 Good afternoon. Welcome to today's City Council meeting. Madam City Clerk, can you please call the roll? Yes, thank you, Mayor. Councilmember Schwedhelm. Here. Councilmember Sawyer. Councilmember Rogers. Present. Thank you. Councilmember Fleming. Vice Mayor Alvarez. Present. Mayor Rogers. Here. Let the record show that all councilmembers are present with the exception of councilmember Fleming and councilmember Sawyer. Thank you. We'll start our day in closed session with item 2.1. Madam Deputy City Clerk, can you please facilitate public comment on that item? Thank you, we'll do. If you're joining via Zoom and wish to make a public comment, please raise your hand now for item 2, closed session. If you're participating via telephone, please dial star 9. Mayor, I'm seeing no hands raised in Zoom and no one approaching the podium for public comment in person. Great. We'll go ahead and recess into closed session then. Good afternoon, Pablo. Good afternoon, Charles. Thanks for joining us today to provide interpretation services. Charles, if you're all right with it, I'm going to go ahead and move you into the Spanish Channel now. And, Pablo, I'll leave you in to do the normal instructional paragraph at the top of the meeting or right before the meeting. It's called order. Excellent. Thank you both. Charles, can you please do a brief mic check from the Spanish Channel? Charles, can you please confirm that your mic is working? I'm not hearing you through the Spanish Channel. Yes, you're perfect. Thank you very much. I'd like the interpreter currently on the Spanish Channel to commence translation of the meeting in Spanish. For those just joining the meeting live translation in Spanish is available for the public or staff wishing to listen in Spanish. To join the Spanish Channel, click on the interpretation icon in the Zoom toolbar. It looks like a globe. Once you join the Spanish Channel, we recommend you shut off the main audio so you only hear the Spanish translation. Pablo, can you please restate that in Spanish? Let's go ahead and bring us back. Madam City Clerk, can you please call the roll? Yes, thank you, Mayor. Councilmember Schwedhelm? Here. Councilmember Sawyer? Here. Councilmember Rogers? Present. Councilmember Fleming? Here. Vice Mayor Alvarez? Present. Mayor Rogers? Here. Let the record show that all councilmembers are present. Right. City Manager Smith, if you could please introduce item three. Good afternoon, Councilmember Rogers and members of council. Item 3.1 is a downtown city asset surplus strategy. It is recommended by the Planning and Economic Development Department, Transportation and Public Works and Real Estate Services, that council hold a study session to receive information, ask questions, discuss, provide feedback, and give direction to staff regarding the downtown city asset surplus strategy. This presentation will be given by Jill Scott, Real Estate Manager. Thank you. Good afternoon, Mayor and Councilmembers. I am here today with Reisa De La Rosa of Economic Development and Andrew Triple of the Planning Department to discuss downtown asset surplus strategy. Next slide, please. So creating a downtown asset surplus strategy is something we've been working towards with staff and council for some time now. The city has contemplated many different alternatives to invest and promote an investment in the downtown, as well as options to manage the organization's very significant deferred maintenance of city buildings and of parking structures. So through the housing action plan, the downtown stationary specific plan and infill developer attraction, the city has really prioritized, promoted, and tried to incentivize affordable housing and mixed use projects in the downtown. And although we know these have been really successful, we do know that more housing is needed throughout our city and specifically in the downtown. So tonight staff is just really seeking council's direction and feedback on an asset strategy for the downtown. And this would be putting those city assets to work to create more housing for the community. And just to be really clear, we are looking at parking assets as part of the strategy. Staff is looking at parking assets with replacement of public parking. So we are looking for replacement of public parking on those assets with the addition of housing. And then I'm going to turn the next slide over to Raisa. Okay, so good afternoon, mayor and council members. So to start us off, we thought it would be helpful to walk back a few years to remember why and how we came to emphasize downtown infill housing development. So if you recall, because housing and in particular affordable housing was and, you know, really remains both a local and statewide crisis in 2015, council elevated housing as a tier one goal. And as a result of that, staff began working on the housing action plan, the mission for which was to facilitate the construction of housing for all, specifically meeting the housing needs for this full spectrum of household income groups, including those currently living within the city and those relocating to the city in the future. So that the housing action plan was approved by council in 2016. And it includes the five program areas you see on the slide, which are to increase inclusionary affordable housing, to achieve affordable affordability by design in market rate projects to assemble and offer public land for housing development, improve development readiness, and increase affordable housing investments in partnerships. So of these program areas relevant to today is program three for the assembling and offering a public land for housing development. And specifically under that goal is the tactic of identifying city and other public parcel suitable suitable for housing and to establish a process for development. So while I don't have the most recent data on hand, at the time the report was created nearly 50% of Santa Rosa residents were renters with 9% of families below poverty level. And in addition, in the report, it was recognized that about we had I think at the time about a 1% vacancy rate for residential rental units, you know, in 2016. So obviously we had a severe supply of vacant units. And it was this kind of data that really spur the aggressive and creative responses that make up the housing action plan and that that kept housing as a council priority since 2015. Next slide. So as the plan was approved in 2016, it was known at the time how prescient it would be to laying the groundwork to expedite the rebuild of homes you lost in the 2017 subsfire, but also to ensure we maintain our momentum to pursue housing for all throughout the city with with that extra emphasis of the downtown area. After the fire, we did a lot of interviews with our major employers. And there was an increase and or sort of I don't want to say was increased interest. There was at that time we understood the level of interest our major employers had in seeing additional downtown housing, both market rate and affordable housing, and how important that was to the recruitment of the workforce that they were worried about, especially after the fire losing. So it was, you know, through the process of the rebuild and the that we were able to sort of expedite and make sure that we maintain the efforts to pursue housing throughout the city. But it was in the the as a result of the conversations and specifically to the plan highlight that we gave extra emphasis to the downtown area. And through these efforts, we had really the great fortune to partner with the Council of Infill Builders to host a developer convening in 2018. And the result of that convening was twofold. First, we got the accelerated infill developments in report that you see on the slide here on the left, in which key barriers were identified and solutions recommended to encourage and expedite infill development. But we were also introduced to new developers from outside of the area who brought new ideas and a lot of resources to the table. Also in 2019, we worked with the Barrier Council to host a developer tour of the downtown and Rosalind areas that also spurred additional interest from a number of out of various developers who participated. I think on that tour, we had it was sold out. We had at least 50 developers. And again, they were mostly from the Bay Area. But we also had developers coming from out of state just a few of them from out of state. And basically, this is all to say that despite the pandemic, we still have momentum to our housing plan. We are still starting to, or I should say not so, but we are starting to see the fruits of our labor in the projects that were entitled or are currently under development right now in our downtown. And, you know, even this year, we still have interest in our downtown city-owned parcels. So before I hand it off to Andrew Triple, who's going to talk through the next slides on policy and some of the other elements that in part came out of the Housing Action Plan, I just want to remind you on the whole, as a plug for housing, that housing plays a vital role in creating the kind of balanced community that allows for fiscal, economic, and environmental sustainability over the long term. And our need for housing is multifold, obviously, but it does carry specifically in the downtown. The housing sort of brings along weaker performing uses, which given the tumultuous year we've had is an important element to our economy. So next slide and these will be presented by Andrew Triple. Great. Thank you, Ryse, and good afternoon, mayor and members of the council. To orient ourselves around today's downtown land use and development strategies, it is helpful to review the most recent policy decisions that are shaping downtown. The downtown station area specific plan update was adopted by council in fall 2020. Codification of the plan was accomplished with amendments to the zoning code and design guidelines that were also adopted in fall 2020. The adopted plan reflects six key planning goals. The top three were more residents and jobs near transit, more housing at all levels of affordability, and increased diversity in land uses. Next slide, please. And then the remaining three goals were enhanced historic character, improved connections, and new art and cultural facilities. The key land use policies that have been codified as a result of the downtown plan adoption include establishing new core station maker and neighborhood mixed use general plan land use designations as well as the zoning districts to implement them, regulating height and density through floor to area ratio or FAR, focusing ground floor activation on key streets and pursuing it largely through design approaches, eliminating the minimum parking requirement, and excluding parking from FAR calculations, and then finally using surplus parking supply to incentivize development. Next slide, please. The new downtown plan is most recent in a series of policy initiatives to support housing development. Other initiatives include permit streamlining and reduced discretionary entitlement requirements delivered through the Resilience City Development Measures established in 2018 following the Tobes Fire. The incentives made available through the downtown high density multi-family residential incentive program that was also established in 2018, the federal opportunity zones that were established in 2019, and the Renewal Enterprise District or RED, which is a regional housing action program in which the city is a partner that was established in 2020. We're happy to go into greater detail on any of these policy initiatives, but for the sake of time, let's turn to what we now know about today's housing production in the downtown area. Next slide, please. So the data reflected on this slide show housing development activity from 2016 through 2021. At the end of 2021, 1,371 dwelling units or living spaces because ADUs and junior ADUs are not classified as dwelling units were either constructed under construction or had received planning approvals. The projects reflect a mix of market rate and affordable housing types with 350 units or about 25 percent approved as affordable housing projects. Today's inclusionary housing ordinance, which Ryza referenced in her presentation, requires that the downtown projects either pay a housing impact fee or provide at least 4 percent of 4 rent units for low-income households or 5 percent of 4 sale units for moderate-income households. Next slide, please. For 2023 through 2031, the reason rena housing allocation is not additive. In other words, the city's new rena housing allocation through 2021 is 4,685 units. The housing element update, which is ongoing right now as part of the general plan update, will identify sites citywide that can accommodate the rena requirement for housing development. In the downtown area, it is projected as part of the downtown planning process that 7,000 new housing units could be developed as a result of new policies, primarily the move using FAR implemented through adoption of the downtown plan. As part of the housing element update, we are reviewing the effectiveness of programs identified in the current housing element to determine if they should be carried forward in the update. A focus of that review is housing for special needs groups, including income-restricted households. One program included in the current housing element directs the city to acquire sites for potential affordable housing projects with subsequent disposition to affordable housing providers. Next slide, please. And then I think we're going back to Jill to follow up with the next series of slides. Thank you. Thank you, Andrew. So we're talking this afternoon about putting city assets to work for the community, essentially. And we're looking at this through the goal of program three that Reisa spoke to earlier of the housing action plan, and that's to assemble and offer public land for housing development. So the actions under the surplus strategy are directly related to that, and really there would be two goals that are actions we would meet. The first being what we're talking about today is identifying downtown land assets that are really underutilized properties that could be made available for housing or mixed use development projects while still including that public use, such as public parking. And then the second portion of the strategy is to consider the public-private partnership options to address deferred maintenance of property assets. So back in 2019, staff and JLL consulting looked at really studied the downtown area and the options for this and looked at increasing availability of downtown lands for housing by really consolidating government services and making them denser, streamlining the access for the community to services, and while trying to solve that growing deferred maintenance issue, and also a big benefit would be freeing up some buildable land in the downtown area. So although staff has not had a chance yet to bring forward in a study session the public-private partnership, we call it P3 partnership options. We do plan on doing that in the near future, but we are bringing it up today because it does relate to some of the parcels that we'll be talking about in the next slides. So both of these actions that we're talking about, the two actions, looking at underutilized land and the potential for a P3 really alleviate the city of millions of dollars of deferred maintenance concerns associated with City Hall complex, the parking assets, they advance the hat goals for much-needed housing in the community and streamline government services. Next slide please. So some of you may have seen this presentation that we have as part of the downtown stationary specific plan, and this really lays out the downtown and the city-owned lots in some of the state and federal buildings as well. Some of those starred lots are really the catalytic sites that we're looking at for development, and that planning has highlighted in the downtown stationary specific plan. And why we're showing you this today is because we wanted to point out to you in red lots 10 and 11, which we'll be talking about today, as well as garage five, which is in just a little bit below that. Thank you. And then the two sites that have stars on them, and one is in red. So Central Library, the White House site, and the City Hall site. So we won't be discussing today the these three sites, Central Library, White House, or City Hall site, because that is really part of the second part of the strategy, which is strategy, excuse me, which is the potential public private partnership. So today we'll be talking mostly about 11, 10, and garage five. Next slide please. So considerations. We really reviewed the staff that you're looking at here today, along with consultants and other staff really reviewed and considered all the downtown assets for marketability, viability, underutilization, and what would, what is the potential for redevelopment. And so after looking at the P3 strategy, the ones that came to the top of the list at the time were the third street garage, which is located on the corner of third and D, and we call it parking garage five, as well as two surface lots, surface parking lots, which are located on fifth street, and that'd be parking lot 10 and parking lot 11. And then again, we're not talking about the White House site, or the City Hall site at this time, because that is included in the public private partnership strategy, which is the second part of the strategy. And so in looking at these and talking about this internally, due to many things, market conditions, lot size, specific needs of the surrounding area, staff really believes that garage five, which is the third street garage is currently likely the best opportunity to launch a market test for redevelopment of city assets in the downtown area. Next slide please. There's further considerations that we need to bring forward and for Council's consideration today. And that is the parking asset deferred maintenance. So the third street garage has about a little over three million in deferred maintenance and parking lots 10 and 11 about 1.5 million each. We've been deferring this maintenance because we've been going through this plan process and looking at all of the potential for these lots. And so we are awaiting Council's decision tonight on while we are moving forward with the lot maintenance or if we won't. Next slide please. So if Council directed staff this afternoon to move forward with a strategy, we've put together what could be a potential strategy launch timeline. It could look something like this. Garage five on third street would be considered for the first asset to market tests for development. And then we could move forward for consideration in the upcoming years of garage 11 or we could do, excuse me, lot 11 or we could do lot 11 at the same time as garage five. We would recommend that lot 10 be removed from development consideration at this time and that we probably should move forward with the reconstruction projects on that lot. And then at the same time and in the near future, staff would return to Council with a study session on the potential for the public-private partnership options. Next slide please. So in 2019, the State of California updated its surplus lands act and this update really changed things for city governments, cities, counties, and agencies. And it made things a little more difficult, I will say, or challenging for development in downtown areas, especially infill development on government property. And so what the new SLA we call it says is that government owned property must be declared surplus by its governing body prior to disposition or request for or proposal RFPs for development, even with continued use such as public parking. So we looked at this and we said, wow, this doesn't really make sense. Our parking lots are not surplus. We still need parking. We still have a community government use, but we have to declare these surplus. So we worked with HCD, the State Department of Housing and Community Services and their attorneys, and we've been working with them for almost a year now to try and streamline this process and work within the law to make this to make development of housing, which is the goal of the surplus lands act. And our current situation worked together in harmony. Unfortunately, we have not found a way to streamline this process yet. And so we do think that we would have to move forward with bringing these to council to recommend that they be declared surplus. But until the time that we do that up until that time, we will still be working with our outside attorneys to try and find a way to declare these exempt surplus if at all possible. And then the second part of that is we need to then make these available to housing sponsors for affordable housing through a notice of availability to the State Department of Housing and Community Services prior to us putting this out to any private development through an RFP process. So we would take these, put them on the list from affordable housing. We would negotiate with any affordable housing folks, developers, and see if we could come together with replacement parking and the construction of affordable housing on any of these lots that we're discussing. And then see if we can come to a development agreement with them. If we can't, then at that point, we would look to an RFP to outside developers. Now, during this process, doing the notice of availability, that is the time when we would really look to our downtown organizations and community outreach on their input on working with specific developers that we get from the notice of availability. And then also in, if we go forward with an RFP in putting together that RFP and in looking at what we get back from that RFP and responses, we would definitely be working for that downtown input and that business input. Next slide, please. Okay, so we have now the Surplus Lands Act, which is a little more, quite more stringent than it was before, as well as we have a city council surplus policy. Now, in the future, we do plan to come back to council to update our city surplus policy, but for now, we have these two policies that do overlap in a lot of areas, but also have their own sets of requirements. The Surplus Lands Act is more stringent than our surplus policy. And so today, we're looking for a little guidance from council on if we'd like to move forward with our city surplus policy as well as the Surplus Lands Act, or if we'd like to bypass portions of the city surplus policy to streamline and sort of quicken the process. And so a little bit about our city surplus policy, which is outside the Surplus Lands Act, is prior to council review, if we have to declare these parcels or parcel surplus, prior to council doing that, we would need to take them to, again, to the Housing Authority for review, recommendation, and action for recommendation to council. Then we would have to go to Planning Commission to have them review for recommendation and action to council and then proceed to council from there and then through the whole Surplus Lands Act. So today, we'll just be looking for a direction from council on if they would like us to follow that entire process or just the SLA process. Next slide, please. So next steps and all and although these are ordered one through four, likely they're all going to be happening around the same time. So the next step likely is probably number four in which we'll go to close session with council and talk about price in terms for these lots or lot, whichever the council's direction is tonight. If we do follow the city surplus policy as well as the SLA, we'll be looking to go into the Housing Authority for their review next. Then after that, the Planning Commission, then we will bring it back to council for a surplus resolution action. And then in that action for that resolution, what would be included is the reservation of appropriate right away, replacement of all public parking with the addition of housing or potentially mixed use projects. And then, of course, those developments would have to meet all the guidelines in the general plan, the zoning code, the bike and pedestrian master plan and the downtown station area specific plan. Next slide, please. At that point, once it's declared surplus, we would submit a notice of availability to HCD, making the property available to approved affordable housing sponsors. If we had any of those affordable housing sponsors interested in replacement parking and with the addition of affordable housing, we would negotiate with those interested housing sponsors. That's the time where we would look to our downtown associations and our businesses in the downtown for their input on these. And then we would look to a development agreement of some sort with the housing sponsor for development. Now, if we are not successful in negotiations there or we do not have any interest from affordable housing sponsors with the replacement of public parking, then we would move to an RFP process. And in the development of that RFP process, again, is where we were really looking for community input for our downtown organizations and our businesses in the downtown. So that is the end of our presentation. We're definitely available and willing to answer all of council's questions. But before I turn it back over to the mayor, I did want to just put into context the direction that staff is hoping to get from council tonight. And that would be number one, does council want to move forward with a downtown strategy with any of these lots or garages? If council does want to move forward, which lots or garages would we be moving forward with? And then number three, do we want to follow the city surplus plan policy as well as the SLA process, or do we want to streamline with just the SLA process? And that is the rest of my presentation. Thank you very much. Thank you so much, Jill and Raisa and Andrew and everybody else who's been working on this one. I think for the purposes of the discussion, it might be helpful if we put back up the map of the different assets that we're talking about that might make it helpful for council members. Let's go ahead and start with questions from council. Council Member Fleming. Thank you so much, Ms. Scott and Ms. Dela Rosa, for your continued, this is not the first time that we've been working on this and I just want to end Mr. Tripple for your continued dedication to our goals and revitalizing downtown as well as getting housing. I do have a couple of questions. One is pretty simple. Can you just reiterate for the council what the city versus the city process versus the surplus SLA and that you did say it, but I just want to make sure we're all super clear on what the differences and what that would mean in terms of timing and staff resources. Sure, I would be happy to. So the city surplus policy would just add a few steps to the beginning of the process. So city staff would be presenting these, would be setting up a meeting and the materials and presenting these to the housing authority for their review and recommendation. That would be about a probably six week process. Once they reviewed and hopefully recommended to council to declare these a surplus, then we would move to another six week process where we would be taking these to the planning commission for their review and their recommendation to council. Then once that is done, then we'd have another six week process where we would bring these to council for consideration. So those are not steps that are essential to the SLA process. The rest of the steps are overlapping with our policy and even more restrictive than our policy. These are steps that the city has had in our surplus policy. So and although they've been very important in the past on many different lots that we're looking at, it may not be with these. And so we're looking for council's direction on if they think that is appropriate or if we should bypass that and go directly to council. And in your opinion, is there any risk of bypassing it? Because what I can see is that it would streamline the process, but I'm trying to figure out what we trade if we do decide to go that way. Is there anything that pops up for you as a concern? I'm not seeing any major concerns right now because we've worked with housing and we've worked with planning on this. Staff has been instrumental in all of this. And so I think planning staff or housing staff would have been able to bring forward any major concerns, but we are bypassing two public meetings. So that may be a concern to council. Okay. Thank you for that information. And then I have a curiosity about slide 14 with the strategy. And I was just wondering if you could add any more information or context to the reason, the recommendation for the strategy of garage, specifically garage 11 and then removing garage or not garage 11, excuse me, lot 11 and for development and then removing lot 10. Lot 11 and lot 10 seem similar to me in both practice and on the map. And try and understand how you came to that decision might give us a little bit more insight in making this decision. I'm sure I'll start on this one. And Risa, please feel free to pop in at any time on this. So with lot 10 and the businesses that are in front of lot 10, the size of lot 10 is very narrow. The businesses are there have specific needs for large size equipment to come in. And so at this point, we looked at it, it's also one of the lots that's in the worst shape, reconstruction wise. And so we really looked at that, looked at the needs of the businesses there and the size of the lot and determined that this may be the one that we push off into the future. And then lot, garage five, I'll go with next, which is on 3rd and D street. Staff really feels that this is a great sort of center location that would be wonderful for replacement of public parking with the addition of housing. It's probably one of our best locations and a garage that is very old and in need of a lot of maintenance and would be primed for redevelopment. Lot 11, those businesses in front of lot 11 don't have the same specific needs as the ones of 10. And we think with replacement parking and housing, it could work there. It's really council's choice if they want to move forward. We do have, we did currently sell lot two, surface lot two, and they will be developing that in the future with the replacement of public parking. How fast or how slow we move forward with the next lots is really council's decision. I just do want to remind council that in within these agreements, we do need public parking and we do need to retain public parking. So within all of these agreements, if the developments don't happen for some reason, or the market changes for the worst, hopefully it'll be better. But if it changes for the worst that the city will buy back these assets as part of the agreement because we cannot you lose parking assets. So I would just caution that we should probably think about that while we're deciding how many lots we move forward with. And if we do something like sell lot 11 for development with the funds that are made from that go into the parking district for our capital improvements? Yes, they will go back to the parking enterprise fund, which is specifically for capital improvements. Excellent. Thank you for answering my questions. If I could just add just one thing, we did do a massing study on lots 10 and 11 and they are feasible. There's in addition to the reasons for lot 10 that Jill said we have less interest even as early as 2019 when we did the developer tours, we had less interest in lot 10. So in combination to the use needs of that lot, that's one thing. And lot 11 is feasible. We did do a massing study and there is interest and it's always been one of the lots that has carried more interest with this position. Okay, that's really helpful to know. Thank you. Thank you, councilmember. If there's any questions to my right. So Jill, just to clarify, so the recommendation from staff in particular to lot 10 is not to move forward with that at this point and actually to invest and repay by assumed since it's a flat lot and since it does need a lot of work, is that correct? That is correct. Okay. For garage 5, what I've heard the most from downtown businesses is a little bit of a called PTSD around the construction of the square and most of the business owners that I've talked to have been fully in favor of the vision of what downtown will be 15, 20 years from now with these sorts of projects moving forward, but really weary of the impact that it's had on their business or that it will have on their business after a pandemic after having been shut down longer for the square. How are we going to incorporate the voices of the downtown business owners to make sure that if this does come to fruition, that it's not just a shared vision of the development itself, but also a mitigation of the impacts while we get that up and built. That's a great question. So if we do go forward with an RFP, we would definitely like to work with the downtown organizations and the businesses to create and craft this RFP for this development so that it's a development that not only works for the city, it works for the community and it works for the developer. I mean, what is the point of doing it if it doesn't work for everyone? Also, looking at the downtown and the PTSD you talked about, which I completely understand, there are growing pains with this and so we realize that parking is one of those and our parking department will make every effort to find different locations for those folks to park, to make parking available for the public and to limit their concerns and really to make those downtown businesses a part of this conversation and figuring out how we make all this work. And then, Mayor, if I may, I would add that one of the fundamental differences in the reunification of Courthouse Square is that it re-bifurcated the North-South you know, corridor and the impacts of learning a new way for our community to move around the downtown, the impacts won't be as great when you're looking at some of these lots and garages. There is an issue with, you know, Third Street is our major east-west corridor through the downtown but it's, I think, slightly less of a lift to reimagine your transit compared to what we did with the square. And then the second thing that I would say is, to Jill's point, the, there are growing pains in our downtown and though we, it was difficult when the square was developed, it did spur in the end when it was completed new economic opportunities. And so we did see some movement and some expressed interest, again, from developers in that when the city put in, invested in the downtown, we did then get the hotel and some new, some new movement in long health parcels that we had not previously expected and a renewed interest in development facing the square. So it is a bit of a seesaw, I guess. No, I appreciate that. So I've heard clearly from staff and I think that don't want to speak for colleagues, they can speak for themselves. I'd be supportive of the DAO and the downtown businesses being a part of that conversation in the crafting of the RFP and then also discussion on the proposals that come back from it. There also is the first part of the surplus lands act where you have affordable housing projects that are being proposed. And I'd like to see as those come in some form of voice for downtown businesses to be at the table there as well, just in the event that we don't even get to the RFP process because a fantastic group of projects come in. Have we been in any discussion or is there a path or an avenue to be in discussion with the county in particular on this asset, given that they are in the process of moving downtown and knocking on some wood here, it will be huge stakeholders in the future of the downtown as well. We've had some preliminary conversations with the county about this, but nothing directly yet. As we're working with them on their parking needs in the downtown, we'll definitely have future discussions. Great. And then my last question is just from a staff capacity perspective. Do we have the capacity from staff to manage two of these potential sites moving forward, garage five and lot, I think it's 11, the one that's the most westward. Do we have the staff capacity to do both at the same time, or would it be better fruits for our labor to focus on one asset such as garage five and let staff really focus their attention on that? From the real estate services perspective, it would be easier for us to focus on garage five first and to move forward with that, but we could bring on consultants if council would prefer to work on both at the same time. Andrew, Raisa? Well, it's a heavy lift, but everything is possible as we've seen repeatedly in the past five years. And I would support Jill in that we can start with garage five and then bring things on following that. I don't know if the city manager had anything that she wanted to add. Council Member, Mayor Rogers, one of the things that I believe we should focus on is just intentional engagement. So I think it would be best if we brought one project at a time and then, you know, thought about the next project. I think it is important the community engagement piece is going to be a heavy lift and considering we're coming out and we want to go into economic recovery, I think we should have an intentional focus on how we stage these projects. So I would prefer that we do one project at a time. Okay. Council Member Sawyer? Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Jill. What I want to hear is a reiteration of the path that does not endanger our ability to maintain the parking. So I know that each time there were several options and the word surplus parking to me is um are two words that I wouldn't necessarily put together at this time. I know in the future we will probably have surplus parking but I don't see that on the I'm truly surplus parking. I don't see that on on the horizon anytime soon. So I think there I think there is a I want to take the path or I want to can you tell me the path that would most endanger or the ability to what path would compromise conceivably our ability to replace the parking that would be disturbed by the project. That's the one I want to avoid. Which one which one is the which one would would be the most what damaging to our parking numbers potentially as far as development? Which location or which process? Which process? That's that's the process that I'm interested in not following. In other words if we were to put it out to declare it surplus garage five for instance and then have a um a developer come in and they were uh able to give us a project that did not include the maintaining our parking is that a possibility if they were able to make that pencil because I can't believe they're given the cost of per space of parking these days. I can't imagine anyone coming in and just putting in an affordable housing project and still be able to replace the parking numbers. There's several parts to that question that I'd like to share with you. First of all I agree with you I think it would be very difficult for a hundred percent affordable developer to be able to replace parking as well but that is how the city would put out the council's direction. That's the staff's intent anyways. That is how we would put it out is that we do require replacement of public parking. There's two different ways to look at when you're talking about surplus and I I'm sure you probably understand this I just want to make sure that everyone listening does. We did do a parking surplus study in 2019 pre-COVID. We do have a little over a thousand spaces of surplus parking in the downtown and that was pre-COVID when it was busier. So even though we do have some surplus in the downtown our intention is not to take away from that surplus with any of these projects. So once we put the project out we declare it surplus and I again completely understand that that does not make sense. It doesn't make sense to most of us but it is part of the process. Once we declare it surplus we put it out to those HCD developers. It will be for replacement parking if they can't do it and then we go to an RFP process. It has to that RFP process has to be the same as the process that we put out through the surplus lands act to the affordable housing developers. So if we wanted to consider if council wanted to consider less than the full amount of replacement parking that would have to be considered in the first part and in the second part. So with the affordable housing developers and in the RFP process. So it is an expensive endeavor especially since we've seen replacement parking numbers as high as 50,000 per space. So really high number right now. It doesn't mean that a market rate development and a affordable development together could not do the majority of the replacement parking but we don't know until we put it out and we see what we get back. We look at the performers and we make sure that there's a there there that there's looking you know working with the downtown working with our city staff working with the council. Is this a project that benefits the city benefits the downtown and the developer. Does this work for the community. That's why we're putting this forward as sort of a strategy for a market test. This process I think I'm answering your question council members where we have no intention of endangering the parking with this process and it it could potentially make make it so that it's not a doable process and a performer for a developer but we just don't know until we put it out and test the market. Thank you and I think what I was concerned with was the the possibility that we could where we would not be able to to request or demand condition the project on replacement parking and I was thinking that if you were if we were to go down the affordable housing we were to surplus it and then put it into the to put it out to affordable housing projects that indeed they could bypass the condition of replacement parking but that is not the case we could we can condition we can condition it at in any of the paths that we take we can condition it to supply us with at least comparable numbers in parking regardless of which path we take that is correct and even in the resolution when we declare the property surplus we will say that it is with some replacement of public parking. So after after we hear from the public public I'm going to be interested in hearing a strong recommendation coming from the economic development and and and you Jill on on the direction to take which gives us the gives us what we what we're looking for at least in the near future and potentially into the far future for our downtown I'm not I'm not looking at this point into reducing or or endangering our parking numbers because they are so right now very vital to the health of our downtown at the same time that the that the new development is also vital to the to the economic health of our downtown and is definitely in our future. Thank you councilmember. Madam city attorney last question I had for you was related to a correspondence that all council members received alleging that this would be inappropriate to move forward with this with the CEQA designation that this action tonight in it of itself doesn't require a CEQA analysis can you address that a little bit for the council? Certainly this is a study session there will be no action no formal action taken yes the council will discuss the different options will give some direction to staff but because there is no formal action taken and this is such a preliminary step there is no no requirement for any CEQA review at this stage certainly as we move into the next stages there will be appropriate CEQA review undertaken at that time but at this at this time this particular study session is exempt from CEQA requirements. Okay councilor there are any other questions before I go to public comment? All right seeing none if you're interested in providing comment on today's study session go ahead and hit the raise hand feature on your Zoom we also have the podiums open for folks if they'd like to join us to make comment here in the chamber I'll start with Natalie followed by Callum. Can you hear me? Yes we can. Perfect Natalie Natalie Valfour representing our poor business center so I was going to make only one point but listening to the conversation I'm going to throw something else in there so I think it would be good to ask staff I would love staff to explain when they say replace public parking what that means because let's say garage five has a I think it has 194 spaces you tear down the garage you put 194 spaces back in addition to residential above so the increased demand reduces supply and this is the explanation I have continued to been given over many meetings with staff so just wanted if you could clarify staff to clarify about that would be great so regarding surplus and how garage five can be deemed surplus I read the SLA and I'm not sure and maybe you guys have lawyers I know better than me but it doesn't make sense how that parcel in and of itself can be considered underutilized just because the city doesn't have underutilized areas because it's actually 77% utilized in your downtown specific plan under mobility it's it has a table if you guys want to look at it at some point and garage five is 77% which is most and it's actually 11% higher than the second highest so staff also brought up maintenance and I understand that but I don't see how that leads to surplus I get maintenance I get the need for housing I get all of that but this is surplus through the SLA so if that can be explained that would be great as well and so really my request today oh actually sorry one more thing is when there is a discussion about disruption of businesses and property owners there is a short term but there is also a long term and I've never seen a report or a study provided showing yes here is the potential negative impacts to the business community it is always yes here is the positive impacts of housing and here maybe can the businesses deal with it so if we could have some sort of this happen in the specific plan too I went through that entire process and it's never from the eyes of the business owners so whether or not it affects them it affects us our building would die and we'd leave 50 of yes but it affects everyone else not sure but it would be great to be able to have a report that focused on that and as well as the data and evidence staff used to to classify garage five underutilized and thus surplus and able to be looked at in this and this fashion thank you and we don't get into a back and forth during the public comment but I did take down your questions and we'll ask staff to follow up on that after we finish our public comment let's go to Callum followed by other Natalie hello mayor vice mayor council members I'd first like actually to take the opportunity to welcome the city manager to Santa Rosa we're extremely happy to have you on board and very excited to work with you to the matter at hand I would just like to register our support as generation housing and meeting the policy director I would like to register to support for a downtown strategy or market test for garage five while you know the previous speaker she did know you know some concerns that we certainly should have addressed and and I am also very interested in hearing staff's comments the fact of the matter is and I know every single council member every single person in that room on this call understands that affordable housing is of utmost priority at this time and I'm also really excited that we have a variety of projects that are going to be developed over the course of next several years in the railroad square area and so certainly having some sort of availability in terms of parking space is useful but we are always at the mind as you know housing advocacy organization and as someone as a group that promotes walkable communities that less parking to the extent possible is always better so that we can drive people towards more transit oriented options public services etc I do understand that replacing parking could potentially be cost prohibitive which might possibly result in a need for market rate developments with our inclusionary ordinance I'm confident that we can still hopefully get a number of affordable units during the process of negotiating so those are my comments I appreciate your time and I look forward to hearing what you guys have to say about this thank you all right thank you James we'll move on to Natalie Hi thank you this is Natalie Chilurzo from Russian River Brewing Company we're located at 725 4th Street thank you Mayor Rogers and fellow council members for taking public comment during the study session also thank you Jill for your informative presentation and thank you to Rice as well we met a few months ago in regards to some of our concerns with lot 10 in particular I understand that there is no action today and I do appreciate you're taking some input by by the public as well so I would just uh just support what Jill had presented in her presentation to remove lot 10 from consideration so I think many of you are aware of our location in downtown Santa Rosa thankfully we're coming up on our 18-year anniversary this year we're also hopefully fingers crossed in the process of extending our lease for another 10 years I know that my landlord is also on this call because we do have a concern that if we do enter into another 10 years on our lease and the city decides to move forward with with developing lot 10 we would have to shut down not necessarily because of the restaurant operations but because of the beer manufacturing operations Jill had alluded to some of our business operations with the large equipment such as weekly bulk gas deliveries we also do daily transfers from of pallets of beer from our Windsor brewery and need to utilize a forklift to access that parking lot we have spent grains picked up on a weekly basis and we also utilize the forklift and then Vinnie and I need to replace our brew house in the next few years and we would need to access the tanks inside of the brewery using large cranes and that can only be done from the back so anyway I just wanted to throw in my two cents today and I just really appreciate everybody's time and I totally support more housing in downtown Santa Rosa thank you well thank you so much Natalie appreciate the comments we'll go to Madonna hi can you hear me yes we can thank you so much for taking my question and our comment uh Mayor Rogers Vice Mayor Alvarez you guys are doing an amazing job I just want to give you a shout out Jill thank you for your presentation my name is Madonna I'm a project director here at Disability Services and Legal Center at 521 Mendocino Avenue and I'm calling just to be in support of the affordable housing and if the projects in the past I know some city has come to us in regards to the disabled community and what housing needs may look like for someone in a bigger wheelchair or you know different forms of you know what equipment they use so I just want to let you guys know that we are still here and available if you need any guidance as far as you know grab bars or maybe the person is a very overweight and in the wheelchair so they need a bigger door those are things that come up quite often for us here so I just want to say that I am in support of having the affordable housing and we are downtown we do support support the housing projects downtown and again thank you and I yield my time all right thank you so much see if we have any other public comments on this study session Mr. DeWitt I'll come to you at the podium thank you my name is DeWitt I'm from Roseland I'm also a member of the Sonoma County Housing Advocacy Group started over 25 years ago and one of the main things that group did was look to see if any surplus properties were available from city county state or even federal possibilities to utilize for affordable housing you had to be on a list to get notified by the city of any surplus properties and what the strategy might be for disposing of a surplus property one of the dilemmas that's come over the years is the changing of staff has made it so that those surplus property lists are not readily available and distributed to members of the public or organizations interested in utilizing the efforts of surplus property being used for affordable housing it is now time to make sure that you folks remember the Sonoma County Housing Advocacy Group is still interested in doing anything possible to help with affordable housing to be provided upon any property that the city of Santa Rosa declared surplus one of the real dilemmas during the housing crisis the homeless crisis which you continue to declare is you don't save housing that you own you've actually torn down houses over the years I believe the member on the board now the longest time Mr. Sawyer he was here when 17 housing units were torn down on stony point road to build a road widening project afterwards the properties that were left over have just sat there and that could be surplus property here in downtown Santa Rosa you tore down a house across the street from the police department no big deal to you folks yet you still say there's a housing crisis and there's a homeless crisis so any properties that you own in downtown Santa Rosa especially if any of them had residents in them in the past should be utilized again for residential there's an opportunity for you folks to show that you truly are trying to solve the crisis by doing what was once called infill downtown city-centered growth instead of building on the green fields at the farthest edges of the town which is currently what has been happening for the last 20 years so I just want to reaffirm to you folks there are people in the community that want to make sure that we know about every property that's listed as surplus we'll put that in writing now you've heard it here in person Sonoma county housing advocacy group has existed for 25 years and none of these problems have been solved by you thank you thank you mr. Dewitt I'll go ahead and bring it back from public comment first we'll start with a couple of the questions that I heard and I'll start with with you Jill there was a question about will the rfp or will the requirement be suggested to be 194 public spaces replacement plus then potentially the demand for any residential use it will be a requirement for replacement of the public the public parking spots that are in each location so the full amount of public parking spots in that location I would say that we need to work with the community and with planning a little bit more on if we need to increase that parking or what the requirements would be for development in addition with that parking or maybe Andrew would like to chime in the one thing I would like to add to just for context is there is a group across the city including public works transit planning where we're looking at parking at home and downtown development and parking needs generally to align it better with our services through the transit and transportation department etc so it's we're not looking at parking and isolation and assets and isolation we're looking at at it over the long term for our broader city goals right and thanks Jill I think and rice I think from a planning perspective because the minimum parking requirement is a development standard in the zoning code we would want to do that study and analysis as part of the RFP development process so that we have a clear understanding of what is needed then going into the RFP process and then subsequent development so that a requirement for parking spaces would then be reflected in in a development agreement rather than to become a requirement of a project asset under those planning review okay thank you there was also a question about or a questioning of the city's process in declaring that garage as underutilized given its 77 percent was the number quoted use can you address that a little bit how did we come to determine that that constituted underutilized or what does that mean within the confines of this the surplus lands act and that's a great question as well we don't mean underutilized as the parking is not utilized it is it is utilized and it's a very important parking location we mean that overall the parking the land itself and the airspace is underutilized so we could make more and a denser um and a denser development to get more for the community more for the city's dollar by including housing and parking together in the space so we're not looking to you know get rid of parking we're not looking to demolish what's on there we're looking to augment what's already there okay and then finally there's the question about the impact for the businesses and i think if i'm reading between the lines a little bit uh and i've heard this a little bit from other business owners we oftentimes talk sort of in a global view of what the projects we do in downtown will do for the overall economics of downtown and for the city but not getting into the sort of the micro view of the direct impact to the existing businesses that are there can you maybe it's reisa can you talk a little bit about what type of analyses we do do and can do uh and how we can take in sort of specifics from those businesses about the short-term impacts and the long-term impacts of these projects as we move through the process i know that's a very broad question well sure i mean we've done market studies um you know specific to development but we can add to the studies and we need to update those anyway um the uh something more specific and calling it more specifically um the impact uh both during development as well as post development when we have more uh residential units downtown um what that means to local businesses i mean on the whole um you know we're seeing an increased you know across the nation i mean i think i was in a tiny town in um in kentucking was surprised that they had more downtown housing and it's kind of a rural um area than we did and i was talking to somebody about and it is it just has to do with the long-term support in the end of the small generally uh small businesses that make up the the um make up downtown so you know housing as vitality to downtown um it offers a 24 seven uh kind of presence um it this presence depending on the density you know helps with um other safety issues um it has the potential to help with safety issues etc but really in the end and you know it depends on what businesses you're talking to of course um but um the opportunity for businesses to have more um uh the patrons of their business more readily available to them matters um and then um some subset to this is you know in our recruitment that economic development is done you know specifically to bring some of the amenities that we know that we need um for example um a grocery store or drug store when we're talking to some of the big providers um you know their answer to us is we're not interested because you do not have the density um so once you you don't have enough of people living in um you know per square mile right um specific to the downtown and so it's a little bit of a chicken egg in terms of what what kind of businesses or additional businesses and amenities we do recruit um we do have a um have been directed particularly by national chains that provide some of the larger um amenities the directive to to add residential housing in the downtown so um hopefully that answers that um we can do additional studies and we need to and um in the meantime we have um models um and input from other areas right so now before I bring it back to council members for comments Jill can you go through the three things that you're asking for direction from council on uh one more time yes so I'd be happy to so um number one does council want to move forward with the downtown asset strategy on one or more of the parcels that we've discussed and number two um which specific parcels um and in what order would council like a staff to um to consider and um the third one would be do we want to follow the city surplus um guidelines as well as the SLA or do we want to go directly to council and then follow the more stringent SLA process okay I heard council member Sawyer with some pretty strong opinions on this one so I'm going to start at his end of the dais thank you mayor um well I am interested in in moving forward with our downtown strategy um the garage the was recommended in garage 10 or a lot 10 in leaving that um for another time another discussion and um and then put starting with garage five and then if there was a um uh an opportunity to do some um work if necessary on 11 um it is an old surface lot all of our surface lots are old actually and garage five is our oldest garage and probably is definitely in need of major work if we weren't going forward with with a project um so I am looking to um if we have to I mean I don't like calling it surplus because it doesn't feel like surplus parking to me or but it is an old building I'd like to go through a process that that um does uh you put it out with an RFP and I believe that that is if I'm not mistaken that would be the city's surplus process am I am I mistaken in that Jill so it's all one process um which gives which gives us the most protection sorry about that I was having trouble with my meeting um the it's all one process really um when it comes to the RFP so we would go um to we would declare it surplus then we would go through the surplus landsac process of putting it out to um low income developers affordable housing developers if that did not work then we would go with an RFP the process for the surplus policy is does does council want uh staff to go to through our policy first which would add the layer of going to the housing authority and to the planning commission prior to coming to council to declare it surplus or does council want us to go just bypass those steps go directly to council and then proceed with hcd list and then an RFP as as the subject matter expert which one which of those options would you would you be um uh recommending to the council um you know we would like to expedite this as and streamline it as much as possible and the SLA process is already quite um long and more stringent than our policy so we would prefer to come directly to council and then well I should only speak for myself but um real estate services would prefer to come directly to council and then move through the whole SLA process well being able to expedite the process is part of the part of for me part of the equation that I would like to um uh support so I would support that the going directly to council then using the using the city's process um of surplus etc and and taking your recommendation that's where I would go council member sped up thank you mr. mayor and thank you for all the presentations on this very vital issue to the health of the city of Santa Rosa and I really did appreciate the explanation of surplus because I was struggling with that reading this whole process but your explanations were very helpful and you know I appreciated it either you talked about the chicken and egg situation where and I think the way you started this jail with work and harmony because I think we all recognize we need parking and housing but what comes first and what's the best way to do that so you know for me um I do want us to move on this process prioritize garage five I'm also supportive of removing lot 10 from this process and I am also in support of stream aligning the process and any lessons learned with this first um experience with garage five we apply that learnings to any future processes moving into the future thank you council member rogers okay uh so I would like to um move forward with um garage five um in favor of definitely uh what involves public engagement because I believe that that is important for us to have public engagement um and I do support the rp process because I also believe that that is very important for us to have uh that process um I don't even know if these go together um because the more you explain it the more I get confused but um in favor of it being expedited um and uh to remove lot 11 the math isn't up 10 remove 10 sorry yeah lot 10 there we go so those are all my in supports thank you council member Fleming thank you mr mayor I concur with my colleagues and what I like about this process is that staff is doing an excellent job of balancing the the fact of the matter which we know that bringing housing affordable and marker eight housing downtown will bolster our business community but that in that process you know the the truth on the ground is that it is difficult and what I really like about miss chelorzo's comments in particular is that she went walk through the steps of how her business would specifically be impacted and it's really helpful to understand how the space and the space around a business is vital to a business and our business community is is an important and essential stakeholder to downtown as is providing them and us with the benefits of having the housing so I like the 30 000 foot view that we hold as a council and mediating that with your excellent outreach and input and so I am in favor of the expedited process of the surplus lands act I'm in favor of starting with garage five I think that it's um going to be a challenging project to start with garage five but it also presents us with the greatest benefit for our inputs and then like council member Sawyer said we can take that as a test study and and use the lessons learned to apply it to to other projects in the city and then I am fully in support of removing garage or excuse lot 10 from the equation at this time all right mr vice mayor thank you mayor I do have a couple questions uh in regards to the statement of the buyback program uh would the buyback price be the market rate or the original price which we sold the the property at it depends on what we negotiate but we always try to negotiate the original price that we sold the property for thank you in regards to the SLA in comparison to the city uh policy from my understanding it'd be saving us at least three to four months uh in the process but I also heard that when it came to neighborhood meetings or concerned citizens two meetings would not be had did I understand that correctly if we went through the expedited process well we wouldn't have you having a housing authority meeting and a planning commission meeting on it but we would still definitely be having many meetings with the downtown organizations and the businesses for community engagement during this rfp or during the first projects first process with the affordable housing members so I don't think that those processes would um expediting this process would take away from any community engagement I'm very happy to hear that and with that being said I I am definitely in support of moving forward uh with garage five uh and leaving uh lot 10 out of the equation for now and uh I do prefer the SLA uh method and and I do love that we're we're seeing an incorporation of mixed use with