated that the measure could have multiple effects on property tax revenue it is anticipated that in the first few years schools and local governments would each potentially lose over a hundred million dollars per year proposition five could impact santa rosa but at this time the fiscal dollar amount is very hard for us to quantify uh staff recommend council take no action on proposition five however council may discuss that decision proposition six eliminates certain road repair and transportation funding uh and requires certain vehicle fuel taxes and fees be approved by the electorate this proposition amends the state constitution constitution to require the legislator to get voter approval for newer increased taxes on the stale storage use or consumption of gasoline or fuel as well as pay for taxes to operate a vehicle on public highways the proposition would also eliminate fuel and vehicle taxes passed after january 1 2017 and up to the date that proposition six could take effect in december of 2018 proposition six would eliminate the increased fuel taxes and transportation improvement fees enacted by sp1 it is anticipated that in the current fiscal year this proposition would reduce sp1 tax revenues statewide by 2.4 billion dollars two years from now the revenue reduction would total approximately 5.1 billion annually the funding reductions would mainly affect highway and road maintenance and repair programs as well as transit programs here in santa rosa sp1 provides much needed transportation funding to repair our roads and maintain our city streets which have been backlogged due to years of insufficient funding with an estimated 3.9 annually from sp1 funding santa rosa will be able to rehabilitate rehabilitate failing pavement and enhance bicycle and pedestrian travel for santa rosa residents under sp1 city of santa rosa transit is projected to receive 900 000 annually in combined funding for operations and capital improvements which are crucial to maintaining service levels supporting the city's bus replacement program expanding the number of electric buses in the fleet and filling funding gaps that have been resulted from reductions in other state funding for our transit services a yes vote on proposition six would repeal the critical sp1 funding required to repair our city roads and maintain transit service levels for these reasons staff recommend council oppose proposition six proposition 10 expands local government's authority to enact rent control on residential properties this proposition would repeal the limits on local rent control laws set forth in the costa hawkins rental housing act for background under current law costa hawkins creates three key limitations rent control cannot apply to single family homes rent control cannot apply to any housing completed on or after february 1 1995 and rent control laws cannot place limits on what a landlord may charge a new tenant when first moving in if past cities and counties could have the ability to regulate rents for any housing to be clear the measure the measure does not make any changes to current local rent control laws rather cities and counties would then need to make take separate action to change their own local laws according to the state legislative analysis the impacts of this proposition would depend on how many communities pass new laws how many properties are covered and how much rents are limited the analysis also noted that the proposition would likely reduce state and local revenues in the long term with the largest effect being on property taxes staff recommend that council take no action on proposition 10 however council may discuss that decision and finally the local measure measure m sonoma county parks measure so this local measure proposes a one-eighth sales a one-eighth cent sales tax dedicated to parks within sonoma county including city operated parks which will generate 11.5 million dollars per year for 10 years if past two-thirds of the funds would go to county parks and one-third would go to cities throughout the county for park improvements this measure must pass with two-thirds voter approval and funds may only be utilized for parks they may not reduce existing funding for parks and recreation in santa rosa the funds provide additional support for projects at citywide neighbourhood and community parks recreational program support and file fuel fire fuel reduction projects it should be noted that it's unclear if the city would meet the maintenance of effort the maintenance of effort requirements to qualify for the entire annual tax allotment staff analysis of the measure shows that the city may be eligible to receive very little of the funding from the measure due to the city's structural deficit and projected staffing levels however city staff are currently working with the county to clarify that language and to determine what funding may be available to the city staff do recommend council support measure m i think one of the things that the city attorney and i were just discussing about about this measure is that even if it couldn't use be used for operational monies it is likely that we could advance a pretty solid argument that it could be used for capital projects so you know that this is the reason we're recommending supporting is because there is a great need on the capital investment in some of our parks as well as the operational requirements and and if i may i was just going to clarify on the maintenance of effort on requirement and as miss merton indicated we are trying to get more clarification from the county but the question came up earlier this evening so i'll just outline a maintenance of effort requires that we not spend less than the previous year unless there's a financial downturn which is defined as a