 Good evening, everyone. I'm unsure if Chair Rogers was not going to be present this evening. Magali, were you notified by her at all? I was not. So I'm thinking she might be running a little tiny bit late. Okay, thank you. It does look like Vice Mayor Alvarez may have had a disconnection at one point. So let's see if he's able to join back on as well. Is in the waiting room. Thank you. I just received a message from Chair Rogers and she's having a little bit of a technical issue with her laptop syncing with the link. We can hold until she joins. I'm happy to be in contact with Chair Rogers. I was actually on the phone with her. Invite. I believe the issue was that her devices were not connecting. Oh, okay. Welcome, Chair Rogers. Hoping we can get that audio and video up here momentarily. Vice Mayor? Yes, just yes, Chair. Can you please start the meeting while I'm handling the technical difficulties? I can absolutely do that for you. Thank you. Thank you. With that said, I believe the time is now 6.07. And let's go ahead and commence the meeting. I will need to open up my laptop for the minutes. We'll start with roll call first. Very well, appreciate that. Council Member McDonald here. Vice Mayor Alvarez. President. Chair Rogers. President. Thank you. Let the record show that all members are present. I don't have it, but I believe we're going to go ahead and pass for public comment. Oh, thank you. There are no hands raised for public comment. Now if we can go to our scheduled items. Well, what happened to the minutes? I can't hear you. We have to approve the minutes, correct? Yeah. Okay. If we can approve the minutes from our last meeting. I'll need to abstain from that since I wasn't there. So it would just be a vote of you and Eddie confirming the minutes if they're approved as printed. No, I did have a correction. The correction would be that Chris Rogers was not the chair and he did not call the meeting to order. Does it say chair Rogers or Chris Rogers? I thought it said Chris Rogers, but of course I can't get any of it up right now. Look for you. I see chair, chair Rogers. Oh, I'm sorry. I thought it said Chris. No, my dyslexia put Chris there first too, but then I knew you'd be in violation of the Brown Act if all of us were here. So I looked again. Awesome. All right. So I think that was it for me. So Vice Mayor, can we get a motion to approve if you're okay? Absolutely. There's no corrections on my comment. Okay. So approval of minutes. Let me go ahead. Councilmember McDonald, you will be abstaining Vice Mayor Alvarez. Do you approve? Aye. Okay. And chair Rogers, do you approve? Yes. Thank you. The minutes from the August 22nd meeting 2022 are approved. And I'm going to, now it's public comment. Do you see any hands raised? Thank you. There are no hands raised for public comment. And item five, scheduled items, community engagement director report. Thank you so much, chair Rogers. My colleague is here. Good evening, everybody. And I have a really quick update for in terms of the community engagement work and some of the work that we've noted for open government task force. On November 16th, we will be holding an in-person summary of the community input on the Hearn Community Hub. So we'd love to invite the entire community for this review process. We'll be reviewing community themes, categories and programs that community would like to see in this space. And all from this community project, which again is about six, it's a six acre space. Secondly, we will be having a CAD meeting immediately after that. So again, November 16th, the CAD meeting will be from 7 p.m. to 8 p.m. at the utility field offices. This will be offered in a hybrid version so folks can either come to the utility field office or they can join us virtually through Zoom for that meeting. And then lastly, in terms of an update of community engagement staffing, as of two weeks ago, we have a new community engagement coordinator, Danny Chaparro, who we promoted from the Violence Prevention Partnership. So some of you may have interface with Danny, who's formerly with Violence Prevention. And he's going to be assisting us with deploying different community engagement events, strategies, and in addition, he's going to be working with our youth. So we want to thank our HR department for assisting us in get moving along these internships. We have PG&E funded internships that we're going to be coming out. So this is an opportunity for young folks who are interested in a particular department at the city or just working with and at the city. We want to encourage young folks to do that. Once we sort of get this thing moving and grooving out there, we're hoping to be holding interviews by late December to early January. And of course, we will be posting more as we get closer to that time. And then soon after that, we will be looking for a community outreach specialist. So that community outreach specialist will work for the Office of Community Engagement. They will be a limited term position. So we're looking at somewhere from 20 to 16 months. And that will definitely assist in expanding our reach in terms of the community engagement activities that we have scheduled and items that we would like to be able to pursue, some of them being directly items from the Open Government Task Force recommendations. So that is the end of my report. Thank you. Thank you. 5.2 is non-citizen voting update. Yes, and that will be me. And I'm going to try sharing my screen. I do have a PowerPoint. It's just, I think, 10 pages long. So I should be able to go through it pretty quickly, but wanted to give some background. This is taken from a presentation that I did to the Charter Review Committee. There are some things that are updated since that time. So let me try sharing screen. I haven't always had