the residential as well as the the parking and I guess my last question would be is there a model and I have not seen it where we have commercial on ground the first ground and we have parking above it and then residential above that is that something that I don't think it's ever happened in in San Rosa but I'm also looking at the Bethlehem Towers and seeing how the sky might just be the limit I can't think of a model like that in Santa Rosa I actually can't think of a model like that that I've seen in other cities right so maybe you have yeah normally we see some sort of parking on the ground floor maybe with a mix of of um mixed use or commercial yeah I've seen a variety of different um ways in which parking um is situated in other cities generally in bigger cities so I've seen um things in San Francisco and LA for example right I think the specifics of it sorry Andrew oh no no that's fine and I think to add to that you know it oftentimes to be able to do what they call those minor buildings on the ground floor that that has the mixed use component to it then to have several um uh layers of parking and then to follow up with the residential component above that oftentimes depends upon the lot size you have to be able to have that space to construct you know the liner buildings and and um and then the parking access as part of that ground floor um program so there there it could be the reality that this this particular site would not be conducive to that approach but you know certainly a development team I'm sure would examine that as uh as part of their um design process and as a quick example of that um on the liner thing um so I think garage seven if I recall correct not cross seven the seventh street garage um if I recall correctly had some space in front of it so that it could have it could accommodate some small retail and then the parking behind that never came to fruition but I think um it was Santa Rosa's attempt at one point um to at least have uh active ground floor in front of the garage that exists behind it so it may not be on the second floor but um we've seen models in that way well thank you all regardless for for elaborating on on this crazy idea or see that we've seen in in definitely larger metropolitan cities and I thank you for that thank you council members so it sounds like you have pretty unanimous support from the council on moving forward on garage five I want to heed the city manager's warning of or I I guess uh vision of being intentional and how we do things and focusing uh to make sure that we are able to deliver quickly and efficiently on things so I'm fine with starting with just garage five I think that that process also allows us to repave uh lot 10 ahead of time and make sure that we have that asset available as well because there will be a disruption to parking as we move forward on this and making sure that we don't over leverage ourselves by having one in construction for a project another underway for a second project and a third that needs to be repaved all at the same time I think will be a nice delicate dance that will benefit the downtown uh ultimately I also want to reiterate what I heard from staff and what I've heard from the community and that's a desire for downtown businesses to be at the table in discussions about what projects come forward in the sla process and then if we go to an rfp ultimately how that rfp is both crafted and who's selected uh just make sure that those voices are heard uh as we move forward I also heard a desire and I think it's a good one for us to consider as we continue to move forward on how we include the the voices of the individual business needs and I know that staff has worked really closely to do so and and that's part of the lot 10 conversation and just making sure that we're again being intentional and how we do that outreach to folks who will be impacted here as we move through the process will be will be uh important for us thank you to Andrew and to Raisa and to Jill uh for all of your work on this uh I'm going to follow your your recommendation on question number three about doing more expedited uh for the sla process and I look forward to us having this back in front of us soon so that we can move this project forward and ultimately help build that vibrancy downtown uh item city manager do you have any comments to add here at the end or do we have sufficient direction from council we have direction we know um which way have we've instructed staff to go and I just want to thank staff um this is a heavy lift and they've been working on this for quite some time so I just want to thank staff and the city attorney's office for bringing this forward today thank you all right thank you everybody we will take a break we don't start our regular council meeting until four o'clock so we'll be back at that time for our regular council meeting and we're back madam city clerk can you please call the roll thank you council member schwedhelm here council member soyer here council member rogers president council member fleming here vice mayor alvarez president mayor rogers here let the record show that all council members are present all right welcome everybody madam city attorney can you please do a report out for our our closed session that we had earlier certainly thank you mr mayor um the council met in closed session on item 2.1 which is a conference with the labor negotiators um the council gave direction to the negotiation team and no final action was taken thank you all right we have no proclamations tonight no presentations let's move on to our staff briefings good evening so the omicron variant continues to aggressively spread throughout the county over the course of the past two weeks sonoma county's case rate has increased to more than 206 cases per 100 thousand per day in the past week over 6000 new cases were reported to county health officials bringing the total number of active cases to 24 000 large gatherings continue to be restricted to the sonoma county's health officers health order excuse me which will remain in effect until february the 11th now for those who are interested in being boosted or vaccinated beginning this saturday the county of sonoma will open a large-scale vaccination clinic at the sonoma county fairgrounds for the next four weeks from 9 a.m to 4 p.m each day these are appointments are not needed but you can make a guaranteed appointment and guarantee your spot on myterm.ca.gov in addition the federal government has launched a website for the public to request for free at home COVID-19 tests per household they can be ordered at covidtest.gov and orders are generally shipped between 7 to 12 days more information about COVID-19 response is available online at socoemergency.org thank you also do we have any questions on item 7.1 all right let's go to 7.2. Good afternoon mayor rogers vice mayor avarez and members of the council magali day is here director of community engagement with a report on the community empowerment plan update so with the mary lou lowrider patrol car project we're excited to announce that the artwork has been completed and the final protective clear coat will be finalized tomorrow january 6th thank you to mani aguilada and his team for all of their work and contributions to making that happen next the car will go to the jihito's car club to have a stereo system installed in addition the interior of the car is currently being upholstered and will be ready in a few weeks after the previously mentioned work next we'll be installing the rims tires and placing the srpd logos on the doors of the car multicultural roots project the project staff have been busy interviewing community members and researching historical stories we'd like to thank the following community members whose stories will be featuring in the upcoming weeks for their time and for sharing their stories and community contributions we'd like to thank dr frank chong chantel riz lores bailey bernice espinoza they're younger lori fong and many others which will be interviewing and featuring soon additionally we have six interviews in the process of being scheduled with members of our black indigenous people of color community and i'd like to take second to recognize and thank our vistas and our vistas are recent sonoma state graduates mattie cox and haley cats who are working day to day on this project and doing an excellent job we're very fortunate to be also working with an amazing intern rocio arjon from the university of san francisco was working on her masters in public health on evaluating the first year of the project of the multicultural roots project and have an evaluation report to share by march the preliminary feedback we've heard thus far has been that one this is our readership's favorite part of the city connections newsletter two community is excited to see black indigenous people of color being highlighted and uplifted three that the public loves learning about santa rosa and sonoma county's history that they've stories that they've never heard before so our team is also working on other ways to expand this program by including video interviews radio interviews and possibly in person displays when it is safe to do so and i just want to thank all of our community organizations who have helped us with with our reach and i've been sharing the multicultural roots project on our social media pages the community advisory board meets tomorrow january 26 at 6 p.m this meeting is open to the public and is comprised of community representatives from each district the cab will be making funding decisions for their fourth quarter community improvement grant cycle the cab grant program offers many grants up to $2,500 for neighborhood and community groups to implement a community project such as creating a mural conducting a neighborhood cleanup day planting a community garden and more so the cab will also hear a presentation on the city's capital improvement program and provide inputs to staff on the cip budget priorities so the meeting is over zoom and the link can be found on srcity.org's website lastly very important operation for our team and our local nonprofits the choice cycle 11 requests for qualifications on january 10th the san rosa violence prevention partnership released the cycle 11 community helping our indispensable children excel grant program requests for qualifications there's currently $750,000 in funds allocated to this grant cycle we are seeking applicants who will provide programming and services that aligned with our most recent community needs assessment and four focus areas from the community safety scorecard those being school readiness school engagement and truancy prevention street outreach and mediation and workforce development so examples of some of these include mental health services pro social activities and prevention and intervention services this critical grant program is funded by measure o and provides many needed services for youth and families which the community requested during the 2020 community empowerment plan listening sessions and through our input and data opportunities so that is the end of my report also my apologies to the translator for being so enthusiastic and saying all this so quickly thank you thank you for your enthusiasm deputy director i'll look to the council to see if there are any questions on your staff briefing tonight seeing none i'd just say keep up the good work on it we'll go to public comment hold on mr. DeWitt we'll go to public comment for our staff briefings like we always do i'll start with folks on zoom if you have any comments go ahead hit the raise hand feature seeing none we'll come back here to the chambers go ahead mr. DeWitt hello sir my name is dwayne deWitt i'm from rosalind i was glad to hear that presentation it's the first time i've seen that director of that little department since july of last year when she spoke outside with mr. Schwedhelm and other staff members and the local chapter of the NAACP it's a good thing that we're having more people from black indigenous and uh cultural groups involved in the things that are occurring but in that one project she was talking about at the first i think it's really important that you not forget the older folks the folks that are in the neighborhoods that might not be on your internet and you're zooming and your approaches you take now there are a number of world war two veterans still around and their spouses who i think would be really good people to talk with and having this historical approach for a multicultural presentation did you know that we had a hero from the united states army's 442nd combat regimental team of the nissai the japanese americans who went and fought for the united states against the nazis in italy in world war two atman's family was over in roseland his wife is still there these are the kind of folks that a lot of people would learn good things from if they were able to participate in this situation but they don't really know about it as a matter of fact i've never seen anybody from this community engagement department unless you come down to their spot and then participate in the way they want you to do it and then it's all carefully structured what used to be considered the community action team that started over 25 years ago morphed into this thing called the community advisory board and it's essentially just become almost like a slush fund for local folks you don't get any money from measure o unless you're in the know that's what i was told by somebody and it's the kind of thing where they're helping those folks that already know it shouldn't be that way it should be something that people in the community can come to someone in the community and they'll work with them the guy that was chosen to work over in roseland nobody really knew he was there and now he's been hired by the city it's quite interesting when you talk about that stuff one of the things i think is really important right now especially in this discussion is tomorrow they're going to talk about giving some money to a large well-funded organization to do a bit of politics now i'm a housing advocate and i'm always there for housers but i don't think generation housing should be coming down here and asking for some of the money for them to do their political approach they've got dough they were founded by st joseph's of uh sisters of st joseph's of orange memorial hospital now providence they got the dough to go thank you thank you seeing no others move towards the podium i'll bring it back any other comments to staff on item number seven thank you so much thank you deputy director we'll move on to our city manager and city attorney reports we'll start with city manager smith tonight good evening mayor rogers and members of council so i am pleased to announce last week the city's north trunk sewer replacement project achieved a major civil engineering milestone completing the successful installation of approximately a thousand linear feet of 18 inches of sewer pipeline at depths up to 35 feet below the surface using trenchless technologies so i would like to thank everyone who contributed to the completion of the significantly critical improvement to our city's infrastructure and hopefully we see more to come thank you all right any questions from council and i apologize city manager where was that pipe put it is the north trunk sewer replacement project i don't have the exact address in front of me but i can get that for you great thank you we'll go on to our city attorney report thank you mr mayor i have two items to report on tonight we'll start with the charter review committee update the charter review committee held its first meeting in mid no mid november as you know there are 21 members on the committee and it's really been a very strong and collaborative group so i've been very appreciative of all of their work the committee is walking through systematically reviewing and discussing the issues that were recommended by council and patty sisco who is chair of the committee is here today by zoom we're looking for her um and she's going to provide the update once she is into the system chair sisco if you are on the zoom can you please raise your hand by dialing star nine or using the raise hand feature in zoom and perhaps while we wait to locate her if we could go on to your update on the third district's seat and then we'll come back uh yes thank you so the second item i'm going to report on is the uh an update on where we are in in the council vacancy um as you'll recall last december um councilmember tibbetz announced his resignation his resignation left the district three seat vacant um with three years remaining in the term so the council met in a special meeting on december 21st and made the decision to go ahead and temporarily fill the position by appointment uh once appointed the the appointee will take the seat immediately thereafter and will serve for about nine or ten months uh filling in temporarily until the next until the november election uh permanent replacement will then be selected by the voters of district three in that uh that november election so in terms of the appointment process um council agreed to a two-week application period uh that began on wednesday january fifth and closed on wednesday january 19th we received six applications those applications are now public um and they are available for public review on the city's website um what i found in looking for them the easiest path was simply to search for city of san arosa um council vacancy um i can give the the full uh uh site name but it's a little bit more awkward and i did find it quite readily um by simply doing that search um the six applicants will be reviewed by the council will be interviewed i'm sorry by the council in a public session on february eighth we haven't yet set the start time but we will we'll talk into the applicants and and we'll set that schedule and that session will be broadcast also want to note that the public was invited to submit interview questions it was that same two-week period of january fifth through january 19th we received no proposed interview questions so the next step is the february eighth meeting uh the interviews the six applicants will be interviewed and the council will is anticipated to make the appointment uh at the end of those interviews so that's where we are on that and let me see if if chair sisco is yet uh on on our zoom chair sisco if you are dialing in by a telephone number with the last four digits of one nine eight four please lower your hand and raise your hand to indicate that is you she's get she's getting on now i just contacted her apologize for that confusion and mayor rogers while we're waiting on that information the location was off chanty road near franklin and humboldt street and i just want to remind you that the reason why the trench trench list technology was so important was because it's a high traffic area you know going up a hill so i just wanted to note that and while we wait for the chairs this uh tramp is this technology transferable to other projects i am certain that it is and we can provide you with some additional information perfect and i understand that chair sisco is now online and available and has she been promoted yes she is on the zoom and can enable her camera to provide her update great thank you very much and welcome chair sisco and thank you great good good to see you i always have trouble with this part so appreciate your patience waiting for me to get in okay um penny sisco uh chair of the charter review committee here tonight to give you just an update of our uh process and progress um on the charter review committee uh our first meeting was held uh november 17th uh it took a little bit of time from the time that you made your appointments to get all the committee members uh set up with uh city email and ipad so that that we could do our work that first meeting uh introduced us to the charter our roles and responsibilities in reviewing potential amendments to the charter and typical orientation matters regarding the brown act in conflict of interest loss the committee uh indicated the desire to look at all of our future agenda items through an equity lens and set about developing a set of principles to guide our work several committee members uh sat on the recent county redistricting committee and brought forward as a template the principles utilized by that committee with the guidance of sakura shields uh our diversity equity inclusion officer uh we shaped our equity principles to fit our charge the committee has agreed to keep the equity principles as a standing agenda item to evolve as the committee sees fit uh the committee understands that there are deadlines to meet in order to get our recommendations finalized and the council we understand that the council will be holding two public meetings prior to finalizing what will go to the ballot our plan is to complete our work by the end of april so that council can meet the august deadline of preparing measures for the ballot hold their two public meetings that they they will need to hold we also understand that council may choose to do some polling on potential recommendations so we understand we have a timeline we received the 12 topics submitted to us by council and separated out the three items that could only be amended by charter as opposed to those that could either be by charter amendment or council ordinance and we prioritize those for consideration first by the committee those three items are council compensation directly elected mayor and rake choice voting the committee prioritized council compensation uh as first to consider and began to review compensation of council to comparable cities the ballot measure uh that uh failed uh on compensation 20 years ago provisions that exist in the charter currently for increasing compensation that have not been utilized and reviewed a copy of a ballot measure that was successful in berkeley in increasing compensation and um i'm summarizing tonight our process but if you have specific questions as to the specifics of our discussion i'm happy to answer those the the general leading of the committee in dealing with increased compensation was to increase compensation the issue being the method of calculating a reasonable number and again the general leading towards some percentage of the adjusted median income as a particular method however committee members uh indicated their decision on this would be tied to our decision uh regarding a directly elected mayor those are linked so it was put on hold until we could have that discussion uh and more fully uh considered the issue of increased compensation um okay so uh our last meeting we took up the uh directly elected mayor uh we received education about a strong mayor versus a council city manager type of process uh we had received one letter from the public in favor of a strong mayor uh excuse me following the uh the staff presentation we agreed to begin the discussion allowing that this would not have to be the final answer from any of the committee members because of the expectation of guest speakers and further information from staffs answering questions that the committee members had made we kind of wanted to get the discussion started and take the temperature of the committee members at that time uh the general direction of the majority of the committee was not in favor of a directly elected mayor however in agreement to fully examine the issue with information and speakers from the next couple of meetings we will continue that discussion uh once that recommendation is finalized we plan to return to council compensation and to uh on to rank choice voting our process uh has been uh to get education provided by staff on the agenda items questions for staff to research and return to the committee and then onto discussion hoping to arrive at a recommendation sue gallagher and rob jackson have been amazing in providing all these answers which i'm sure you understand can be quite uh legalese and thick to the committee and uh locating items of research for consideration committee members have also been bringing in materials for review on a particular agenda item we are meeting every other wednesday from five to seven uh and all of the meetings have been well attended so that's a general summary and again if there if you have any specific questions as to our discussions to this point um we don't have anything finalized yet but we're deep in the in the thick of it right now and um you know getting all kinds of information and education to inform our opinions and thank you very much patty and i'll also mention that we will be putting on to the um uh the city's website a calendar that will outline kind of where we've been and where we're going um you know the uh the later as we get to april there'll be some to be determined uh agendas but at least we'll lay out kind of the path that we're seeing at this point happy to answer your questions and i know patty uh chair cisco is as well all right thank you madam city attorney and thank you to our chair council members do you have questions for the group i'll start at the end with council member rogers no okay council member fleming yes thank you chair cisco for all of your work and the work of the committee could you walk us through the logic of how you the majority of you arrived against uh appointing uh the notion of appointing or having an directly elected mayor um well we we we're not finalized on that decision yet um discussion points uh that were uh kind of not from committee members that were uh not in favor of a directly elected mayor it kind of was it began with what problem are we trying to solve by having a directly elected mayor as opposed to um you know the mayor chosen among the the seven uh of you part of the part of what was brought up was that it could be um seen as detrimental to the demographics that it would be financially straining and kind of the wrong direction for equity and um i take that to mean that um in getting a directly elected mayor uh part of what we did with district elections uh accomplished um a less expensive way for candidates to campaign and it was uh i believe a concern that having a directly elected mayor might be an expensive campaign uh a campaign that only somebody um with more wealth than kind of average uh person might be able to do and that we might be tipping the scale backwards from equity uh to to to somebody that's uh just has more more wealth uh to do the the campaign for an at-large mayor um there were several uh you know former council members that did say the campaigning is expensive and uh again i think the move to district elections was to reduce the cost of that and and this might not be in keeping with that uh there were other issues about particular concerns about legal conflicts with dilution of districts the part of what we would be looking at is um if we had uh a directly elected mayor we would have we have seven districts now that we would be uh moving to six districts with the directly elected mayor and that would be um a dilution of the districts and kind of kind of taking away some things uh from uh you know the public at large um there was concerns that the our method of district elections and the district league district's council but hasn't had a chance to really prove themselves and to see again if if a mayor that oversees the entire city is is really uh an important thing there was concerns that um that uh your method now allowing the rotation among members uh to become mayor allows for growth and team building uh the strong mayor definitely uh there was some some definitely negative opinions about that they were really concerned about how the city would be completely reorganized uh that it might make it difficult to recruit good city managers um so the temperature was not uh it was pretty cold but again we're not done yet we uh we did not have uh the benefit yet of uh mayors themselves that are directly elected that might be able to point to sort of point out a more favorable uh point of view than some of these concerns um also in the meantime uh Sue and Rob are going to be looking into some of the questions and concerns that uh that the committee raised to this point uh there definitely were members that um thought that their arguments good and bad on both sides um so it's but again it's just we don't have all of the uh information at this point to have made a full recommendation but the temperature at this point is cold i hope that answers your question yes it does it's very informative thank you okay council member rogers so um thank you very much for coming to give us an update um and thank you stew and rob for your participation um and thank you all your members i'm just very grateful that you guys are taking the time to to do this i know it was very difficult for myself to choose um who i wanted to be on on the committee but i am um very grateful that you are providing your time and each of you have a level of expertise that you are bringing um to the table in a in a different way of of looking at the items that we have asked you or that we have brought forth um and so i i probably will continue to do this because this is just what i do but thank you thank you thank you um for volunteering your time um because we do not do this very often um as you guys know and this is um very impactful for our city and how we run our city so thank you for your time and please pass that along to everyone thank you it definitely will thank you for your appreciation it's it's a really involved group and um and again with multiple perspectives you all chose very well and they're engaged and involved and i'm sure they'll appreciate you appreciating them council uh vice mayor thank you mayor well i too want to thank the entire uh charter review committee as as they're definitely dedicating their time and energy to making centers a better city uh for myself i was hoping that the rank choice voting could be elaborating and explained for those that might not understand what it means for our voting system yeah that we are we have not taken that up yet uh that's um it's one of it's one of the priorities we really wanted to get through council compensation and the directly elected mayor because those were linked but i believe it's our next meeting we will be having a speaker come and explain that and and then that the committee will be able to take that up but at this point we haven't gotten any information on that thank you i personally will definitely be awaiting to learn more about it as well as i know some of my community has been have been asking the question um my second question is regards to brownock violations i was hoping that you can elaborate what we as council members can do and can do in relationship to interaction with both our appointees and the charter review committee as a whole through the mayor um yes the uh you are welcome to speak to your uh appointees or to speak to other members of the committee um i also want to reiterate i mean it's really been i've been very impressed um with this uh group of uh group group of residents very collaborative very thoughtful very engaged um very sophisticated in their in their discussion and their analysis so really very much appreciated and um you and i would encourage you you're certainly welcome to speak with your appointees or with others um but also you've appointed this committee to do this work so um i i i really encourage you to you know give them the freedom to do that so um i also am happy to to respond to a couple of other things quickly if if you'd like in terms of the ongoing discussion on at-large mayor uh next week the count the committee will be meeting again on wednesday five to seven and we will be hearing from the directly elected mayor from petaluma and also the directly elected mayor from uh san rafael so that i think will be helpful for the committee and then rob and i will also be bringing back responses to a whole series of questions that the committee had so um that should be an interesting meeting on rank choice voting uh yes the committee has not yet gotten there and we will be having diva provo from the registrar of voters will be coming and giving that presentation in a nutshell um i'll i'll just mention each voter ranks their choices so if you had three candidates each voter would rank their first choice their second choice their third choice if a one of the candidates receives a majority of the vote that candidate wins uh if no one receives a majority of those votes then the lowest uh the the the candidate that received the lowest votes their votes would then go to the second choice and so forth until one candidate has received a majority of the votes again it's a little bit complicated but um uh we'll have uh the full presentation a full explanation of the system um not this next meeting but the following meeting so okay i just want to say thank you to the chair uh miss cisco for your efforts on this i have to corral six people you have to corral 21 so by my non-mathematician uh outcome your job is three times harder so thank you so much for uh for for those efforts uh council are there any other questions on this update otherwise we'll go to public comment i just want to say i appreciate and uh the the honor of serving as chair and i'm loving every minute of it so thank you all certainly uh be careful what you wish for uh type scenario but we're happy to have you leading the helm thank you we'll go to mr duit for comment hello duane duit from roseland i'm very interested in this topic because 26 years ago a petition was put together