the general fund declines by one percent or more or if there's other unexpected events and that's not defined if there's a financial downturn or an unexpected event then the city needs to spend no less than the lower of three fiscal years 15 16 16 17 or 17 18 as shown in the adopted budget so it will be challenging us for us to meet that that threshold on the operational side in any in any circumstance but but i believe we've had conversations and that there's a belief that we could advance the capital but it is still a complicated question open to interpretation and this body will not be it'll be there'll be a citizens oversight board that will probably be making these decisions about qualification and here's a summary of the staff recommendations thank you miss merton's um mr rogers do you want to uh help us out with what the i'm sorry the name of the body is escaping me at this point it's the uh mayors and council members legislative association what that group has uh has recommended or has has done so far on these measures uh yeah i i believe that these uh actions reflect what that group has done if it'd be helpful miss merton's did a great job but i have some supplemental information that i can provide to the group for making this these decisions sure let me let me find out if there are any specific questions first from the council i'm just going to ask if we could if you have questions on um the measure 10 if you could ask them now and i'll step out while you discuss it because i i i would i would have to recuse myself from any discussion on proposition 10 if there's no questions i'll just stay in the chamber questions on that i have comments later but i was wondering if as a process we might do this a little like we do consent items where we pull a few of them and then just go ahead and vote on the ones that we don't get pulled does that make sense that way we know what we're questioning and what we're moving forward it's just a suggestion to i was going to suggest that we just go through them one at a time okay um and we'll take prop 10 last we'll stick measure in before that alright everybody okay um i'm not seeing it oh mr schweidtum i just had one question on measure m the oversight who is appointing the oversight and how large is that body it's appointed by the board of supervisors i'm sorry the board of supervisors establishes the committee and then there's an appointment of seven committee members minimum of two of the committee members are selected from a list of names submitted by the mayors of sonoma county cities um and in the absence of one or both names from the city mayor mayors in the sonoma county parks advisory commission chair and vice chair will serve on the oversight committee each board a supervisor member appoints one person so there there you have the seven so the seven is a seven or five soups and then two from the mayors and council yes and and again there's two pots of money there's a a county pot and then there's a city pot and and the city pot is there's a there's some ambiguity about how that city pot is to be divided um and i think we need if we can find the language maybe we can talk about that but this the oversight would over have oversight of both of those pots of money the same oversight yeah but but there'll be two thirds will be going towards county projects and not a garden city yeah my own question is about the oversight so thanks okay if that's all the questions i've got a card here from shelly clark is she still here i think she exited the room um we'll bring it back to the council um mr rogers thanks mr mayor uh i just wanted to i'll add a little bit of information in context to some of these uh for proposition one and two uh there's the amount that's listed for the bond and then there's the additional amount of financing the bond over the course of its life and typically and in both of these it's the case it's about double what it actually is so for prop one it's four billion in general obligation bonds it will actually end up costing the state closer to eight billion uh and likewise for prop two two billion to four billion just to make sure that that information is out there for proposition number three the league of cities is supporting proposition three i actually personally do not and i will just tell you there was uh during the the water shortages many individuals from southern california elected officials who were making comments such as uh if we can pay for the water who cares how much we use we should pay for the water that's fine that's their prerogative but what prop three actually does is it ends up backfilling in a lot of those instances where there was deferred maintenance on the actual systems so that they could cut costs essentially to continue to use the same amount of water it also would further the delta tunnels project by clearing a couple of key hurdles for them so just in particular that's why most entities have not taken a position on prop three or have gone no the league of cities being an entity that is looking at providing resources to cities and jurisdictions they went yes so that makes sense for prop five this actually is commonly referred to as the golden handcuffs where once somebody is locked into their mortgage with diminishing increases towards their property tax value or extermination state diminishing capped increases to their property tax value so it'll be an interesting conversation with prop 10 as well it's difficult for folks to downsize to move into a home that then ends up spiking their property taxes where this has become a problem though is under the current rules with prop 13 it's a reciprocal agreement typically between counties it's one time if you're over 55 and it has to be of a property of similar value that gets wiped