great luck with this. So try this. Exit out of that. And just get my, okay. Well, let me try one thing. And if that doesn't work, then I'll, I'll send it off to her. I'm not sure why it's not showing up. So I will go ahead and send this. Very much apologize. Did that come through? Was that through an email, Sue? Yes, it was. Okay. Give me one on it. Okay. I'm not seeing it come through as of yet. Well, maybe we'll do it without a PowerPoint. Let me try one more time. I just tried it. I just sent it again. Checking. Perfect. It should be coming through here. I see it. It's just approaching scan. Okay. I know the scan takes a while. So why don't I go ahead and get started and then we can skip to get to the page that I'm on. So again, this is, this presentation is a version, an updated version from the presentation that I gave to the Charter Review Committee when they considered a proposal to allow non-citizens to vote in local elections. So the proposal was to, the idea was that we would allow all those who live in our community to participate in local elections, like the local elections only. And it would require a Charter Amendment. So that would have to be approved by the senators of voters. So to give some legal context, under federal and state law, non-citizens cannot vote in federal or state elections. Whether non-citizens can vote in local elections is a little less clear. But currently across the nation, there are 15 local jurisdictions. Actually, I'd add 16 local jurisdictions that I know of now that do allow for non-citizen voting in their local elections. And the criteria for eligibility to vote varies. Sometimes you have to be a lawful permanent resident. Sometimes you have to meet some length of residency requirement. Sometimes six months. Sometimes there is no, as long as you're a resident of the community, you can vote. So California, this is an update. Up until this late summer, okay, we can skip to the third slide, that one there. There's nothing in expressly in California law that precludes local jurisdictions from allowing non-citizens to vote. I was more confident in that statement during the summer when I was, or last spring when I was giving this presentation. I would say now that California law is unsettled as to non-citizen voting. There was San Francisco, as you'll see, allows non-citizens to vote in a school board, local school board elections, a court in during the summer in August struck that down and said that state law prohibits non-citizens to vote in local, prohibits local jurisdictions from allowing non-citizens to vote. That decision, that secured court decision is upon appeal. So we'll see how that goes. The appellate court did allow the election for this year to move forward with non-citizens voting. Next slide. And I also think it's helpful to have a little bit of historic trend, a historic context, because I think a lot of people, the first reaction is, well, wait a minute, you have to be a citizen to vote. What are we talking about? But actually, in early U.S. history, there were 40 different states at various times that allowed non-citizens to vote. That ended, though, in 1926. There have been no states that have allowed non-citizens to vote on statewide since 1926. As of December 2021, five states have adopted measures that expressly prohibit non-citizens from voting in local elections. In general, the folks that have looked at it nationwide have concluded that there are 14 states that have no clear impediments to local jurisdictions allowing non-citizens to vote. Again, among those 14 states, California was included. We now have that case. It's winding its way up through the appellate courts, so we'll see what the ultimate decision is on that. Next slide. So, as I said, there were 14 jurisdictions, 15 jurisdictions. At the time, I gave the initial presentation. There are now 16 at least. San Francisco, as I mentioned, non-citizen parents of school-aged children may vote in school board elections. That's currently under legal challenge. Oakland just passed a similar measure for school board elections. That also has now come under legal challenge. Maryland, there are 11 cities that allow non-citizens to vote. New York City adopted a law in 2021. That is also under legal challenge. And then in Vermont, there are two cities. The next two slides talk about what supporters say, what the opponents say. Supporters, folks that work and live here and pay taxes here, should be able to have a say in how our city is governed. Second is to allow non-citizens to vote. Strengthens the community, promotes engagement, investment, and belonging by non-citizens. Brings us all together. Third, when a segment of the community is excluded, we increase the risk of discriminatory public policies by allowing the entire community to vote and be included. We should have, the results should be more equitable public policies. And then fourth is, given the high costs and long waiting periods for naturalization, it really doesn't make sense to say, no, you have to wait through that long period of time. Even though you are a member of our community, you're fully engaged, you're paying taxes, there's no reason to make people wait. And then the fifth is taxation without representation, because you are being taxed, whether you are a citizen or not. Next slide. The opponents argue that people should accept the duties of citizenship before being granted the right to vote. Allowing non-citizens, they suggest that not allowing non-citizens to vote could discourage individuals from seeking citizenship. There are significant logistic hurdles to overcome. You have to establish a separate voting system for local elections, and I'll talk about that in a couple of slides. Opponents argue that there's possible risks of immigration enforcement for