for a ballot initiative to have district elections and a popularly elected mayor this was just after the city had gone to seven uh council members thinking that that would help with more representation actually what's occurred over all these years is there was no more extra representation of the disadvantaged it was pretty much more strength for the business community and more business as usual the petition that was put together in the past was done with an attorney by the name of uh dick day a good man who believed in democracy there are still copies of it available and we'll make it available to this charter review committee because essentially right now the process is still the same with the chamber of commerce and the sonoma county alliance have far more power and deciding who becomes the mayor of our city than the residents if we have a popularly elected mayor there's an opportunity that we can get a grassroots representation to help us lead our own way rather than us constantly following almost a slavish devotion to what the business community wants with six districts we can also hopefully keep the more representation we've gotten for disadvantaged communities right now with this new redistricting that you're about to undertake we may end up having mr alvarez and miss rogers run against each other when they just got on here this is the kind of thing that we need to avoid we need to get the disadvantaged communities of santa rosa better represented in the decision making process planning is politics and the charter review is essentially a planning process which is politics you've got a lot of folks that are collaborative because they're already thinking alike this is an exclusive group it basically wasn't really well advertised to the community people that i know they were like i never saw anything in the paper about it as a matter of fact why don't you put things in the santa rosa press democrat now for those folks that aren't connected into the internet like you folks are they're still voters they're still taxpayers and they need to have their voice heard too it's kind of funny to them that the first thing that's coming up is increase the compensation for the council members rather than the idea of the popular elected mayor the rank choice voting and finding out what the community wanted to be in the charter review this was basically what the politicians wanted to be reviewed so please try to make it more inclusive we'll get that copy of the 1996 petition into you so that you'll be able to see that this was already discussed it was already looked at six districts popular elected mayor well i'll be better off for it thank you thank you mr do it any other comments go ahead yes 8.2 regarding the third district appointment i would like to see anybody who melts money from the government excluded from consideration because the government should not be a user of playground to make money and i'll give you an example to clearly illustrate what i'm talking about before uh domino capoli resigned it was disclosed that he uh had bought a ownership interest in a security guard company and the reason he did that is he wanted to provide security guards for the homeless hotels and what have you so he figured out that you know he could use that as a way to channel our tax dollars into his pocket that that should be really offensive to taxpayers and voters in this county that somebody in elected office is looking to profit from our tax dollars so that should be looked at seriously and critically during this appointment process all right thank you i see no hands on zoom so i'll go ahead and bring it back we'll move on to item number nine that is our statements of abstention do we have any abstentions from council members tonight mr vice mayor thank you mayor i will be abstaining from item 12.3 uh involves the cannabis agency and i am involved in the cannabis industry i'll go on to council member soyer thank you mayor i just need to abstain from the minutes of november 30 at 11.3 due to my absence from the council on that evening great if it works for council members i'm going to move us through the agenda a little bit faster we do have our federal dc team on the line for item 14.1 so i'll skip item 10 and i'll come back uh later in the meeting mr vice mayor yes i'm sorry i omitted that i i'm sorry i take it back out for the minute so i'm sorry mayor okay so we do have uh we'll come back to item 10 after we do our public hearings actually let me rephrase we'll come back to item 10 as our last item for the night we'll do our public hearings and our report items and then come back for council member reports we'll go to approval of minutes we have three sets here we have november 16th november 30th uh our special meeting and november 30th our regular meeting uh we already heard from council member soyer that he will be abstaining from uh 11.3 are there any changes or amendments from council members on the three sets of minutes mr vice mayor sorry again mayor i actually do need to abstain from from uh it would be the november 30th uh 11.2 special meeting as i was not in attendance okay seeing none i'll go to the public and see if there are any changes to those sets of minutes seeing that in the chamber i see none on zoom we will show the amendments or excuse me show the minutes adopted as presented with council member alvarez abstaining from 11.2 and council member soyer from 11.3 without objection from the council move on to item 12 our consent calendar mayor rogers and members of council we have four items on the consent calendar tonight item 12.1 is a resolution additional funding for the purchase of computer and server equipment from dale marketing item 12.2 is a resolution san aroza tourism business improvement area advisory board appointments item 12.3 is a resolution it's an amendment to the city classification and salary plan to add two fte limited term senior planners and one fte limited term senior planner positions in the planning and economic development department to reallocate leap grant funds accept and appropriate state department of cannabis control local jurisdiction assistance grant program funds and appropriate pg and e settlement funds item 12.4 is a resolution approval of grant of temporary construction easement to specific excuse me to pacific gas and electric company on a portion of city-owned property located at 55 stony point road apn 010-320-019 and 2100 west college avenue apn 010-320-303 for the development of battery electric bus charging infrastructure okay do we have any questions from council members on those items council member schwedl um madam city manager could you just confirm the apn on that second one if we had the right one i'm not sure if that was what i have on my paperwork i thought i heard 303 versus 030 that last apn 2100 west college apn 010-320 dash 030 thank you all right happy to have the clarification i see no questions from council members let's see if there's any public comment on these items see none in the chamber and i see no hands on zoom so i'll bring it back for the vice mayor to make a motion thank you mayor i move items 12.1 through 12.4 with the exception of 12.3 as requested by myself vice mayor alvarez second we have a motion from the vice mayor second from council member soyer let's call the vote council member schwedhelm hi council member soyer hi council member rogers hi council member fleming yes vice mayor alvarez hi mayor rogers hi that motion passes with six eyes and then i will entertain a motion on 12.3 so moved i've got a motion from council member fleming and a second from council member soyer let's call the vote thank you council member schwedhelm hi council member soyer hi council member rogers hi council member fleming hi mayor rogers hi that motion passes with five eyes with vice mayor alvarez abstaining all right it is not yet five o'clock we'll bypass item 13 for the moment we'll go on to item 14.1 that's our federal legislative platform update the city manager item 14.1 is a report for the 2022 federal legislative platform the report will be given by staff member scott alonso our intergovernmental relations and legislative affairs officer good evening mayor rogers and members of the council and city manager smith i'm scott alonso the city's intergovernmental relations and legislative affairs officer and we have curiakis pagonas and john o'Donnell with us tonight to present you the federal legislative platform and they're joining us virtually from washington dc in 2018 the city of santa rosa hired mmo partners as our federal lobbying team last year the council adopted a federal legislative platform for the first time mmo partners has greatly assisted the city's efforts with wildfire recovery and resiliency and securing federal dollars in support for our residents mmo partners has worked with city staff to conduct an analysis of our legislative priorities federal funding goals and helped prepare today's platform for your consideration the adoption of this year's platform will continue to aid our lobbying teams efforts to better respond in a more efficient manner on behalf of the city and council i do want to acknowledge and thank all those staff members involved in this process we met with various departments and programs in late 2021 to help prepare tonight's updated federal platform the platform tonight is largely based from last year but you'll notice some key differences in some areas that john and curiakis will go over from COVID-19 to public safety to surface transportation and the like and especially regarding the infrastructure bill and build back better finally i'm pleased to turn over the presentation over to john and curiakis which will give you some more background on their work and walk us through the city's proposed federal legislative platform for 2022 and city clerk you may advance to the next slide please uh scott thank you for that introduction mayor rogers and council members and city manager smith thanks for the opportunity to make this presentation to you tonight report on santa rosa's 2021 federal legislative platform and review the city's uh 2022 proposed federal priorities um i just say a word about our firm mmo that scott mentioned we have been representing local governments and special districts in washington for four decades and are proud of the fact that we continue to rep represent our first four city clients which are albuquerque uh oklahoma city oxnard california and phoenix arizona the purpose of your federal platform your federal program that's the next slide is really to communicate the city's federal policy and project priorities to the public to the california congressional delegation congress and federal agencies and also provide guidance and direction to the city staff and federal representatives regarding the city's funding priorities um and as was mentioned before the prior platform was adopted uh last year uh in february 2021 um before we get into the details uh scott mentioned that there was a a short update on what are the big priorities going on here in washington dc which do have an effect on the city of santa rosa and those things are i'd throw i'd put them in three categories one that has happened one that will happen and one that is expected to happen but we're not sure in what form the one that happened is the infrastructure investment in jobs act which provides significant competitive and formula funding for state and local governments we've shared much of that information with uh scott and and city staff and uh we know that the the city's previous success at seeking competitive funding we expect to see that continue in 2022 the uh program that will pass or the legislation that will pass is the f y 22 appropriations bill which as we've said to scott earlier today uh and to city manager smith last week this is a legislation that will get done and one of the reasons we think that is because there's a whole lot less publicity about it at this point in the in the calendar and last week things died down and that's a good indication that things are working behind the scenes the important thing about the f y 22 appropriations bill passing um and not having a continuing resolution for the rest of this calendar year or up until the end of september is that any earmarks that were provided to the city in uh the appropriations bill this year if we don't have a final appropriations bill enacted those earmarks disappear because no new federal spending can be accommodated in a continuing resolution and finally i just say that on the build back better the reconciliation package there's quite a bit of discussion going on now about how to move portions of that package uh forward and the white house and the uh leader of the house nancy polosi and the leader of the senate chuck schumer are continuing to work on different approaches to trying to get uh portions of that if not the entire package passed one of the things they're discussing right now is whether they break it into smaller pieces in order to pass it in congress and that's that concludes the report on what's happening here i just want to say before passing this report over to karyakas is how much mmo partners appreciates the opportunity to work with uh santa rosa uh the the elected officials and the city staff and and since we've been hired we know the pressure that the uh city the mayor and city council and and city staff have had in recovering from uh the fires that that greatly damaged the city and so i want to just recognize the excellent support we get from city staff in doing your work in washington dc karyakas thanks john next slide please so mayor rogers uh vice mayor alrez members of the council before we go into the 2022 uh proposed priorities uh for the city we thought it'd be a good opportunity take a few minutes to go over uh what happened as a result of your adopted federal platform in 2021 as john mentioned uh past last february and uh in no way is this meant to be a highlight real or infomercial for mmo you know the successes and outcomes represent uh first and foremost the mayor and council's direction to us and laying out the direction for us to go in as john mentioned you know your city uh staff management uh certainly uh put in a lot of work over the past year uh to recognize some of these successes and certainly um your congressional delegation you know deserves all the credit for number one voting and getting funding passed in the law to address uh covid and then you know as as john mentioned certainly now on the infrastructure side but uh you know this is certainly a team approach that we um that we take and really appreciate the opportunity to be on the team so with that said i just to go over uh your platform for 2021 the first area was was to address covid recovery and economic resiliency uh the 1.9 trillion dollar arpa law was signed by the president uh back in march 11th 2021 uh the city council uh made it a priority for direct funding uh to address uh the covid impacts both uh the health impacts uh certainly the the revenue impacts the impacts the families and to small businesses as a result uh with with that work and certainly the work of many other cities pressing for this uh congress provided 130 billion in covid uh local fiscal recovery funds uh the city share is about 35 million which i know you all are working uh to uh allocate uh you your first tranche came out last year the second tranche funding about half of 35 will come out in a few months uh treasury department also recently released final guidance that provides uh significant flexibilities uh for uh the use of that funding and i know uh your team is looking at at that um the bill also so provided and is not a entire list of the things that are provided in the bill but certainly the ones that i think align with uh the the priorities that the council laid forward last year um so provided 1.1 billion for a low income home water assistance program that program uh provided the state of california with 116 million uh that program is set to open uh sometime in may of this year it's geared towards you know helping uh low income households uh pay for their their water and wastewater uh services as as a result of of covid uh 50 billion was included in the bill for fema to provide uh reimbursements to local governments for eligible covid related expenses we'll go into a little bit of that later but um that is something that you know we have certainly talked to the city about and the city has taken an active uh very active and proactive approach uh to getting reimbursed for eligible expenses next slide please there was 3 billion included in in arpa that's the acronym for for the bill american rescue plan act 3 billion for economic development for the economic development administration they're currently putting out guidance for those funds and i you know we've been working with city staff to review that and i know uh they're they're working hard to go through those uh notices of funding opportunities now uh extension for paid family leave uh there was a significant amount of money put in for emergency rental assistance that funding uh was limited to areas above population threshold um and sonoma county was allocated funds for that and i know your your staff is working uh collaboratively uh with their county counterparts uh 47 billion as i said for the program the county's allocation uh the first round was about 14.7 million 15 and then about 17 million in the second uh tranche for emergency rental assistance uh seven seven billion in for broadband i know that's uh a significant uh priority that was laid out by the council that funding is being rolled out now by the administration uh there's significant funding for for families and households to to get service and offset the costs for that but also money for schools and libraries to to provide things like hot spots and equipment for for families that need that uh voucher assistance was provided in the bill five billion for emergency housing vouchers the city of santa rosa was awarded 131 vouchers i know megan and her team are working uh to move those um move those forward next slide please um so that that covered a snapshot on the covid's covid funding and recovery um funding that was included in the american rescue plan act that the council uh advocated for the next this next slide covers the policy and infrastructure priorities laid out in the 2021 federal platform resolution that you you adopted on the first category wildfire resiliency as john mentioned earlier there was a new process put in place this year for members to be able to ask for community project funding or member directed spending for community projects and priorities the city submitted a one million dollar request for a permanent emergency operation center representative thompson both senators uh feinstein and pedia both secured one million dollars in the fy 22 commerce justice science appropriations bill again this this was made possible and we worked closely with you know your staff the chief chief west strip uh neil bregman and and others to to get the the necessary paperwork and and information together community support letters and working with cal oes to make that project eligible and considered for funding and as john mentioned we we won't know that outcome until they the congress finalizes the fy 22 appropriations bill about 34 million dollars was allocated this year in 2021 through the hud's dbg mitigation and and the cbg dr infrastructure ram that funding was supported by your delegation that funding will be used in some respects to do fire station five relocation and and other community infrastructure needs as a result of of damage that the community sustained during the 2017 wildfires uh there's also work that we we did on your behalf um to really impress upon congress and and the administration um that certain language and policy reforms are necessary um for uh FEMA funding uh we found out uh you found out that um you know certain policy like around relocation assistance with prohibitive uh for relocating uh infrastructure that have been damaged uh during wildfires um back in august senator pedia uh held a roundtable discussion in the community uh i know mayor rogers and chief west strip participated in that discussion and really um talked to the senator about the importance of updating the staffer act to to reflect uh the uh challenges that you all faced uh during the the wildfires and the challenges urban areas face um you know as a result of of wildfires which are much different than flooding damage and and hurricane and other damage uh senator pedia introduced the fire act which includes language the city requested um for uh FEMA to take into consideration infrastructure there that is located in the wooey uh that that bill has been introduced there's been a companion bill on the house side supported by both uh congressman thompson and congressman huffman you know we're we're optimistic that that will move forward it's certainly um you know a packed calendar but uh it's it's at the beginning of that process so we're optimistic that that will uh move forward sometime this year hopefully uh by the end of the year if not then uh then next year the infrastructure investment jobs act included 500 million for at-risk communities i know the city staff are working on identifying potential opportunities in this regard city and county and mayor rogers i want to thank you for leading a letter uh to the delegation um requesting that the transportation bill part of the infrastructure investment jobs act include language that uh directed dot to prioritize uh federal infrastructure funding to areas that have experienced wildfire and also uh i know congressman huffman supported language that allows federal transportation funding to be used for things like vegetative management along roadways so those those things are are now into law and i know that as the administration gets those programs up and running we'll be talking to them about how that funding should be spent locally under the next section of community environmental infrastructure there's 108 billion dollars in the bill for public transit i know your transit department are working closely with their counterparts um but mtc and at the state and at fta to get you know operations back on track um you know covid certainly took a big hit on on transit um so this this funding uh is there to help bolster uh infrastructure spending on transit also do things like electrification uh there's 27 billion in there again for uh there the 27 million i'm sorry for uh santa rosa urbanized area for for transit there's also um a project uh martin luther king uh park uh renovations an update that the city submitted uh and is currently pending before the national park service to do uh infrastructure improvements uh to mlk park the delegation has weighed in uh and support of that project and uh that that will hopefully um will at least hopefully know uh sometime in april or may uh the outcome of that there was five billion included under housing community development for the home program of which the city received about 2.7 million for affordable housing purposes um we've been working closely uh with alan and his team and and scott uh to really uh work on reimbursement for costs at the salmon hotel uh the city uh incurred during covid about focused on on on those programs so thank you for raising it and then uh on the the climate front uh do you have sort of the leeway within the policies or what's being presented for the platform to really be aggressive on climate change uh not just policy changes not or policy changes as well as going after funding to help the city i i have to go back and look at the language i think i think it's there scott i mean do you think that the the language that we've currently got is is yeah i i i think mayor rogers under the the water and energy resiliency section we do have some language there on reducing greenhouse gas emissions and energy usage so i think the platform does cover it but we can certainly make sure that's top of minds you know as especially as built back better evolves um and we and we see the infrastructure bill being implemented and that's something that uh john and kirie office are uh following very closely with us and so i think that's something that we can certainly take a look at especially with this infrastructure funding uh coming online great thank you and again just a another thank you for all the work that you've done for the city i know we've had more more meetings than probably on most topics on going after funding for in response for going after funding for the herne avenue uh over crossing the bike bridge the hot eoc you guys have really been there to help us on a lot of these projects councilmember rogers all right hi thank you for being here tonight really quickly i just wanted to say that i i would like to see um some policies around helping our older adults um that don't yet meet the age where they can get help from like a ps um necessarily or fit that criteria but they still need help um i see it when uh we have people that fall under they have mental health issues or or they're homeless but they don't um they can't get out and go see uh a place for rent as quickly as like i would be able to or they can't move as fast um as other people would be able to so by the time they get ready to go see the place it's already taken off the market right so they don't have the same abilities as other people do and they just don't really have the the safety net um and they don't have the wraparound services um in order to do that or the support or the the transportation or whatever it is um that other people have and also for those that are housed the cost of living and um how the cost of living is constantly rising but um the their income is not rising so how do we protect them and offer a safety net for them so that they do not end up in our unhoused uh category um so just some things that have uh been crossing my mind are in our of concern for me thank you thank you council member let's go ahead go to public comment on this item and see if we have folks on zoom or in the chambers who would like to give comments on our federal legislative platform i'll start with mr. duit thank you my name is duane duit i'm from roseland and working with the sonoma county housing advocacy group i'm hoping that your team would look into extended stay suites single residents only approaches to providing housing and seeking federal funding for this right now what's been happening is the santa rosa housing authority has been using housing vouchers that have been awarded to veterans under the HUD vash program and saying well because they can't find a place they're not going to necessarily get the voucher we're going to put it into a project based voucher and then build something with it which then takes two to three years minimum and those homeless veterans are stuck so one of the business models that works really well and what you folks have been doing is buying hotels basically hotels are a business that can start up quickly compared to building quote housing so extended stay suites you see them all across america whenever you're on the free way you'll see hampton in and suites right over here near the herne avenue overcross what you spoke about you see extended stay america a three-story hotel with many many units there this is a way if you can get the federal funding to help to construct these things quickly you could have a model that would solve some of your problems also some communities call it public housing santa rosa has never broached that topic because almost 50 years ago the city manager at that time said well it wasn't a good idea so then your redevelopment agency director steve burk he took that to heart and said well we'll never have public housing here and all these years now that we've needed to have housing he hasn't used that model and he's still no longer working for the city but on the housing authority so maybe it's time to look at this reality the three tallest buildings in santa rosa are housing bethlehem towers and silver crest and you have people living there on limited incomes and they're happy housing works done this way and you could use this federal funding that's coming from these new initiatives under this administration to get some things done and get them done before the next president comes in it's the type of thing that with a legislative body of lobbyists that you hired they could look into this they could help you to start a new paradigm let's get past this thing of well we can't have public housing soon you're going to be a city of almost 200 000 people you could have public housing and you could do well with it and you could house many of these people who were in a crisis situation think of seniors and veterans extended stay suites there you go seniors and veterans extended stay suites thank you duane see no other hands in the chamber or on zoom i'll bring it back council member fleming could you oh hold on i just had a couple of hands pop up so i want to make sure we give them a chance we'll go to johanna followed by madonna hi can you hear me yep hi um i just um addressing the the water and the drought issue um i would love to see the water and drought issue in california addressed more directly also um it's truly a dire need and we see more drought and more fire in the future i think one of the best and easiest things is to implement youth water collection for every house why not um will it be funding for this very few residents can afford this on their own but government programs could really help care also in terms of firefighting and in terms of water for agriculture and drinking water even but especially for firefighting uh this may be a radical idea but southern california has already done it can you just put in an epsalination plant and use sea water to direct to make fresh water for firefighting i think it's a really an easy way to do this and to supplement all the irrigation that we're going to need in the future i don't think there's going to be going to be more rain i think we're getting less rain overall thank you i'm just being sure thank you for the the comments we'll go on to madonna thank you can you hear me okay thank thank you for that presentation um uh mere rogers i just want to thank you for highlighting the mental health issue um that our first responders do go through um the trauma that they have went through in just the past four years is very serious um and uh the gentleman who spoke about the extended stay america that's something that i i would like to see happen also where i work disability services and legal center are over um we have over 2000 clients annually they are all low income so that's something that they would be able to afford living you know independently with their disability on their own um and the um council member rogers i want to thank you for bringing up the um elders as well uh we serve a lot of them at my agency and um i think we need public housing too we don't have enough public housing we have a lot of people who do not make enough money to live here um and when i was 18 my first department here was at ketten court um off of herna avenue and it was about 500 a month for a two bedroom um those are almost close to three thousand dollars a month now and um they're not upgraded there there's no granite countertops there so um just something to think about um again thank you for uh letting me speak i yield my time all right thank you so much madonna so i'll bring it back council member fleming if you'd like to make a motion and we can discuss i sure would um and i wanted to take the opportunity again to thank mmo partners for your excellent work you know you guys are great to work with and effective and we're you know super grateful and thank you scott it's great to have you on board so with that i bring a resolution of the council of the city of santa rosa adopting the 2022 city of santa rosa federal legislative platform and wave further reading of the text okay so we have a motion from council member fleming and a second from council member rogers is there any additional discussion from the council okay i'm just going to say thank you once again and let's go ahead and call the vote council member schwedhelm hi council member solier hi council member rogers hi council member fleming hi vice mayor alvarez hi mayor rogers hi that motion passes with six eyes thank you john and karyakis and i will be talking a lot soon and thank you scott i know your uh second presentation before council here tonight we appreciate all the work that you've been putting in and we're looking forward to working with you through the legislative sessions at both the state and the local level thank you thank you right council will go to item 13 that is our public comment for non-agenda items it's the first of the night so if you're interested in providing public comment on an item that is not on tonight's agenda but within the jurisdiction or the scope of our jurisdiction go ahead and approach the podium but mr dwight hello my name is dwayne d witt i'm from roseland regarding santa rosa city government and roseland residents our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury in roseland in every stage of these transgressions we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms but to no avail again today a petition seeking redress from the foul treatment of many environmental injustices and social inequities we in roseland must endure and suffer daily every day drunks are at southwest community park making an outdoor latrine in the northeast corner just 