 I'd like to ask the interpreter currently on the Spanish channel to commence translation of the meeting. For those just joining the meeting, live translation in Spanish is available, and members of the public or staff wishing to listen in Spanish, could join the Spanish channel by clicking on the interpretation icon in the Zoom toolbar. It looks like a glow. Once you join the Spanish channel, we recommend you shut off the main audio so you only hear the Spanish translation. Renzo, would you please restate this in Spanish? Good afternoon. I'd like to say the interpreter is going to start speaking in Spanish. For those of you who are attending with us, the meeting is this afternoon. There will be an interpreter available in Spanish. You will have to press the button that is in the bottom of those screens, which is a logo, and it will give you the option to be able to hear everything that is said in English, also in Spanish. Okay. Okay, everyone can hear me now. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us for the June 20th, 2023 meeting. May I ask Madam City Clerk for a roll call vote. Thank you, Council Member Stapp. Here. Council Member Rogers. Here. Council Member Okrepke. Here. Council Member Fleming. Here. Council Member Alvarez. Present. Vice Mayor McDonald. Here. Mayor Rogers. Present. Let the record show all council members are present. We'll now go into item two, announcements of the closed session items. Madam City Clerk. We have item 2.1, 2.2 and 2.3 under closed session. We are now taking public comment on those items. If you are in Council Chamber and would like to comment, please provide your name to the administrator at the top of the well. If you are participating in Zoom, please raise your hand or dial star nine. You will have three minutes in a countdown timer. We'll alert at the end of that period. We do have one hand being raised via Zoom and I will turn it over to our Zoom host. Hi, can you hear me? Yes, go ahead. Okay, great. My name is Robin Zimbler. I'm the manager of Freeboard Development Company. We partnered with Rogal Projects on our response to the city's notice of availability. I'm sorry, I'm just now realizing my video is not on. Anyway, I'm not gonna waste time trying to figure out how to get my video on. But anyway, again, we partnered with Rogal Projects on the response to the city's notice of availability. Freeboard is an affordable housing developer. I'm currently partnering with the City and the Housing Authority on South Park Commons, which is the redevelopment of the former Bennett Valley Senior Center. We partnered with Rogal on this response because while affordable housing remains a critical need across California and in Santa Rosa, we believe it should be balanced with mixed income and market rate development to create a more vibrant, equitable downtown, increased the tax base and spur additional investment. As such, Freebird, the affordable housing developer, is taking the lead on the lot 11 and affordable housing development on the White House site. And Rogal and our proposal has taken the lead on barrage five and the mixed income development on the White House site. Again, just going back to our partnership with the City and Housing Authority, Freebird broke ground on South Park Commons in April with great support from the South Park neighborhood. We were successful in securing over $23 million in funding from the state for that project. We applied for three different gap funding sources, one tax credit application and then taxes and bonds, and we were successful in securing each source on the first application cycle that we applied for, which is kind of unprecedented in these competitive times. By securing $23 million in state funding for that project, we were able to reduce the amount of funding that we needed from the City and Housing Authority to make the project work. Again, we broke ground on that project in April and it is as you will drive by under construction and going well right now. We are hoping to continue our great partnership with the City by working together on the downtown site. So I just wanted to speak today to say, we're hopeful that we will be selected for one, two, or all of the sites. And that's it. Thank you, Robin. Keep your up next. Once you unmute, please go ahead. Very good. Thank you. I want to just express how enthusiastic we are about the potential to collaborate with Robin on these sites. We have a shared vision, I believe, about downtown, about the kind of dynamic mixed very income, very kind of resident community that it can be, how dynamic it could be. And I know the council has been working very hard to bring that to pass. We feel confident about the ability to realize that these sites are actionable in a way that some others in the downtown have been less so in the current inflationary environment. The sites on the White House site, as it's known, we've teamed with a partner called the Groupie, G-R-U-P-E company. Some of you may know that the Sonoma Developmental Center is certainly one of the major development opportunities in the Bay Area to arise in the last decade or so. That site has been awarded by the state to a partnership which is led by my company along with the Groupie companies, we have a close relationship and that's a huge investment coming into the community. We would work together on this site and the particular product type, a five-story infill site is something that Groupie has completed regularly. There are several they've opened in Sacramento not long ago where the economics have a similar relationship to those here. So again, this is a very actionable site. The Garage Five is more complicated and complicated, those who know me well know that that's kind of my specialty, my fascination. I think it's extraordinarily important to bring dynamism to that area and we think we've got a mixed use program we believe in. And again, it's a scale of project that can be achieved. Just by way of backdrop, I should note that our work in Napa, the build out of an Apple Pipe site will be more than 1,000 housing units, three quarters of a billion dollars. The Sonoma Valley site will be not less than 600 units, again at least a half a billion dollar kind of project over time. So we're comfortable raising money, we've had success with it, but most of all, I have a passion for the potential of great design to bring energy, life and beauty to a downtown core and the most beautiful part is when it really serves a wide range of residents of all ages and incomes and that's why we're so enthusiastic about this potential partnership, so thank you. Thank you Keith, we have no additional comments on Zoom and we have no prerecorded messages for this item. Thank you Rhonda, we are going to move it back to Council Chamber, we have a public comment from Mr. DeWitt. You ready? Hello, my name is DeWitt, I'm with the Sonoma County Housing Advocacy Group, which for over a quarter of a century is advocated that we have more affordable, residential rental housing made available here in the downtown Santa Rosa area and throughout the county. It was interesting to hear of these two speakers and to hear of this project, which was pretty much been held in secret for many, many months apparently, maybe years. Years ago when the mixed use ideas were being put forward for the White House site and a study was done by the city of Santa Rosa, paid for by the taxpayers, it was advocated to rebuild that site and do it well. The Housing Advocacy Group supports that but asks you to make a taller building. The three tallest buildings in Santa Rosa right now are senior housing, Bethlehem Towers and the Silvercrest Buildings. Bethlehem Towers was put up when developers came forward in Santa Rosa after the housing authority and the redevelopment agency of the city of Santa Rosa demolished much housing here in our core area and then we're able to say, okay, you can build another building tall to replace the housing that was lost, especially from single resident only hotels at the time. So it's very important that we advocate, excuse me, for another tall building at the White House site which was mentioned here today a couple of times and this is the first time I've ever heard of the project. Now to that, that might not be important to you, you might think, well, we're the government, we're gonna do what we do but you need to have community support for large projects and you can get community support for a really tall building at least as tall as the Bethlehem Towers and the Silvercrest Towers. You should not just stop at something five or six stories. You few trails building down the street which is going in could have been another three or four stories taller. No one is gonna protest that stuff. It's time for you folks to actually take the lead and say, yes, we want the taller buildings as soon as possible and get them in there. And then last but not least, as my time runs out, I wanna thank the city attorney for her time here working with the city and point out that as you go forward to recruit another city attorney, please don't raise the wages. Keep the wages the same, keep everything going forward like we have. You don't have to give more money to a new employee. Have it be the same salary as this city attorney and then have that city attorney prove themselves before they get raises. Thank you for your time. Have a good closed session. Thank you, vice mayor. That concludes public comment on item two. Thank you so much. I'm gonna bring it back to council for any comments. Council member Rogers. Yeah, just as a point of clarification for Mr. DeWitt and anybody watching at home the project that was discussed by folks calling in is presumably one of the ones that responded to an RFP that we did from our surplus lands act request. Those were all done in public meetings. We have not actually selected any projects at this point. It's just a discussion about what came in from that RFP as possible proposals, but obviously the community will be involved in any decision that we make. Are there any other comments from council? Okay, seeing none, we will now adjourn to closed session. One, two, three. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. And we apologize for delay start of our meeting. I'm just checking really quickly to see if council member Rogers is in chambers. We're gonna go ahead and move forward. Madam city clerk, will you please call roll? Thank you, vice mayor. Council member staff. Here. Council member Chris Rogers. Council member O'Crupeke. Here. Council member Fleming. Here. Council member Alvarez. Present. Vice mayor McDonald. Here. Mayor Rogers. Present. Let the record show all council members are present with the exception of council member Chris Rogers. Thank you. We're now going to have a report out on anything from closed session. Thank you, Madam mayor. The council health closed session met on three items. The first item 2.1 is public employment for the recruitment of the city attorney. The council gave direction to the recruiter and to HR on next steps. Item 2.2 is public employment for recruitment of an interim city attorney. And same, the council discussed and gave direction to the HR. The third was the 2.3, the conference with real property negotiator and that concerned three properties that have been in the surplus lands process. The first is six. Hold on just a second. We'll talk a little lot. Can you hear me okay? Just for a good, I talk loud because I can't hear it all. So we'll make sure the rest of us talk into the mic a little clearer. Thank you. Yes, I apologize for that. Is this better? Okay, great. The third item that the council met on in closed session was conference with real property negotiator concerned three properties that have been going through the surplus lands act process. First property is at 625 and 637 Third Street known as often known as garage five. Second was at 505th Street, lot 11 and 730 Third Street, lot seven. On all three properties, council discussed and gave directions to the real property negotiator. And I have nothing further to report. There was no final action taken on any of the three items. Thank you. Thank you, Madam city attorney. We do not have any items to report out on closed session for a study set or pardon me for a study session as we had an end today. There are no proclamations or presentations tonight and it doesn't show any staff briefings but we are now on item eight for our city manager and city attorney reports. Thank you, vice mayor. I have no updates today. Thank you. And thank you, madam mayor, madam vice mayor for I have nothing in general. I have nothing in general to report. Sorry about that. But I do have our monthly report of settlements and active litigation and given today's very full calendar, I will keep this short. I have two settlements to announce, one which is listed in the published materials, the other which is more recent. So the first is the matter of STG Unical Place versus city of Santa Rosa. I did report out on this last meeting as well but it is now into the record. We have reached a settlement in the amount of $612,500, the case concerned property damage that was caused by flooding, allegedly caused by negligence of city employees. The second settlement to announce is Palio versus utility partners of America and the city of Santa Rosa, plaintiffs alleged violation of prevailing wage and other labor codes in connection with the installation of advanced metering infrastructure water meters across the city. The city reached a settlement with the plaintiffs in the amount of $250,000. This was subject to court approval, the Superior Court and the Court of Appeal have now both approved the settlement confirming that is a reasonable settlement and a settlement made in good faith. This will release the city from the case entirely. The utility partners of America will remain the sole defendant as the matter moves towards trial. Otherwise our case loads remaining pretty consistent at around 30 cases and we have several cases in the stage of extensive discovery and we have several trials coming up and we have ongoing efforts to resolve some of our smaller cases with little or no cost to the city. And I'll leave it for that today but I'm happy to answer any questions if the council has any. Thank you. Council Member Rogers. Thank you, I just want to say great work. I know that some of those cases were phenomenally difficult cases and really complex and so great job by you and your team. Thank you very much. Any other questions from council? We'll now facilitate public comment, Madam City Clerk. Thank you, we are now taking public comment on item eight. If you are in the council chamber, I would like to comment but have not provided a speaker card or your name. Please make your way to the podium. If you are participating via Zoom, please raise your hand or dial star nine. You will have three minutes and a countdown timer will alert at the end of that period. Madam Vice Mayor, I see no hands being raised via Zoom and no one approaching the podium for public comments on item eight. Thank you, we are now moving to item nine and that is statements of abstention by council members. The vice mayor would like me to abstain from a couple of items. It looks like I recused on those items. I can just abstain from this item entirely and let you guys vote on it rather than figure out which CIP item I abstain from. Under the staff report under budget, we have a couple of different resolutions that some of us will be recusing from. I'll be recusing from two different resolutions under park and recreation for reasons of a personal relationship with someone in the department. And it looks like we have one from or three other council members. Council Member Rogers. Madam Vice Mayor, we have changed that so that when looking at it again, the council members do not need to recuse on those items because they are items primarily of simply maintenance of existing streets and therefore there is not a need under the FPPC regulations to recuse. Thank you for clarification on that. I appreciate that. So we have changed the order. When we get to that item, we have changed the order so those can all be grouped back into a single vote. Thank you for the clarification. I hope that's clear to the members of the public as well. We're now moving to item 10, Mayor and council reports. I'm looking to council for those who'd like to report out first. Council Member Staff. A few events from the last couple of weeks. Two weeks ago, the Santa Rosa Plain Groundwater Sustainability Agency met for its quarterly board meeting with the main item of business being approving the budget for 2023. After that, a few of us, three of us I think, my colleagues, Council Member Rogers, Council Member Fleming and I attended the mayors and council member meetings in Sebastopol and are not as sweet from Santa Rosa Metro Chamber did a great job talking about childcare in the county and an upcoming ballot measure that's designed to bring more funding in childcare. I'd like to thank the city parks and rec staff for their Park of the Month program, which happened, I guess it was two Saturdays ago now at Doyle Park. We must have had 30 or 40 of us out there that morning cleaning up Doyle Park and it looks great and thanks to the parks department for organizing that. And then two conferences, two interesting conferences in town last week. First, the Wine Institute, the California Wine Institute held its semiannual board meeting in Santa Rosa talking about various issues that are affecting the wine industry statewide as well as locally. And then a couple of us had the chance to attend the 14th annual California Climate and Energy Forum, which was a two-day conference here in town. Council Member Rogers did a great presentation on the second day of that conference and we must have had, how many folks, 600 people? Something like that, it was a packed ballroom at the Hilton in town, or the Hyatt in town, excuse me. I think that's it, that concludes my report. Council Member Rogers. Yeah, thank you so much. In addition to what my colleague reported out on, we did mention beforehand that this was coming up, but a huge congratulations to our city manager for winning this year's Influential Women Award here in Sonoma County. We obviously think she's, there's nothing that politicians like more than when people agree with them, and we've thought she's amazing, and now we know that the rest of the county agrees with us, so congratulations, Merakisa, that was an award that was well-deserved. We also had our monthly SCTA RCPA meeting this last week ago, Monday. As was mentioned before, we are in the process of recruiting now for a new Executive Director, Suzanne Smith, who has led the agency since it was created 27 years ago, has announced her retirement. So we did select our consulting firm, the headhunter that we're going to bring in to do the executive recruitment going forward. So if folks are interested in applying, please do. You'll find that on the SCTA RCPA website as that moves forward, and please, please stay engaged in that process. Sonoma County Transportation Authority is not as well known throughout the public as, say, a city council is, but the work that we do allocating funding for roads and for bike projects and for addressing climate change is really, really critical. Council Member O'Crapke. Thank you. I, too, attended the MBBJ Influential Woman Awards, and on Father's Day, this past Sunday, I was able to take my family down to the Engineering Contractors Association, Shine & Show, Father's Day car show, just across the street here at Juilliard Park. It was a great time. I highly recommend going. It's fun for the whole family. There's taco trucks, ICs, and face painting. I know that because I was forced into that by my children. And I highly recommend it. It's Father's Day every year at Juilliard Park. Council Member Alvarez. Thank you. Speaking of car shows, the Peggy Shew car show is the one that I had the pleasure of attending. And what a great event. Seeing all those old school cars up and down our downtown area, it caused me to imagine a simpler time here in Santa Rosa, where it was just peace, love, and this beautiful temperature, and the beautiful cars going up and down our streets. How simple things might have been, at least in my memory. And for Santa Rosa really to be going back to that era, if only for a day, it was a beautiful experience for me to witness. And now that we've actually moved forward with repealing our cruising ordinance, hopefully we'll be seeing more of that family vibe in downtown Santa Rosa. Definitely more life, that's for sure. Along with the car show, a Juneteenth event at MLK Park in South Park. Another event, family coming together, another beautiful day in Santa Rosa. It truly is a gem. We hear of all these places that talk about negative degrees and all of a sudden it's like in the desert heat. And yet here in Santa Rosa, it's always beautiful. And that's definitely another plus of why we consider Santa Rosa home. On a more somber note, I definitely wanna address the death that one of our youth experienced here in Santa Rosa a couple days ago. We had the death of a 15 year old in my district, a 15 year old who lost his life in our streets. And I'm happy to see that our violence prevention team is moving forward with community events, town hall meeting, a conversation to be had with our citizens about how to address the issue of violence in our streets seriously. And I as a representative of the district take it upon myself as being responsible for a death in my district. One more, but the death of a 15 year old, unexcusable. So to my community, we as council members, I know what we're about addressing the needs of our community. And this one hurts, a 15 year old. And if I could say in Spanish, please allow me to. La muerte de un niño de 15 años no tiene perdón. Como su representante en la ciudad de Santa Rosa, yo sé que mis colegas y yo estamos comprometidos a ayudar cada niño que es nacido, crecido y que conoce Santa Rosa como su hogar. Again, as council members, I know that my colleagues are committed to make sure that every need of the children of Santa Rosa are met. We take this very seriously. I know I take it seriously. Thank you. Thank you, council member Alvarez. I do have a few things to report out on. I do want to congratulate our city manager on the reception of her award and how proud we all were of her to be able to receive that. On this Saturday coming up, I do want to announce that at 11 o'clock at Juilliard Park near the Stone Bridge, there's going to be a parade for support for our pride community