undocumented individuals. The counter to that is, give people notice of what the risks are, let them decide. And then legal concerns. If there are some legal concerns, you may get challenged as a local jurisdiction, you may be facing a lawsuit. Next slide. So what are the logistics concerns? You do have to have a separate data voter database, a separate ballot, and separate procedures. It would mean if Santa Rosa adopts that, it means we will be having a larger voter population than for federal, state, or regional elections. So our voter base will be different than the county as a whole. That means that we're going to have to prepare a separate ballot, separate ballot materials, so that would be only as to the local election. You're going to have to exclude federal, state, and regional elections from that ballot. And so you're going to have to, you're going to have dual ballots. There may be some way to have it as a single ballot with really clear markings as to what, who can vote in what. The registrar of voters did come and speak with the charter review committee and she confirmed that, yes, we would have to run, we, the city of Santa Rosa, would have to run that election. It'll require a separate voting procedure, separate mechanics. We would be on our own in running that election system. In terms of costs, we don't have any, any real estimate of the costs at this point. Next slide. So the charter review committee really had a very robust discussion on the potential for allowing non-citizens to vote in city of Santa Rosa elections. Ended up recommending that, yes, the council move forward with at least a consideration of expanding voting rights to non-citizens. They suggested that the council initiate a study session to look at and they named specifically these areas to look at. What would be the eligibility for voters? What's the cost of a new system? How would you go about implementing it? What have, what's been the experience of other cities and then related issues? The committee also very strongly urged that we have, we engage in a very robust community outreach and engagement so that we get a real sense of what the community's preferences are, how much support there is and really carry that through. There was a suggestion in the committee that the recommendation include a recommendation that the council place this on the ballot in 2026 to allow that the study session and the outreach and the really examination of everything. Time to move forward. That did not, that was actually a tie vote in terms of whether to set a deadline for council or not. So that did not pass, but there were again half of that, half of the committee did recommend trying to get it to move forward at least by 2026. And council did accept the recommendation. Again, that specific date wasn't included, but it did accept it. So where are we now? We will, we got through this election in 2022 election. The council did indicate that it wants to move forward with this. We don't yet have anything scheduled, but we will be looking at starting to move forward on that investigation. Of course, we are here in our office, we are monitoring the now two lawsuits here in California against San Francisco and against Oakland to see what happens. If the court of appeal ends up agreeing with the trial court that it's not permissible under state law, we'll have to, we would likely not continue to pursue that. Both San Francisco and Oakland concern voting on school board elections and there are some election code issues that play into that as well. So there might be a difference if it's just general local elections versus school board. I know San Jose has also been considering voting rights for non-citizens and there may be other cities across the state as well and we'll be looking at those options as well. So next slide, I'm happy to answer any questions. Thank you for that city attorney. Does anyone have any questions? I do. Are you ready for me? Okay, so a couple of things. Have we done any outreach to our local schools to see if they had an interest in being a partner for this because I mean that's one of the initiatives that we would have is that parents can vote on their local school board members as well as their city council members. So if we're going to do an initiative like this, I think that would be the first step is to try to talk to the 11 school districts that are in City of Santa Rosa about, you know, kind of their thought process on that and sharing that with them in what San Francisco does. The difference is that San Francisco has one school district versus us with the 11. So my question on the election part of that, if we're going to be inclusive, is does that mean we have 11 different procedures that we would need for just that voting as opposed to how we're doing things citywide? And then if we're in district elections, how do we know is there going to be a process to checking addresses and things like that when people are registered to vote? What's that process? Because if the registrar's office isn't registering people to vote, what would that, how would that impact the city? And clearly I think cost would need to be looked at. If we're looking at 2026, how much would it cost? How much staff would we need to have having that kind of full analysis? If we're going to go out and put this out for charter, what I don't want to do is not be prepared to fully be able to explain to people voting on the charter amendment how much it would cost for us to do this, what would be the staff preparation on it, and really so that we can be prepared for helping with understanding as to why we see this as a good thing to do for engagement in the community. But I think that's pretty much kind of my thought process on this. I think specifically around school board voting it would just be so