100 feet from the restroom it is a cesspool where the drinkers publicly openly defecate and urinate within the site of the school children at dutton meadows elementary school so disrespectful of local roseland residents the drinkers arrive at dawn to stay after dark ignoring the rules of the city park about alcohol drinking drugs and tobacco smoking and littering so sad to the west ringing the park on silvers per avenue off of herne there are squatters with their rvs who just stay for years now with their trash strewn about over at the bare neighborhood park years after the opening the restrooms are permanently locked while porta potties are still in use imagine being handicapped and having to use cold and dirty porta potties not many local resident roseland families or females want to use the facilities as you might imagine over at old stony point road dozens of folks are trashing land next to the creek without regards to the longtime roseland residents and neighbors who try to make our area better they have been doing this for many months now and city staff let it worsen upon sabbastopol road at roberts avenue where a woman was murdered months ago a squalor returns after cleanups because the local brownfields are not a priority to the city this is just across the street from a new approved drug manufacturing business moving into the site of what could have been our roseland long-term community center and library instead the council ignored the petitions of the local residents and local youth against drugs and instead showed slavish devotion to the development and business community in every stage of these transgressions we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms now please take this petition seriously before the local residents seek actions from your federal funding sources to stop your discriminatory ways by the way thank you to some santa rosa police who were today on mcminne avenue they were trying to see what they could do about some of those visitors that come in with their rvs and park next to an open space and stay as long as they want pretty much without any redress so i thank you once again for the opportunity here in our land we can at least ask we can petition and i'm glad that you might listen if we have any hands on zoom seeing that on zoom i'll come back here to the chamber go ahead sir good evening my name is bruce defter and i'm a resident of the uh dutch floor neighborhood uh and representative or councilwoman roger's district we actually will be discussing that project in just a moment this is you said none i thought you'd covered all the agenda items i'm sorry oh no this is the first chance to talk about something that's not on the agenda for tonight but that item is coming up next if you want i'll just hold your comments for a few minutes yep go ahead my name is michael hillbar south west santa rosa area i share some between the widths concerns i think one of the main issues uh is the number of drug users i see around you know collecting cash and uh living in the parking lots and what have you i want to relate to you that i saw a drug overdose fatality recently it's not the first overdose i saw but it was the first fatality i watched it dispassionately you know what that means from the point of view of someone who doesn't really care to put it nicely i pulled into a parking lot very late in the evening it happened to be raining there's a parking lot that normally has a lot of drug users hanging around there but because of the rain it was relatively clear there was a black suv there and i heard some yelling coming from a woman but i was just walking through the parking lot i was going to ignore it i thought it was some sort of argument so anyway this white female yells at me says get over here ha so anyway i stayed well back and i observed standing there in the rain she pulls this black guy out of the passenger side door of her suv he looks completely limp puts him down there on the asphalt in the rain you know i never saw him move or anything from there on just laying there in the rain so that let that be a lesson to people you know if you're not smart enough to stay away from drugs that might be what happens you just end up laying on the asphalt in the parking lot in the rain dead okay i hope the other lesson for folks is if you see somebody who needs help to make sure that you help uh we'll go on to our next item it's item 15.1 item 15.1 public hearing adoption of master plan amendment for dutch floor neighborhood park tim bernard assistant park planner will be presenting the report good evening mayor rogers vice mayor alvarez and council members and attendees my name is tim bernard and i'm a park planner assistant for the parks department i'm also the park project manager for the dutch floor neighborhood park master plan amendment which i'm excited to introduce to you tonight city staff along with plural landscape architecture studio and community members including students parents and educators from the yellow elementary have been working diligently over the last 10 months to create an amended master plan the primary goal of the project are to bring the two play areas closer together for maximum supervision ensure the improvements meet the americans with disabilities act code compliance and update associated equipment and amenities i'm happy to welcome hailey waterson from plural studio who will walk you through the master plan process that was taken can you please repeat the name of the consultant hailey waterson from plural hailey has her hand up now good evening can everyone hear me yes we can great um my name is hailey waterson i'm a landscape architect i'm principal at plural we're a small landscape architecture studio in san francisco um and we call ourselves plural because we believe that great places require many different people working together to envision to build and to steward them and this project in um the way we have collaborated with the neighborhood and what the city is really emblematic of of those values the next slide tonight we're talking about the dutch floor neighborhood park which is in the northwest quadrant within the city it is located there approximately located at that red star next slide this is an aerial of the existing park it is 2.38 acres it is surrounded by single family homes the main streets fronting it are exeter drive and white chapel way and the northeast side as tim mentioned is by yellow elementary school which shares a small edge with the park next slide this is the current master plan this master plan was completed in 1983 and the park itself was completed in 1989 you can see here on the master plan white chapel way on the bottom of the screen and extra drive on the left the master plan is showing um large open turf area represented in that kind of lime green color and then two play areas the northern one which is kind of in that brownish orange color and then one down closer towards white chapel and then some paths surrounding them and this is more or less what was built there today and so this is the master plan where we've been working to update with the neighborhood next slide here's a quick diagram kind of explaining that current layout that I was just discussing on the previous slide the two pink blobs represent the two play areas they are quite a bit of ways apart you wouldn't be able to see both play grounds at the same time the upper playground is allocated for children with a between ages of five and 12 when the the lower area is between for children between ages two and five there are sitting opportunities scattered around the park there's now very mature trees beautiful mature trees on the site you can see in this photo here on the right um and there's also a small fitness uh space just northwest northeast of the five to 12 play space there in that uh blue uh oval and so um as tim mentioned we really had uh you know three main goals um and a few objectives the goals are really to create a safe and welcoming park and playground to improve the connectivity um the accessibility um and really the usability of the park and then to build on the park's beauty enhance the beauty of the existing park it's a very beautiful park um so there's a lot to work with there um and how we're doing that we're updating the two playgrounds um looking to move them closer to each other updating the adult fitness equipment updating the paths so that they're all um accessible and all of the site furnishings as well uh would be updated a lot of the park infrastructure would be updated as well um including improved drainage uh irrigation and uh furnishings next slide as tim mentioned we've been working um through a series of neighborhood meetings over the last 10 months um altogether we've had around uh over 250 uh participants throughout the three um zoom neighborhood meetings they were several months apart they were all virtual uh we also met with um the bio elementary school leadership and uh held a small kind of us school-wide brainstorm session for the play structures which i'll talk about um and a little bit more detail but we're we're really happy with the um the neighborhood meetings we were able to reach out to um the people who live right adjacent to the park 80 percent of the participants are in the northwest quadrant um 67 percent of the of the respondents visit this park weekly or daily and again the majority of the respondents are within a five to ten um walk from the park so it's it's very much a neighborhood park um and its users and um we're happy that we were able to reach out um to the majority of that group um and not without the thanks of bio elementary school community um for putting the word out there and and being involved um in the process so we um on february uh the week of february 10th we uh presented uh floral studio and um tim and jen we all had these uh presentations to the three age groups the the kindergarten group the first through third and the fourth through sixth grade uh where we talked a little bit about what's landscape architecture is um and also we uh put out some precedent images to inspire children about what their play space and new playground could be like um and then the children went away and uh within their classes either together as a class or individual students did various um styles of of um putting together ideas of what the playgrounds could be so if you go to the next slide um we got beautiful drawings from um from the students some diagrams there was a really really cool range of ways that that children were able to kind of respond to our prompts um somewhere in writing somewhere in diagrams and we put together this word claud here at the bottom which summarized the dozens of drawings that we kind of analyzed um to pull out some of the main themes and elements that um the children are really interested in next slide and if you couldn't i'd like to actually jump to the the next slide first and then back to this one thank you um so the way we uh organized the three neighborhood meetings was to work with the kind of macro scale of the master plan and then as the meetings went on we got further down into more detail so for this uh the first the first community meeting we really focused around the site organization um where the main pieces of program should go um and how they are connected to other program items so we presented these three site organization uh diagrams by community preferred option c here where both age uh play spaces are really next to each other with the um the blue dots represent the adult fitness stations and move scattered along the adjacent path and picnic areas along the south side of the play space we also asked about um the play structure the play space itself what the character and what the look and feel um should be we presented a bunch of ideas um and talked about other additional concepts the community ultimately um was drawn towards the more natural uh kind of character with also some more traditional kind of post and platform play structure elements and so like like this often goes it becomes kind of a hybrid of the elements that were uh desired by the community we also talked about specific playground components what are the the most important elements to have um within the play structures um and of course that is swings and slides and climbing um more of the kind of top priority elements for the neighborhood and in the second community meeting we presented three master plan options so if we go back now up to the previous slide we can take a look at those we had um three options that looked at um different ways we could treat picnic areas whether there's a large group picnic area versus several small group picnic areas um and with those uh the different locations of fitness equipment different location for stormwater treatment gardens which will be your requirement for the master plan um and along with that came three playground concepts um that were really based off of the feedback that we heard uh from the second neighborhood meeting people really drawn to uh master plan c but they liked the dry creek playground option that was in scheme a so it kind of took those high those two um playground option dry creek and the master one option c and merge them to together all right we could jump now to two slides forward perfect this was the draft master plan that we presented at the third neighborhood community meeting it's taking this dry creek playground concept which is really um an idea about um inspired by the adjacent santa rosa creek it's only a few blocks away from here and you know a big piece of the settlement story of santa rosa um in the upper left of the playground is the larger five to twelve play space um we heard in the community meetings a big desire for a zipline so we are working to fit that in um there's a large structure with slides and climbing elements and swings um you can see around the southwest edge of the playground there are these three picnic spaces um places to gather and watch your children um and then the lower right side of that play space is the five to twelve other sorry the two to five play space um and then along the um paths which we've relayed out to be accessible has some of the adult fitness equipment and uh this is to sit and then at the entry the corner of exeter dry the white chapel way there's a small storm water garden really access to storm water you know and welcoming um garden entry into the park and uh from in that community meeting we got more specific feedback um people had different preferences for the storm water garden talked a little bit about um a fence or some kind of barrier between the vial elementary school and the playground um it were really wanting a more natural feel to make sure that we're using native plantings and trees um that'll promote that'll be drought tolerant and promote habitat creation um looking for more shade uh there was a desire for uh games like cornhole and chess and table tennis trying to get more adult fitness stations um and then we also had a request to take a good look at the security of the park um and make sure there was clear sight lines through the park from the streets jason streets next slide these are some of the um survey results from the draft master plan we asked again more kind of detailed questions we talked a little bit about the entry monument sign whether that should be replaced we talked a bit about the type of the adult fitness equipment um should it be geared towards a certain type of fitness level um the neighborhood ultimately said it should be multi-generational equipment we talked a little bit about where the park game should be um and we heard that some should be adjacent to the playground but some should also be outside of the playground um and then we talked again in a little more detail about the adult fitness equipment the types of um either strength train or cardio type stations next slide and with that feedback through those conversations um we then revised the draft master plan and now we're looking at the proposed master plan here um and we've from this point there are really kind of detailed modifications we brought in the um table tennis and the and some chess tables they're number 10 and 11 um on the right side of the screen there um yep thank you zoom in perfect um there are benches along the uh park paths so that you are able to come and enjoy it if you're not here with a child there's bike parking that we included adjacent to the um playground um there are small there's a small um sand pit um at either playground uh we heard from the neighbors um a big desire to keep some um piece of a sand element there for that textile experience particularly for the two to five age um we have the picnic spaces that are adjacent to both age groups um there number four um again number two is the two to five play space um number one is the five to twelve play space um a lot of the trees that you're looking at that have the solid black line represent existing trees we are working very diligently to try to preserve as many trees as we can um and that has the form of the um dry creek path that surrounds the playground is really dried from the location of the existing trees it's an all accessible path that gets allows children to circulate um and get to all of the play structure equipment um it also makes for a really great loop for for tag or for scooter riding um and there's uh the cornhole number 12 that's adjacent to the picnic station um and then there's five adult fitness stations um they're number six just north of the playground and again that that boulder edge um along the northeast corner it can be a um it's actually working to provide a great change between the playground and the adjacent path but it also could be a um flight element as well next slide so we are um getting ready to get into the 30 and 60 construction documents um through the spring uh we will then spend the summer um working on the 90 to 100 construction documents and the bid set uh with bidding at the end of the year starting and in through early 2023 um and then that would have set us up to start construction after the rainy season um in April of 2023 this is a kind of conservative uh schedule from our experience of how much time these things take um and of course we will always be looking for opportunities to to shorten these timelines um when possible next slide and I just wanted to mention too that um we did present to the board of community services on October 27th um and they I've recommended um that the city council um approve this master plan thank you so much hailey so go ahead tim thanks hailey I hope you enjoyed the presentation um the recommendation by the transportation of public works department that the council conduct a public hearing and their out by resolution adopt the map that's for neighborhood park to include ADA compatible paths picnic areas children's play areas for ages two to five and five to 12 table tennis chess cornhole fitness stations monument sign and multi-use turf areas next slide thank you tim if there's any questions we'd be happy to take those now thank you great council members do we have any questions for the team I'm seeing no excuse me initial questions so we'll go ahead and open our public hearing and hear from the public on this one I'll go ahead and start in the chambers with you sir my name is Bruce Dichter and I live in the uh Dutch floor neighborhood uh I only became aware of this project uh with a recent mailing and it perked my interest uh I have no background in landscaping or uh really in gardening but in recent years I've become aware of the importance of planting to support a wide range of life and it's my concern that the flora that's selected for the park uh be native uh have a uh low water need be drought resistant but also that it be of this of the type that uh supports a wide range of insect life I have some material here that I would be happy to share with members of the council uh that goes into that in detail that I'm really not prepared to but just as an example uh in one of these documents that I have it's it's written by a man named uh Douglas Tallamy who's a professor of wildlife ecology at the University of Delaware and the local native gardeners are all aware of this but he he did studies he found that for instance oak trees support 270 different varieties of caterpillars which are basically a keystone species that birds rely upon and then other animals there's a whole chain and I'd like to see our parks support a wide range of of life certainly the people that use it but also the animals in our area just to try and maintain the diversity and perhaps even increase the numbers but then you get into other varieties um elderberry supports only 33 different varieties of caterpillars you get down into um well I don't know I would like anyway I don't need to belabor this I would like to share this information with you if you're available to receive it thank you absolutely thank you and if you go ahead give it to Julie Guzy she can have it distributed to council members to take a look all right thank you go ahead oh hi can you hear me yes we can um my name is Elizabeth and um I wondered if you had considered putting a bathroom in the park um something that all ages need to use when they go to the park especially little ones um that's just my question that's it all right thank you I think they need one yeah yeah so we don't usually get into a back and forth in the public comment but I took a note down and I'll have staff address that after we listen to the other comments if that works for you okay thank you very much yeah absolutely seeing no one else approach the podium here in the chambers we'll go to zoom we'll start with Janelle and then go to Lenny I didn't just start talking hello my name is Adam and I'm um one of I'm a neighbor to the park I would like to actually see just a grill and you know maybe a a little bit of horseshoe pit or something um I think having a grill would be a place especially with the times now COVID neighbors trying to figure out a place to hang out I think a grill would be a nice place to have somebody a nice safe spot to hang out the kids playing in the park and we can put some sausages on and stuff I think that'd be really um uh down with what's going on right now okay I appreciate that comment do you have additional comments no that's it thank you so much for your time and I appreciate you guys putting your effort into doing this we really do appreciate and I know our kids we love it isn't here a problem in the background yeah we're excited for thank you oh thank you so much for calling into the meeting we'll go to Lenny hi you can hear me okay yes we can all right beautiful so I'm Lenny Moore Santa Rosa resident so this is what I just want to point out a couple things one this is an excellent recent example of community engagement and I just want to congratulate you know the staff for how they reach out to the community how often they reached out the level of engagement from all the way down to the young kids doing drawings it's beautiful stuff so congratulations to you guys for for that effort it's really appreciated and we definitely need a lot more of that as far as developers within the city and their projects uh the second thing I want to do is I want to second the native drought resistant plantings that support diverse wildlife uh that's a really important thing uh it applies to climate change it applies to um water retention in soil of keeping you know the the plants happy keeping the animals and the wildlife around the neighborhood happy and in the whole city of Santa Rosa so those are my comments and I'll get back the rest of my time thank you all right thank you I see no other hands on zoom nobody else in the chambers we'll go ahead and close the public hearing we did have a couple of questions that I'm just hoping we can address one of them was specifically about uh drought resistant and native flora particularly as it pertains to supporting additional types of ecology and wildlife I'm just wondering if that was considered yeah yeah thanks thanks for the question and thanks for the shout out something that we um you know advocate for in all of our work and I'm glad you mentioned oak trees it's one of the main um we're looking at two different varieties to go around the playground um for the same reasons that you have outlined um and the the shrub and um plantings that will be around will will definitely be diverse and have flowers that attract wildlife um birds and butterflies it's not only great for diversity of the environment but it's also a great kind of learning teaching tool for children so um yes we will be including those excellent anything uh tim anything to add or jen great the next question was uh about the bathroom and jen I know that this is probably one of the most common questions we get about inclusion of of a restroom at certain parks versus others can you give sort of the overall context of how the city determines which parks to put a bathroom in and which one's not to of course thank you mayor uh gen sentos deputy director for parks and this is a really common question every master plan opportunity we have with the community this comes up and generally overall and you know it's hard to generalize but usually we look to include restrooms in larger community parks where we have a wide variety of people coming and staying at the park for hours and we typically do not put them in neighborhood parks where we are looking at folks coming from a half mile radius or a smaller section of the city and folks usually live close to the park although we also had this debate for the coffee recent coffee park master plan that we did and that we ended up with mixed results in this community we had a couple people mention it at our meetings but there was no significant request for restrooms at this park during our public process so they we didn't move forward with that at this time but in the future of this community would like to have restrooms or portable units we could consider that as a separate future amendment but at this time there wasn't public request for that large public request for that and it's not a common practice and very costly as well all right thank you and then the last question was about having a grill or a horseshoe pit seeing if there was still the ability to maybe include those amenities at the park yeah that's a good question um we did talk with the neighborhood and through the through the meetings about a having grills and group kind of gathering and while there was some people that were for it there were actually the majority of the respondents did not want to have a large cooking group cooking area for concern with people not being up after themselves and the you know the issues that come along with that we can certainly as probably it goes with the the bathroom was that it could potentially be a future item and then the other one was around horseshoe we can certainly take a look at that to see if we can fit it in there through the neighborhood meetings the main games that came up were cornhole table table tennis which is ping pong and chess tables great thank you so I'll bring it back to council I'll go ahead and look first for a motion to put on the table for discussion from council members and I'll look to council member rogers I would like to make a motion to adopt the resolution um with the title of the council of the city of Santa Rosa adopting a master plan amendment for the dutch floor neighborhood park to include ADA compliant paths picnic areas children play areas for ages two through five and five through 12 table tennis chess cornhole fitness stations monument sign and multi-use turf area and wait for the reading of the text second we have a motion from council member rogers and a second from council member soyer let's go ahead and see if we have any discussion or comments on the item uh I'll start all the way down here look at our council member sweat out thank you mr. mayor I just want to offer my compliments to staff this whole process I know jen mentioned the coffee park process which I thought was very successful and every time I go there you know at least on a weekly basis you're seeing some of the features that are in this park specifically bringing the two play areas together it's very well used very well thought out and I really appreciate getting the school kids involved in seeing what their vision of that future is so thank you for experiencing what went through the coffee park applying it here and I think this is a very well done project so thank you vice mayor thank you mayor well I definitely want to congratulate the the residents of of our area of district seven and really participating I was very impressed by the number of participants the participants that showed up to speak what they want their area look like and definitely want to commend staff for their work and as well as our council and rogers and district seven for for really improving the life of its residents so congratulations to them and really speaking up for themselves I love to see that out of the senate residents thank you our senate residents and council member rogers um just really would like to thank the residents I think that they really showed up and were able to voice what it is that they wanted um in the neighborhood and we appreciate it um uh really like to thank the staff for continuing to open mindedly um not only hear the feedback but receive the feedback and continually come back with you know great ideas of implementing the feedback that was provided so thank you so much um for making the vision that the residents had a reality um and I look forward to April 2023 um where we break ground and where we finally start to to see the park um becoming you know a reality so this is this is a great time so thank you very much all right madame city clerk if you could please call the roll thank you mayor council member schwedhelm hi council member soyer hi council member rogers hi council member fleming hi vice mayor alvarez hi mayor rogers hi that motion passes with six eyes right tim hailey jen thank you all so much for your work on this and as uh council member rogers said thank you to the public for participating and as you saw if you didn't get everything that you wanted in it there are still opportunities down the road to reconsider how it's best meeting the needs of the neighbors but I think that this is a really good first step for folks uh to provide much needed recreation space so thank you that we will move on to our next public hearing item 15.2 uh as uh just as a note for folks we'll take a dinner break after this item and then come back for the rest of our study our excuse me report items after the fact mayor rogers members of council item 15.2 public hearing redistricting of city council districts fair maps act second of four public hearings stephanie williams the city clerk will be given the presentation thank you mayor and council members I am actually going to be introducing Sophia Garcia from redistricting partners who will be making the presentation and also providing a demonstration on how the district our mapping tool works so that our residents can submit draft maps to the city and so with that Sophia hi good evening are you able to hear me yes we can what do you want to all this be saying next slide with the person instructing wonderful um so we're going to talk a little bit of uh kind of the stuff that we have to use or look at before we go into the draft maps and those criteria are under the fair map suck which is a new california-based law you can look it up if you google ab849 but these are the criteria or best practices that we use for creating any draft plans they're also the rules that we evaluate for any public plans that have been submitted and reviewed and we actually have one of our draft plans that are based on a public submission which is wonderful which is what we've loved to see uh so these are in ranked criteria order um the first one is the of the most important it's to it gives us a lot of stuff in there and the first one is to that it creates it has this due districts that relatively equal size so this means that the council is not subject to passing plans that are exactly equal size we have what's called a 10 total plan deviation and we're going to get into that with every draft plan that we review it also touches on the data that we have to use and for redistricting we utilize the 2020 decennial census file which is a point and count file and it also relates to uh people not citizens so we are looking only at that total count of uh folks who filled out that census in 2020 we look at districts that are contiguous so this means that they geographically touch one another or it could be functionally contiguous so does it make sense that a particular district looks that way whether to we can look at boundaries to not cross a freeway a highway or other specific boundaries maintaining communities of interest is a criteria that has really been elevated throughout this redistricting process this year um they we have a new process because of the fair maps act so it is a new redistricting cycle before any other and maintaining communities of interest is that criteria that allows for the public to come forward for the council to to voice their opinions and that we try to maintain communities of interest and keep them intact as much as possible we also look at following additional census designated places or government data so if there are neighborhood boundaries or if another thing that comes up a lot is looking at renter data or other socioeconomic data points