in solidarity. So those of you who'd like to come out and support our LGBTQ community, there'll be another additional parade for them. I also attended the MLK Park Juneteenth event, which was a great event and really wanted to really make sure that council member Alvarez was spotlighted on this one. His words really sunk into the community on that day, the importance of equity in our community and that we are committed to their safety and that we want to make sure that we are constantly having an inclusive community. So on a technical note, we also met, oh, we went to the Wednesday night market. And I do want to thank actually the Wednesday night market committee for their ongoing commitment to the city of Santa Rosa and the events that we have every Wednesday night downtown, which it was a packed event. It was Pride and Joy San Francisco, it was great. I got to get up on stage. I really wanted to sing with them, but they didn't allow that part, not this time anyway. So, but it was a really great event. I would encourage everyone who can get to the Wednesday night market downtown to come down there, have some food and see what's up downtown and enjoy the music. So last but not least, we have zero waste that met on, let's see, in June. And there is a Corbel 2023 environmental health and safety fair from 130 to 430 on 623. And one of the things that we were talking about in zero waste was a model ordinance for building project materials, management, the deconstruction and how we can reuse those products. It had a lot of discussion from all the different jurisdictions on how we could do that best and looking at our own ordinance and how we coincide with that. So that was something we discussed. We didn't approve their ordinance, but we will be bringing that back for consideration. And that ends my report and I'm going to go ahead and go to Mayor Rogers. Hi, mine is fairly quick. I just wanted to congratulate our city manager on her award and also thank Lon Peterson for helping me to get the nomination in on time or we were having some technical difficulties, but he made sure that the nomination forms did get in on time. So congratulations city manager and thank you, Lon, for really helping us to get that through the finish line. Thank you, Mayor. We'll now facilitate public comment on item number 10, Madam City Clerk. Thank you. We are now taking public comment on item 10. If you are in the council chamber and would like to comment but have not provided a speaker card or your name, please make your way to the podium. If you are participating via Zoom, please raise your hand or dial star nine. You will have three minutes and a countdown timer will alert at the end of that period. Thank you. The first public comment will be from Mr. Dewitt. Hello, my name is Dwayne Dewitt. I'm from Roseland. I wanted to thank council member Alvarez for his thoughts and sharing his concerns. It's especially problematic in Roseland where we have a number of violent situations occur. We're actually quite glad that council member Alvarez is taking the time to interact with the violence prevention partnership with the police department and other activities to help over in Roseland where we can get some of this, what you might call, youthful recklessness rained in so that people don't use their lives before they even had a chance to start it basically. Now, it's almost 10 years since Andy Lopez died to the south of Roseland at only 13 years old. So we're still in this dynamic where violence occurs. Young people think that the answer might be to perhaps turn to a weapon. My hope, Mr. Alvarez, and every council member down there and everybody serving on boards and commissions is that you folks will take the time to interact with the community in person out there to talk with parents and youth about different alternatives, things we can do. The Roseland Boys and Girls Club will be opening soon. They used to have a thing called Friday Night Basketball when I was younger. We could bring that type of stuff back in, make it Friday, Saturday. We gotta do something and we need to do it proactively so it's not seen as some sort of a power situation so it's actually seen as a community effort in a coordinated and kind situation. I know we could do this and I'm sure that Ms. Smith who's worked in bigger cities than ours and has seen worse stuff. I've done West Oakland, drive-by shootings, gang killings have been big there for a long time. They've come to an agreement with people in that community that it's not a problem if you give the police information. Some people hear that term and they say snitch. We have to get past that. We have to get to the situation where in the community, people will call and bring in law enforcement and the young people will see law enforcement as an important solution to what's happening. Last but not least, gang graffiti removal. We've mentioned that before and we think we can get that going with gang graffiti removal by veterans in neighborhoods. Please let us step up. We wanna do that and we helped. Not myself, but other veterans helped establish the Roseland Fire District in the past. We can do it as veterans and community. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. DeWitt. Vice Mayor, there's no one else approaching the podiums for public comment in council chamber and there are no hands being raised via Zoom for public comment. Thank you. We'll now move to item 11, which is approval of the minutes. Are there any corrections to these minutes? We have three extensions on this from absences. So with that, can we get an approval of the minutes? I don't know if you can move it if you were one absent. So you only actually have to recuse if you didn't go back and rewatch the tape and read through the minutes. So with that, so moved. Well done. Can I get a second? Thank you. Thank you, Mayor Rogers. Is there any more discussion? Now's the time of honesty to see who did that. So with that, I'll go ahead and take the vote. All in favor? But we have to do- I swear I have to do a roll call vote if you called for a vote. Otherwise they can be approved as submitted. Even with the abstention, we don't have to do a roll call vote. Correct. Then we'll do that approved as submitted. Do we do need to do public comment on the minutes? So. Thank you. We are now taking public comments on item 11.1. If you are in council chamber and would like to comment but have not provided a speaker card or your name, please make your way to the podium. If you are participating via Zoom, please raise your hand or dial star nine. You will have three minutes and a countdown timer will alert at the end of that period. Vice Mayor, I am seeing no one approach the podium for public comment on item 11.1 and no hands being raised via Zoom. Thank you. Just for clarification, Madam at the podium, are you here on item 11? No, I'm here for item 12.2. Thank you. Thank you so much. Okay, we'll now move to consent. Thank you. Item 12.1, I'm behind today. Item 12.1, resolution of the city of, a council of the city of Santa Rosa approving a professional services agreement, number F001424 with LWP claims solutions, Inc. for administration of the city's self-insured workers compensation claims program. Item 12.2, resolution, fourth amendment to agreement F002014 with legal aid of Sonoma County. Item 12.3, resolution, third amendment to professional service agreement, number F002302 with Bureau Veritas North America, Inc. for fire code plan review services. Item 12.4, resolution appropriations limit fiscal year 2023-24. Item 12.5, resolution, approval of the fourth amendment to professional services agreement, number F001766 with Wolpert, Inc. Item 12.6, resolution, extension of proclamation of local homeless emergency. Item 12.7, ordinance adoption, second reading, part one, ordinance of the council of the city of Santa Rosa adopting zoning code text amendment to title 20 of the Santa Rosa city code, chapter 20-48, short-term rentals to provide additional time period to submit applications to renew expired short-term rental permits issued during the first year of short-term rental ordinance. File number REZ23-001. Thank you. Are there any questions from council on consent? Any items to be pulled? Thank you. We will now move to public comment on the consent. We are now taking public comment on item 12, the consent calendar. If you are in council chamber and would like to comment, please make your way to the podium. If you have not provided a speaker card or your name. If you are participating via Zoom, please raise your hand or dial star nine. You will have three minutes and a countdown, time or will alert at the end of that period. The first public comment will be from Dwayne, followed by Allen. Name is Dwayne DeWitt, founding member of the Sonoma County Housing Advocacy Group. On 12.2, I want to make sure that you folks understand just how good it is to have the legal aid of Sonoma County working with people who are at risk of homelessness, helping them to avoid homelessness. I would ask that you do two-year renewals on this in the future. This problem isn't going away where homelessness is actually perhaps increasing even as you build more new units to try to house the folks who are unsheltered. Further in your consent items, you have the continuation of the homeless emergency at 12.6. This proclamation has been going on for years now and we're basically trying to find a way to end it, I hope, so that you'll be able to say, homeless folks can find spots to be. So 12.2, think about doing two-year renewals in the future with more money because some of this money right now won't come back due to the fact that the CARES Act will be changed out and sometimes there's more competition for the Community Development Block Grant funding. It's really important that you folks take the lead and say yes, legal aid of Sonoma County is doing good work and they deserve even more and give them those two-year contract renewals and then this idea about the homeless emergency proclamation. Many senior citizens in my area of Roseland are at risk and it's not seen because folks are proud, they don't wanna say anything about it, especially veterans. A lot of veterans that own their own places now are on a fixed income, they might lose one of their spouses, things can happen and then the next thing you know, you could be out on the street. So I'm hoping that you folks will take on this effort and say that along with solving the homeless emergency, you'll look into actually making sure that those folks who are at risk never become homeless. That's one of the keys to this whole situation and when you talk to people who've been homeless and have found housing, you'll find from them that the number one thing was being able to afford a residential rental unit. You folks have talked about these things in the past and that's why the city of Santa Rosa actually founded a housing authority over 50 years ago because they knew it was difficult to provide affordable residential rentals. You folks could be at the forefront, it's up to you, not us obviously and I thank you for taking the time to listen. Perhaps some others will have some things to say about this later in the meeting. Thank you, the next public comment will be from Alan, followed by Ronit. Good afternoon, city manager Smith, Mayor Rogers, my name is Alan Thomas, 306 Boy Street. I'm here to speak about the extension for the short-term rental application period. Again, thank you for your vote and your time at the last meeting whenever that was, three, four weeks ago. Maybe it was three weeks ago. And it was clear from your vote that six of you were in favor of having strong regulations that protected the community but still gave people that have been doing the right thing for years the opportunity to continue to do things without causing problems to the community. So I appreciate that and I think it was a pretty clear message, six to one. But I want to address some of the issues that were brought up at the meeting that didn't have a time to respond to. When staff said they didn't have the opportunity or the ability to send out cards to notify people for renewal. All of my neighbors got this card. I think hundreds or thousands of these cards went up, they're addressed, it was addressed to me because I live really close to mine. And it's from the city of Santa Rosa. So I'm a little confused by staff would say something like that. The short-term renewal process is arduous. It's the same permit, it's going through the same process. I don't know who came up with this idea. I've spoken with a few people with staff. It makes no sense to me. You have to submit everything you have to do. Parking plans, occupancy, all kinds of drawings. For the exact same thing that you did a year ago, I submitted four permits a month ago. Two of them were late and I appreciate the opportunity to re-submit. But I still haven't gotten the two back that were submitted a month ago. So why is everything so complicated? And it just seems to me that the way, and maybe it was just an accident, maybe it was people that didn't really know what they were doing in terms of coming up with how to process these permits. But it seemed pretty punitive and it seemed like staff was doing everything they could to figure out a way to keep people from renewing their short-term permits. So hopefully with this extended time, we'll have the ability to get things right and maybe a little more simple for people that pay their taxes, that don't cause problems, and they can work in harmony with staff and not be the enemy, because it sure felt like I was targeted as an enemy and I don't consider myself an enemy of the city. Thank you for your time. Good evening. Thank you. The next public comment will be from Ronit. Hi, my name is Ronit. It's a tough one. Thank you. I'm the Executive Director of Legal Aid to Sonoma County and I just wanted to take 30 seconds to thank the council very, very much for its ongoing support of our Housing Stability Program. Many government bodies recognize that homelessness is an issue and fund homeless services, but not so many recognize the importance of stabilizing tenants in order to prevent homelessness. You are a standout in that regard and I appreciate our partnership so much. Because of our partnership with the city of Santa Rosa, we have stabilized housing of hundreds of low-income families over the past few years. So just thank you very much. Mayor, I'm seeing, or vice mayor, I'm seeing no one else approach the podiums. There are no hands being raised on this item and there are no prerecorded public comments. Thank you. I'll bring it back to council to see if we have any questions on the consent agenda. Seeing none, we'll go ahead and have council member Alvarez put a motion on the floor, please. Thank you, Madam Vice Mayor. I move items 12.1 through 12.7, waiving further reading of the text. Thank you. Thank you, Mayor. Okay, any discussion? We'll go ahead and do roll call vote, please. Thank you. Council member Stapp. Aye. Council member Chris Rogers. Aye. Council member Ocrepke. Aye. Council member Fleming. Aye. Council member Alvarez. Aye. Council member, or vice mayor McDonald. Aye. Mayor Rogers. Aye. Let the record show that all council member or that, excuse me, the consent calendar passed unanimously. Thank you. We're going to be moving to item 13, which is public comment on non-agenda matters. And just for the sake of those in chambers, we're going to be going in succession of the actual agenda. So we'll be doing 14.1 next. And then after that, we'll be moving to public comment. So we're down to item number 13, public comment on non-agenda matters. Madam city clerk, will you please facilitate? Thank you. We are now taking public comments on item 13. If you are in the council chamber and would like to comment, but have not provided a speaker card or your name, please make your way to the podium. If you are participating via Zoom, please raise your hand or dial star nine. You will have three minutes and a countdown timer will alert at the end of that period. Please note that if we have more than 12 public comments on item 13, the remaining speakers will be afforded the opportunity to speak under item 17, non-agenda matters later on in the agenda. Okay. The first public comment will be from Mr. DeWitt. Is the overhead projector here if I may? Coming right up. Thank you. Hello, my name is Dwayne DeWitt. I'm from Roseland and I wanted to say thank you for talking about car shows. It's really a nice thing to do, not just on Father's Day, but come on out to the Santa Rosa, Sonoma County Vets Memorial Building on Saturday the first of July and see the cars out there. Our U.S. Representative, Mike Thompson, is a Vietnam veteran army. He's going to be there serving breakfast. Come on out, you'll have some fun. It's good stuff, American's helping on good things. I wanted to congratulate Eddie Alvarez for his approach to standing forward to get an enhanced infrastructure financing district for Roseland while you folks were talking about it and saying, well, that portion of Roseland that's in the downtown doesn't get to be part of it. It's like, wait a minute, we've been doing this for decades, where you guys on the other side of the tracks, oh, I know that's where I'm from, excuse me, where you guys over there look over here and say, well, no, you can't be a part of this. We need you folks to start looking at Roseland like it's part of the city, the big city, and you can do these infrastructure enhancement areas there on Sebastopol Road. And by the way, I don't know if you guys heard this, but Mr. Alvarez was putting forward maybe having that section that runs between Olive Street and Stony Point Road named after Roseland. We got a Roseland Avenue down there off of McMinn, but having the whole section 1.2 miles long be named after Roseland somehow. You know, we got a Roseland way over there. We know how we do things. We could make something good out of all this. And he even mentioned to some other folks putting up an arch over there at Stony Point with the name Roseland on there. Like when you go to the West End, it's painted on the overpasses. You could have that over here on Olive Street, but nobody ever thought to do that yet. Mr. Alvarez has stepped up. He's like, yeah, let's do that. He probably doesn't know that 25 years ago there was a committee working with the county that had stated they wanted to see that Southern and Western entrance to Roseland be recognized. There's a little commercial there, a place called Southgate. They put that in there, but that's not Roseland. It's over in the right district across the street. So come on, Roseland. I want you folks to come down there. And last but not least, let's do a car show at Southwest Community Park. Let's get our low riders out there. Let's do something for the Roseland folks right in there. Although Southwest Community Park is in the Bellevue district, we're all good. We hug together, we're getting it. But it's most of all important that we have some embracing of Roseland for a business association. And I believe Mr. Alvarez is already working on that bad boy too. So thank you, sir. Thank you, Mr. DeWitt. Did you want to use that too? Yeah. Oh, yours, man. Yeah. Cool, you got it. There it is. There's one for us. I wanted to use that one too. Hello, council. My name is Terry Sanders. I also wanted to share in my enthusiasm and excitement for our city manager for receiving the award, well-deserved. I'm following the lead of Mr. DeWitt. If he can talk about a car show, I can talk about this. I also like to, you know, we did really have a great Peggy Sue car cruise and it was fantastic. And what I loved the most was seeing council member Alvarez really engaging with our community. I've never seen someone have such a good time, a smile on his face the entire time and everyone in our community was really appreciative of having, you know, those that represent us engaging with us. It was fantastic. I also like to thank you both, the vice mayor and you, council member Alvarez, for coming down to the Wednesday Night Market, hopping upon stage. It means a lot for our folks in the community to see you and engage. It was great to see council member flimming at our Juneteenth celebration and along with everyone else. So, you know, please keep that up. Stay engaged with us all because this is, you are us, we are you. This is our town and we make of it what we want to make of it. And with that said, I have this really neat opportunity. The Oakley Interfaith Gospel Choir is coming to the Sonoma County Fair. For the first time, the fair is featuring a gospel act. And the best part for me that I'm so excited about is that Terrence Kelly, that's this gentleman right here, is going to come in a couple of days early and engage the community in two workshops, one on July 23rd, one on July 30th. And he's gonna teach us a couple of gospel songs. Maybe two, three, four, five. We're not looking for Mahalia Jackson's and I will stand in opposition of council member Fleming's assertion that she cannot sing. I do not buy it. I expect to see you there. You gave me a sample and it sounded pretty good to me. The best part is that we're gonna learn a couple of gospel tunes and then you're going to perform at the fair. And that comes with a ticket to the fair. You're gonna open the show for the gospel choir. So we don't need Mahalia Jackson. We just need people with a good voice and a good spirit. So I hope to see you all there and I'm leaning on the council members to bring that same enthusiasm council member Alvarez that you brought to Peggy Sue to bring to this because it's a really neat and community engaging event that we're having and it's gonna be held at the New California Theater also in downtown Santa Rosa. So thank you all very much. Thank you. I see no additional public comments from council chamber. I'm gonna turn it over to our Zoom host where I see one hand being raised. You Karen, I am adjusting your permissions. Please go ahead when you're ready. Thank you. Afternoon, Mayor Rogers and members of the council. My name is Karen Weeks and I'm here today as a member of the Merit Awards Committee. The city has awarded Merit Awards since 1978. That's pretty incredible. Nominations for the 2023 Merit Awards opened a couple months ago and will close on July 9th with the ceremony being held on September 18th at the Finlay Center. Hopefully you've all received a save the date for that event from staff. For those of you who have been to the Merit Awards you know what an incredible event it is and those of you who haven't I encourage you to attend. The