out in this so prop five would actually allow you to move as many times as you would like at any age and it would allow you to move from properties of not similar value so for instance this would allow folks to purchase a home in calusa county and then move their property tax base to santa rosa which is why you see in the analysis the diminishing return for the local schools and for local municipalities it's because you can't predict how people will move or shift their property taxes around that's why that that one is on there and that's actually why most entities have taken a no position on prop five uh other than some of the realtor groups and i do believe actually now that i think about the league of cities might have taken a no position on that as well but if you could double check for prop six we've talked a lot about what this means for sonoma county in particular it means widening the narrows it means extending the smart train it means filling potholes but really the first bullet point in the presentation is one that needs to be considered it would take it away from the hands of the legislature to ever be able to make determinations based on road funding again it would instead make it so that it has to be a ballot measure that ends up doing that as you know right now it's a two-thirds threshold in the legislature to get anything like this passed this would make it so that even a two-thirds even a 100 agreement from the legislature would not be able to do it without a statewide costly fight as well to clarify the league did not take action on five yeah and that's pretty much it for my my comments on here here i will just i will also mention there's prop four children's hospital funding prop seven daylight savings time which is not actually daylight savings time prop eight dialysis patients prop 11 ambulance employees and prop 12 related to farm animals not related to cities happy to talk to you guys about that offline but of course everybody's favorite prop nine which would have split the state into a number of different states which was then taken off the ballot by uh judicial action mr. Sawyer thank you um mr. vice mayor is could you explain to me why or maybe staff why we're not taking a no on proposition five so i think i think a little bit the wording here should be um not necessarily no action we don't have a formal recommendation at this point i think that would have been a better language choice on five and ten no recommendation that's for the council to discuss if they want to have a recommendation and i think the reason really why people have struggled with this one is that it is a very real problem uh that golden handcuffs that i was talking about of of individuals particularly later in life who want to downsize but they can't because they'll actually end up paying a lot more so that's a very real issue that they've tried to figure out how to deal with but in practicality the way that this is written um would end up harming cities and counties if you are in a city or county that's desirable so that it's created another problem right that's the other one that's right thank you i'm not surprised i guess i shouldn't say that thank you mr. vice mayor are there further questions before we get to uh making some decisions here yes well i wasn't sure if we were going to go there on prop 10 or not um but did um i'm sorry did the league take a position of prop 10 uh the league did not so the the league looked at this uh and really what they come down to is that it is a local control issue as was noted in the the staff report prop 10 doesn't actually implement rent control but there was an attempt in the legislature this last year to reform costa hawkins and the bill in particular there was um a deal that was sort of on the table the table to keep a 20-year window of that costa hawkins prevention of it applying to homes that were were new keeping a 20-year buffer so that you could realize returns on that new construction and that would move each year as the new construction happened that one ended up failing uh actually by one vote in the housing committee and uh in the the reason or i shouldn't say uh for sure but that deal was largely rejected because there was a ballot measure that people wanted to push on costa hawkins and so i think the league looked at that had discussions about this is a local control issue and from that perspective they don't like costa hawkins but at the same time because you had the legislature abdicating their authority they would have preferred to have amended a state law with a state law not with a ballot measure that then uh would be harder for them to change if they needed to so i think that that was the reason thank you other questions okay um um mr. short you have this item or at least most of this item i will introduce introduce a resolution of the council city senator as a supporting proposition one authorizes bonds to fund specified housing assistance programs and a period legislative statute and wait for the reading second any further discussion your votes please passes with six eyes secondly i'll introduce a resolution of the council the city senator supporting proposition two authorizes bonds to fund existing housing programs for individuals with middle illness it is a legislative statute second your votes that passes with six eyes i'll introduce the resolution of the council the city senator roza supporting proposition three authorizes bonds to fund projects for water supply and quality watershed fish wildlife water conveyance and groundwater sustainability and storage this is an initiative statute and wait for the reading would you accept a friendly amendment would you like to change that to no i was going to suggest to fund the amendment of the city not taking