important to do, but I think that we do need to have a little bit more on that. I'd also kind of like to see what ends up happening in the appellate court as it comes back. Certainly, I think it's more disenfranchising if we move forward with something and then have a court decision overturn that. I think that that would be extremely disappointing for folks that have been able to come out, have a voice in something, and then to then go back and say that our own judicial system has disappointed them. And so I would not want to move forward until we had those questions answered on this specific topic. Thank you. I appreciate that. And I'll respond to a couple things. Yeah, in terms of the local schools, it would mean that we would be having separate ballots because the school districts don't correspond to our council districts. Those are going to be separate ballots. And again, we're going to have to run it all ourselves. We will not be able to rely on the county registrar or voter. So we'll need to set up our own election system entirely. So we'll certainly reach out to the schools and see if they are interested. But that does add another layer of complexity. I do also understand that that is so direct in terms of if your kids are in the school to be able to have a say in how the school is run as really critical. And yes, we would be doing, before we went to the voters, we would certainly be doing a full cost analysis with really a full analysis of what all is going to entail logistically. What do we need to get? Voting machines, how are we going to run our registration? We don't want to have, we don't want to have, we talked with the registrar or voters a little bit about, well, maybe they could still do elections and we're just running the non-citizens. But then you have potentially unequal voting system. So we nixed that pretty early on. So we'll be really doing a deep dive into all of that. And that's one of the reasons why we wouldn't be looking to do this until 2026, which at the earliest. The other element is the timing of the appeal. In general, my experience is that to get a decision from a court of appeal, the appeal has just recently been filed. They take time to get the transcript all in, then they have a briefing schedule, and then the court hears it and then the court has a certain amount of time after the hearing by which they can issue their decision. So it's usually about a two-year process to get a decision out of the court of appeal. If it were then to be appealed to the California Supreme Court, you're going to add another couple of years for that process as well. So, you know, it's possible that we get a decision sooner than two years out of the court of appeal, and maybe it doesn't go further up to the California Supreme Court. I would suspect that this would be the type of case that whichever side lost in the court of appeal would likely appeal it up to the Supreme Court. So we may be looking at quite a while before we have California law settled as to whether it's permissible or not. And then I just had one more kind of thought that kind of came to me as you were talking because of all of these different appeals that could potentially happen. Have we thought about if this is a goal of the city council and this is something we want to move towards? Have we thought about approaching our legislators at the state level to see if there is the will to potentially amend state law? Because certainly that would fix a lot of things because then the registrar as a voters would be beholden to state law, which makes it easier for all of us and it would be, you know, more than just the city of Santa Rosa that would give that opportunity to community members. So it just might be another route for us to consider talking about as we move forward if this is in fact something that city council definitely wants to look into. Yeah, and I think that's a great idea. And the court that struck it down did also cite the California Constitution. So if a court of appeal or the California Supreme Court relied only on statutory law, then yes, the legislative fix would work if they ruled against, I mean, this is all hypothetical. I don't know. I don't know, you know, where the courts will end up. But if they disallow voting rights for non-citizens and they do it based on the language of the California Constitution, then we would be needing a constitutional amendment that would have to be a statewide ballot measure. Okay. Okay. Thank you. Thank you so much. It's all worth trying. Appreciate your homework on all of this and it is helpful for us so that we actually know what we could potentially be working with if this is, you know, the role of the council to do. Thanks. Thank you. Vice Mayor, did you have any questions? No, I don't. Thank you. Thank you. So the attorney, I did have a question or two. What are the five states as of December 2021 that prohibited non-citizens from voting? You know, I don't have that off the top of my head. I have to pull it out. I'll let you know, though, they were, I mean, that was, most of those were done recently to prohibit non-citizens from voting and probably won't surprise you that those were my recollection they were all red states. So I was thinking. I just wanted to ask to clarify. And then another question I had was or a comment I wanted to make was the the cost being unknown. I think looking at some of the other jurisdictions that have passed it to kind of, like you said, observe them so that we do know what the cost will be and how often we will be doing that. So what elections, all elections, like, are we going to try to streamline elections or, you know, how can we make it happen by still making it economically feasible for us to do so, so that all our residents are heard. And the last question comment I had is