categories this year are beautifying our community, serving others particularly young people, seniors and those in need, strengthening our neighborhoods, expanding and enriching the artistic and historical culture of the city, fostering sustainability and protecting the environment and rising to the challenge slash community heroes. So if you know anybody who could meet one of these categories please submit an application. As I said that application period closes on July 9th. Thank you. Thank you. We have no additional speakers on Zoom and no prerecorded messages for this item. Thank you so much. We'll go ahead and move on to item 14 and item 14.1. Thank you. Item 14.1 is a report independent police auditor annual report. So I would like to welcome Michael Janako and the OIR team down to the table. And if you could all just state your name for the record. Thank you. Thank you for that introduction. Madam city manager, council, my name is Michael Janako and I have my colleagues with me. Brian would you introduce yourself? Good afternoon. My name is Brian Core. Very glad to be here. Thank you for having us. And good afternoon. My name is Steven Connolly. We are here as your independent police auditor and we are pleased to be here this evening to report on our first year of activity as your IPA. It has been an interesting year. We have had a chance to learn a lot about how the police department works and have been very engaged in ensuring accountability. And the second, I think major responsibility we have as the IPA is to ensure transparency. So for the first time and probably ever your public has as a result of our public reporting is now able to judge for themselves what kind of complaints are being received about the police department. And most significantly how well is the police department responding to those complaints through an internal investigation. And for those in which there is an outcome necessary is the outcome based on evidence that is collected during the investigation or is it more a fact of whether or not the chief of police likes or doesn't like the officer. And so the report which is of some length delves into that and provides our evaluation of this very important accountability measure. And we are here today to highlight that report to showcase it to talk about some of the key recommendations. We're obviously going to take a higher level approach to this than we did in our written product but we do intend to at least give you an overview and then certainly are able to answer any questions that you all may have at the end of our presentation. Can we go to the next slide, Steve? All right, so your IPA is currently filled by OAR Group. OAR Group is a team of police practices professionals. You have three of us here. There are other members that are home doing the real work as we're up here in beautiful Santa Rosa for the next couple of days. But we have been doing this work for approximately 20 years, specializing in the independent evaluation of police agencies internal review systems. What that means is when somebody is complaining about performance of a particular officer or an employee of the police department, it's imperative that the police department, one, take the complaint, two, hear out the complainant, and then three, do an investigation so that the allegations can be thoroughly vetted, evidence can be collected, interviews can be conducted. And then ultimately, based on that investigation, a decision can be made about whether or not the officer violated the policies, practices, expectations of the leadership of the police department or not. Critical role and our job is to provide an overlay, an independent objective overlay into that process in Santa Rosa. And that's what this reporting is all about. Our team in Santa Rosa primarily consists of, so this is sort of a timeline of the work that we got started. Those of you may recall that we were first brought on board, not as your IPA, but really as an expert to look at and help with the after incident investigations following the protests, following the George Floyd murder. And so we worked closely with the department as they took a look at each of those complaints involving primarily uses of force relating to the protest activity over those tumultuous few days after the George Floyd murder. And again, bring our expertise to bear to ensure that there was an investigation and that those investigations were thorough. Again, as with our current work, this is real-time monitoring. And what that means is we don't wait until the investigation is all done and wrapped up and a bow tied around it and the officer's been notified of the decision. That's not the process that is going on here. The process is much more in real-time. So what that means is that when a complaint comes in, we're aware of it, either directly from the complainant because the complainant can and we often do get complaints from individuals who are concerned about particular performances of officers in the city. In fact, as I was waiting for a council to commence, I just got a complaint on my Google voice that I'm gonna attend to after the meeting. So that is a real system. I think it has allowed complainants to feel more comfortable talking to an independent body, explaining the options to the potential complainant, and also explaining our role to them as well. So in any event, we did work hand-in-glove with the department on those investigations into the uses of force. Some of them ended up resulting in accountability because there were mistakes were made. I don't think there was anything malicious or intentional based on the evidence, but there were certainly some issues with regard to choice of weaponry, use of weaponry, et cetera, et cetera, that were addressed during the series of investigations that ensued. In November of 2021, that is later that year, we were then selected through a extensive process and RFP process to be your IPA for the next few years. We got up and running about the beginning of 2022. So this report is intended to encapsulate the calendar year 2022 to 2023, the beginning of 2023, and contains our findings, which we'll get into in a minute. The other thing that we thought was important to do, and so did the city, under the leadership of your city manager and her outreach team helping us, we were able to perform significant outreach in August to let your community know who we are and what we are assigned to do. And we had some very good conversations in August of last year in order to further our work here in the city and to get to learn the city a bit more. And Mr. Corr will be talking about that in a little more detail in the next slide, please. In fact, I think he's gonna do that now. Mr. Corr. All right, thank you, Mr. Janko. So again, I'm very pleased to be back here in Santa Rosa. I was part of the four-person team. It was the three of us and our colleague, Teresa Magula, who will be joining us tomorrow for community outreach. But it was a really important part of the initial conversations with the council and the city manager's office about how to make sure that the work that the OIR group is doing as your independent police auditor was not only technically good and able to meet the requirements, but really did engage the community. And so as Mike said, with the help of the Community Engagement Department, here at the city, we had a number of opportunities for structured and informal conversation with community members. And we were here for really about three full days. And in that time, had the opportunity to meet, as I said, both formally and informally with community members, also with the people in the police department, with city council members, and just encounters along the way. Really, as we had meals, as we enjoyed your city, being able to just chat with people who would ask why we were here, and then we could talk about why we were here. And it was great to be able to hear people's impressions of policing, public safety, their concerns, what they liked about the city, the police department, and it really helped to inform the work we do. And it also helped us to have a better sense as we did the outreach sessions, what to expect and what to listen for. So in that time, as it says on the slide, we had two scheduled listening sessions that were opportunities for people to come to hear formal presentations about our work. We had remarks from the city manager, from the mayor, from the police commission, police chief, excuse me, I have a police commission where I live in Massachusetts, from the police chief, and then to really, after we talked about what we do, have a chance to hear from people. One of those was at the Findlay Community Center, the other was at the Victory Outreach Church in Roseland, and had a variety of people come, but people really were open about sharing both their concerns and what they liked, what they wanted to see more of, and what they hoped that we would look for. People tell stories, some very recent, some very old, and all were important to help give us an understanding of the community that we're working in, of your community. We also, at the community drop-ins, one at Tia Maria, Panaderia, and one at Victory Outreach Church. I feel like I've doubled up on that. I have notes. I always want to do it off the top of my head, but I don't want to misspeak. But at those informal sessions, I'm sorry, one of the formal sessions of the Shepherd Community School, that's why I meant. So the informal session at Victory Outreach Church and the session at Tia Maria, Panaderia really gave us a chance to sit down one-on-one with people. Teresa Magoula is a native Spanish speaker, so that was important for us to really be able to converse with people in their language of choice to the extent possible. And again, it was a different kind of opportunity rather than a formal presentation, really to just sit down one-on-one. And I found it very helpful. I know the rest of the team did to find out what people were feeling in a way that wasn't structured, where they weren't speaking in front of a large group, but they could just tell their stories and raise their concerns. And also, again, let us know what they really appreciated and wanted to see more of in the work of the police department here in Santa Rosa. And I think the main issues again, which wouldn't surprise anybody that we did hear about were issues around the unhoused population, the people who feel that the challenges of having such a large unhoused population are very difficult to deal with, and the people who have deep concerns about how people who are unhoused are treated, how the services that they are provided, how the public safety services that they interact with affect them. And so it was a very complicated landscape, but again, it was very important for us to hear that and to understand the variety of perspectives and how the police department in its work every day interacts with people who are unhoused and how that's perceived in the community. And the last thing is that we had a real chance to talk with people in situations where we were in a not public space, but with people in the police department, with the city leadership, and with patrol officers. So we met with police department personnel who do investigations of misconduct and internal affairs complaints. We got to meet with city leadership. I mentioned some of the informal conversations, but we also had formal conversations. And for me, it was very interesting in particular to do ride-alongs with patrol officers because it's important to hear what people have to say, people's perspective, people's stories, but there's nothing like going out and seeing what officers are doing, how they're interacting with people, how people are responding. And I know I had a chance to go out to the Sonoma County Fair and see interactions with police officers and members of the public to do a ride-along where I was able to experience sort of the typical traffic stops that you see, how officers handled that, how they provided support, asked questions, made sure that people were safe. And also one particular situation with an individual who was apparently in a mental health crisis who was creating quite a tumult in scaring people and the care and concern which the officers displayed in their attempts to deescalate the situation and deal with someone who clearly was very troubled. So it was a very good opportunity in that granular way to see what's happening. And I also know that it was important for police officers as the people who are subject of investigation sometimes to get to know those of us who would be in this role. So I think the last thing I wanna say in my very hopefully brief remarks is that we are in town for a couple more days today and tomorrow. We are going to be doing more outreach work. We will be back at Tia Maria Panaderia tomorrow at 9 a.m. And anyone who is interested in coming to speak with us is more than welcome to stop in. We look forward to hearing from people and hearing again that informal setting what people's concerns are. We'll also be meeting with the, at the first meeting of the new group that the same manager has appointed to take on the role that the chief's and community ambassador team had been doing and continue that work in a new way with a new mandate. And we look forward to having continued engagement with them as another way to hear about concerns and share what we know with people in the community who have influence and represent very different parts of the Santa Rosa community. And then we will have a meeting at the back of the Finlay Community Center, another a bit more formal meeting tomorrow. So we look forward to those opportunities. And again, just really want to say how much I've appreciated the opportunity to work with Santa Rosas to work with the city staff, with elected officials, with the police department and really just with members of the community who have concerns about how to make Santa Rosa an even better place to live. Thank you. Thank you, Brian. Just again, this is in our scope of work in our report, but we have a lot to do here. One of the things is I think I've highlighted in my initial remarks was that we do real-time review of all internal investigations and civilian complaints. And that means that from the beginning of the investigation, its inception, all the way to its conclusion, we're involved in every step of the way in providing advice, participating in interviews that are critical and ensuring that there is a good product at the back end so that the chief has the best information from which to make important decisions about accountability and disposition of those cases. We do receive timely notification when there is a critical incident. If there is a critical incident, somebody is reaching out to us, getting us on the phone, and we're starting to learn almost immediately within an hour or two of what the initial information is demonstrating. And throughout that process, from that initial phone call debrief all the way through that event, we are kept apprised of any developments of those critical incidents. We are able to conduct periodic audits of investigations and their outcomes that take us to larger issues, such as allegations of bias-based policing, use of force, whether or not body-worn camera activation is being complied with or not, whether there's policy compliance, and then we're also able to review and make recommendations regarding policies and training and have done that over the past year. As I indicated, one of our critical responsibilities is to receive civilian complaints and we do that on a regular basis. We have been asked at least once a year to provide a report, which is what is the impetus for our appearance here today, and that that report be done in a public forum, which is, again, we think critical so that you all as leadership of the city as well as your community can know and learn and have the opportunity to participate in dialogue about what we have found and any additional issues that may be of concern to the community members, which is what we're going to be doing again tomorrow. Go to the next slide, please. Steve, I think this is when you can talk about some of the nuts and bolts of our first year. So good evening again and thank you for having us. So I wanna talk a little bit about some of the particulars of our work and I wanna start with a focus on process. One of the key features of this model as your council designed it really relates to our access, our real time and complete and independent access to all the confidential personnel files and records and body-worn camera recordings and interviews and police reports and everything that goes into making decisions in these cases. This is a very significant element of the model for a couple of reasons. One is because obviously we have the most informed opportunity to weigh in and offer our two cents with regard to each investigation as it is unfolding and secondly, it really does speak to the independence of the model insofar as we have been basically entrusted with the same level of access to the department's computer database as the chief of police himself as. So I can remotely from my home get into the department's database and look at body-worn camera recordings, look at the interview transcripts or the progress of individual investigations. I don't need anybody's permission to do that and I can do it when I want and kind of stay updated and I think that adds a lot to the ability to make a informed and relevant contribution to these individual cases. So I was gonna say next slide please but I guess that's me. So in terms of our real-time independent monitoring of the cases, again, Mike talked a little bit about notification with regard to critical incidents. We become apprised within a day or two anytime the department opens a new investigation into officer misconduct if there's a new allegation, a new citizen complaint that comes in. We also have the opportunity to participate in those investigations up to and including sitting in on the interviews of officers when those happen and we have done that on a handful of occasions with certain cases and last but not least, we consult with the department's decision makers as to our opinions with regard to appropriate outcomes and that can go all the way up to the Chief of Police himself if we have some concerns or issues that we want to resolve at the highest level. In terms of our activity level last year, there were 67 separate matters investigated by the Santa Rosa Police Department. 53 of them were complaints from the public, 14 of them were started by the department itself and one of the things that I wanted to be sure to mention and this is something that the city manager really kinda has emphasized with regard to transparency is this idea of a case chart that basically lays out the brief summary consistent with officers' confidentiality rights and privacy protections. The case chart that's the appendix in our report kinda gives you some insight into the kinds of things that are being alleged and the department's response to them so we think that's a significant contribution to the transparency in the city. Our involvement relates, again, at different phases of the process, we help to make sure that investigations are framed appropriately in terms of making sure that all the allegations that might be relevant so that might be part of an individual member of the public's complaints that those have been looked at and assessed appropriately. One of the things that we're certainly interested in in every case is whether the investigation is sufficiently thorough, whether the evidence gathering has been sufficient to make an informed decision about whether the allegations should be sustained or not. We talked to the department about outcomes with regard to our perspective and what we think should be happening and last but not least, we also have opportunities, we promote opportunities for holistic intervention when it comes to these cases. So every time there's a formal complaint investigation, there's a bottom line determination about whether the officer's conduct was in policy or out of policy and whether some sort of formal accountability measure is warranted but beyond that, there are lots of situations where these cases end up being kinda feedback loops for the department, they give insight into how officers are performing in the field and how they're being perceived by members of the public. So there are lots of situations where even when the actual allegation might not be sustained and there's gonna be no formal discipline, we've talked to the department about looking for ways to work with officers and just kinda point out, hey, you did 93% of that pretty well but that communication at the end was not your best moment and that was probably part of the reason why that member of the public felt he or she wasn't taken seriously or treated appropriately or given the right amount of respect or courtesy and so having those kinds of informal interventions, even when the formal charges are not sustained is something that we really try to emphasize and that we've really tried to promote with the department itself. In terms of critical incident review, that's another part of our mandate. The last critical incident meeting, the kind of standard definition was an in custody death that occurred in November of 2021. I'm sure you're all familiar with that case. The criminal and administrative reviews of that matter are complete. However, there is still pending litigation and so we will be talking about that in more detail and our perspectives on the department's response to it and some of the systemic issues about the department's review process that we have looked at and discussed with the department and we'll address more of those in a more public setting in the future but we did wanna emphasize that our access and our ability to kind of participate and weigh in also applied to this case which has obviously and understandably gotten a lot of public attention. In terms of use of force review, that's something that we're hoping to expand a little bit in our second year of work. Mike talked about some of the different audits that we are able to perform under our scope and we wanna drill down into use of force review a little bit more broadly. In this first year of our time in Santa Rosa, most of our window into how the department responds to force was when an element of a particular complaint involved an excessive force allegation. There were a handful of those in the calendar year, none of them were sustained and we agreed with the department's