a position on proposition three i would accept that do we have to take a vote at all if we're taking no position now if you're um i would i would take a vote i would recommend that because we have a resolution before you so um i could withdraw it or we could you could with either you could withdraw the motion and and move if no one else makes a motion to act on it then there's no action and that's clean i would draw the motion the resolution is there any other motion on this item moving on introduce a resolution of the council the city senator roza opposing proposition six eliminating certain road repair and transportation funding requires certain fuel taxes and vehicle fees be approved by the approved by the electorate it's an initiative constitutional and initiative is constitutional and is an amendment and wait for the reading and if i may i just want to clarify and i apologize i should have spoken up on propositions one and two as well and we did provide the council with a modified resolution earlier today i believe i just want to make sure that those are the resolutions there should be a there's a very minor change the change was simply to clarify that on each of those items you were also authorizing the city to be named as either in support or in opposition uh in the in the coalition rather than it listing the council as being in support it allows us to list it as the city of city of Santa Rosa so that change was made on proposition one and two just to have the city is you're authorizing the city of Santa Rosa to be listed as part of the coalition in support of those propositions and on proposition six that the city of Santa Rosa is part of the coalition in opposition to proposition six everybody good with that i'll second the motion that was on the floor okay and the motion that mr. Sawyer just made was in opposition to prop six we'll take a vote on this and then go back to number five which i think you skipped i think you and i don't have any paperwork on five okay because because it was because of the no action okay all right so we're still on six we have a motion to oppose six second to oppose six your votes i think is that is that it can you clear that okay thank you okay that has six eyes you have no paperwork on proposition five correct make any motion on proposition five um hold on i would actually i would move to oppose proposition five yeah i would i would i would move to oppose it second he votes in favor of opinion and that has six eyes and then let me go to um and then i'll excuse myself i res uh to introduce the resolution of the council the city of Santa Rosa supporting measure am parks for all wait for the reading second you votes that has six eyes and give mr. Sawyer a minute yeah and we want to make a motion on prop 10 i don't think i can count to four on 10 so it makes no sense to make a motion my understanding is we have to have four votes is that correct we can't do it with a simple majority a seated no we'll need four votes thank you we have five people we'll just leave that live thank you very much moving on to 14.2 item item 14.2 report real property transfer tax designation of funding for homeless and affordable housing programs real property transfer tax an amendment of council policy for number 000-48 policy to designate general funding for homeless and affordable housing production dave guine and chuck mcbride presenting many mayor members of the city council this item allows you to consider designated designation of funding for homeless and affordable housing programs through real property transfer tax we start with what we have as a staff recommendation it provides you with the opportunity to consider the amendment to city council policy 000-48 policy to designate general fund funding for homeless and affordable housing production you can adjust the amount of real property transfer tax funding to be designated for homeless and affordable housing programs so just by way of background to give you a sense on the real property transfer tax also referred to as rptt is a tax imposed on the transfer real property from one person to another or an entity the tax is based on the property sales price due at the time of property transfer the city's rppt is $2 per 1000 of property value the county's is $1.10 per 1000 dollars of property value for a combined total of $3.10 for a thousand dollar property value thank you currently we receive approximately four million dollars each fiscal year from the transfer tax under our current council policy 25 of those funds are designated to be used by housing community services department for homeless and affordable housing programs so just by order of magnitude in 17-18 we committed 1.1 million dollars to that this item provides the council with an opportunity to consider adjusting that policy amount of 25 percent for the housing programs so an option that has been discussed with the long-range finance committee was to address that that additional dollar 45 that was added in 1990 so initially there was a 55 cents per thousand dollars of valuation that went to the city and then 55 cents valuation that went to the county that was adjusted in 1990 so the city's portion went up by a dollar 45 to two dollars per thousand suggestion was that all of this dollar 45 increase be provided for homeless and or affordable housing so to allow us to for adjustments for the impact of the general fund this increase could be phased in over a number of years and the increases despite how many years that we phase this in over be cumulative so we could wind up with 100 percent of that dollar 45 of the transfer tax funds being allocated to homeless and or affordable housing so a brief presentation and concludes we were happy to answer any questions no I would just like to