that is allowable and then finally looking at districts to keep them compact so this could mean an appearance or in function so does it appear to have uh districts that look familiar to us or if there's a shape that looks a little funny uh functionally does it make sense to have the shape the way that it does again these are the criteria that we use for evaluating the draft plans and for any of the public plans that have been uplifted so we'll go to the next slide you know it's a lot of information in the upper slide so we do have some draft maps here before you this evening and how we got into this stage is that we really for redistricting and our redistricting partners believe that this is a publicly driven process and that there should be multiple ways to engage and as was mentioned your city decided to go with district which is a wonderful online mapping platform and as a just an hour ago before I reviewed you do have four public plans in there and that's great and hopefully we continue to receive them throughout the process this process is also driven by those traditional redistricting criteria and also looking at minimizing neighborhoods or additional communities of interest and then finally these maps were published prior to this meeting so they were made available to the council and the public so that they can review them and come to this meeting with any amendments feedback or any other comments that they have on the maps so we'll go to the next slide please we do have three plans here for you for review and that's draft plan a draft plan b and draft plan c so each plan does have an overview of the plan it also has a page that gives you specific data and then it continues to have a page that shows you individual individual districts with data and a closer view additionally all the plans also had a web map which is an online map so you can zoom in and look at the boundaries on street level because we know that it is a little difficult to see that detail when you are viewing the pdf and again these were made available on the website and prior to this meeting so we'll go to the next slide um so we also have your existing lines and we'll go to the next slides this is what they look like currently um and we have the data table and if we go to the next slide it should highlight what your deviation is as so under that first criteria again we have to create districts of relatively equal size so all of the districts don't have to be exactly perfect you have some room because there's all those other criteria to consider the communities of interest looking at contiguity compactness but we do have to maintain a deviation that's under 10% so currently with your existing lines with the 2020 data you are at 20.6 of a total plan deviation so regardless of whatever plan is passed by the council there will have to be some change it's so we're in compliance and how we get that 10% total plan deviation is we look at the most populated districts of the district with the highest deviation and for this instance it's district two at 7.7 and we look at the least populated district which here is district four and that deviation is negative 12.9 and we add that together to get that 20.6 so we are looking at for that total plan deviation the highest and the lowest and adding that difference together so that's how we got that number and we'll go to the next slide please we also have the citizen voting age population data which gives you the percentage for Latino Asian and Black CVAP and again this is for the residents who are over the age of 18 that's how it's called citizen voting age population not to be confused with voter or voter registration data again we are not allowed to look at that this gives you that percentage a question we get most often is why are we only highlighting these three groups that's because in California these are the three groups that would have the highest the highest amount of population to create a majority minority district or a plurality district or an influence district and so these are those three groups that have the highest population I'm looking at your data right now you don't have any of those districts that are majority minority you do here currently in district one have a Latino CVAP that's over 30% and that's what we call an influence district so that's just additional data for you to look at for the public to evaluate as well and this will be available for all the plans as well and we'll go to the next slide please so we're going to review each of them and then I'll give it back to the council and the public to hear any amendments or feedback but draft plan a was created based on the current existing line so it is our minimal change plan and what we did is we made some minimal changes in order to make that deviation be under that 10% and we'll go to the next slide please so we have the overview of your plan with again those existing lines that oh no excuse me this is your draft plan a so does his looks really similar to your existing lines but there are some minimal changes we'll go to the next slide please and the what we see here is the existing lines underneath the draft plan a so draft plan a is in the black lines and the color underneath represents what the existing lines are so you know it's a little hard to see but we can see in seven there's a little change we have a little change between four and five and then minimal changes between four two and three and again just as a repeat so the block lines represent what draft plan a is and the colors underneath represent your existing lines again this is the minimal change plan and we made those minimalist changes on there in order to make sure we're under that that 10% we'll go to the next slide please these circles highlight where we made those changes so that it's a little bit easier for the public and the council to see where those changes were made again if all the other districts and the construction of the districts do look really similar to what you have currently and we'll see that change as we go through the other drafts and we'll go to the next slide please here is your your data table and we'll go to the next slide it'll highlight that we do have a total plan deviation now of 3.7 percent as so we have our highest our most populated district which in this instance would be district two at 2.6 and our least populated district which would be district five at negative 1.1 and we add those together to get that 3.7 we'll go to the next slide please we have here your draft plan B and the basis of this is we use major highways streets and neighborhoods to divide and have your a draft plan B some of the little notable neighborhoods that are in the plans are for district one you have Bennett Valley and South Park district two you have junior college greater cherry street and Burbank gardens district three there's Kenwood district four it may pronounce this incorrectly so apologies rebel Wallace cobblestone low low meter heights district five Lincoln Manor Copperfield and Weston district six Apple Valley and district seven Roseland so again the base for drawing our draft plan B was we looked at those major highways streets and also the dividing lines of the neighborhoods and we base this off of the the map that you see on this slide to the right called the Santa Rosa neighborhood so we took this directly from your site to ensure that we were following those neighborhoods that you have and again if we think of those traditional redistricting criteria neighborhoods could be considered communities of interest and they could also be considered under those additional government lines so this is the basis for your draft plan B and we'll go to the next slide please so here's what the draft plan B overview looks like but we will have that existing lines overlay for you as well so go to the next slide please here we have the existing line so we do see that there is a pretty big change to the construction particularly on the left side of your city and so again the colors underneath represent what the current lines are and then the black lines represent what your draft plan B would look like and again just as a reminder the basis for this is those highways streets and also your neighborhood lines and we'll go to the next slide and we have your data table and if we go to the next slide please we here have a total plan deviation of 5.5 percent so we will see that there is a difference of your deviation between all of the three drafts that are available you just have to be under that 10 percent having a plan that is a lower deviation that number in and of itself doesn't really necessarily mean that it's a better plan we're just again ensuring that we're under that 10 percent and giving you the reasoning behind the base of all the plans so we'll go to the next slide please here draft plan C was based on a district or submission which is something that we love to see against and the ID number is 101628 and I will show you where that is on the district or site after the presentation and there is a lot less change of this plan from the current lines from that B but there is you know more change from the current lines than your draft plan A we did take this down we ran what we say when we base a plan off of a public submission as we take it down from the district or site we put it into our internal mapping software and then we will look at it and clean it up a little bit and that could mean that we potentially a member of the public missed a couple of blocks in the city or may have a non-contiguous area and so we make those minor changes check that it's under that 10 percent and then we give you that office again so that's what we mean when it's based on a public submission so we'll go to the next slide please we have the overview of what the draft plan C looks like so again it does look a little similar to what draft plan B looks like but there is some changes from your existing lines so go to the next slide we have the overlay of your existing lines and again those colors underneath represent what you currently have and the black lines represent what draft plan C is showing we'll go to the next slide please we have our data table and the next slide will highlight what our our deviation is for this particular plan so this plan we have a deviation of 3.8 again we take district 3 and district 4 which are our highest and lowest districts and add that difference together so we'll go to the next slide please um so what's next so again this is a draft map hearing these are not final plans and redistricting it's an iterative process so it is more of an art than a science and so we're here to listen to the council and listen to the public for any additional amendments that you would like to see how you can ask us to go back and uplift another district or plan make amendments to one of the plans that you have in front of you and we'll take that back and and look at it and make sure that we can make all those amendments that that you asked again you can suggest possible changes to a plan or provide direction for a new draft just as a note all of the draft maps that will be considered at your next hearing again must be made public prior to the meeting so we'll work with your staff in order to ensure that we we get those to you ahead of time and we'll go to the next slide please and that's all we have for the presentation and I'll give it back to staff did you want me to give that a demo right now or after after comments from the public and the council let's go ahead and do comments on the draft maps and then we can do the overview of redistrictor after that work okay wonderful all right I will see if there's questions from the council councilmember Fleming yes thank you for that presentation and the options laid out for us I have a really just simple technical question which is on some of the maps like for example on slide 28 it shows district one in draft map A and you can see some of the streets but on the same draft map for let's say district four you can't see the streets and so my question is going forward can we have maps that are consistent and clear with that granular level of detail or an option to a GIS interface where we might be able to get that level of detail yes we have a web map that should have been made available to you in the public which gives you that ability to zoom in and out we also have in other jurisdictions worked with their GIS department and given them the shapefile so that they can make a quick application which does allow you to move around have all the maps on or all the layers on a particular application but for us we have the PDF or the web the web map would be happy to work with your staff okay well nonetheless like it is not clear as to why though like on some of those slides we can see the streets and some we can't so um some some way would be helpful moving forward thank you any other questions from council council member sweat home thank you mr. mayor yeah I have a question on map B the parameters that said basically keeping neighborhoods together the first thing was the the freeway major highways and it goes at least from district six where current boundaries is one-on-one it looks like it moves it to the railroad tracks but yet that's not the railroad tracks that cuts across several different districts it stops between what's at six and five can you talk a little bit about how that came about yeah we I looked at it all those combination of factors so your major um highways other specific travel features and then in combination with your your neighborhood lines so that's it was kind of a combination of stuff in and the drawler decided to split your district four and six at that railroad line but again we are here to listen to feedback and can make amendments to those and move it back to that the highway if if you were the council would wish to see that change so I'm sorry I missed how was that decision made or who made that decision to go from one-on-one to the railroad tracks um so when we look at creating draft plans there's a number of factors that the line drawler will will look at and for the basic in of your your draft plan beat was a combination of all of those so it was looking at not only major highways but also following your division of neighborhoods so it's a it was a combination and we didn't have um we didn't look at any or there wasn't specific feedback or community feedback so that that was the base of that plan highways and also your neighborhood lines all right thanks I had a question about map a if you could pull that one up so this one is the one that is substantively similar to the existing districts but then modified uh to be in compliance and just playing around with the tool uh and and it is possible I know on the city's redistricting website you can click on redistrictor and look at each of these within it and then modify them so I was playing with district or with map a and one thing that I noticed in particular was where districts five six and seven meet those modified areas particularly that little jut out from five into seven and then I don't think it's shown on your slide but there is a little area where five meets six that there's a difference or a change proposed um if I return that to their existing district in that area the population is the population deviation deviation is still under three percent so I'm just wondering if there was a reason that those changes in that area were proposed again the ones to the right of that uh just between districts four five two and three those changes they make sense in terms of balancing the population but the ones that are made at the tips of five seven and six seem to not impact the the deviation much on district it only gives you the the district that has the highest deviation it doesn't give you that total plan deviation and so that's why we we take district or plans down and look at them in our internal software um and so that that could have been a reasoning of why we had to make all those those small changes I see so uh with this modification the difference is doing quick math math in my head about well about 1500 people difference uh between the lowest populated district and the most populated district um so I don't know I'd have to do them the math to make sure that it's within the allowable deviance but I think it is are you suggesting that we look at a specific area and make that change and come back with you within amendment to this plan or at least just an explanation if there's a reason within the fair maps act that if that doesn't throw it out of the the deviation and if this map is intended to be minor changes based on the existing maps explaining sort of for the public why we would need to make those changes to that area if it isn't within the population deviation I think is going to be important and and likewise that it doesn't actually matter because it's not population uh the the draft map on a moves the fairground property from district two into district one uh when that is not the existing case as well and I just wondering if there's any reason for doing so other than just uh map drawer's preference and when the the map drawer looks at the the plan they also look at the existing plan when we make the minimal changes based on all of those criteria so often when they're they're making small changes they'll go to follow major roads highways or um streets that look let look larger yeah I think that's why I'm asking the question is it switched but there doesn't seem to be a reason that it was switched between which district this is just the the fairgrounds down between districts two and district one it substantively it doesn't matter I'm just wondering if there was a reason or a preference for doing so okay I don't see that um change it at all we don't need to dig it into it uh now we've got a couple of other hearings where we can talk about it um but I I just noticed it and was curious I will look into that and can come back to you um with an answer okay and then for map c uh the way that it comes up west avenue comes over and then goes up Dutton Avenue uh really right through the through the roseland area uh it does that change I'm trying to figure out how to ask this question does that change the ability for underrepresented communities to be elected into that district does it cut the latino population to make it harder for folks uh or dilute their voice in the election we go to drop and see and then again I have it up on uh on district or so it looks like in this draft map you have stony point it's the starting divide between seven and one comes across herne avenue until west avenue comes up west avenue comes across south avenue and then goes back up Dutton Avenue so in creating uh new plans if there is not a population that is over 50 plus or an ability to create a minority minority district based on section two of the voting rights act uh we're disallowed from using race as a predominant factor in drawing districts as so when we don't have that we have to use the traditional criteria when creating draft plans but if there is a another way to look at those particular communities if they're a neighborhood or specific community of interest or we can look at other socioeconomic factors that that's a way to evaluate it but without legal counsel directing us to draw a district based on race to have a 50 plus district which our our line drawlers looked into it um and currently don't have that ability we have to use those other criteria if that if that makes sense okay understood I'll I'll leave I'll leave it a little bit for our district one and district seven representatives to weigh in on that if they'd like to but I I think that it would I would have a hard time uh explaining to the public how that would pass the smell test in terms of creating a district especially given the circumstances on how Santa Rosa moved into district elections so that'll be my my feedback I'll see if there are any other questions from council members about the draft maps or about the process mr vice mayor thank you mayor I definitely am interesting in the in the conversation that you just had and uh as we learn more about that I'm sure we'll be addressing it in in in the proper form uh I just wanted to reiterate council member Fleming's comment about the street recognition just for for not only our ability but also the general public's ability to know exactly where the lines are as you're not a straight line so to speak and I would definitely appreciate that in the future on the maps so at a glance anyone could look at a map and and really know exactly what the lines look like especially with the different options thank you so I think just in terms of some of that feedback and I think this is talking with the clerk if you go to the city's redistricting page and if you click on the submit a draft map now it takes you to a link that shows you all of the different submitted maps perhaps what might be easier instead of jumping through all of those hoops is to on the redistricting page have direct links to district for each of the maps because once you click on it once you can open the map it opens it in district or so that you can zoom in and you can make changes it's just not intuitive on how we get there so perhaps we can can fix that uh as we move forward through the mayor if I might um I appreciate that that is one work around I think that this is the way that most people of the through the staff presentation is the way that most people will access this and so if I couldn't figure it out I don't know how other people will and I think it needs to be in the staff presentation oh I'm suggesting both okay excellent thank you yeah no absolutely I just wanted to make sure uh for folks who between the meetings want to submit maps or see the maps that have been submitted let's try to make it as intuitive and user friendly as we can uh for folks but I completely agree let's do both I will make sure that we um also bring in our GIS staff to along with um to work with redistricting partners to get all of that information for future maps that are submitted great thank you is there any other feedback from council before we go to public comment nope all right that I will open the public comment uh public hearing Mr. DeWitt hello DeWayne DeWitt from Roseland a few years ago when district elections came I was quite happy but I was disappointed in the way the powers that be set up district one so that it was split by the freeway highway 101 and the mayor at that time was very glib and said oh well it's no big deal to go across the freeway for the candidates that's not the point the point is on the west side of the freeway are the most disadvantaged underserved and overburdened communities and this should be set up so that we help those communities if it weren't for district elections we could reasonably say that mr alvarez and miss rogers might not be here it's good that they are here I'm very glad we have people of color on the board excuse me on the city council and I don't want them to have to challenge each other's to stay on that council I believe highway 101 is a natural boundary and that there should be both district one and district seven on that western side of the freeway I'm hoping that your map draws Ms. Garcia takes us into account and understands the dynamics of Santa Rosa the other side of the tracks that's the key to this whole kingdom up here essentially the people on the east side and mostly what's called the proctor terrace district then moved on up into the northeast which is the fountain grove district and then bennett valley when it was built out 50 years ago they became the powers along with oakmont from 50 to 60 years ago that really run the city people on the other side of the tracks were just along for the ride but we could change that if we look at this from the geographic perspective as well as the population perspective and that is that the people on the other side of the tracks are historically disadvantaged they need to be represented by more representatives upon this council also the south park district which is on the east side but was the historically disadvantaged black neighborhood from the past has never had full representation so if you set it up so that district two takes in all of south park district one takes in all of roseland and moves over into district seven and then let district seven move up to the north you'll get a fair representation for the people of this community who have been historically disadvantaged and you can say quite honestly I believe it was done on purpose and that's the nature of the debate this is politics and politicians don't like to give up power but i'm trying to get more power for people like mr alvarez people like miss rogers and another representative who'll help the south park district then we finally might be able to get some parity and some social equity in one of the most discriminatory cities i've ever dealt with and i've been around quite a few blocks my friends having grown up here i know it well thank you thank you mr dwitt go ahead michael hillbar at this point i would uh voice strong support for map b i don't like the way the districts are drawn currently and i would object to any uh proposed new district it's just a minor tweak tweak of what we have currently south park is a very important uh area and deserves the best representation but i believe um they deserve somebody who was uh uh not not needing to divide their um priorities between south park and and roseland interests so mainly i would like to see rhodeland be represented continuously from uh you know highway 101 west through stony point all the way to right road where the home of shelter sam jones is and south of highway 12 for many reasons you know the commonality of the issues along sabastopol road like if you got camping on rogers avenue and then over on and then over on lombardy court you got a bunch of rvs and and that's west of stony point in a different district currently and then further west out by right road you know what happened uh san rosa removed the uh bench from the bus stop to discourage lord lordering near the homeless shelter but you know there's a lot of congregating at like even 10 p.m and drug use in spite of the fact that the um um bus stop there has no bench or anything they just uh you know squatting on the ground around there and huddling and sorting through you know what they're going to smoke and what have you so we need somebody you know continuously along the whole sabastopol road area all the way to right road who has an awareness of this issue not afraid to get out there at 10 p.m and look around what's going on at 10 p.m and has an interest in that so i think it's very important that um rosalind have continuous representation all the way west and um you know north of uh highway 12 i look at that it's quite different and there's also like like dwayne brought up an issue of you know northeast versus southwest and there's a you know uh disproportionality of political power between these two uh you know furthest apart areas and i think we need to address that in one way is to to have better representation for rosalind continuously west of highway 12 thank you we'll go to our zoom public comment we'll start with brian thank you mayor um brian laying in uh i'm a district four resident in all three of the maps uh provided um i'd like to encourage the council to support map a uh and i guess title minimal disruptions as has already been presented i have a few points uh in 2018 uh having multiple representation on the downtown core was very important and that was one of the reasons the maps are drawn as they are the downtown core as we defined it back then had has multiple representation on the council and we'd like to keep that where maps b and c do not have that any further um second to the the minimal disruption point last week at our charter review committee meeting there was a consistent tone of of let's give district elections a chance we've had two elections we're starting our fourth year of a diverse council from the district elections and before we make any big changes let's really have a two or three cycles through these current districts and again that was brought up at last week's charter review not necessarily about the redistricting but i think it's a common theme um third four years ago i think the fear if there was one was that uh elected district elected council people may get parochial and try to serve their district potentially at the expense of others in the rest of the city and i can sit here three years later and say i've never had a hint of that any way shape or form i i think the councils have done a good job the last three years and uh any significant disruption could only make that more challenging it's working right now it's improving the year after year and um again to the point of less disruption i think will be helpful my last point uh along the same lines as as previous testify in here um the whole purpose of district elections was to create diversity amongst the council that we didn't have and clearly after two elections with districts now we have accomplished a big big step towards diversity and we're better for it so again i think least disruptions are better and i thank you for considering supporting map a thank you brian there's anybody else who would like to give comment on this item hit your raise hand feature on zoom it's seeing none i will close the public hearing i'll bring it back for council are there any additional comments or questions before we go into a quick demonstration uh from redistricting partners on how to actually utilize the redistricting tool okay so fiat if you want to go ahead and show us the demonstration that'd be great okay wonderful okay okay stop okay so this is your redistricting web page and it's wonderful your staff has done a great job so you have that big button that says submit a drop map online now and if you click on that it's going to take you directly to the district or tool a district or is an online mapping software out of tufts university and there are a lot of other jurisdictions who are utilizing their tool for their redistricting so again it's really important to use this specific page there's a couple of sections at that top section it gives you just some information on the tool you have two ways that you can draw maps either using the community of interest drawing tool or you can do it by districts there's also the public gallery section and you have four maps that have been submitted so far so it gives you the date of when the maps were submitted the name and the names come directly from the author and we'll show you when we get into the tool how you save it but also every map will get a unique id number and that's how we reference the id number for draft plan c and that was id number 101 on 628 you also have a section if you scroll down a little bit more called works in progress and you can click that button load drafts I don't know if there's any draft plans so there is so these are plans that members of the public have not submitted in their final form they have them here as drafts that they are still working on and then the final section if you scroll down a little bit more it tells you a little more about the data that is in the the mapping platform so we work directly with district to ensure that you have for your specific tool the city layers of it and the correct data that we have to use in California so we'll scroll back up and would you like me to go through both the community of interest drawing tool or just the district based tool go ahead do the district based tool I think we've already gone over the communities of interest okay wonderful so we'll click on the purple button and it says Santa Rosa seven city council districts built out of census blocks and so the community of interest tool and the district based tool do look really similar there are some notable differences just from the imagery you have a grayed out background instead of the street layer but you still have the city limits and then also on the left of the image you might be asking what are those gray sections and those are the census blocks so again for redistricting we have to use the decennial census file and when we're talking about data we're also synonymously talking about that census geography which will be your census blocks on the top left hand corner you have a plus and minus button which will allow you to zoom in and zoom out of the map and then that button on the bottom will orient your map pointing north and so those are just the small stuff that you have on the left side but on the right side of your screen is the bulk of your the work that you're going to be doing so you can see that the hand button or the pan tool has already been clicked on so that allows you to move the map around and to also zoom in and zoom out of the map so that will automatically be the button that you are on as you open your tool the button to the direct right of it is the brush stroke tool and we click on that we'll see here and again there's a difference here from the community interest tool you will only be able to draw a specific number of districts for the district based tool you can you can submit a plan that only has one district or less than seven but you can only draw seven districts so that is a difference from the community tool you do have the ability to change your your brush stroke size which is that the toggle button right under the the blue color as it says brush size and if you can move that to the right you're going to be able to grab a large portion of census box or if you toggle