assessment in each of those cases but we also found we had some questions I guess would be the best way to put it about the rigor of the department's force review process itself and the level of supervisory involvement and again that whole idea of holistic full fledged evaluation of it, not just was it in policy but could something have been done differently or better to change the result and we'll be working with the agency more on that this year. We had eight recommendations, some of them related to the discipline process and a couple of them just to be clear, one of the things that we really pushed for and that has gotten a certain amount of attention has to do with the interviewing of subject officers. We saw less formal interviews of subject officers than what we are accustomed to in dealing with other agencies but to be very clear about that there were only a small handful of cases where we felt like that, you know, I wish there had been a little bit more in terms of just getting some insight into the officer's mindset. Part of the reason why there are individual cases where a subject officer doesn't end up getting interviewed is because of the impact of the body-worn camera evidence. Santa Rosa PD's had body cameras for a few years now and that is hugely significant in terms of the ability to reach kind of an appropriate swift conclusion one way or the other and there were many cases, even cases in which the policy violations were sustained, even cases where the complainants' allegations were supported where there just wasn't a need to interview the officer because everything we needed to know was already out there and one of the things we presented to the Public Safety Committee a little bit informally last week and one of the questions that came up in the aftermath of that had to do with the interviews of complainants. There were some members of the public who I think very astutely recognized that interviews with complainants would be a really, really important part of the process on a few different levels and I wanna be very clear in case the report itself is not clear and in case I wasn't clear enough last week, the department is actually very good about conducting those interviews with complainants, making sure that they understand what the complainants' concerns are and I have the opportunity to listen to those interviews and to make sure that all the different identified issues are tracked. As far as the consequences, piece of it, again, some of this is what we're used to as opposed to Santa Rosa culture and I've spent some time talking with the department leadership and arguing with them from time to time about different ways of seeing things and doing things. I do understand the department's philosophy and I think we're getting a little closer with regard to some of those things and by the way, the department has talked about the value of subject interviews and maybe expanding the number of cases in which, yeah, the body-worn camera's great but maybe officer mindset and just really understanding a little bit more completely why this encounter turned at this particular moment, just to de-stigmatize that process and to make sure that the officer's version of events is fully heard and understood. Last but not least, oh, just to go back to the use of force piece, I did mention that a couple slides ago and again, I will be very interested in tracking any adjustments that the department makes in the coming year with regard to the more thorough, complete and maybe just better documented supervisory analysis of these individual uses of force even when there isn't a complaint that arises out of them. Last but not least, one of the department's big pushes last year and I think it's a really important one had to do with training in implicit bias and equity issues. It's obviously a extremely prominent topic in national law enforcement. The department put together its own four-hour training block last year. We had the opportunity to track that and to sort of follow along as it was being developed and then sit in on a dress rehearsal where members of the community were invited from different groups to kind of share their two cents and refine the finished product and we thought of it as a very good start and we wanted to commend the department for its commitment and for the really good work that a team of its own people did in putting that training together. That said, we don't want it to just be, well, great, we checked that box and we're done here. We think there's more work to be done in this area and that there's new perspectives and obviously new thinking and new events that are occurring that our hope is that the department will continue to kind of prioritize these topics and I think we've had representations from different folks in the department that they absolutely are on board with that. And that is all from us in terms of a formal presentation but we certainly welcome any additional questions or follow-up from you folks and thank you and I'll turn it back to Mike and Brian in case there's anything else. I think unless you have anything else, Brian, I think we submit based on what we've said so far but certainly obviously here to answer any questions or clarify anything that we had said this evening or that's in our report. And again, thank you for your support. Very helpful. Thank you for your report. I'm gonna go ahead and check to council to see if they have any questions for you. Council member O'Crepkey. Thank you very much. So one of the things that stuck out in your report and that you mentioned again is the term formal interview. And I don't know if I should ask you this question or our chief and his team but is there a difference between a formal interview and having a conversation or a one-on-one with the subject and why do you think more formal interviews are needed? Thank you for the question council member. I'll take the first pass that I know the chief has his opinions about it too and we have talked about this on a few different occasions. What I simply mean is a formal interview is one where the officer is represented and has all of his peace officer bill of rights protections and it just kind of goes through a more formal basically legal process to ensure that all of the officers administrative rights are appropriately observed. And that is a requirement for a certain level of formal discipline. In other words, it's for an officer to be formally disciplined to be given a written reprimand or above that kind of opportunity to be represented and heard is one of the baseline requirements. In several situations, the department has issued document counseling or evaluation notes, which is a form of discipline that falls below that written reprimand threshold. The department does treat it seriously and keeps track of it in ways that were new to us and so some of it is learning. And I think the way you put it is very interesting that kind of they very much think that there is value to those one-in-one less formal but still hearing the officer, giving the officer feedback, having that exchange with the supervisor that is still happening in the vast majority of cases. It just has to do with the level of formality attached with regard to the consequences. Does our team wanna come on that or? I can give a little bit more on that and I'm John Frieden, our chief of police here in Santa Rosa. And I think I agree where Mr. Connolly is coming from with that, but one thing that's really important for us and this is where we talk about like the subjectiveness of formal that for us every complaint that we receive in the police department is documented. We have a process that IA Pro database that we talked about before. So the sergeant, whether it be the patrol sergeant or investigative sergeant or professional standard sergeant memorializes that in an investigative memo and talks about this is the allegation that we received. And we have interactions with the officers and many times we're able to watch one of the game changers for us as every officer is equipped with a body-worn camera they're required to use that body-worn camera when interacting. And so it really takes some of the subjectivity out of the context with us that we see exactly what was said, the tone that was used, the services that were offered or not offered and we're able to make a very clear understanding of what occurred. But then we formalize and what Mr. Connolly talked about of doing evaluation notes are these documented counseling. So we see something that's low level but something like, hey, you could have done a better job officer will document it. One of those documented counselings it gets memorialized with the sergeant signs it to officer signs it. It gets memorialized in this IA Pro database. The sergeant and lieutenant review those to make sure they concur with them. I'll review them if I think it's something significant for in a document and counseling, our protocol is we memorialize that in the officer's annual eval too. So we're saying that's something that's important to us that we were moralized it in that eval that stays in their personnel file. And it's something too that we make sure that there is a formal process. Now it is different of a more of an actual administrative investigation where the police officer Bill of Rights comes into it and you have a formal union rep or attorney that's a part of it. And that's usually a more serious allegation at the end of the day, like we talked about earlier in this presentation our desire is to change the behavior. And so we change that behavior by documenting it making sure it's there for progressive discipline purposes and no matter what it's accessible and by being memorialized it's also available for our police auditor anytime to access and review and see what the determination is. And if we get a strong pushback from our police auditor saying we don't think this is a documented counseling, this ought to go to a higher level of whether it be suspension or written reprimand that goes in their file. Certainly something that we take into consideration and we've always been able to come to an agreement on those disciplines. And then ultimately the city manager has the ability to say to override that but we've always been able to come to an agreement. So I hope that gives a little bit more clarity on it to make sure that no one's left with the perception that these are just ignored or not memorialized because that never occurs. That does, thank you both. My last question is over let's say the last five years or so how many departments have you guys been in IPA or done monitor investigations like you originally did with ours? Would you say roughly? Probably too many. But just in this area I think we're the IPA for about half a dozen cities and counties. This area being Northern California. Northern California. So we're the IPA for the city of Palo Alto, city of Davis, county of Santa Clara, the county of Santa Cruz, the city of Santa Cruz. So those, I'm up to six already. Okay, all right. And then what's your impression of our department's standards that they set for themselves and how they live up to those standards compared to your other experiences with other departments? Yeah, I would say that in our first year of really digging into the complaints in a really systematic and methodical and comprehensive way that we found one, we get everything we want. And Council Member Ocrepti, as Steve was saying, that's unusual in the sense that I think there may be one other agency that has given us essentially the password to their database. And that really is helpful because we can actually in real time look at whatever we think we need to look at in order to come to our independent conclusion on these cases. So I think that puts your police department ahead of many of the other agencies we work with regarding the way in which they address these things. We also couldn't agree more with what the Chief said, which is nothing swept under the rug, everything is documented, everything is there. And I think it's a methodical systemic process. I think that the ability to input before the case has fallen off the cliff, if you will, I think is really critical and really helps us to make a difference on the cases instead of waiting to some jurisdictions, we have to wait till the case is over and then we audit it. By that time, it's too late with regard to that case. It's too late with regard to accountability in that officer. We can criticize and we do decisions that we made that we think wasn't sufficient investigation or there wasn't enough accountability or we would have come in a different conclusion. But here in Santa Rosa, we get to have those conversations as the sausage is being made, if you will. And I think that really causes there to be more of a footprint that we can actually have in the shaping and development of accountability. Ultimately, we recognize it's ultimately the Chief and the city managers call on these cases, but we can have meaningful input as the system goes along. And you know, I sort of didn't answer your question directly about what grade we should give them or how they would rate to others, but I would just say this, I would say, they certainly are not at the bottom and they're certainly rising near the top as far as what we have seen. More to be done, there's always more to be done. Challenges of today are gonna be different than the challenges of what happened after the George Floyd murder, for example. And the challenges tomorrow will be different again, but I think the process is such that it's well situated. And the thing, again, that one of the things we're most proud of is our ability in this city to tell your public these are the allegations that were received and there's 10 pages of them. And you can see what people are complaining about and how well the department is responding to them. And I think that, again, is relatively unique to this agency and this city. So high marks is what I would say and I wouldn't give it a litter grade because I resist that, but I think you should be proud of, I think it's a positive report is what I would say. Thank you, I appreciate that. And I really appreciate the time you are committed to spending in our community and getting our community feedback as well. Thank you, I'm gonna go ahead and go to Mayor Rogers. Hi, so where can one find all of the documentation that you have at 10 pages without you coming to present to council? Can you repeat the question, Mayor? I'm gonna get this. You're here presenting to council now, but where can residents and community members find that information, live time, like you said, now you just received another one. Where can they find that information without you coming to present to council? So in terms of cases as they are unfolding, I know that the city manager has talked about taking the case chart that we put into our report for completed cases for the year and to making that more of a real time tool that the public can have to say, hey, what's going on here? I looked at this case last month, what's the progress of it? And I know that's a step that the city manager and our officer are committed to implementing in the second year of our work. Thank you. Council Member Rogers. Thank you, Vice Mayor. So first of all, I wanna thank the chief and the department for that commitment to transparency because that's really critical for us even knowing what to ask and how to talk about moving things forward. I think it's been the hallmark of it. You mentioned that there were 14 complaints that were internally generated. And I think that that speaks to that as well, trying to hold each other accountable. Are you able to generate random audits or if you read something in the paper, are you allowed to come forward and say, hey, I think we should take a look at this or does it have to be driven by a community complaint or an internal complaint? Thank you for your question, Council Member. It is part of our scope to do audits and we would talk to the city manager and the department about particular projects and certainly input from the council would be very welcome as well. But yeah, part of our ability would be to look at a particular issue and to evaluate it without waiting for a specific complaint. Great. One of the things that I find really helpful in especially that spreadsheet and I know I've talked with the city manager about this a lot is really looking for trend data. Whether it's the same officer making different mistakes and that's one approach or seeing if the same mistake is being made sort of throughout the department that might be more of a training issue that we need to address. Were there any trends that you found across the complaints? And I know you made recommendations, but were there any trends that you think that bear looking a little bit further into? I would say yes to that, Council Member. And the good news is it's relatively benign to your question about the department and how the officer's performance really grades out. We did notice a number of the complaint cases that just came down to poor communication on the part of the officers and they did everything perfectly well right up until the end, but then they just didn't close the deal appropriately in terms of finishing the call for service. I talked about that with the department and one of the things that they pointed out which I think is very important to keep in mind is that there are a lot of very relatively young inexperienced officers that are out on patrol and there's a learning curve that goes along with that. So I think the department actually, as the year progressed and as we started to notice that in a theme that ran across a number of cases, the department actually got into the mix and started engaging with people in terms of training bulletins and just interventions and just kind of pointing out to people. Look, you're doing great, but this last little bit of customer service is a difference maker. And I do wonder, and you don't have to go too far down this rabbit hole with me if you don't want to, we're talking about the budget later. One of the things we're constantly talking about is the calls for service and the ability of officers to adequately tier and close the loop before they have to run off and do another one. And so I don't know if that was a common trend that you heard. I hear it obviously frequently from officers, but it sounds like you're not saying that it was a malicious thing that there just might need to be a little bit more hand-holding at the end of calls. I think timing is absolutely a factor in why sometimes officers become impatient, especially when 95% of the work is done and they're just ready to be finished. So I think it absolutely is a factor. Okay. Did you find any cases where the, I know there were some in the report where the body camera was inconclusive or might not have been turned on, but did you find any cases where you felt like it was malicious that the body camera wasn't turned on as opposed to just something happened? So two things. One, there were very few instances of body-worn camera policy violations overwhelmingly. The officers were in compliance with the policy and that was very helpful. And I think it's been my experience, believe it or not, because it's very much changed in the last five or six years. I think the officers like it as a tool and they like to have the documentation of what occurred in the field. And no, we did not see instances where we were under the impression that one of the rare body-worn camera violations was a function of malice. Right. That's great to hear. As a technical one, you had one of there, it said possible unlawful cleats, C-L-E-T-S access involving former officer. What's cleats? I apologize. It's the California Law Enforcement Tracking Database which has a number of data entries including criminal history. So unfortunately, clearly that is only to be used for law enforcement purposes, but there are times when officers use it to access information for personal interest and that's a violation of access to the system. So that was the one instance we saw. So it seemed to be listed, I just wanna make sure. So was somebody who accessed the system while still a police officer, but for an inappropriate thing, not somebody who was able to access the system after they were no longer a police officer? So this was a complaint that came in that turned out to be unsubstantiated. It was a member of the public who reached out to our office directly and was under the impression that information had been accessed inappropriately by a former officer relying on contacts, but the department kinda ran it down and the system itself tracks these things and captures the activity level pretty conclusively and found that there was no support to the misconduct allegation. Great, I appreciate that. Do we keep demographic information on the people who are making complaints? So we do not single that out specifically now. Okay, I might be interested and I'll see if there's other interest. Just to see if we have particular communities that are disproportionately finding the need to make complaints and whether that points us in the direction of maybe more implicit training and implicit bias training or some other type of resource, but I'd be interested in hearing a little bit more about that. We had one complaint that referenced a third party had done some form of an investigation. Let me, I can pull it up while I ask you the other question really fast, so I'm, but a couple of these complaints that were sustained, it said that the officers no longer involved with SRPD that they had moved on. Do we know where they went? I do not know. Okay, so is that perhaps an area that we should look at that if a complaint is sustained here and the officer has moved to, say, Runner Park just south of us, that there's some level of communication between our department and their department? So I would just speak to that very superficially because it's not an area of expertise of ours, but two things, one is absolutely an officer looking to get rehired by another agency would have to provide the access from his previous, his or her previous agency as to personnel investigations. And so there shouldn't be any secrets in that regard. And secondly, the state of California has worked in recent, very recently to address that concern of people just bouncing from agency to agency with their new decertification process, which is kind of still unfolding but is meant to address that phenomenon. Okay, great. Found it here. The status, the allegation was, department opened a formal investigation after hearing allegations of