what prohibits, and you can tell me that you don't know on this since it doesn't have anything to do with it, but to me it does, what prohibits felons who are citizens and also pay taxes from, is that a federal state? Is that federal law that prohibits them from voting? Yes, both federal law and state law. In our state constitution it says it's citizens may vote. So, and the same in federal. So federal, I don't know if it's just I'd have to look back whether it's just it's statutory or whether it's constitutional, but in California it's constitutional and statutory in terms of the state. So is that what, what keeps felons from voting? Oh, felon. I'm sorry, I didn't hear that. I misheard that. I don't know. Stephanie, do you know? My guess is that that's statutory, but I don't know what it is either. I thought it was more running for office versus being able to vote. No, there's certain restrictions that they have that don't allow them to vote, which to me you can have a felony, I mean some years back and we send them through the system we say to allow them to come back in. I believe is that they don't have a pending charge or that they're not on probation, but they can't have a felony on the record, a felony on the record. Okay, so I think that that will be something that maybe will come up when we're looking at this and we're looking at having all of our residents have the opportunity to vote because that sure is something that comes up for me just because you're a felon doesn't mean you don't have kids, children that are in school. It doesn't mean that you don't go to the store and pay local taxes and pay, you know, so how does that work? So that would be all my questions or comments and public although I do not see anyone in the public. Correct. There are no hands raised for public comment. Perfect. So we'll go on to 5.3 discussion of open government task force pending recommendations and I believe golly is going to take this away. Is that correct? Thank you. This is part one of the open government task force recommendations pending items and also items that you can see here in red that have not been implemented but have been, you know, we can talk a little bit more of like where they stand and then just to give everybody some context and we can just jump straight into the first, you know, pending item which is goal one, one point to create a city mission statement which embraces community engagement. We've not done that but it's going to be our recommendation to forward that on to, sorry, City Council for consideration during their goal setting for this next time around and please correct me, Sue, if that's incorrect. But I believe we're going to be forwarding that over. Yes, that's correct. It is, has been our practice in the past that the mission statement does get examined during goal settings. So it seems that that's the most appropriate time to bring this forward and goal setting generally happens in February, sometimes March. So yeah, so essentially this is a call to integrate community engagement more into the city's mission statement. So there is sort of an action that's going to happen with that and that that will be going to goal setting. So hopefully we'll be changing the color on this soon. The next goal is we get into goal 2.1 which is to genuinely engage and partner with neighborhoods, volunteers, businesses, institutions and other organizations which support our community. So 2.11 is the shift definition of partnership to include community engagement and we're in the process of this as we're outlining what it looks like, sorry, to close the community engagement loop and we started doing some of this work in 2020 with the community empowerment plan as we went into communities to gather input to do listening sessions on what was the most prominent topic at that time which was to build better bridging between community and police. So we did get started in that process. And then are there any questions about this item? 2.12 is to coordinate the use of city, a volunteer city-wide. We have begun some of this work as we have our AmeriCorps VISTAs that we use that the office community engagement uses in our work. Typically we've had two, sometimes three. This year we have one VISTA that is joining us and doing work for the Violence Prevention Partnership and in tandem with some community engagement work. But you will soon be seeing more participation and this mostly youth led through our partnership with Latino service providers and their youth promotores. So we're going to be bringing them on to help us really engage not only our younger community but also our monolingual Spanish-speaking community. They already have a lot of great built-in networks through the work that they're doing and we're just going to really leverage and capitalize on them and them becoming young professionals and really assisting with different city engagement events. So you'll see more of that. We also have, as I mentioned earlier, these paid interns. There will be eight of them for this year coming up. So there'll be eight various departments that have already started the process of requesting an intern. So one of those departments will be our Office of Community Engagement to help us expand our reach. In addition, we are going to be utilizing making use of, and I do apologize I don't have the exact name here, but recreation already has a built-in volunteering system that they use that community members can just kind of plug into for different events being put on by recreation. And so we are going to be plugging into their system when we have some of our larger events to be able to have a larger reach with folks. And we're looking at expanding that network. So if there is a community group that you'd like for us to make sure that we are engaged with, if