that to the left you can do one by one or have a smaller amount of census box that you'll draw um you also have the ability to lock already drawn districts um so if you have that's that space right there um so if you have districts that you've drawn and you are really happy with how it looks then you won't be able to make those changes the final two buttons and we'll come back to this brush stroke size is the erase tool directly to the right up at the top um this here is is similar to the community of interest tool so it allows you to erase and like the brush stroke tool you can make it a huge eraser or um do one by one and the final button on the right and then we'll get back to the the brush stroke tool is your um your search tool so if you if you zoom in a little bit on your map it will allow you to have information by census blocks so give you the total count of the census block the ethnic breakdown for that inspection tool um so those are all the buttons that you have but if we can go back and click on the that brush stroke tool and you can pick a color now um if you want to start drawing a district so just click any area of your map and start clicking away so you can create a district by moving your map and clicking one by one or if you click an area and then drag your your tool then you'll be able to pick up a large portion you are going to see simultaneously what's happening on the right side of your screen is there's going to be a bar that is moving to the right this is going to give you in real time the amount of um total count that you have in a particular district if you want to change the color then you go back to the just go back to the brush stroke you have a really wonderful staff member who is is familiar with district it's great but you can click on another color and then you can go ahead um and draw another district so if you don't have that lock already drawn districts you can go you can move your uh yellow district into the blue one so if we want to take up portions uh so we're able to do that but again if you're really happy with what your district looked like you're going to want to click on that lock already drawn districts button some of the other numbers that are important here is if we go to the bottom right of the screen we see the ideal so that is if you had districts of exactly perfect size the ideal size of a district would be 25,502.14 people so that that's also what the line represents in that middle of that box um so we can see that we have the blue district and the yellow district are above that ideal population and it also gives us the unassigned population so if a member of the public is interested in submitting a full district plan you're going to want to try to get that as close to zero there is something called highlight unassigned units at that bottom left and if you click on that it's going to highlight all of the areas that are not currently in a district and you can click that off as you're going your plan it also gives you the max population deviation so as I noted it doesn't give you the total population deviation but it will give you the max deviation of your district so currently the 80.5 is representing the yellow district so we do have a lot of members of the public um who do do their deviation that's under 10% but again if the council would like we can take the public submissions down put them in our internal software and then have an atlas produced for you um so um yeah you can continue to make uh make a district and again this is just a demo myself and the staff member who's uh using this tool this is not a plan that we're submitting this is purely for example purposes uh so we can go to the the tab that says data layers which is right to the right of that population um and there's a we can see right now we have the thing clicked on called show painted districts so that allows us to see the districts that we just drew um if you'd like you can also click on the one directly beneath that called show numbering for painted districts um if you want to number your districts you also have boundaries for your current district so if you'd like to kind of see where you are in reference to your current boundaries you can click on that and they will appear and again you can click on and off on on all of these and then the final one if you click on population by race you will have some more information that shows up so you can click on show population and then go to variable um to the right of where it says variable i'll go a little bit to the top um under show population there is a tab directly yes and here if you click on any one of those it's going to show you the total population of just your area or by a specific ethnic group again if we are creating a district based on race that would be under come from your legal counsel to direct us to do so but if we were directed to do so we would be utilizing the citizen voting age population data set so we can click off the show population and then we'll go to the bottom and click show citizen voting age population and this also gives us the CVAP so it's really similar to what we just did but now we can look at the total CVAP and we have a couple of different groups and and areas that we do on our specific data tables the final tab is the evaluation tab which if we go back up to where it says data layers and if we click on evaluation tab we can click on population by race and this will show us a comparison of your districts based on different groups so here for compare you can change that to again we have a tab to white population Hispanic Asian Black Asian American Islander and Native Hawaiian and you can compare those different groups per district it'll give you the percentage in the table below similar to your top for data layers it also gives you this the same amount of information for your citizen voting age population by race as well so those are all the tabs and the if we go up to the top above the colors where it says save so we're going to click on that button so once you're done or you're done with your session and you want to save it as a draft you'll click on that blue button we won't be adding it to our district or page right now but we'll go ahead and click on that save button and up will pop a window so here is where you will save your map and when you do save it on the bottom where it says shared a gallery we won't be clicking that now again because it's a demo but you can click on that and it will automatically appear in the home page that we viewed at the beginning of this demo above where it says shared a gallery there's that box that allows you to add a oh just write a bunch shared a gallery right there that's the space where you can name your map so it gives you the ability to name it if you realize another difference between the district or tool and the community of interest tool is that you don't have the ability on the map to add any additional text so if a member of the public would like to give additional information on their map that they submitted we urge you to send an email to attend one of these meetings to uplift your map and let us know the basis behind your plan but again you do have that ability to name it if you don't want to share it directly to the gallery you can click on right below share now you can click on work in progress and we'll click on that and now the button on the bottom says save as draft so now you can save it as a draft directly to the gallery you do have a ability up at the top of this window where it says copy to clipboard so you can copy your specific URL to your map on on the web and be able to look at it there but again the best way to ensure that the council and the public can view the map that you have worked so hard on to review is to share it directly to the gallery and we'll exit out of this window and we have one last button and then we'll be we'll be done at the very top right there's three lines and if we click on that you also have the ability to print your map as a PDF or if you have another mapping software that you would like to look at this plan in you can download it as a CSV a Geo JSON or a shape file and then you can add it to your software such as map to tutor Esri to look at it more in detail in that way and that's that's all the the buttons and functionality for district it is a pretty user friendly tool and again we already have four plans and we're still accepting them for the council to look at and that's the the district or demo all right thank you so much Sophia are there any questions from council okay let's see if we have any questions from the public before we officially close this item okay seeing none uh Sophia can you or uh or Stephanie can you walk through for the public one more time what the process looks like in terms of the timeline from here on out and when our next meetings are going to be on this I can talk through kind of what's coming next and then and then staff oh wonderful your staff is great and on it so today we're on January 25th so we're here at your first draft map hearing so this is the initial draft map hearing and so we will continue to receive public feedback and council amendments and we will have the another hearing on um February 17th it'll be a community outreach hearing and then on March 1st will be another draft map hearing and for any amendments if the council would like to send us them we ask that you send an email to staff and your staff can forward us forward us that email directly just a note though for the up or down vote for a final plan that plan must be made available to the public seven days prior to the meeting so if there are any changes to a plan um and you want to vote on it as the final plan and if there are substantial changes to that you will have to have another hearing so if and let's say when we come back on the first and there are substantial changes we're going to have to have that next hearing and post the map seven days prior that's under the the fair maps act but you do have until um April 12th again if we do have additional changes that the council would like to see to have our meetings finalized or a map finalized excuse me okay council member Fleming yes um just one last clarifying question how do you define substantial change um so sometimes there might be a map where you want to just there might be an error with a census block and you make you move one line over an area that would be a minimal change but if there is a major change where we're for example moving the boundary from the rearwoods to the highway or making changes throughout the map that would be that would count as a substantial change okay thank you okay thank you so much we look forward to the completion of the process uh but we'll finish this item for tonight and just thank you for joining us uh council is going to take a dinner break so we will come back in a half hour so just before eight o'clock and we'll talk then welcome back Adam city clerk could you please call the roll yes thank you mayor council member schwetham here council member soyer here council member rogers president council member fleming here vice mayor alvarez president mayor rogers here let the record show that all council members are present all right thank you let's go on to item 14.2 please item 14.2 is a report city bus temporary transit service modification to address staffing shortages the report will be given by rachel e deputy director of transit thank you so much and good evening mayor rogers and members of council i'm here this evening to discuss with you some of the current challenges facing city bus as it has to do with our staffing levels and also to seek council's approval to implement a minor temporary service reduction in the city bus system to enable us to ensure system reliability as we work to rebuild our bus operator staffing next slide please so by way of background as you all know we had to cut service quite significantly in the early onset of the COVID-19 pandemic back in April um april may 2020 and then over the next several months we gradually added service until by august 2021 we were back to about 85 percent of our pre-pandemic service level at that time we felt that was a sustainable service level based on our staffing levels we were already struggling with bus operator recruitment but we were still in a good place um however as we move forward into the fall and had some significant attrition including a number of bus operator retirements we found that our recruitment efforts were not able to keep up with the level of attrition we were experiencing with the result that we're currently carrying more vacant positions now than we were back in august and have in fact 15 vacancies and only about 74 percent of our current budgeted positions filled for bus operators coming into the holiday period we were maintaining our service with a pretty unsustainable level of overtime and have to thank our dedicated staff for doing everything they can to cover service but it got harder and harder and in fact as we got into late december early january we did experience as you know some instances of having to drop some service on on some specific days because we were unable to cover all of the scheduled work as you all know service reliability is fundamental to the transit rider experience i think it's probably second only to safety in terms of the level of importance if there's a bus on the schedule you want to know that that bus is going to be there at the time it says on the schedule so in light of this deteriorating system reliability our staff huddled up and came up with a proposal that's before you today to slightly reduce our baseline scheduled service to a slightly lower staffing level to give us a chance to keep the system reliable as we as we bring on higher trained new bus operators next slide please so that said between the time that we prepared this council item and today we of course have experienced some unanticipated significant impacts from the omicron surge in fact about a week and a half ago we ended up with so many staff quarantine that we had to implement an emergency service reduction well below the proposal that will be before you today due to the the level of people we had out on quarantine so we are currently as of today operating a saturday level service with some additions to address some of the differences between the weekday and the saturday routes to make sure that we don't leave anyone stranded for example on group 10 on the weekends we don't go up to round barn boulevard we are doing that and this current saturday level service so that people can get up to the community health center to kaiser and the jobs in that area route 15 we're running on a weekday span as opposed to a saturday span and we are operating some supplemental school service particularly on route six because we have some very very high school demand to comstock and to piner high school as staff begin to come back over the next days and weeks we will be able to add to that saturday service so we're working on plans to begin to augment that but it's a little hard to crystal ball right at this moment exactly how quickly we'll be able to step step back up to something closer to our pre omicron service level so the proposal that i'm i'm going to focus on tonight would be that that proposed endpoint that we wouldn't necessarily go right back up to where we were as of august but a slightly lower service level but still significantly more robust than what we're operating today based on the omicron emergency service reduction so that's been been challenging to message to writers but i wanted to just take a minute to clarify that we are looking to to step significantly back up from where we are today next slide please so in putting together the proposal i'll review with you today staff had two goals the first was to reduce service by the equivalent of two weekly driver rosters so essentially two driver positions we felt that that was conservative in the sense that it preserved as much service out on the street for passengers who really have kind of a post pandemic or late pandemic level of service need at this point while giving us just a little bit of buffer and breathing room to accommodate the regular things that come up with people being out sick it certainly you know didn't anticipate the level of impact from omicron but sort of on a normal day-to-day basis as we go through the rest of this pandemic the second goal was to minimize impacts on riders by preserving span of service and avoiding reductions on routes that are already operating at lower service levels so for example we did look at some scenarios that would require saturday service to reflect more of a sunday service model so much shorter service day we felt that we didn't want to do that to writers we have a lot of writers that really depend on our system for the basic trips didn't want to leave anybody stranded in the early morning hours or in the evening hours and then we also didn't want to further impact routes that are still in that you know 15 percent we haven't fully restored from before the pandemic you know some routes that used to operate every 30 minutes are still operating hourly and we didn't want to further disadvantage those routes so after going through about a dozen different iterations of how we could achieve this goal of reducing by the two weekly driver rosters we came upon a solution that we think is the best in terms of minimizing the impact on riders which is to implement a modest service reduction on route one mendicino avenue which would reduce the weekday frequency from every 15 minutes to every 20 minutes it's a relatively modest frequency adjustment but it does actually let us take advantage of a lot more efficiency in the system and achieve the goal of where we want to be in terms of the sustainable service level there is a weird scheduling artifact with this proposal which would mean that we do have some additional hours on sunday that need to be uh need to be scheduled to make 40-hour rosters for our drivers and so we did have the opportunity to actually add some service back on some additional service on sundays as a little bit of a consolation with this proposal next slide please so route one just so everyone is familiar is primarily on mendicino avenue on this map it starts at the transit mall which is the blue circle with the big t it follows oh thank you for whoever's running the pointer it follows the blue dotted line up mendicino avenue all the way up to bicentennial up by kaiser turns left on bicentennial and then comes down to codding town the arrange avenue so it serves a large number of pretty key destinations in our system including the santa rosa junior college santa rosa high school the county center and kaiser medical center so you know we don't take an adjustment to this route lightly based on those number of destinations it is one of the two highest frequency routes in the city bus system and it is just defined as one of santa rosa's high frequency transit corridors next slide please so this is a lot of detail but the intent here is just given idea a preliminary look at at how this schedule could play out in terms of the number of trips operated on route one to the left of this table is the current service and this would be current meaning august 2021 not current as of today with with the emergency reduction and then the proposed services on the right so you'll see on route one we would have a reduction from 57 trips on weekdays to 41 trips on weekdays and then you also see on sundays we would temporarily go from 11 trips up to 20 trips so there'd be a little bit more opportunity and frequency for riders on sundays on route one there are a couple other small changes that that we wanted to include for example there's an additional trip on route six to deal with some very very high passenger loads we have at peiner high school so route six would go from 28 weekday trips to 29 couple additional trips also on route 12 to deal with some demand issues we have on that route and route six is a long route that travels sort of throughout the western side of the city via peiner and folton road and then back via third street and route 12 is our route that goes to the heart of roseland so the overall impact on the number of trips operated it's you know a decrease from 301 weekday trips in total to 289 weekday trips but even with that relatively modest decrease in the number of trips it does actually let us achieve what we need to at the staffing level next slide please so we we did want to get some rider feedback about this even though this is kind of an emergency action we we definitely wanted to try to get some input from riders about the approach we should be taking the level of impact this proposal would have i'm going to be honest our ability to connect with riders and really focus on this outreach ended up being inhibited somewhat by the omicron related emergency we had because we had to pivot in the middle of this outreach to really communicating with riders about this emergency service reduction and making sure people were aware of this change that we had to implement so quickly so it hasn't been a perfect process but we were able to implement a rider survey both online and with hard copies in person we received about 120 surveys back we had social media notices a gov delivery email to our large rider email list notices posted in the transit facilities with information about how to comment we also reached out to our stakeholders including the santa rosa junior college and santa rosa city schools to let them know what was going on see if they had any major concerns we did we got acknowledgments but no expression of significant concern i think they're they understand the the the issues that we're all facing as it relates to um COVID related staffing impacts we also reached out internally to our colleagues in planning and economic development because the medicino avenue high frequency corridor is important for some of the development initiatives going on in the city we wanted to make sure that you know even this temporary reduction we're proposing in the level of service on route one wouldn't have an unintended consequence in the planning and economic development world and the feedback we got was you know in light of the fact that this is a temporary COVID related reduction that there wasn't a concern there and then finally we've been working very closely with the sci su leadership representing our bus operators um they understand this proposal um they're supportive of it um they see the need to give our our bus operators who've been stretched very thin covering service a break in some and breathing room and for us to be able to get back on our feet next slide please so for the writer survey we asked two main questions we wanted to just get a sense of what is the the preferred approach to service reduction recognizing that there really isn't an option not to reduce service to some extent but we could either have the scheduled planned reduction the temporary reduction in the route one frequency um that people would could plan for on a day-to-day basis or we could continue to do what we had been doing which was as we couldn't come cover service on a certain day we were messaging out to riders which trips would be affected um overwhelmingly riders picked the the the route one reduction is like it's better for us to know and have that sense of of what the service is going to be from day-to-day as opposed to like waiting to hear that certain trips may not operate um that percentage was slightly lower for um Spanish speaking respondents so about 82 percent overall but 74 percent for Spanish speakers but still a large majority of riders indicating that they preferred us to just bake in a little bit of a reduction um that they could rely on from day-to-day next slide please the other question we asked was about the level of impact this route one change would have on riders um and in that question 86 percent of riders indicate indicated that they would either experience no impact or be somewhat impacted meaning their trip might take a little bit longer but it wasn't really a big deal um 10 percent of riders said they would be impacted meaning it might cause a more significant change in their travel or highly impacted which meant it might affect their ability to make their trip at all um and this was all based on not being able to give the riders exact schedules to sort of describe what would happen but this is the feedback we received and in this case um the the the feedback from the Spanish language survey was very consistent with the English um they they were right in line in terms of the percentages of riders um indicating these different categories um the other category that four percent of the bottom those are people who didn't elect to answer in any of the categories above but had other comments and those all tended to say things like please don't cut service in Roseland please make sure you keep um service to Pioneer High School and we aren't planning to adjust or change any of those other services so I think that um that we're we're meeting those riders um with what they've requested uh next slide please so based on this rider feedback and where we find ourselves today we do feel comfortable bringing forward this recommendation to council that we proceed with this temporary reduction of route one frequency um and recommend implementation of this service change as soon as possible likely in early March that will give us enough time to print new schedules to reach out to riders so that riders have advanced warning they can see the schedules planned for any adjustments they need to make to their trips in advance and not have to just respond in the moment um we would plan also as part of this recommendation to restore the 15 minute service on route one as soon as staffing levels increase and stabilize with the target of this summer hopefully early summer uh and I will say that there is good news on this front it's I you know hopefully can end on a little bit of an optimistic note which is that you know after struggling with recruitment and to get any applicants in the door for bus operator positions um we um you know in December I think we only had two applicants um and we just pulled applications we had 12 and we're interviewing all 12 of those folks today and tomorrow and so hopefully we'll be forming a pretty good size bus operated training class um within the next few weeks so that's really positive and and I want to thank everyone who's helping us with that outreach in the community to try to get the word out about this position um it's a great opportunity um to come work for the city uh so with that I'll wrap up my presentation and I'd be happy to answer any questions the council has thank you so much Rachel council member Fleming thank you Missy this is um is a really good solution to a really difficult problem and I'm heartened to hear that we have people interested in driving our fantastic city buses I do have one question about the sunday change because how I look at it for route one um that travels so much through district four is that that we're gonna have this wonderful increase in sunday service and I'm wondering if this means that we're gonna have instead of hourly service service on the half hour yeah it would mean it's right now it's 45 minutes um every 45 minutes on sunday oil right now pre pre omicron 45 minutes on sundays it would go to every half an hour on sundays okay under this proposal so the only concern I have is is probably a good concern is just that you know if people start using becoming more transit dependent as a result of that increased level of service you know um I could see they're being down the road you know when we do have more transit operators them they're being some frustration about our reduction in service on sundays because I think it's going to be overall a significant benefit to people who ride route one so just wanted to put that out there otherwise well done thank you and I'll just comment I I I appreciate that comment about you know it's very difficult to take something away from people once that they've gone thrown accustomed to it and adjusted their travel around it and so um you know at this point when we revert back we would plan to go back to the the service level um that we had implemented in august on sundays on route one that said if we see a response in in the hopefully small number of months we have this service level implemented and we're really hearing from people that they like it you know we can certainly look at and see if it's possible um and it's indicated by the data to sustain that service level so I wouldn't rule that out and I completely understand the the concern that you're expressing because adding five minutes to the weekday well seems like inconvenient but not like the end of the world like pretty pretty doable but a 15 minute change I think might might get people so hopefully it will be wildly popular and and you'll be compelled to make that change permanent thank you thanks I appreciate that comment councilmember and that that would be a good problem to have I think from from my perspective if more people are relying on public transit councilmember rogers um thank you for the the presentation I was just going to say um that in while on council I have been relying on the bus more because it has been convenient um and due to some personal circumstances um so and I've noticed that the ridership has increased so I'm hoping that this does not decrease the ridership uh for climate in a lot of other reasons I'm hoping that we can maintain our ridership and that people can just find a way to continue to take public transportation but also I wanted to to thank you for uh reaching out to um the ridership and asking their opinion and also for engaging uh the seiu leadership um to allow our operators the um so their opinions and what they their needs to be heard so I just wanted to thank you and your uh management for doing that so thank you any other questions from council all right let's go to public comment on this item if you're interested in providing comment on 14.2 hit the raise hand feature on zoom all right seeing none I'll go ahead and bring this back councilmember Sawyer do you want to put a motion on the table sure thank you mayor I could introduce a resolution of the council the city center Rosa approving a temporary reduction of city bus service due to a staffing shortage and wait for the reading of the text second we have a motion from councilmember Sawyer and a second from councilmember Fleming are there any additional comments let's go ahead and call the vote councilmember schwedhelm hi councilmember Sawyer hi councilmember Rogers hi councilmember Fleming yes vice mayor alvarez hi mayor rogers hi that motion passes with six eyes okay let's move on to item 14.3 item 14.3 is a report the roseland creek community park master plan rescission of mitigated neg mitigated negative declaration and project approvals and direction for preparation of environmental impact report this report will be given by sue gallagher city attorney thank you actually the report will be given by gen centos deputy director of parks thank you thank you sue and uh good evening now not afternoon in her mayor rogers vice mayor alvarez and council members and gen santos with the city of Santa Rosa parks and we are here tonight to talk about rosin creek community park master plan again to talk about rescinding recent approvals of the plan and directing staff to prepare an environmental impact report next slide so just taking a step back to remind ourselves where rosin creek community park is it is located in roseland and the southwest quadrant of the city and south of highway 12 and west of highway 101 and in this map it's outlined in yellow you can kind of see it there the closest nearby park with an outline with a green outline around it is bare neighborhood park a reference next slide please zooming in a little bit closer to an aerial view of rosin creek community park we can see that it's bordered on the west and east by burbank avenue and nickman avenue and across burbank avenue is rosin creek elementary school directly across the street from the park otherwise the park is generally surrounded by single family homes and open farm land and the you can see the park is has a lot of trees in the middle of the park it's also bisected on the middle and southern parts by rosin creek and you can see some pre-existing or you know pre-existing farm dwellings and houses and pout buildings etc still on this plan the above ground buildings have been removed but nothing below ground has been touched on this park so it's generally in the shape of this area as you see today next slide so we're reducing the massive amount of community engagement that we have done with this community over the last 12 years to one slide but know that it has been a enormous outreach effort for 12 years now since 2009 with more than 17 public meetings and seven community meetings between 2009 and 2018 in 2019 we held six additional public meetings and in 2021 we held one more public meeting and joined into council member alvoret or vice mayor alvoret as listening sessions he had six listening sessions and then a final seventh listening session was held combining all the previous listening session um participants to meet with each other in the community to provide the city with what their ultimate request was for the master plan going forward and that happened in 2021 next slide please we also began a very in-depth environmental review of the potential future master plan and