inappropriate comments and other potential harassment behavior by an SRP officer. And then for the status, it says investigation was conducted by an outside third party and determined that several policy violations had occurred. You concurred with the findings. Is the third party, is that the sheriff's office or some other law enforcement agency? I believe it was an investigator hired by the city in that particular case. So that's not unusual to have third party, for cases of a particular complexity or gravity to kind of bring in a third party to do it is not unusual. Okay. And then my last questions are for the chief if I can steal him away from lawn. Sorry, lawn. So chief, there's eight recommendations that were made. We didn't really take the time in the presentation to walk through each of them specifically. How are you evaluating those recommendations to see which need to be implemented? And how would the council or the public know so that next year when we get a report we don't just see the same recommendations again? Yeah, that's important to me as the chief. And so we're sitting down with my team with my professional standards team and going through each one of those. And we really welcome the constructive feedback at the police department about how and actually we didn't wait for some of those recommendations. We engage with Steve Connolly and with Mike Janacco on a regular basis. So we've had some of these conversations over the course of the year and already have started making course corrections long before this annual report came out. And some of the things are the feedback on being more involved even when it's captured on a body worn camera or now we have will be the first in Sonoma County with all of our vehicles having three different cameras on them. Even when it's captured that we're being more engaged in interviewing the officers. And that was direct feedback from Steve Connolly. And so we started doing that on more of these cases to receive that feedback. We've made changes to our use of force review. So we've always had where a sergeant goes out to the scene and a lieutenant does an independent investigation of all uses of force that we have occur here. Some of the feedback was having an outside or another officer interview the suspect that was involved in that case where the force was used. We've already incorporated that. So there's a host of these, but what we'll continue to do is have community engagement. And we're doing that when I'm going out in the community talking about that. That's something too that we can continue to do through our public safety subcommittee is be able to address some of these things and talk about the progress that I've made in reviewing those. But each one of these recommendations had some merit to them. And there's things that we're working to make some of the changes on and I'll continue to report out and be accountable to our community on those changes. So would it be potentially then the public safety subcommittee where they'd see recommendation one, we agreed and here's how we're implementing it. Recommendation two, we found that it kind of fits. So we're doing this, but this is what we're not interested in doing or don't think that it had merit. Because obviously the recommendations are non binding. Yeah, I believe that's the best venue for it. And that's what the public safety subcommittee was addressed to bring some of the issues on that. And so now the public safety subcommittee meets every three months. We're gonna meet on the third Wednesday of each month. And so the next one will be in September. So that could be something and we'll work with Chair Alvarez about putting that on the public safety subcommittee in the future and diving deeper into it and then giving us some time as we go through these recommendations and show the steps that we've made to make those improvements. Okay, yeah. So for instance, recommendation one, SRPD should expand the range of complaint cases for which it conducts the formal interviews. We heard a little bit about that. But so my expectation as a council member who's not on the public safety subcommittee is that at some point that committee looks at it and says, all right, recommendation one, what exactly does it mean to expand it? Why do, what do we do that we think fits this bill? What's the overall intent? How are we gonna meet it? So that that way the public can be a part of that discussion. I'm just looking for a commitment, I think, from the city that there will be that venue to discuss the recommendations. Yes, absolutely, and I think I'll work with Chair Averos to make that that's on the agenda and the agenda hasn't been set for September. So that's the perfect one for us to add and be able to show. But again, that we can talk about already made and that's one on recommendation one where progress has already been made. That we, well before this annual report of that came from the really constant feedback from Mr. Connolly about wanting to see improvements on that, so our team has already made adjustments. Great, I really appreciate it, Chief. Brian, Michael, Steven, thank you guys so much for everything that you're doing. I really appreciate the partnership. Council Member Stapp. And likewise, I really appreciated this report. The nuance with which you investigated these issues was very helpful, particularly the emphasis on a holistic approach in terms of interviews with complainants and the officers not relying over much on body-worn cameras or not relying entirely on body-worn camera footage. Very helpful. Just a small question in follow-up to Council Member Rodgers' question about trends. There was a note in the report about how we use the incident database to identify trends in the sense that we look for, say, use as a force within a specified time period. And it's implied that there's a few other ways that we use the database to identify trends like that. I was wondering if there was another example or two, either from you or from Chief Cregan. Thank you for the question. I would defer to the Chief, as far as some of the different ways that in terms of operational and supervisory review that could be looked at. Yeah, and that's an important one for us. And so that IA Pro database, we're entering everything in there from complaints, from uses of force, from vehicle pursuits, any administrative investigations that we put in there, discharges of a firearm, even not an animal or anything else. So we have all these little triggers in there. And so talking about the number of complaints that you receive, the uses of force that you receive, any type of document and counselings. So each one of those is important. And then what we have a process is, if it reaches that trigger, so saying that you have so many uses of force within a, and it goes on a 12 month rotating basis. So it's continuing the rotating 12 months that it triggers an alert to the supervisor, both the line level supervisor, the sergeant and the manager, the lieutenant, and they look at those. And sometimes you say like, all right, there's some of the causes for that. And sometimes it's an alert for us, okay, we need to take some proactive action. So that's where we're working. Steve Connelly and his crew have access to that as well, to be able to constantly be monitoring that. And then we take action and we have a formal process where we sit down with the officer, we sit down, we do a review of those. And if sometimes we're saying maybe there needs to be like an intervention with some mental health support, or maybe there'd be some training on de-escalation or are better with some of the verbal conversations on how to close out a deal. So we look at each one of those. And sometimes we say no, each one of those uses of force were absolutely appropriate. There was no interaction that needs to be taken. Thank you. As we talked at length about the gathering of data and the use of data, I'm glad that we're automating some of this or really finding ways to use the data most effectively on the back end. Thank you. I just have a couple of questions for you. You mentioned earlier around the need for a better communication. Do you find just when we're looking at that it is because our officers are really kind of strong a little bit thin throughout the city? So as far as response times needing to get to the next call, is there any way to tackle that type of data when you're looking at these or give that kind of view? Not that we want them to rush, but is that maybe perhaps part of why they're not able to conclude or do that last ending? So it's a great question, Vice Mayor. And I think that there are different factors that shape it and calls for service and the pressure to get on to the next thing is one of them. I would say from my personal opinion that could be certainly something that the department should look at, but I also think that there are some simpler, more direct solutions just in terms of customer service and diplomatic communication that would be helpful. Thank you. I appreciate that clarification. As far as getting back on how often we receive this report, could you tell me the resources that might be needed if we were to have, say, an update every three months brought to the Public Safety Committee so that they could have sort of that real-time look on, this is what's happened the last three months and how we're addressing it with the goals so that the community realizes that not only are you investigating in that real time and our officers are really responsive to making sure that they're doing that complete 360 constantly, but is there a way for the community to maybe hear about it so that they realize we're not just doing this once a year, this is a constant thing we're looking at. So thank you for the question. One of our goals absolutely is to kind of raise our profile in the city and with the community and we would absolutely be responsive to more regular appearances at the Public Safety Committee. Great. Thank you. I appreciate that clarification. I think that's an important factor when it comes to this specific kind of report that we really let our community know that this is something we're working on constantly. I'm just gonna make sure there's no more, pardon me, Council Member Alvarez. Looking for confirmation or clarification here. The question by Councilman Rogers was asked, if you look at situations without there being a formal complaint, did I hear that correctly? So we have the ability to look at, to do a subject matter audit. So whether it be body-worn camera compliance or how does the department respond to mental health calls and just kind of delve into those kinds of topics without necessarily requiring a complaint. Thank you. With no more questions from Council, we'll now facilitate public comment on item 14.1. Thank you, Vice Mayor. We are now taking public comment on item 14.1. If you are in the Council chamber and would like to comment but have not provided a speaker card or your name, please make your way to the podium. If you are participating via Zoom, please raise your hand or dial star nine. You will have three minutes and a countdown timer will alert at the end of that period. The first public comment will be from Barbara. Hi, Wayne. Oh, hello. Can you hear me? Okay. Sorry, it's my first time at the center of the City Council giving public comment. So, yay. First of all, I just really wanted to thank the City Council for putting this agreement in place with the IR. Reading the report was really eye-opening and I felt like it was very robust. And I also wanted to thank the Chief for the openness and the transparency that's been displayed with the access to the database and the real-time communication with the OIR as incidents come up. So, I just wanted to thank everyone that was a part of making that happen. I think, in my opinion, after I read this, the most important recommendation I saw on here was recommendation number one, which was, as we've been talking about, making the interview process formal for all complaints. And I heard what the Chief had to say about the process they have, but I also think we're trying to move forward in an area of increasing our performance and moving more towards best practices. And that's kind of what I got from reading the report and listening to the report. I also wanted to just commend the Chief for putting together that implicit bias training and involving the community, and particularly the corrective action that they took when they found that one community, underrepresented community, was not included and they circled back, so thank you for that. And I also want to just encourage you that it's not a one-time thing. And I think I heard that from the auditors as well. This is something where you need to go back every so often and bring that community of color to the table and make sure your training is as impactful as possible in the department. My next point is around the Chief Ambassador team. I was glad to see that it moved to a more independent appointment, but I would encourage that maybe the City Council consider making appointments from each of their districts similar to the way Iolaro does for their community advisory committee, as a way to even make sure it's more independent and more representative. And then the last thing I would say is this is an annual report and what would be really great as a member of the community is that the Sheriff, I mean Sheriff, God, sorry, I'm in unincorporated, so my brain is working crazily. The Chief formally respond to all of the recommendations. That's something that we've been trying to implement at the county with Iolaro and I think it just gives a more overall picture of the public of this annual report, what was recommended and how it's gonna be implemented. I can't believe I got it done in time. Thank you. Seeing no additional public comments from Council Chamber, I will turn it over to our Zoom host for Zoom public comments. Thank you. First up will be Carl followed by Keita and then Eric. Carl, you're being asked to unmute. Please go ahead when you're ready. Hello, and my name is Carl Tannenbaum and I am a member of the Committee for Law Enforcement Accountability now. I have a long and rich history in law enforcement and in law enforcement reform. Mayor Rogers, honorable council members and Chief Pregan, I wanna thank you for your participation today and your interest in this issue as well as with the members of OIR. First to address, council member Rogers asked earlier what Cleats was. It's actually Clets and the official term is California Law Enforcement Telecommunication System. That is a very restricted system that it's a crime for anybody to access that system without authorization, without purpose, even whether it's a law enforcement officer or not. So I think that speaks to the point of that particular issue sort of being glossed over when the allegation is of somebody committing a crime, somebody of authority. The other issue that I have is that this report, I think I'm a little bit confused because my understanding was that the report would address the pitfalls and problems within the complaint process to the Santa Rosa Police Department, but also would speak to some of those issues and complaints specifically where the problems were. And while some of that has been touched on, the majority of this report talks about the collegiality and how well everybody got along and how cooperative everybody was. And I think that's all well and good. It's really good to have a spirit of cooperation. I think the community should be involved. However, looking at the report, the one thing in that area of transparency and accountability and involvement, in addition to all of the meetings that you held, the public meetings when you were here for two days in August and now that you're here again talking to everybody and going to these different venues, I find that interesting that there is such an embracing of involvement, yet if I were to try to go and make or file a complaint against the Santa Rosa Police Department, just as it is with the rest of the law enforcement agencies throughout Sonoma County, the only way to do it is to go online and to print up a form and mail it in. And in a world where we live, that I can pick up my phone and do anything internationally, order something, make a report, the fact that there is not an online digital reporting system for filing complaints seems to fly in the face of everybody's desire to want to have community involvement. So I strongly urge you to look at that and also take a little bit more of a serious approach to the interviews, as was mentioned by Barbara earlier. You know, the lack of formal interviews, the officers have their bill of rights, their peace officer bill of rights. They're entitled to representation. They should be able to utilize that, but they should also be subject to an interview for every allegation of misconduct, no matter how large or how small the allegation is. Otherwise, this furthers the appearance that there's not full transparency and accountability. Thank you very much. Next up will be Eric, followed by Jim. Eric, please go ahead when you're ready. Yes, thank you. This is Eric Frazier with Truth and Tourism at gmail.com. Thank you for your time out here. And I do want to be a little bit critical with my remarks. I guess I'm getting a reputation for that. But it was interesting. Carol's remarks sort of hit me by surprise, but I was also sort of struck with sort of the lack of seriousness or maybe standards in how the oversight should work. And so just sort of like on the outside looking in, it seemed like if you're as oversight professionals put in this position of providing real solid guidance and oversight that it must conform with some sort of standards. And here, Carol was talking about the expectation of having a deeper dive in the complaint process to ferret out bottlenecks or obstacles. And it seems like that would just be sort of one-on-one type of stuff. Well, as you know from an email I sent earlier and as a researcher on short-term rentals, I feel that there's a huge problem there as well in that code enforcement officers are not subjected to the same type of overview process. And in my email to you, I highlighted some things that I'm sure you're already aware of about problems in code enforcement. And then also left you with perhaps some additional homework if you care to you with the links from public documents that show how unequal the enforcement has been against STRs and how due process has suffered and how people's rights have suffered. And so again, my call is to find some way that outside oversight can be provided to code enforcement. I can save my comments as to that applying to parking department officials as well. But any city employee with a policing power should be subjected to this triangulation of oversight. And I want my comments in the remaining minute, hopefully I don't use it all, but I really want to underscore though the benefits of triangulating oversight with, to the community. So not only are we looking for accountability employee by employee as well as course corrections within an organization, but we also want a palliative effect in the community and an issue like short term rentals for instance, not only fueling incredible injustices in that code enforcement and plan economic development, but the community suffers because of the misconceptions, because of the way that these things are being handled, because of the politicization of it. It seems like it's psychological warfare and there's many commonalities to what happens in the policing environment. And so again, I ask that this oversight be increased to include PED and code enforcement. Thank you. Jim, I'm allowing your permissions to talk. Mayor Rogers, members of the city council, my name's Jim Duffy. I'm an oversight practitioner residing in Runner Park. Thank you for taking my comments. Santa Rosa's current oversight model has outreach, but no community wide available community engagement function. Outreach and engagement are different and are often confused. Both of them are essential to a well functioning civilian oversight regimen. Santa Rosa could start moving towards having community engagement either by having the CCAT meetings be open to the public and taking public comment at those meetings, or at a minimum having CCAT host a couple open town hall style meetings a year to hear from the public. It's great that CCAT is no longer appointed by the chief. Santa Rosa can do even better by having community organizations do the appointments or using a lottery system or having city council members do the appointments. Having the city manager do it or the law enforcement agencies really not a great practice. And OIR can help you think through what is the best mechanism for the city for what you want to achieve. You just got to ask them to do it. They've got the skills for that. My other comment relates to the downtown enforcement team. It appears that it operates under different protocols from the rest of SRPD that govern the team's strategies and approaches. This is one of the footnotes in the audit report. I think that should be sunlit by the public safety subcommittee hosting presentations on these strategies and approaches as they appear to result in an increase in community member complaints. Thank you for taking my comments. Thank you. We have no additional public comment on Zoom and no prerecorded messages for this item. Thank you. Is there no more public comment in chambers? All right. We'll go ahead and this is not going to be a motion to approve this particular report but I want to bring it back to council for any final comments or questions. Council member Rogers. Thank you. I just wanted to follow up on one of the public comments that mentioned needing to fill out the form and mail it in. Is that true? I would certainly welcome the chief to chime in. That has not been my experience at all. In fact, we've seen complaints come in under a variety of mechanisms. Yeah, I can clarify that. That's absolutely not accurate. So we take complaints in all forms. So the most complaints has come in via a simple email. We have the email address to our professional standards team. People directly email me. They leave voicemails. You don't have to fill out the form to do that. We take them in any form. They can verbally come in and talk to a supervisor and they all get routed. So we regularly get them and we have also just the SRPD info at srcity.org. And that probably is our greatest month of people to send in and generally saying, I'm complaining. We have a process that immediately goes to our professional