they have Youth Promotores or some Youth Promoter model, we'd love to learn more about it. So moving to item 2.1G, build on the excellent engagement model of the Santa Rosa Violence Prevention Partnership. We have been deploying that in some aspects, but I think the initial intention and I want to state again that unfortunately I wasn't with the city when a lot of the original conversation around this came about, but I understand that this was really around neighbor fest and creating community hubs and partnerships within community. That is an item that we will be exploring once we hire our community outreach specialist that will specifically be working on really building on neighborhood engagement, understanding who the neighborhood groups are that are already formed, how those groups get formed, and how the community, sorry, how the city could tap into and partner with those groups, especially when there are larger city messaging opportunities, various items that are coming out. And then item 2.1H to make use of key strategies outlined by Matt, police forgive my pronunciation of this, but Lane and Juror's discussion on planning for stronger local democracy, a field guide for local officials to effectively engage the community during decision making, specifically looking at actively recruiting diverse viewpoints, also involving those citizens in structured facilitated small group discussions interspersed with large forums or amplifying shared conclusions and moving talk to action, which again is going back to our spectrum of community engagement. Give the participants in these meetings the opportunity to compare values and experiences and consider range views and policy options. And lastly to produce tangible actions and outcomes. We have done some of these items again through our community empowerment plan. We also have the seed recommendations coming to council in January, I believe, and where there is explicitly an area where we make recommendations on behalf of communications and community engagement that is what we consider to be a more equitable distribution of how we get the word out and also on engaging community. And specifically with the community empowerment plan, there's a lot of work and consideration towards being trauma informed when working with community and understanding the diverse communities that we're working with. And then the partisan process is trying to hire or create an evaluation for the current community engagement process that we do have given that community engagement is operating with half of my time and then now a full-time position with Danny Chaparro who's a coordinator and then hopefully soon another 20-month position coming up soon through this community outreach specialist. So with that update, are there any questions? Any questions from council members? All right, open it up to public comment. There are no hands raised for public comment. Seeing none, thank you so much for that presentation. We will be going to future agenda items. This time is reserved for discussion whether to place matters on future agenda for further discussion. Potential items for future agendas include original mayor's open government task force report presentation and which will occur in February and open government ordinance implementation update which has not been scheduled as of yet. Is there anything that either council member McDonald or vice mayor Alvarez would like to see on the future agenda? All right, seeing none. That's okay. I'll just jump right in. I would like to have us talk about our website a little bit more for engagement and for the need for posting public meetings in different languages. I think that we need, I know we're looking at improving our website right now but it was just brought to my attention recently. Not only how we are engaging public on the meetings but the need for us to consider more than just having things translated in Spanish. And then in addition to that what meetings, how they can navigate through to find our meetings, that seems to be also very problematic. And in my time on council I have yet to hear one person that speaks a different language than me ask a question during council. And so that tells me we are not doing a good enough job engaging community members that aren't native to English speaking. And that is a concern of mine when it comes to open government and being transparent. I think we need to look at those areas please. Can I just say jump in real quick? Council member McDonald, we currently, the agenda, any agenda can be translated into any of the language on Google. It's not just Spanish anymore. So you just choose the language that you want to be able to read your agenda. And so I've tested it. I've done it in Farsi. I've translated our council agendas into a few different languages just to see what it looks like. But there is that option and to do that what we can do, I can look at the website where all of our meetings are posted. That's not actually our portal. It's Granicus's portal made to look like our website. So we don't have another way to list all of those because a lot of the agendas are generated through the Granicus system that we have. I do know that on the website there is an icon that says agendas in minutes that takes you right to the portal. But just so that you know there is a way to get agendas in different languages. It's not just in Spanish. That's helpful. I'd still instead of so many steps like to talk about how we can make it a bit easy for folks. But I appreciate you, you know, letting me know. I figured there was a way I just want to make it easier and more inviting. Any other feature agenda items? All right. Seeing none, 7 is adjournment. So thank you guys for hanging in there with me through my technical difficulties and have a great night. Bye-bye.