the rosin creek community park site this started in 2018 this it was a really in-depth study called an initial study and they we analyze all the potential environmental impacts that the future master plan for rosin creek community park could have on the park and the surrounding neighborhood there are a variety of things analyzed including aesthetics agricultural and forestry resources air quality biological resources cultural resources geology and soils and on and on and on lots of environmental review of the site uh next slide please and so here's what was reviewed this was the master plan that was presented to council in 2021 and we won't go into all the finer details here but just to do a quick overview of the site you can see that generally most of the site is left in its natural state more than 80 of this park is proposed to be remaining as it is right now with the addition of some of a playground and a couple picnic areas in a lawn etc on the southern portion of the park with a nature center is a little white box in the middle associated parking lot and a potential community garden and a picnic area we also have a bike lane um transacting from the let's see the northeast side of the park all the way down through the southwest part of the park it's a really exciting plan it really preserves a lot of the park as it is but it also allows for those requested community amenities such as playgrounds and picnic areas a sport court lawn and a nature center as well as our trails we also have a requirement with the ag and open space district to install the upper pathway that you can see there it's in brown connecting McMinn Avenue to Burbank Avenue and then crossing over to Rosa Creek Elementary School that's a particular interest to the city to get this done as soon as possible because we do have school children using cutting cutting across right now there is no crossing there so it's very unsafe or they're walking all the way around the park throughout the neighborhood to get to their school site next slide please so the master plan I just mentioned was at city council on September 28th uh 2021 and council heard a in-depth presentation documenting all of the community feedback received since 2009 and heard a thorough review of the environmental review process that review process is called a ultimately leads to a mitigated negative declaration it's essentially declaring that the park has negative environmental impacts with some mitigation measures in place and so council also approved the mitigated negative declaration that evening at council and staff shortly thereafter filed an environmental declaration with the state clearinghouse next slide please and a month later on October 28th 2021 Rosalind action and Dwayne DeWitt filed a lawsuit against the city challenging the city's ability to adopt the uh MND the mitigated negative declaration along with the master plan in review of this lawsuit we recognize that it could significantly delay the project and add a pretty significant amount of cost well over a hundred you know much over well over $150,000 an increased cost to litigate this lawsuit so we also recognize that there would be a potential three-year delay to get through the litigation process with this lawsuit as planned meanwhile the park would remain undeveloped and not be available to the community to to use in an improved manner next slide so it really left this it really leaves the city in the unenviable way of having two options that are not neither one of them are are something we want to do we are excited to approve this plan and move forward but looking at what our options were we have two options we can litigate and defend the master plan and the mitigated negative declaration the way in which it was approved as i've mentioned previously this would add a significant delay to the project and well over $150,000 in attorney's fees etc or we could decide to rescind the recent approvals of the master plan and mitigated negative declaration and prepare an environmental impact report those are uh that at a reduced delay we could finish an EIR an environmental review uh in about seven months so that would put us into fall of this year 2022 and the estimate is $100,000 or less to get us to this point and this is enticing because again we really the community has been waiting a long time for this park and we really think that this is going to be our best bet uh moving forward so that we can expedite the opening of this park to this community who's worked so hard this is a community that struggles to agree about what should be in this park but nevertheless we did we did make some great progress over the last 12 years and we were able to approve that in 2021 and the recension of the approvals of the master plan and and directing staff to prepare an environmental impact report would get us to the point where we could open the park sooner it does mean that we would have to take that time to prepare the environmental report and come back with the current master plan in the fall for council's adoption and at that point we could move forward with um the necessary steps towards construction next slide please so again we've been at 12 years um talking about rose and creek community park plus a lot of community members have been talking about this park for much longer than 12 years but officially the city's been meeting with the community for about 12 years we are recommending uh to resend the recent approvals so that we can reduce the amount of delay the community has to wait yet again to have their park and EIR as I mentioned could be developed in about seven months at that time staff would return to council to adopt the EIR it's a higher level of review than the mitigated negative declaration with the current master plan this fall again emphasizing we really want to get this back to the community they've been waiting a long time next slide so with that i'll re-heart recommendation it's recommended by the city attorney's office and the transportation and public works department parks division that in order to to avoid this significant expense and delays associated with engaging in litigation filed against the city by rose on action and dwayne dwitt challenging the council's prior approval of the rose and creek we need to park master plan the council by resolution rescind resolution number res 2021 uh dash 162 which adopted the mitigation negative declaration for the rose and creek community park master plan and approved the rose and creek community park master plan and two direct staff to prepare an environmental impact report for the rose and creek community park master plan as drafted next slide and of course the city attorney and i are available for questions madam city attorney uh thank you and and yes i'm i'm also available for answering any questions and i just wanted to note one thing um mentioning the cost of the litigation the 150 000 that is representing the city's attorney's fees what we would be paying to an outside council to defend the lawsuit and we really are confident um that we would prevail if we pursued it it's really simply and i know we've said this in the staff report it's really simply from a perspective of time and money um that we are recommending let's get that just just go through the process and get the park uh developed and open to the public as quickly as we can just wanted to clarify um that we are confident if we pursued the litigation we would prevail but boy the time and money that it would take is just not worth it thank you thank you council are there any questions you know questions let's go to public comment on this item if you're interested in providing comment hit the raise hand feature on your zoom we'll go to lenny followed by madonna that was quick all right um my name is lenny more i live in southwest center rose and near the rosland creek community park i support rosaline actions efforts to have the city rescind the mnd and repair an eir for this project this is a really sensitive ecological area and eir is most appropriate and in this situation uh there's only two areas in the entire world that are oak woodland savannahs there's a little tiny tiny spot in texas and here in sonoma county and that's it this park's perfect example of this oak woodland savannah ecosystem and it must be protected under sequestria argument standard the city must prepare an eir whenever substantial evidence in the whole record before the city supports a fair argument that a project may have significant effect on the environment i asked that the city scrub the mnd prepare an eir and work with the rosaline action towards a positive resolution and i thank you and i uh give back to rest of my time all right we'll go to madonna thank you can you hear me yes we can thank you so much uh you guys are doing a great job tonight um and uh so i'm a community member close to the finley area but i do do all of my shopping in the roseland area um and the bair park is a park that i visit frequently um at a time my daughter would be astik dancing in bair park with her group um and my recommendation is please move forward and open the park i yield my time all right thank you we'll go to susan thank you um susan kerks here president of the madron out of on society in sonoma county and a naturalist with over 20 years of experience specializing in american badger and i'm speaking um wearing both caps tonight i am pleased to see this item on your agenda i actually anticipated seeing it and i think that the recommendation to move forward with the ea eir is the appropriate recommendation i would like to see the city of senorosa identified lands in southwest senorosa that are appropriate for a variety of public access and recreational types of activities this property as many of us has shared with you for years and years and years is not one of those properties you have an opportunity here um to have some vision especially in our climate emergency with the multiple schools in the area of the students who visit this property who likely will have career paths in environmental studies conservation park rangers a variety of environmental openings for our young people who are in schools in the southwest senorosa area to connect to this property as a world-class nature preserve of 30 acres in your senorosa area and i would like to say that i was so impressed in the last meeting when the community park plan was approved by you that so many so many of the residents who live in the area came forward in public comment and literally begged you to save this land for the nature for the ecology those were the exact words that i heard used spoken in both english and spanish so i also would like to share that i i met with uh vice mayor alvarez and it really enjoyed a walk and a talk with him because madrone autobahn has been very dedicated to this property for years supporting the roseland community action group because we know the value of this property to the city and to your citizens the fresh air the health benefits the nature that will be part of these children's lives in southwest senorosa so i encourage you to move forward with the er and then also to come to the table and revise the plan so that you have the best 30 acre preserve that literally will gain attention for you nationally and that is not an exaggeration and we are devoted to helping thank you and i do i see one more hand johanna uh hi can you hear me okay great um yes i'm johanna greenberg i lived in southwest santa rosa i'm a doctor of veterinary medicine with further education in wildlife ecology and regenerative agriculture why do cities feel they need to destroy every beautiful place by building on it okay being a giant parking lot the 30 acres question on burbank ad is one of the most beautiful christian pieces of native oak woodland environment within the city boundaries this is rare and really worth preserving as is putting parking lots and roads on this property is the prosperous there are tons of roads in and around burbank ad there's the city community park with all the pavement and traditional park facilities directly down the street on herm ad the last thing this area needs is more roads and parking lots there is no question that the proposed parking lots and paving will have huge impacts on local wildlife on pollution levels and the quality of life for local residents a confident e ir will show this trees grasslands and shrubbery are literally the earth's lungs and moisturizers these trees create moisture and help create rain we depend on native green space locally and throughout california to keep the air we breathe the soil we grow food on the water we drink healthy critically the more paving a city has the less rainwater infiltration and groundwater replenishment this means more drought less available water lower water tables and more fires more paving and less green growth and trees contribute to higher levels of co2 pollution drought and climate change let's keep paving and city-style building for the city center leave these natural wild areas and edges intact that support this ecosystem health and our health um this preserve and burbank is a perfect example and is also a critically needed sink for winter flood waters and summer drought mitigation guarding the integrity of this preserve is one of the easiest decisions the city of center rosa can make it is clearly what the constituents want preserve it out of this no paving needed no roads needed it will be a real testament to the city of center rosa and couldn't be more perfect or productive this will be a beautiful piece of rare golden woodland in years to come keep the southwest and the city of center rosa healthy and beautiful for all thanks thank you no more hands on zoom i'll come to the chambers is there anyone who wants to give public comment in the chamber my name is dwayne de witt i'm from roseland parking lot construction and road building projects need to have environmental impacts known before the projects are undertaken therefore an environmental impact report will be helpful to local residents near such large construction projects as this the best environmental alternative needs to be chosen studied and implemented for the benefit of nature and local residents not businesses asphalt and concrete paving of impermeable surface being laid down over raw earth has an undeniable negative effect upon the environment where this happens paved parking lots built for automobiles trucks and motor vehicles undeniably changes the patterns of water recharge into the ground and stormwater runoff such water becomes polluted from vehicle fluids and also particles from brakes and tires roadways are notorious for stormwater pollution of local waterways the rainbow sheen you see in standing water on parking lots and roadways is poison to fish humans and wildlife the parking lot construction project for two separate spots with a total of 36 parking spaces now proposed by santa rosa city staff is unnecessary the sites proposed have gravel rock covered driveways for close to 80 years without problems many vehicles have parked there over the years without problems the 14-foot wide roadway proposed for new construction across the natural land area locals know as roseland neighborhood does not need to be paved good permeable surfaces can make a nice unpaved path and trail across the site usable by both pedestrians bicycles and folks using wheelchairs and baby carriages there is a local man who often enters the neighborhood now with his motorized wheelchair his name is dylan and says no city staff have ever talked with him about his view to not pave over any of the area for the over 100 years motor vehicles have been using burbank avenue there has not been any problem with fire trucks and emergency vehicles accessing the sites at 1370 and 1400 burbank avenue the house at 1027 mcminn avenue was accessible from its construction in the mid 20th century until it was destroyed by the city a few years ago an honest design process with the community before the scoping of the err will allow for an accurate and helpful evaluation of our impacts upon nature one more sentence also this your time is up mr do it thank you thank you for the err i'm gonna go ahead bring it uh back for our voicemail public comments yeah hello my name is ryan schwaab and and my comment is related to 14.3 the roseland creek community park uh i agree that the mitigated negative declaration and approval of the park should be rescinded until a comprehensive site specific err is performed i also would like to say that the parking lots and roads within the park do not need to be paved we should keep this park in its most natural state and limit the destruction to this area as much as possible um the city should see site specific errs as a necessary protective benefit rather than a nuisance which should be completed instead of trying to sidestep them whenever possible that's all i had uh thank you city council for hearing my comments thank you and i would uh like to comment on the roseland neighborhood plan we believe that the parking is unnecessary uh and should be eliminated from the plan um we don't need to add the greenhouse gases with more parking we don't need more cars coming there and there's plenty of parking across the street at the school across the street please let's do a legitimate greenhouse gas assessment for a change and uh protect this woke woodland uh and natural park in his uh natural state thank you hi my name is mary go and i'm calling about the agenda item the proposed er for the roseland creek community park and i feel like the the parking spaces that they're wanting to put in is just too much and that it seems like they're going to pave over 20 of the park which is a small park anyway so i think that the parking is too much and i would just like to see the park left as natural as possible so that the school children nearby and the people that live in the area can walk to a natural park like people in other parts of santa rosa are able to easily get to spring lake or howlard park thank you very much goodbye i can close public comment on this item here thank you dina i'll go ahead bring it back and councilmember flaming can you please put a motion on the table for discussion yep okay a resolution of the council of the city of santa rosa rescinding resolution number 2021-162 which adopted the mitigated negative declaration for the rosland creek community park master plan and the rosland creek community park master plan and directing staff to prepare an environmental impact report for the rosland creek community master plan and waive further reading of the text second motion by councilmember flaming second by councilmember sweathelm who wants to start mr vice mayor thank you mayor i i completely understand the concerns of our community and i do want this to go as quickly as possible as i feel this is a mini a resource a gem that's been spoken about for rosalie for decades and yet we still are without a park i believe children deserve to enjoy appreciate nature and not be kept out of it i believe parents deserve to send their children to school and i have to worry about them when they leave out the door nature safety is exactly what this project is about and what it means but i got to tell you nature is not a septic tank in the middle of a park it's not tires that fill a creek it's not the foundation of three homes that are strewn within the property i too want this gem to be preserved and displayed for what it is i believe we're all in agreement with that and if this means that we rescind approval that we made a couple months ago then so be it what i do not want to see is that this project is lost in litigation that resources are spent when they could be used to improve the natural resource that this park is and we heard it from our community they want nature they want to be preserved but i have to tell you nature is not a septic system thank you thank you vice mayor there any other comments from council all right i'm going to be uh fairly candid uh there is a lot of anger and frustration i think around the item tonight i think that that frustration comes from an understanding that at least one of the people bringing this lawsuit stands up week after week and land based this council for not making investments in roseland this is a substantial investment that we have been trying to make and because it's only 75 percent of what a small minority of folks in roseland wanted that wasn't good enough and i can understand some of the comments around the ecology and the environment but i will tell you one of those people that i talked to that are neighbors that are opposed to the park told me they opposed it because the sound of children playing was going to be detrimental to their community so i want to be very clear this precision is not based on environmental factors it's based on a select few who recognize the gem that they have next to their homes and want to make sure that nobody else can participate either when they talk about not having parking spaces what they're saying is that folks who live three blocks away who can't walk across the the street which is busy and can be detrimental for kids that they don't want their parents to be able to drive them over so that they can enjoy the park too i want to thank the vice mayor for all the work that he's put into this leading is hard finding compromise is hard and eddie has worked very hard to try to bring together everyone in the community to develop an asset that's going to be beneficial to everyone not just to the people who live up against the park like i said i'm i'm frustrated i'm angry i know that the rest of the council is as well we want to deliver a park for the community we don't want to be stuck in litigation needlessly and baselessly but i want to make it really clear to the community that this is not an instance of santa rosa the city not wanting to invest in in roseland it is an instance where we're doing everything we can to get a project across the finish line and we're having to push through some of the privilege of the people who live right there who are bringing this lawsuit with that madame clerk if you could please call out councilmember soyer i just want to thank you mayor for for being clear and concise and accurate i appreciate it madame city clerk thank you councilmember schwethelm hi councilmember soyer hi councilmember rogers hi councilmember fleming i vice mayor alvarez hi mayor rogers no that motion passes with five eyes and with mayor rogers voting no all right thank you staff we will move on to our final public comment for non-agenda items it's item 17 i'm going to check on zoom to see if there are any additional hands for items that have not been discussed tonight it's seeing none we still have item 10 which is our councilmember reports we did skip that earlier to facilitate our dc team not having to be up until midnight to be able to give their report uh who has a report for tonight that they'd like to go over council member fleming yeah uh our new city manager scooped my report about the shenate uh the north trunk sewer project i wanted to give a shout out to our public works team for all the work that they've done up there the residents are glad to have this the um egress from shenate ingress and egress up there and also um additionally all the work i know they're not quite done on pacific but the the road is like glass you could probably ice skate down it on a cold morning it's a really a beautiful thing um even for someone like me who's not not a car person but i do use that route to get my daughter to school many mornings a week and it is really really wonderful so um a huge shout out to to our staff who've put in tons of work and tons of communication with the residents of district four thank you so much thank you council member council member soyer thank you mayor i wanted to report out um this evening on sp 1383 um in december the interim city manager and city attorney signed a memorandum of understanding with zero waste sonoma to establish certain roles and responsibilities that zero waste sonoma shall assume on behalf of the city of santa rosa as it relates to sp 1383 implementation jurisdictions like santa rosa may enter into a contract with a joint powers authority to implement certain requirements of the sp 1383 regulations except that the jurisdiction shall remain ultimately responsible for compliance prior to its signage city staff with subject matter expertise on solid waste matters reviewed the mou and is comfortable with the roles and responsibilities set forth in the agreement city staff will remain closely involved and up to date regarding sp 1383 implementation and progress in santa rosa thank you council member council member sweat home thank you mr mayor just want to report out that i was able to attend uh the virtual santa rosa rotary lee abrahamson public safety awards program on the 19th it's kind of nice seeing jeff colonn our former interim city manager and former city manager facilitated the meeting and i was so nice to see our current city manager and attendants but i want to express my congratulations to the santa rosa fire department honoree tim avidera and the santa rosa police department honoree jason jucatan for their selections and they were selected by their peers additionally sonoma county sheriff's lieutenant andy kash was also recognized but it's a wonderful community event with about 80 85 folks there thanks right thank you so much council member are there any other reports okay as is customary tonight i will be shuffling some of our appointments for council members on boards and commissions it's always a interesting process talking to folks and giving them a blend between what they would like to serve on and what the city needs them to serve on uh so i do want to uh to sort of express my my thought process we do have a couple of council members who have come in over the last year and have been particularly involved on a number of issues and uh had talked with a couple of not to call you old hats but folks who have been here for a while who have a lot of experience who have been able to help mentor over the last year and so many of our assignments i'm going to flip around to put council members in new positions to be able to lead and to get experience running boards and commissions i'll start with the regional appointments that are uh mayor appoints and council confirms so i will make my my comments and then see if there's a motion to approve uh and i will also mention that there are a number of appointments tonight that will either be left open or if permissible we actually have staff that can serve in some of the roles temporarily while we find our seventh council member to be able to plug in as they can as well and we'll shuffle it up a little bit when we know what their skill set looks like so first for the renewal enterprise district my recommendation is council member Fleming to continue to serve and council member sweat helm to move from the alternate position to the main position with council member excuse me vice mayor alvarez as the new alternate for that committee to come up to speed on it for zero waste sonoma council member soyer to continue to serve as the city's representative with joey henowitz one of our staff members who's fantastic and who deals with zero waste as the alternate at the moment until we have a seventh council member since he's at all of the meetings anyway uh sonoma county transportation authority and regional protection climate protection authority i would like to stay on that with council member fleming becoming the alternate particularly with her ties to the mtc uh work that she is doing now uh for sonoma clean power the same i'll stay on that with council member fleming continuing to be the alternate for the senator as a senator as a plain ground water sustainability agency i'd like to leave council member sweat helm on it and give vice mayor alvarez an opportunity to serve as his alternate for our continuum of care uh council member sweat helm will continue to serve on that and kelly kikendall our staff member who is at all of the meetings will serve as the current alternate uh if until the time that we have a seventh member as well for our water advisory committee i'm going to switch uh council member rogers into the primary and keep council member sweat helm as her alternate for the russian river watershed association i'll keep vice mayor alvarez as the primary with council member fleming as the alternate for the mayors and council members legislative liaison committee i will continue to serve on that with council member fleming as the alternate i'll note i'm also the chair of that committee for the league of california cities north bay division i'll retain council member soyer and council member rogers on it for the library advisory committee the vice mayor will continue to lead with council member rogers as his alternate and that's in particular focus with the actions that we've taken to develop a new library in southwest santa rosa i think that's a good team uh for health action i'm going to ask council member rogers to serve as the primary with council member fleming as the alternate and for a bag the association of bay area governments uh the mayor is the primary delegate but i'm going to ask council member fleming to serve as the alternate so those are our regional positions can i get a motion from council to approve so moved second so motion from council member sweat helm and the second from council member fleming it's called the vote council member sweat helm hi council member soyer hi council member rogers hi council member fleming hi vice mayor alvarez hi mayor rogers hi that motion passes with six eyes thank you council now for our subcommittees and ad hoc's our bpu liaison committee will uh and this is mayor appoints the bpu liaison committee will remain council member vice mayor alvarez and council member soyer with a third to be named later our downtown subcommittee will stay the same with vice mayor alvarez as the chair and council member soyer on the committee and a third to be named later economic development subcommittee i will chair that committee with council member soyer and council member fleming joining for our violence prevention partnership both the steering and the policy meetings we will flip council member rogers into the primary for the city with council member sweat helm as support a long-term financial policy and audit will keep the same with myself council member sweat helm and council member soyer the open government and community engagement committee i'm going to ask council member rogers to chair that committee and then i will remain on the committee as well council member alvarez for our climate action subcommittee i'll continue to chair with council members rogers and alvarez continuing to serve for our public safety committee uh give a leave it the same with council member fleming as the chair and council member sweat helm and rogers as support on the committee and serving for our homeless ad hoc we will keep council member sweat helm on the committee and add council member fleming and then for our fire resiliency and rebuild ad hoc which was defunct for the last year through covet but is going to have some work to do this year i'll continue to chair that with council members sweat helm and fleming on that committee as well i will make sure i send this list over to staff so you don't have to try to capture it off of the video and through the mayor the council get a copy of that since of course yeah i'll make sure it's distributed to everybody yes staff will update the list and send it all thanks to all the council members excellent i do also want to let council know that a number of our uh boards and commissions that we appoint need new members so make sure that you are making those appointments i also will be doing some of the same thing that we've done here where i'm going to give a couple of additional uh members on those boards and committees a chance to lead and change some of the chairships around just to make sure that we have broader diversity of experience for folks who are serving uh who will plug in at some point as well uh with that let's move on to item 10.2.1 oh sorry go ahead council member i was going to say i'm probably also remind the community that a number of our boards and commissions need have vacancies and need appointments so if they want to take a look if they're interested in participating that would be um a good way to do so and serve absolutely and that's srcity.org is the city's website and there are links to our boards and commissions it's a great reminder thank you forward slash boards forward slash boards great so srcity.org forward slash boards thank you let's move on to item 10.2.1 it's the appointment to our waterways advisory committee we only received the applications from incumbents interested in continuing to serve so that is the recommendation from council i will see if there is any discussion from council members on this otherwise i will look to council member schwethelm for a potential motion not seeing anything so i will make a motion to reappoint mark neely kevin c steve robinowitz and art dyke to fill the four at-large vacancies for the waterways advisory committee it's a motion from council member schwethelm and a second from council member soyer let's call the vote council member schwethelm hi council member soyer hi council member rogers hi council member fleming yes vice mayor alvarez hi mayor rogers hi that motion passes with six eyes great that's our last item for the night thank you everybody we will go ahead and adjourn