standards team. They memorialize it, they do a PDF of that email and put it into our IEPRO database and it's memorialized that way. All right, I really appreciate that. I figured that must not be the case. We have an app that does pretty much everything else in the city, so I couldn't imagine we wouldn't have some form of a tech response to it. I just want to, again, thank the team for all of the work that they're doing. Thank the chief for the processes that he's been putting in place. And also thank the department for really embracing it. I was not sure what I would get year one from a report coming back, especially after a couple of years of us not having the independent auditor. And I think that it highlights to council member O'Crepkey's point, I feel like we have a department that is heads above the rest and always room for improvement and always looking for that improvement. But I find in the report the willingness to get there and the willingness to hear from the community what they need and to hear from officers about what's working and what's not. So I want to thank everyone. Mayor Rogers. Thank you. I just wanted to thank the team one for coming and thank the chief for his willingness in the department to take in their input to only make our department better so we can better serve our community. And I would also like to thank my fellow council members because I really heard some accountability on our part about things that maybe we can do to support the department to help them to serve our community better. So that really stuck out to me too. So thank you. Yeah, I just want to say thank you so much for the thorough report and for the feedback. And I also want to really commend SRPD for their commitment to continuous improvement. And that's I think what this really is about to be able to get something in real time, give feedback and then show the commitment from our officers that they're willing to implement it and do better for our community. So I think that's great. And I look forward to working together in the future for the betterment of our community. So thank you so much for today's report. We're going to just take a quick five minute break so that we can set up for the next item because it takes a moment to do that and give us just a couple of minutes and then we'll take item 15.1. Thank you. Thank you. I'm going to go ahead and call council back to order. Can everybody hear me? Okay. We're going to go ahead and stick true to our five minute break and call council back to order. Madam city clerk, will you please call roll? Thank you. Council member step. Here. Council member Chris Rogers. Here. Council member O'Crepkey. Council member Fleming. Here. Council member Alvarez. Present. Vice mayor McDonald. Here. Mayor Rogers. Present. Let the record show that all council members are present. Thank you. I know everybody's excited that we're moving along so quickly in our agenda. So we're going to go ahead and get established back and bring back to the meeting. Thank you so much. We're moving on to item 15.1. Item 15.1 is a public hearing, amendment to chapter six dash 66 of the Santa Rosa city code, rent control mobile homes to set cumulative limit on rent increases for combined calendar years 2023 and 2024. Thank you. And just before we start our presentation, I do want to announce that the next two items in public hearings will take two minute public comments tonight. We have to adopt our budget by nine o'clock tonight or else we won't be able to. So we're going to hold true on public comments for two minutes. So we're going to start with an overview of mobile home parks in Santa Rosa. Some of this will be a refresher from the item that we heard in November of 2022. On the slide up right now is a map of the city of Santa Rosa. The mobile home parks shown in blue are subject to the mobile home rent control ordinance. And those parks that are shown in green, which can be seen on the left hand, the mid left hand section of the map are not subject to rent control. Are not subject to rent control primarily because the spaces are owned by the mobile home park, the mobile home owners. So they own the space and the improvements. So a quick summary of the 16 mobile home parks and this information is slightly different than what we saw in November because there have been some changes. We do an assessment of all the spaces in February of each year. And that's where the parks identify how many spaces are currently subject to rent control items that could exclude them from rent control. Could be if it's not the primary residence of that particular individual. If the unit, the actual mobile home is owned by the park. So the space and the mobile home are owned by the park that would exclude it as well. We also had one park switch from senior to all age. So there are currently 11 senior designated parks and five all age parks. So as you can see, there are 2100 roughly spaces in the city of Santa Rosa and about 1900 of them are subject to rent control. So for a quick overview of the ordinance, the city of Santa Rosa first adopted the mobile home rent control ordinance in 1993. The purpose was to provide reasonable rent increases on an annual basis to protect the residents while allowing the park owners to receive a fair rate of return. This is the legal test that is still in place but cities and counties have significant discretion. There are over a hundred jurisdictions in California that have rent control ordinances. Santa Rosa is one of those. So back in 1993, the city also established a park policy board to administer and enforce the ordinance. This board was in place until about 2001. It had five members that were appointed by council and then two non-voting advisory members that represented the residents and then the park owners. The ordinance was amended many times between 1995 and 2004. As you can see, it's 13. The policy board was eliminated and they created a process for pass through. So that's where parks can pass some of the capital improvement costs onto the residents and that is reviewed by the city and also introduced fair rate of return hearings. And these include the incorporation of an independent auditor to review the information and assist the city and the residents in reaching an agreement. These hearings are paid for by the space fee that is collected for each space within each park. So part of the February assessment that I referenced is to identify how many spaces within the Moa Home Parks are subject to the fee. It's currently $4.78 per space per month and the park can pass half of that fee onto the resident. So to touch on the history of allowable increases within our jurisdiction, the ordinance was originally adopted with 100% of CPI. And then as you can see, there were adjustments made over time to lower the maximum allowed rent increase and then adjust the minimum. So when the ordinance was first adopted, the maximum annual rate increase was 8%. Minimum was 4%. That was then adjusted down to 7% with a minimum of three. 2004 was the most longstanding adjustment and that's when we set the maximum rent increase of 6% and no minimum. So between 2004 and 2022, the rent was adjusted by CPI each year. And as you will remember in November of 2022, we had a public hearing where council approved a reduction in the annual allowed rent increase to 70% of CPI with a maximum of 4%. At that time at the beginning of 2023, the CPI was 5.7%. And so when you applied the 70%, it was 3.99. So right under the 4% cap that council said. At the time of the November hearing, the city's rent control ordinance was in line with many throughout Sonoma County. The two outliers at that time were the town of Sonoma and the city of Warner Park. Since then, Windsor has made adjustments to their ordinance. And most recently, Petaluma had a public, sorry, a study session to review their ordinance and they will be proceeding in the near future with a public hearing item to adjust their ordinance. And it is appearing as though they're going to model theirs similar to ours. So I think they were looking at 70% with a 4% cap, but that will be subject to their public hearing. So to summarize the action that council took in November of 2022 with the second reading in December, there was a reduction in the allowed rent increase and the rent can be increased once per 12 months per space from 100% of CPI with a 6% cap to 70% of CPI with a 4% cap. That ordinance became effective in January of 2023, January 6th to be specific. The issue that we are looking to result tonight is that parks that had rent increases on January 1st were able to apply the 5.7%. So the residents of parks that had a January 1 rent increase did not receive the benefit of the 3.99% rent increase. Council's ordinance amendment also allowed parks to adjust the in-place transfer fee. So when a space unit that is on a space that is subject to rent control sells to a new owner, the park can increase the rent 10%. We have developed an administrative process to review the rents that were in place and then make sure that that rent is not exceeding 10%. Tonight before you is a proposal for a further amendment of the ordinance. What we are looking to do is limit the cumulative rent increases for calendar years 23 and 24. So essentially it is the lesser of 8%. So if a park increased the rent by 5.7% in January of 2023, the rent that they can apply in 2024 cannot exceed 8% for those two years. We are not looking to adjust the 2023 rents. There will be no rent reduction in 2023. This strictly applies to the cumulative rent increase that would go into effect in 2024. Believe on the next slide, we have an example of how that math would work out. Using $700 as an estimated rent, you can see that if there was a 5.7% rent increase, it went up $39.90. And then in the upcoming year when we are applying, and this is an estimate based on current CPI trends, if CPI is trending around 4.2%, applying 70% to that would be a 2.94% increase. So without any adjustments to the cumulative rent that could be charged in 2024, the estimated rent for this particular space would be $761.65. With the benefit of the cumulative rent increase, you can see on the right hand of the slide, we'd have a maximum of 4% for 2022. And then you could have the 2.94 for 2024. So you would have $749.40. So that is a summary of the proposal that is in front of you tonight. Staff from the Housing and Community Services Department is recommending that council introduce an amendment to the ordinance to limit the cumulative rent increases for mobile home spaces for calendar years 2023 and 2024 to the lesser of 4% increase for 2023 plus the allowed increase for 2024 or 8%, whichever is less. That concludes the presentation and I'd be happy to answer any questions. Thank you. Looking to council, council member Rogers. Thank you so much. If you could go back to slide 11, please. So on the example on the left, I might need a clarification. Maybe I'm looking at it wrong. I thought that the proposal was to cap over the two year period and an 8% increase. Maybe I'm reading it wrong, but the 5.7 plus the 2.94 exceeds 8%. Yes, so that example, I'm sorry, I misspoke when I explained it as well. That would be if adjustments weren't made, that would be what residents in the parks that received a 5.7% adjustment in 2023 would have to pay. So you can see it's 5.7 that went into effect in January of 2023. And then using the hypothetical 4.2 with the 70% cap, it would go up at 2.94%. Perfect. So just kind of further, obviously what we're here discussing, trying to figure out is how do we make things equitable and how do we make up for the parks that were left unprotected that had the increase, the 5.7% increase. And with these amendments from the council, it won't be an immediate, but by the end of year two, everybody will be at the same, correct? The intention is to establish parity, correct. Right, so if somebody jumped ahead with the 5.7 in year one, by the end of year two, they're limited in year two, what they can raise relative to other people is even more restrictive than what the council did. So it'll all end up theoretically being the same at the end. Correct, so if you had a 5.7% increase, it would essentially be up to 8% minus 5.7, regardless of what the CPI is, the CPI adjustment allowed for 2024. Perfect, I appreciate that. And I'll just say before we go to public comment, I find it a little bit infuriating that we even have to be here. I know most of the mobile home park owners that we worked with operated in good faith, not all did. And I'm gonna be very supportive today of fixing it to make sure that those who tried to take advantage of the system and take advantage of our seniors who are living in mobile home parks are put back in their place, which is we're protecting our constituents. Thank you. Are there any more questions from council? Okay, seeing none, I'm gonna go ahead and open up the public hearing and then we'll facilitate public comment so the public hearing will begin now. Thank you, we are now taking public comment on 15.1. If you are in the chamber, we'd like to comment but have not yet provided a speaker card or your name, please make your way to the podium. If you are participating via Zoom, please raise your hand or dial star nine. You will have two minutes and a countdown timer will alert at the end of that period. Please note that you can approach the podiums on either the west side or the east side of the council chamber and we will call your names out. The first public comment will be from Tom, followed by Gary. My name's Tom LaPenna. I'm the president of the Santa Rosa Manufactured Homeowners Association. I'm sorry, disappointed we came out a little late. Seems like deja vu from the November meeting but I know it wasn't on purpose. Agendas are a tough thing to schedule. First thing I wanna say is to our city manager, there's a song that was sung by Tina Turner called Simply the Best, Better Than All the Rest. That's you, my friend. Now, I thank you for what you're doing. I think, you know, we presented a different solution but whatever gets my people whole, I'm behind. As Eddie would say, you gotta do the right thing. Right, Eddie? Now, I'm gonna need you to do more, really. And a lot of it happens in Councilman Alvarez's district. If you've read the papers about what's going on in Carriage Court and look up harmony communities, you'll read horror stories. Please direct the city attorney's office to put in overlay zoning for senior housing on every senior 55 plus park in the city. We need that protection, please. The other thing you're gonna hear more about today is the in-place transfer, 10%. You know what in-place transfer is? It's another word for rent increase and seniors can't hack it. We can't do a 10% every time somebody sells a unit. Look at Petaluma's new ordinance. Thank you. The next public comment will be from Gary, followed by Dwayne. One thing that concerns me is the rent control mediation fund money that we were expected to pay four times a year. And I don't know how much money's in that fund now. Megan, do you know how much money's in that fund? It's over 800,000. I wish it to be frozen until a time when that money has a use. It's a nuisance and you're allowing it to be, to continue for us to be charged that money quarterly and the owners. And with really no plan and no outcome and it's not being used. Thank you. Thank you. The next public comment will be from Dwayne, followed by Roger. I don't see Dwayne in the council chamber. Roger. Down here. Thank you. Please go ahead, sir. Thank you. Roger McConnell, I do live in the country. I hope the council reads and understands what this proposal is. I've read it several times. I still don't know where this 8% comes from. I mean, on my rent, that'll be an extra $67. I don't know. It just run around in circles. It took us six months from the time the mistake was made to get to here. It doesn't make any sense, people. It just doesn't make sense. I hope you're more aware of when you were back in November when they presented that 10% in place transfer fee. It's a huge increase. There's no cap on it. The people we were trying to help the most was those on Social Security only, so they could maintain it. They can't even qualify to get in the parks. At $800 a month, you gotta have three times the income. Social Security is not there. Most of these people on Social Security are somewhere between $18 and $2,100. We forced them out of the parks. This wasn't what we were trying to do. We were trying to save it for these people, and that's not what happens at all. We asked staff, way back when we negotiated with the park owners or whatever they called that silly fiasco, we need our mobile home commission back in process. It was discontinued in 2008 or nine by Mayor Susan Goren. We all know what the economy was in 2008, nine and 10. We need that back. We need a place for these people to come and express their anger at some of the way they're treated in those parks. Thank you. Thank you. The next public comment will be from Joanne, followed by Barbara Gee. Joanne, are you approaching the podium? Good afternoon. My name is Joanne Jones, and I am the vice president of the Santa Rosa Manufactured Homeowners Association. And I would first like to say thank you for giving us a bathroom break. We definitely needed that. Also, I would like to thank the city council, Mayor Natalie Rogers, city manager, Mayor Keisha Smith, housing and community development manager, director, Megan Basinger, for your ongoing support and work for us. We've come a long way with an ordinance revision in the 11 parks. I was left out of that for this year as well as the other four parks, but we are still grateful that we have the ordinance revision. And I didn't, yeah, I'm like Roger, I didn't understand completely the legal language of what was read to us. I know that what we proposed was when figuring out our increase for 2024, it would only be increased as if 2023 rent had increased to 3.99% from 2022. So if we get anywhere close to that, I'll be happy. So with that said, we just implore you to do it in your power to correct the rent disparity before the CPI comes out for next year. Manufactured homes have been the last means to affordable housing. However, if space rents continue to surge and sometimes they double, that will no longer be the case. Seniors will be displaced and left without a home and we were the, I mean, the last place to go. There is no place other than the senior manufactured home parks. Thank you. Thank you. The next public comment will be from Barbara G, followed by Linda. My name is Barbara Goodman and I'm a new resident of a mobile home park that got left out. Last year when we were here until nine o'clock in the evening, I don't think that'll happen again today, but we were last again on the agenda. So maybe hopefully there's not a next time. But anyways, last year, I also am one of the people that did not, one of the parks, the country park that did not get included. I'm going to ask you today to just do what is right and what is fair. For some reason, whether it's the date or I don't know what the loophole was, but someone was going to fix it and they didn't. 11 parks got the discount to 3.99%, five parks did not. Those five parks already paid more than the others. There's no reason for the next two years to be able to have to pay more. We already have a loan plus rent and the rent wouldn't be so bad if something happened for it, but it's just really money out of our pockets. There isn't a lot of integrity, how to use it. There isn't a follow through and I'm going to ask you to follow through to finish what was started last year and to make it right for the rest of us. 11 parks got it, five parks did not include the five parks with a 3.99%. That's all. We already paid extra. It's simple. I don't know where this other formula came out of or why it did, but it's not right. Thank you. Oh. Thank you. And I didn't mention the 10%. I thought that was part. Here's a park that did have new people come in and they had to pay 10% extra. Why? I thought this was all one piece, but it's not. The next public comment will be from Linda followed by Diane and then Barbara Sue. Hello, my name is Barbara Sue Wilson. I live at the country. I've been before you folks a few times and I've told you all my sad stories and I don't plan to do that again. I'm here for not just myself, but these other five parks. This rent increase has just really hurt us really bad and we need to have it fixed and we need to have it fixed now. We hope that you will pass this new ordinance and get us back down to where the other parks are. This is like Barbara said, it is not fair. And we have had seven months now. You might as well call July because it's too late now to do anything. So we've had seven months of this horrible rent increase. I saw that chart. My rent went up $44. That really hurt bad. And I'm sure others in here probably even had more. It's just according to how long you lived in the park. So I ask you please tonight give us seniors some relief. Take this awful increase away. I ask you please, please do this. I vote for it tonight. Thank you. Thank you. The next public comment will be from Bonnie, followed by Diane. Hi, my name is Bonnie Petty. I live in one of the senior mobile home parks in Rankin Valley. So I am one of the lucky people. I got the rent, I qualify under the program. I'm here in support of my fellow brothers and sisters who are gonna be experiencing severe rent increases. And I'm also against the 10% transfer fee. But I'd like to make my comments. I've given each of you a copy of an article that I got from Forbes Business Magazine. And the article says, the title is, five reasons why mobile home park investing is recession and inflation resistant. Concerns of an upcoming recession sparked a renewed interest in commercial real estate investing as a viable alternative to uncertainties of the stock market and other traditional investment vehicles. However, all real estate investments are not created equal. In fact, mobile home parks have historically delivered outsized returns, even in the worst of economic times. Here are five reasons why investing in mobile home parks is recession and inflation resistant. Number one, mobile home parks generally perform well in both strong and weak economic environments. Between 2004 and 2018, operating income from mobile home parks rose by 87%. This income never declined even during the great recession of 2008. Item number two, the demand for affordable housing is unprecedented. I don't think I have to talk about that any further. Mobile home park residents tend