to point out that this has been a little bit of a confusing issue over the over the months and years that we've talked about it the original staff report and presentation on this that that the council received and the public received last week talked about 100 percent of the of the three dollars and ten cents what the long-range financial committee has has talked about in our meetings over the past several months is getting 100 percent of that dollar 45 increase into housing and homeless services and that's what the report that you just gave reflects and I believe that that's actually an accurate reflection of what the long-range financial committee has has discussed and is recommending to the full council tonight and if I yes I wanted to clarify you are correct that as originally drafted the staff report would have addressed the full allocation of RPTT not simply the dollar 45 increase and it had a schedule in there to go up to 100 percent of the full RPTT to be designated for housing and homeless and affordable housing programs what we have provided you this evening is an alternative option that is as you spoke addresses simply the dollar 45 increase from 1990 so that's the portion that we're talking about and in this in the draft resolution that was provided to you now and that is available to the public upstairs takes it just to up to 80 percent you are free under either the original resolution as provided to you and online last week or under this you can adjust those numbers you are free to adjust the percentages you're free to adjust whether it's the full RPTT or the dollar 45 the time frames you can adjust that I was just issue question was raised regarding the brown act the brown act is satisfied because the item has to do with what the allocation from RPTT is what that designation is going to be for housing and and homeless programs it's all within the scope of your deliberations tonight to decide again the number the percentage what's it based on and the time frame thank you questions council mr schwaith maybe you said by mr was there a recommendation from the long-range committee and if so what was that what was the vote of that recommendation the recommendation from the long-range financial committee I believe was what is reflected in the the updated council policy that we see right here so not a line version the red line version is what's recommended by the committee was a unanimous vote yes I do have a question about I don't I what I don't remember was the stopping at 80 percent if I could get some clarification on that I thought the conversation was I mean at least to have an option of moving to the full hundred with with kind of with the option if necessary to delay with a full of with an open vote of the council and to reduce that that obligation if we became if there was a reason to do that fiscally but I did not remember it's stopping at 80 could you refresh my memory on that honestly mr rogers do I'm looking at the document right now that we worked out for the long-term finance this is accurately reflecting that going to 80 percent by 2022-23 that was the decision may yes thank you just another ripple in that in the memories yeah any other questions mr tivitz thank you mr mayor the question I have is what is the difference I understand the logic behind the dollar 45 increase versus the full 100 percent but what is the difference in annual amounts for housing because what it comes down to for me is is again housing's got to be a service that the city provides looking at what the cost of living is in this community today and so I'd be interested in the full 100 percent but if 80 is what is is feasible at this dais then I'd like to at least know the differences so my understanding of reading these documents and I wasn't part of the long-range finance committee then it seems that what the 80 percent refers to is is the full dollar 45 so I'm just doing some rough math here if you took all the dollar 45 and committed it to housing homeless you'd be looking at about three million dollars per year assuming that we get four million dollars a year in transfer tax and it does fluctuate if you go to 100 percent of the entire two dollars which is again my reading of that then you'd you take the entire four million dollars so the difference there the way I read it is a million dollars and that is the what the question was yes okay one thing I'd like to just put out there and I apologize for not doing this in the comment section but it's my understanding that when we lost redevelopment we went from about eight million dollars a year for housing to 3.5 million so I'd encourage the council to look at it from that perspective if we do the full 100 percent uh granted phased in over multiple years which is the smart budgetary thing to do we'll have done a great job in closing the gap where it used to be redevelopment and I think that's important to think about especially as we go into November with measure n it may win it may lose um and if I hope it doesn't lose but we're at two this is a very important um it's a guarantee for the future of the city mr rogers thank you mr mayor I've actually asked this question a couple of times my understanding is that part of the rptt actually goes to the county and goes into the county's general fund I think it's about a million dollars a year that they get uh how do we make sure that that actually is spent on housing or how do we take that back to make sure that we spend it on housing we only have control over the money that comes to the city yeah so my understanding is that we actually it's real property transfer tax that comes into the city we remit a million to them that was passed prior to having uh any type of a vote requirement for such a such a tax and therefore we're locked into what was done by council policy or ordinance prior to my interest my question is do we have to pass an ordinance to take that and re-divert that those dollars back towards housing here locally in the city or do we have to actually do a ballot measure if we were to try to do that I have not looked at that and it is and I'm happy to look at that that's not part of the agenda item for this evening so we can't really go too far on that discussion I'll second having that discussion at some point it's fine and I see some shaking heads behind you that I'm my understanding might be a little bit off on that but the but the intent is there and hopefully I can follow up with uh some folks we'll follow up all right let's go miss do we have any cards on this Adrienne lobby hi this is Adrienne lobby from Grumos Action I'd just like to support you in passing this resolution and making this adjustment it's uh as Jack said a security measure and something that will help us in the years to come and I applaud you for getting at this far along thank you thank you that's all the cards I have uh go ahead Mr. Ling Ryan Ling snow county line yeah I'm sorry my card apparently is still up here in the basket we've just reiterating the points we've made uh a few of us attended uh I guess it was three or four of the long-range planning meetings and the proposal that was discussed as you mentioned to phase it in over four years to get to the 80 percent of the dollar 45 I'll let you guys do the math from there but we continue to support that as we've mentioned it's certainly our belief that that was the intent when this was done in 1990 there's nothing we need more than support for all things housing and the sooner we can get this implemented the better if you want to do more quicker we certainly would support that but uh we continue to support the proposal that we've made uh as most recently last June thank you thank you it's all the cards I have um any further questions yeah Mr. Rogers yeah I just wanted to make a quick comment Mr. Mayor we have seen this at the council level and we've seen it numerous times at the long-term finance committee level and I think for me in particular this is really an issue of transparency and once it became very clear in our discussions that this is what the dollar 45 was promised in the increase that it was going to go to particularly looking at our finances this year and having another sales tax measure that's on the ballot I think it's really important for this council to continue to spend dollars the way that we told the public we are going to spend dollars when they approved them to come to us so for me it is a transparency issue uh just as much as it is a budgeting issue and obviously I don't disagree with the intent which is to develop housing as well so I'll be supporting tonight thank you this comes thank you um I agree and I want to thank the long-term finance committee for their work on this and for bringing this forward to us obviously I'm a strong supporter of housing and we need these dollars for housing it's my understanding we already spend close to this amount and clearly we need to reestablish trust in our community this council can be the trustworthy council by making good on the promises of the prior councils so thank you for bringing this forward there for the comments on this mr tibbetz thank you mr mayor and yeah I'd just like to thank the long-term financial subcommittee we brought this up a year ago and I really appreciate the fact that you took it into consideration and and brought it back it means a lot I've been looking at this I actually like the 25 to 80 percent by 2022 23 just because being able to get those dollars out there and get that housing I mean this can be our local match on a lot of this stuff so having more by 2022 having 80 percent rather than 45 by the same time period I think is important so I I mean I'll be supporting and I am supportive of the the proposal that was just delivered to us Mr. Sawyer thank you mayor well I also like to appreciate the the community coming forward and articulating very clearly the need to go back to the original intent and also their understanding that we do need if necessary an escape hatch and that they supported that if as long as we were open and clear about it and voted on it clearly that's exactly what we were doing but they're clearly under they understood the need for us to have an escape hatch especially in the fiscal environment that we find ourselves in and I'm happy to support this tonight Ms. Combs you have this item I hadn't realized it thank you I'm going to move a resolution of the council of the city of Santa Rosa amending council policy 000-48 policy to designate general funding for homeless and for affordable housing production as amended in the redline version and wait for the reading of the text second your votes that passes unanimously thank you for your work on that Mr. Mayor yes Ms. Combs I'd like to ask a process question if I may it's my understanding Jack can you wait a second it's my understanding that we can revisit an item during a council meeting if if a council member so chooses that we can request to do that that we have a process for doing that I would like to revisit our action on proposition 10 if the council did not take action on proposition 10 so what I'd like to do is make a motion that as exceeded that we we move proposition 10 it's it's a little odd because the reconsideration is if a measure has passed or if there was a vote on a measure and the person and a council member who was in the majority vote can ask for reconsideration of an item but here you took there was no action taken so okay I'm not trying to figure out the majority was to take no action right and I was in that