to stay put longer. Item number three, and reason number four, mobile home parks can operate with higher profit margins. As rent, because mobile home parks typically operate on high margins, expense ratios around 30 to 40%, there is more room to recover in the event of an economic downturn. Just saying. Thank you, Bonnie. The next public comment will be from Diane, followed by Margaret. Hi, my name is Diane Monroe, and I live in Sequoia Gardens Mobile Home Park. Oops, did I jump the, okay. My name's still Diane Monroe, and I live in Sequoia Gardens Mobile Home Park. Thank you for hearing me this evening. I want to express appreciation for the amendment that's being made. It's one way to try to redress the problem of the mobile homes that got left out. What I want to speak with is my concern about carriage court and it changing itself to all ages as perhaps a way to get around the rent increases. There was an April 10th article in the Press Democrat in which the new manager from Harmony Communities, the new owner, the new regional manager, is quoted as saying, this ordinance has prevented carriage court from reasonably earning a fair return, and further states that if they can't earn more money, they'll just shut the whole part down. That is unconscionable. Again, April 10th Press Democrat article. So what is this fair return? First, some facts. Older adults are the fastest growing age group of homeless population, and the main reason for this is the high cost of rent and the lack of affordable housing. This from justiceinaging.org. According to a New York Times heavily researched article in what was it, October of 2020, the number of elderly homeless is projected to triple by 2030. Older people are getting pushed out into the streets due to the high cost of living, and mobile homes is one of the last resorts. Okay. Second, mobile home parks are very profitable for investors. Thanks for the previous speaker for bringing that article. A quick, oops, sorry. Thank you very much for hearing my concerns. Bye. Thank you. The next public comment will be from Margaret, and I have been told we also have two additional public commenters prepared to speak as well. Margaret's a Madio housing policy attorney for Legal Aid of Sonoma County. First I wanna thank you for your steadfast support of Legal Aid. It allows us to support the many seniors sitting here and beyond. We have been hearing from a lot of residents experiencing retaliatory conduct by park owners since you all passed the necessary reduction last year. There is a severe power imbalance between park owners and residents that only you really have the ability to correct. So we wanna thank you for your consideration tonight of solutions for correcting that imbalance. I know it's been a challenge making this equitable for the parks that were left out. So again, thank you for trying to make this right. I do agree that it is a little bit confusing, but if the math works out that we would support the amendment as drafted. We support the many seniors who've shown up and shown courage time and time again in this room at late hours during dinner time, over and over again to speak up in the face of a power imbalance. And I just wanna make sure you know that just last night Petaluma passed their mobile home ordinance with urgency effective immediately, capping rent at 4% or 70% of the CPI change, whichever is less. They're returning in July to make further substantive amendments, making the protections even stronger for Petaluma residents. And in doing so, there's no plan to invade their vacancy control. There's no plan to pass an in place transfer fee. And we would encourage you to consider that it's never too late to return to improve a law that's aimed at protecting precariously housed and vulnerable seniors. Thank you so much. The next public commenter, please come to the podium to provide comment. And please identify yourself for the public record if you choose to do so. When I reside at the Orchard hometown America in Santa Rosa. And I just wanna kind of give you a little more education about the cost, like 20 years ago, mobile homes were 80 to $130,000. At where I live, we had lost, I think, 83 homes due to the fire in 2017. And some of the new homes, of course, cost of materials has gone up sky high. But we have new homes in our park that are in the range of $380 to $469. And that's not your old grandma's mobile home anymore. It's their pricing way up high because of the cost of living and materials. And so that 10% when someone moves out, it's kind of a joke. It's supposed to help increase the rent because we're trying to reduce our rents. But the parks are taking advantage of people who've, we've paid our dues, we've worked our lives, we've gotten where we are, not by accident. But I just wanted to give you a little information about the cost of mobile park homes these days. So thank you so much. Thank you, can I see? Hi, I'm Carol Reinke from the Orchard, the mobile home park. And I just have two things to say. One is that 100% or the 10% in place transfer is going to really cause a problem. The new homes are going for 1,000 rent, 980 rent, and you increase it when they sell it by 10%. It's gonna put those people, they won't be able to sell their homes. The other thing is, I think it's really unfair that you make us wait till the end of your council meeting to have this when all these people are senior citizens and they need to get home. And penalizing us with two minutes for comments is unfair. Thank you. Thank you. I wanna confirm Dwayne has not entered council chamber before turning it over to the Zoom host. Thank you. I see two hands being raised via Zoom. I will let Rhonda facilitate public comments via Zoom. Thank you. We'll start with Salo and up next will be Keita. And I apologize if I've mispronounced the names. Salo, I'm asking you to unmute. Please go ahead when you're ready. Thank you, council members. My name is Salo Longdano and I'm with WMA, the Western Manufactured Housing Communities Association. Despite the existence of a strict rent control ordinance, owners and managers of mobile home communities in Santa Rosa have worked diligently for 30 years to find ways to successfully maintain their communities. Despite the city's rent control ordinance, severely limiting their ability to do so, they have been able to maintain a high quality standard of living that presidents appreciate and expect. Unfortunately, the city of Santa Rosa has recently jeopardized a sensitive balance with several measures to further limit an owner's ability to maintain their community. Going as far as restricting their ability to even keep up with the rate of inflation. We understand the uncertainty of current economic conditions and we attempted to negotiate with the city in good faith, offering concessions and rental assistance programs for those in need, unfortunately to no avail. We're here again today as the city looks to further restrict and control local rents, even beyond the actions it has recently taken. Instead of further entrenching an adversarial relationship between the local business owners and the city council, we respectfully urge the city of Santa Rosa to take a step back so we can work together for the benefit of our local community. Thank you for your time. Thank you. Up next is Keda, followed by Trey. Keda, I've asked you to unmute, please go ahead. Hi, my name is Keda Hodgson and I live in the country. I do want to comment that I moved here from West Hollywood and I noticed that it's just a common thing for city council agendas to be hours and hours and hours long. We are not the last item on your agenda and I can see that. So I want to endorse two things. One is that you demand that there be a freeze on this insane fund that we are paying into for litigation fund or I don't know what the fund is, but anyway, we keep paying into it. It keeps building up. I hope it's getting interest and I don't know who's getting the interest, but that needs to stop until somebody can figure out what the fund is about and how to best use it. The second thing is the transfer fee is just insane. I mean, if it was a flat fee to cover for paperwork and filing and all that kind of stuff, that would be understandable, but a 10% transfer fee is just insane, especially for housing that is predominantly used by seniors. So I thank you very much for your time. I wish I could thank you for the service, but it's just really completely unconscionable. It's really biased that five of us, five of the park, excuse me, were not included in the original ordinance. I don't know why, I don't know how. It just, the fact that there was no flexibility on that just really unfair. So thank you for your time. Thank you, Trey. I'm asking you to unmute. Please go ahead when you're ready. Thank you. Can you hear me now? Yes, go ahead. All right. Thank you, members of council and mayor. My name is Trey Pinner. I wasn't originally planning to speak tonight, but after I heard the original comment from the council about that this was a mistake that were there and sort of how unconscionable it was, I felt the need to speak up. Unfortunately, as you know, there was a timing issue with regards to this ordinance and it fell with requirements to the 30 day notice which brought us to January 6th. But I feel the unfairness was the fact that all parks are required to give a 90 day notice to their residents per California law and all the parks had given a 90 day notice and that was considerably ignored by the council when doing so. So the reality is many of these ordinance or these increases should have been allowed through till March, but I understand that you're at this point now trying to, as you quote rectify or think it's unfair that we were at this point, but again, as I mentioned, I think it was unfair how it was handled in the first place. Second, as I pointed out last time this matter came before you, I need to keep reminding that the preamble of the rent control ordinance for the city of Santa Rosa has a specific statement that says it is not the intention of the ordinance to protect affordable housing. That is not the legal ability for this ordinance to do so. And that's the comment comes up about affordability and that's not the intention of this ordinance. It's only to deal with the fact that inability to move a mobile home from one park to the other causes a need for creating some ability to regulate rents. And lastly, I would also mention with regards of affordability, people keep continuing saying it's unaffordable, but I don't know if there's ever been a suggestion that the residents of the park who sell their home consider a restriction on the price that they can sell their home, as opposed to always the park owners having a restriction on their rents. Thank you very much. Thank you. We have no additional public comment on Zoom and no pre, quote, we have one additional comment. Dean, you're being asked to unmute. Go ahead when you're ready. Unmute, you can hear me now. Yes, we can hear you. My name is Dean Moser. My name is Dean Moser, I represent Rencon Valley and I would like to speak to- Mr. Moser, can you please speak closer into your microphone? We cannot hear you here in council chamber. Okay, can you hear me now? No, sir. Can you hear me now? Slightly better. Okay, well, I'm basically yelling, but the 10% increase on turnover is something that a new resident can afford to look at to decide whether or not they would like to live in the facility. And you heard earlier that the prices in one of the parks went from 80,000 to 380,000 and that has a lot to do with the fact that they have low, low rents. So the lower the rents, the higher the sale price on the home. So it's a little selfish of the residents to say that the 10% increase is too much. So that's kind of my comment at this point in time and I appreciate the time. Thank you very much. Do we have any additional colors on Zoom who wish to speak on this item? Seeing none, and we have no prerecorded messages. Thank you, I'm just gonna check once more to make sure there's no more public comment in chambers. All right, we'll go ahead and close public hearing and I'll bring it back to council for final thoughts and direction. Okay, Megan, could you do me a favor just so that I'm clear on the math? If it was an 8% cap over the next two years meaning 4% and 4% and one of the parks was charged 5.7% in this year, would that mean that next year they'd only be able to be charged 2.3% under this ordinance? That is correct. So the intention is to equalize the rate increases in 23 and 24. So as noted in 2023 under the amended ordinance the allowed rate increase was 3.99%. So we rounded up by 100% to 4% and then using that as the maximum cap. I just wanna make sure for the public that there is an understanding because it was confusing to me as well when I read the presentation that it was shoring up those that did get charged extra this year and we understand I think from a council's perspective that this was not equitable, that it was something that was missed on our part as far as five of the parks not getting to get that cap in and so this is our way to fix this issue that has happened but in the meantime it doesn't mean that it doesn't hurt our community members who had a bigger bump this year but hopefully by next year you'll see that your bump will be lower than what everyone else can get to shore it up. So I wanna apologize for not catching that as it came forward to council. We were not aware that that was something that was going to be missed. So from my perspective this is a good fix. I know it's not perfect but I don't want the perfect to get in the way of the good and that's that we can fix it within the next two years. So with that, if there's no more, oh council member Rogers, go ahead. I appreciate that vice mayor. I don't wanna, I'm not trying to quabble with my colleague but I wanna make it really clear that this didn't happen because the city council missed something. We couldn't make the findings for an urgency ordinance that night. This happened because the park owner had an increase ready to go and sent out notices the next morning to make it really clear to people that they were not going to abide by the decision that was made. Some did, some parts did, some park owners did not. And that's my frustration as a council member that we find ourselves here tonight trying to find equity that we could have not needed to do if all of the mobile home park owners had actually operated in good faith with the city. So I'm not trying to quabble. We should have figured out- That sounds a little like a quabble. I just wanna make it clear. This council is trying to protect people and we're making up for a couple of park owners who are bad operators. So thank you. Thank you council member Rogers and I appreciate the quabble with you. May I go to Mayor Rogers and then I'll go to council member Fleming. Thank you. So I just wanted to ask that we make it very clear what the 8% is and maybe have a calculator or something so that there are no mistakes next year or at the end of this year when park owners and residents try to find out what is indeed within our ordinance. I think that is going to be the difficult part because I did some math and I'm pretty good at math and I don't understand anything that we put on there. So I think we need to make it a little bit easier for people to put in their specific rent amounts and increase from this year to see what they can get increased for next year. Thank you. Council member Fleming. Thank you. Thank you to staff, Ms. Bassenger, city manager, Mr. Dunstan for bringing this forward as well as the patients on the part of the folks who were discriminated upon during this unfair imposition of this really high rate increase. I know that with inflation and all it's just too much. So we did know that night and I am really sorry that we couldn't get it fixed before now but you will see a lower rent increase than your peers who did get the lower increase and you all will be even pretty soon. Couple of points I wanted to make. One is many of you brought up the 10% in place transfer. I want to challenge you to come to our goal setting and to press us to get that changed. I for one would be very interested in looking at that. Another thing, there's one other additional point that's alluding me at the time but there are a couple more pieces of this that I think we should continue to work on and meet to adjust because this is certainly not a perfect policy, it's a good policy but it's not done so let's keep going. Council Member Alvarez. Tom, you're a champion brother. I hope that when I'm looking for a mobile home for me that there's one of you amongst my age group amongst my generation. Thank you for what you do brother. I appreciate all the applause tonight. I really do, it makes it much more exciting to be up here tonight with that. Megan, I do have one more question that was brought up around the burn rate of the money that we charge to mobile home, the money that they pay in where part of it is by the mobile home, park owners and some of it's by those that are in each of the slots. I'm probably not saying this well. The applause took me off guard, I apologize. So I think it's $4.70 was the amount. Could you give me an idea of where we're at on that burn rate for this year and where we would be if we were able to maybe put a pause on that in the next year as we go into budget discussions and just for the record we do have another big item after you tonight so you weren't the last. So I just wanna make sure everyone in the audience knows we still have another item that we're discussing but Megan could you give me a little bit more on that? Yes, so that fee is as I noted collected based on the spaces that are subject to rent control. So 50% in general is paid by the residents, 50% by the parks. The fund balance is approximately $900,000 currently and there are a couple reasons for that. One, we've had staffing vacancies over the past few years and this is funds that are used for staff to administer the ordinance. So the absence of staff has eliminated our ability to expend the funds. We also need to maintain a fund balance in the event we need mediation services and those can have varying rates and so there needs to be a resource available to pay for that expense. With the adoption of the new ordinance in 2022 with the implementation in the beginning of this year we've had an increase in staffing costs associated with administering the ordinance. As I mentioned we verified the in place transfers so there's a lot more staff work that is done to administer the ordinance and I anticipate that continuing with the rents in 2024. So we are expending a little over 100,000 this current fiscal year and unfortunately at the top of my head I can't tell you the budget for 2324 for mobile home rent control but it is increasing because of the additional staff costs associated with ordinance administration. I believe it's in the budget document tonight and I wanna say that it was closer to $300,000 if my memory serves but you can't count on that right now but I just wanna make sure that that's something we're looking at and I know that as we discuss the budget and our next item that could be potentially something we look at but I appreciate the clarification on that. So with that I'll go ahead and have Council Member Ocrubke. Madam Vice Mayor looks like the mayor's hand up. I apologize. Sorry. One more time I know I have my hurt. Oh, I'm so sorry Mayor Rogers please go ahead. Okay. I was just gonna say I really honestly wanna thank staff. This came up and it was very difficult to even look at and know what we were gonna do and how we were gonna do it and although I don't completely understand it I think this is very creative. A very creative way to go about doing this and I just hope that it works out and I agree with Council Member Fleming that we're not done, that we do have a lot more to do and I think that you have commitment from many members on the council if not all the members on the council to continue to look at this and other things that are going on within the city to make them right. So thank you. Okay, now we'll get ready to have our motion on the floor. Council Member O'Crapke. I'll take that one. Council Member Stapp, I'm so sorry. I'll make a motion to approve this ordinance of the council of the city of Santa Rosa. I'm ending title six of the Santa Rosa city code chapter six dash six six rent control. Mobile homes to set a cumulative limit on rent increases for combined for the combined calendar years 2023 and 2024. Second. It's been moved and seconded. Is there any more discussion? Madam Vice Mayor, may I also just clarify that the motion was to introduce the ordinance and it'll be brought back for final adoption at our next meeting. Thank you. And I also heard way for the reading of the text. Thanks to both of you. Thank you. So we need, we're going for roll call vote now though. Thank you. Madam City Clerk. Thank you. Council Member Stapp. I am. Council Member Rogers. I. Council Member O'Crapke. I. Council Member Fleming. I. Council Member Alvarez. I. Vice Mayor McDonald. I. Mayor Rogers. I. Let the record show that passes unanimously. Council will be taking a 30 minute break and then we will come back for our budget adoption and public hearing. Thank you everyone for your patience. We're going to go ahead and get started on item 15.2, but I'm going to have Madam City Clerk facilitate a roll call though. Thank you. Council Member Stapp. Here. Council Member Rogers. Here. Council Member O'Crapke. Here. Council Member Fleming. Here. Council Member Alvarez. Present. Vice Mayor McDonald. Here. Mayor Rogers. Present. Let the record show all council members are present. Item 15.2 is a public hearing. Public hearing on adoption of the City of Santa Rosa fiscal year 2023-2024 operations and maintenance budget and capital improvement budget. Thank you. Thank you, Mayor Rogers. Vice Mayor McDonald and members of the council. I wanted to take a couple minutes, one minute before we start our presentation to acknowledge the team that has put this budget together. It's a large and complex budget with a lot of challenges. Veronica and her team in budget, Mike and Tricia and Jose and now Andrew worked very hard on this and they worked with the rest of the city team throughout every department. We had department heads and budget liaisons and ASOs come together to work on this. The budget has turned into a, it's not quite a full year process, but it's getting close and it does take a lot of effort to get it from the very beginnings to the finish line where we are