majority and so I am requesting that we take action you may do that okay so I'd like to move that we consider supporting proposition 10 returns local control to cities regarding what is best for our community we get to make that decision ourselves our council in the past has passed a rent control ordinance among the talking points regarding that ordinance was the unfairness that was opposed imposed by costa hawkins this proposition removes that unfairness without requiring us to adopt any rules regarding rent control so I'm hoping that just as a matter of local control we can make that motion based on my belief that costa hawkins is a terrible law and that and also my belief that local control is a good thing let cities decide how they want to run their cities I will second that motion yes mr. swardow I just have some questions because the interpretation what I heard just with the vote is not what I heard you say we did not take an action of no action there was no action taken so the the item was brought to you earlier to take a position on proposition 10 the council determined not to take action on on proposition 10 so that was the action that was taken was to not take action so I do believe that there is an opening I can't say I've seen any law on the matter but that was a that was a decision by council to take no action on prop 10 so what is now what was asked for reconsideration was that decision to take no action okay so then the second question I have just knowing that some council members of the body who are currently still here I understand mr. Sawyer his excuse himself but when we've had to deal with some rent control issues there's been a discussion that a couple other council members have to use themselves yes and any council member I do not know current status of the other two council members who previously have had conflicts as landlords as renting their rooms if that is still the situation that they are in then they should also recuse themselves from this decision it was my before you before you recuse it was my understanding that if a significant number of individuals within the city are in the same situation that we can continue to move forward with the vote the the issue here what we have is a that is that does not apply here because costa Hawkins itself limits the application and there is no local we have ordinance before you I am not clear that there is 25 percent more than 25 percent of the population that are landlords that fit within costa Hawkins but I know a landlord that fits within costa Hawkins so why can't I go ahead and vote because I have a single family residence right and so you so you you are not able to vote because by eliminating costa Hawkins you may then become you may be covered by yes and the conflicts of interest don't don't depend on whether whether your vote is going to help you or hurt you it's whether you have an interest in the vote can you explain what the consequences are if we choose to vote anyway consequences are the action can be voided you can be subject to civil fines and the criminal fine or criminal actions you can be subject to an fpbc fine okay well I still have friends of my children living in my house and they do make a contribution toward the household expenses which I interpret to be similar to if not equal to rent yes so I have to withdraw the item because I made the motion yes okay moving on the card for public comment from Thomas do you have something to say that does not cover what you covered before different subject is what I'm asking yes my comments before were I thought regarding 12.5 and 12.6 as I made very clear Thomas at the time it was that was a combined discussion about homeless items do you have something other than homeless items to talk about yes this public comment period yes thank you that was my public comment on non-agent items at that time not so though they were separate thank you we have not heard here as I believe we have not heard here the Sonoma County civil grand juries requests from the city regarding the fire so the fire was as I understand the predominant aspect of the Sonoma County civil grand juries report which was issued to both the county and the city and to the various departments and I don't believe we've had a hearing of that I know that there must have been responses to the civil grand juries report from the county and the city from the city and the various departments but I don't believe we've heard that I think we should have heard that and we should hear it whether we whether we should have or not we should hear it having to do with the response it was a massive fire it was it's obviously devastating as Mr. McGlynn mentioned it was you know catastrophic horrible and so the grand jury has asked many questions we don't even know necessarily exactly at least I don't know exactly what the questions are the answers were from the from the various departments and I would like to get some information on the response from the city as to that because for instance the water measure right here and I I'm opposed to the tunnels because all those issues in San Joaquin but that water issue prop three could fund and meaning you could look additionally at reforming that that doesn't do the tunnels at the state you're not going to do it yourself but obviously the influential members of the senate that we have obviously uh in this area and so on um can reformulate that in a way that you could support where state money comes here from a state bond that goes and deals with the watershed issues that are very important in proposition three I understand why you don't want to support proposition three but at the same time there are these watershed issues that are critical to Santa Rosa thank you thank you Mr. Mills with that we're adjourned