today. I think it would also be remiss of me to not mention the fact that through our review process we have a very interested and an attentive city manager staff of the city manager and the two ACMs that help us guide this budget through. So I just wanted to recognize that it doesn't get set often and with the work that's there I thought that I would take this time now. That was almost a little bit more than a minute. So with that I will kick it over to Veronica who will walk us through the presentation. Are you keeping the clapping going? Okay, just every time you finish we're gonna clap. Council Member Fleming prefers jazz hands. Thank you, Allen. Good evening, Mayor, Council Members, Vice Mayor. We are back here today for the budget adoption public hearing. And just to give you a quick recap of what we've been through this last budget season you saw us on January 10th where we had a public hearing on budget priorities. March 9th and 10th council have their goal setting sessions when we attended and took into consideration council goals in this annual budget. In late March, the city manager sat down with each department and did a detailed review of each department's budget requests and additional needs requests. And then you saw us for two days on May 9th and 10th and we did a deep dive of all department budgets and the overall city-wide budget. And now we're back here today for the final step to adopt our annual budget for next fiscal year. So when we saw you back in May we have made a few changes to the budget and I'm gonna go over the details with you now and point them out in the coming slides. Not in the general fund. So outside of the general fund in the housing authority both revenues and expenditures have been increased by about $106,000. And this is just due to updated revenue estimates from the housing department of housing and urban development allocations. We've also appropriated an additional $1.6 million in the ARPA fund. This is due to the fact that the remaining reserves in the ARPA fund were set aside for homeless services not for this upcoming fiscal year but the fiscal year beyond that. So fiscal year 24-25. And we were realizing it's most prudent to appropriate everything up front. We don't wanna have reserves sitting in that fund that are not spoken for, that are not assigned. So we have gone ahead and appropriated them against the homeless services contracts. They won't all be expended in the coming fiscal year 23-24. Some will be expended in 24-25 but that is an increase in appropriations that you'll see in this fiscal year. And then continuing on in the water department we presented to you three staffing changes back in May that the department decided to not go ahead with. They've been working with our human resources department and will continue to find the right staffing fit for some of these items. Utility system supervisor was proposed to be added. Instead they'll be adding a water quality supervisor and the department was going to delete a vacant skilled maintenance worker and in its place add a wastewater operation supervisor. They decided to not do that at this time. So these minor staffing changes have resulted in a decrease of about $28,000 to those enterprise funds. And then finally the final change that you will see in these coming slides is in the general fund in the police department we have appropriated an additional $557,000 for improvements to the public safety building. This is not coming from general fund dollars. This is offset by a transfer in from our state asset forfeiture fund. And I do wanna mention that the funds coming from the state asset forfeiture fund were actually determined by the DA's office to not be asset forfeiture but actually lost property. So the city went through the necessary steps to try to reunite this property with the rightful owner could not be found. So it became the city took ownership of these funds and we'll be using them to do a improvement project. I believe a security gate at the public safety building. So you'll see this increase in appropriations but it has an offset. So there is a net zero impact to the existing general fund deficit. So in those previous slides I went over the changes that we have included in the budget and these next couple slides I'm sorry just this one slide. We're gonna be bringing forth some proposed changes. We have not included these. We are asking council to consider these changes and vote on them at this adoption hearing. So one is to eliminate 1.0 FTE vacant assistant city attorney. We had proposed adding this position initially but after some thought knowing that we are unfortunately losing our chief attorney to retirement in the coming months. We thought that best practice would be to let a new city attorney come in, assess the staffing levels and then possibly request an assistant city attorney next fiscal year. So at this time we are proposing that we do not add this position. Second one down we are requesting to add 1.0 FTE employee relations manager. This will cost the general fund about $190,000. And the purpose of this position would be to assist in the upcoming labor negotiations and there is a whole long list of benefits that this position would also be able to accomplish but we know that with a year of labor negotiations ahead of us it's kind of critical timing. And then finally we discussed back in May, there's the reorg that occurred where we moved community engagement from the Reckon parks department over to the communications and intergovernmental relations office. There's two vacant positions that were moved. One is a vacant community engagement coordinator. We are requesting to downgrade that to as admin secretary and I apologize. This slide says senior admin assistant. The position is actually an admin secretary because we want that position to be able to assist with boards and commissions in that department. There is also a vacant deputy director of community engagement that the department is interested in downgrading to a manager. We cannot bring that to council at this time because that's gonna require a classification study through HR. So that will be something you may see in the upcoming fiscal year. But all told with these three changes of council chooses to move forward with them this will reduce the general fund deficit by about $61,000. And with that we're gonna move into some of these slides that you saw back in May. We're not going over all of them again but I will take you through the changes that we just saw and point out in some areas where they've changed. So this is our city wide revenues by fund. This is all in all entities, all funds. Revenues total about 499.2 million. The only change on this slide from when we saw it back in May is in the enterprise funds line item that increased by about 106,000 as I mentioned from updated HUD allocations. I'm not gonna go into the big changes and variances here because we discussed those in detail back in May but that is the one change that we see. And city wide expenditures by fund type. So this is the expenditure side. And again, this is city wide all funds, all entities. And here we do have a few different changes. So the first one would be up in the general fund 200.9 million that's increased by 550,000 as I mentioned for the public safety building project with state asset forfeiture funds. The enterprise operating line right beneath that has been reduced by 28,000 due to those staffing changes we mentioned. And the special revenue line item at 25.6 million has increased by 1.6 million from when we last looked at this back in May due to the ARPA appropriations. And then finally the housing authority line item has also increased by 106,000 due to HUD allocations. So all in our proposed O&M budget, operations and maintenance budget is 461 million, 461.3 million, excuse me. And then our capital improvement program has not changed since back in May at 74.9 million. And this is just a visual of that previous slide showing all funds within the city. The general fund is the largest at 38%. And that's what we'll be taking a look at next. So back in May, we showed you this slide with an overall deficit in the general fund of 2.5 million and we are proposing to use fiscal stability funds to offset that deficit. This number hasn't changed. What has changed is you'll see our expenditure line item increased by 550,000, again, for the state asset forfeiture funds, but that's offset by the transfers in line item, which has also increased. So no change to the general fund. And here is just a visual of our general fund revenues. These have not changed since we last met in May. We are still at 201.9 million in the general fund, which is what we project our resources to be that we can expend for the upcoming fiscal year. And then finally, our general fund expenditures. This visual shows us that salaries and benefits are our largest expenditure in the general fund. And again, none of these have changed since May with the exception of the very bottom line, O&M project, that's our operations and maintenance projects. And that's where we put that expenditure amount for the public safety building security project for their security gate. And all in general fund expenditures are expected to be 200.9 million. So the five year forecast that we showed back in May also has not changed with that deficit in fiscal year 2324, still staying at 2.5 million. This means that our outgoing numbers still have not changed. And as a reminder, this forecast still does not include anything that is unknown at this point, including labor negotiations, including the expiration of ARPA funds for things like in response or safe parking. So while it's not a great picture that we'd like to see for our forecast, it's also somewhat on the conservative side. So staffing citywide, excuse me, as I mentioned, we did retract some of the changes in the water department, but overall our proposed staffing changes have not changed. So we are asking council to consider not adding the assistant city attorney, so that top line that says CAO with 1.0 FTE change, we are asking and proposing that that one be retracted. And down on the very bottom line where water shows 2.0 FTEs being changed, this has not, they're being added to the department, excuse me, this has not changed since May, although there was some staffing changes that we went back and forth on, it didn't affect the overall number. So total FTEs at this time, we're proposing to add 7.0 FTEs, which would bring us to 1,285 and a half FTEs. If council goes forward with those proposed changes, including adding an employee relations manager and removing the assistant city attorney, that's also gonna be one addition, one subtraction. So those total FTE count of 1,285.5 would stay the same. So in conclusion, the city manager and the finance department recommend that the council approve by resolution, eight resolutions that will adopt the O&M and the CIP budgets. And then we have a separate resolution to amend the measure O, transaction and use tax implementation plan to adjust the fiscal year 2324 budget for all programs. We're happy to take any questions. Thank you. Looking to council to see if they have any questions. Do we wanna take it in segments or the budget as a whole? We're just gonna take it as a budget as a whole and they'll have to answer questions as we go through. Council member Rogers will let you start. Yeah, so just a quick question following up on some of my comments in our last study session. One of the things that I was looking for and I appreciate the slide on the staffing changes. I really thought that those were good moves from us. But the other component of it was around the, I think it was half a million that we were originally budgeting for labor negotiations. And I apologize if I can't find it spelled out by itself in the budget document. All I can find in here is the increase of 744,000 for professional services and legal consultation and labor negotiations. So rather than kind of being able to see, did we reduce that initial number? It instead got kind of conglomerated with other things. Yeah, sorry that wasn't very clear. The $500,000 for labor negotiations is still included in the budget. That 744,000 includes the 500,000 and then there's an additional amount on top of that for other things in the human resources department. So after some discussion with the department, with the city manager, it was determined that that 500,000 is a realistic expenditure for this year, especially considering that we will be losing in our chief attorney. We will, we have our HR director is kind of in flux that position. And if we are hoping to add an employee relations manager, there will be some time needed to recruit and train and bring someone on board. So that expenditure for $500,000 for professional services as actually a pretty realistic figure and the whole thing would be needed. Okay, my opinion still isn't gonna change on it. And I'll ask my colleagues to do this as well to make this change. If we need to exceed 250,000, coming back and having a conversation with council about why we're spending more than a quarter of a million dollars on labor negotiations, I think it's prudent. And I hear you that we're losing staff and it's potentially gonna cost that much. But I think given the contentious nature of some of our previous negotiations where there was concern that outside council was driving up the cost, I wanna make sure that we have some pretty clear oversight over what's happening with that. And just for context, we did go back and look at previous years to see how much was expended in labor negotiations and it has typically exceeded $500,000. So it's been a very high expenditure. So that was the reason and thinking, we'll leave that in now. It's possible it won't all be expended. It is a not to exceed total amount. It's not a guarantee it will all be spent. But for the placeholder, it's just a prudent way of moving forward. But yes, thank you for your comments. Council Member Fleming. I'll second Council Member Rogers' suggestion. I think that it builds trust with our employees to have an employee negotiating with employees rather than to have outside lawyers. I don't know about you, but when outside lawyers are negotiating between me and someone else, it usually is a sign that things are rough. So at any rate, we love our employees and we want them to know that. I do have some questions around our reserves. Our reserve policy, correct me if I'm wrong. I've got the numbers from the city manager. So these questions are mostly intended to help bring the public along, not in order to put you on the spot. But it's my understanding that we have a prudent reserve that's 15% of 17, excuse me, 17% of our overall budget. Correct. And can you tell me how much money we have in our reserves at this point in time? Sure, so as a point in time, we would have, we have $49 million in our unassigned reserves, which is about 15, or 25%, and which is about $15.6 million over the 17% mandated policy. So, and that money is unallocated. The 15, I have nine here, about $15.6 million of unallocated reserves above the 17%. Correct, it's unassigned. Okay, when we get, would you prefer to take programming, additional programming requests after public comment or would you like them to be taken? Now I think this might speak to council member O'Crepkey's concern about segmentation. But you are the presiding officer. How would you like to do this? I think we should ask all of our questions now for clarification and then go to public comment. There's commentary laid in questions in here. Then save the comments for the end, but ask clarifying questions now. Yes, ma'am, I will rest my case in a moment. Thank you, thank you for asking for clarification. With that council member O'Crepkey, do you have a question? Yeah, now the prudent time to ask questions about specific departments, about their needs. Okay, chief, police chief, sorry, I saw you too, Scott. So I don't know about my colleagues, but I got more communication about policing than I have about pretty much any subjects that we've tackled so far this year combined. So a couple of questions for you. Can you give me a little bit of context of our staffing levels now versus historical staffing levels? Yes, we discussed some of it at the budget hearings that we've seen in a rollercoaster of staffing in the city of Santa Rosa with the police department. And the one that we've been discussing that's been coming to light is in 2006, we were at our highest level with sworn. We had 190 sworn and 90 civilian employees. Since then, we've seen a growth in the city of approximately 20,000 with annexation of Roseland and as the city has continued to expand, currently that sworn number has gone from 190 to 181. So it's gone down by nine sworn officers and the civilian employees have gone from 90 to 78. So more substantial in the civilian employees have taken a hit over there. So that's where we've seen. Now, some of the things that we've done is we've seen the in response introduced, which is gonna help us with some of the calls for service, but obviously as the city has grown, our continued calls for service have increased along the way. Thank you. Can you give me a little bit of context with the current call volume and the amount of time spent on calls by our officers on average these days versus historical averages? Yeah, and I think we've seen that COVID greatly affected the number of calls that we saw as a substantial dip in COVID. Those numbers are coming back strong. Last year, we had over 250,000 911 calls that came into the 911 dispatch center for help. And we dispatched officers to just over 108,000 calls. One thing that's really important to understand though is like even in my 24 years in the career, how much like each call for service has changed. And right now we're seeing a lot more with the introduction of body worn cameras and how that adds to the time on the calls. But also we've seen a lot about we're doing more in our calls. And some of the things is we have a much higher expectation for community engagement. And that's something that I've really enforced with our department about getting out there and being involved in the community. And we've seen things administratively with RIPA, which is the Racial Identity Profiling Act, that any proactive contact that an officer goes so they go through a questionnaire of answering those. So each one of these calls for service takes more and more. We had a federal law that changed with, did not get too far in the details, but the uniform crime report of how we report out on crimes. And now we've gone to Nibers for this national incident based reporting system. So now it takes, or many of these calls, you have to break them into multiple reports. So if you arrest a car load and they have an aged kid has drugs on or whatever, we used to write one report with one narrative. Now they have to take a separate arrest report for every single person. So it adds literally hours to the process for the officers. We've seen a lot of the things, even with what, like one of our things that we really focus on two words at the police department are time and distance. We slow down things. And so we're able to use less force doing that. And we put distance between us and the suspects, but each one of those things is causing us where we see some of these cases where we'll send officers, we'll spend an hour or two of really like negotiating, calming things down in an effort to not use force, but it has a lot of staff that gets tied up on these calls. So in the long story, what I'm saying is many of the calls for service are now taking longer than they did years ago. And we're seeing some of the impacts on the streets of Santa Rosa. Thank you. And then, can you tell me a little bit, well, there's the obvious difference of a civilian FTE versus a sworn officer, but in terms of workload, what they do, how they interact with each other, how they help each other, can you give me a little information on that? It's a key partnership. And for us, we have civilian employees serving as like police technicians that are handling calls in the lobby, going out and doing citation sign-offs. They handle a lot of online reporting and assist with even if someone comes in for a complaint, they can take those. They help even with our 290 registrants and do a lot of that. Our dispatchers are handling over those 250,000 calls. And a critical role is we have as these field evidence technicians that go out and they process all of our crime scenes, so all 12 homicides and 421 shootings in 2022. The field evidence technicians process those crime scenes. And they also handle or assist with our officers by going out and taking collision reports, burglary reports, and literally dozens of other reports that they're able to take. And while they're taking those reports, our police officers are able to respond to 911 calls across the city and help focus on reducing our priority one responses and assisting to those who are in need and focusing on some of the community engagement that we've greatly prioritized. So would I be accurate in saying that I keep, I said FTEs could, we're talking about full-time equivalencies, but FETs, that FETs could actually help reduce response time if used appropriately or if staffed appropriately, is that possible? Absolutely. And I've been really working on using data to better allocate their existing resources. We have to do that. But the additional full-time employee positions, whether it be in the civilian or the sworn, there is a synergy between the two. And I think that you will see not only a better service delivered to our community, but a reduction in our response times throughout the city. Thank you, Council Member Alvarez. Thank you, Madam Mayor. My question is in regards to page 137, contracts. My question is, seeing how the cost of labor force has gone up over the years, are there any of these services that can be returned to in-house opposed to having a contract out? Specifically parks. So we do look at that on a case-by-case basis, actually part of the budget process involved this year, involved looking at a number of different operations in either parks or public works that could potentially be brought in-house. What we tend to find is this, while in the immediate term, it may be less expensive for in-house staff to hire the staff, hire the equipment, do all of that. Given where our salaries and benefits are gonna go in the, let's say, in the next five years, it goes in the wrong direction. So it actually becomes more expensive in that way. Again, not knowing exactly what our salary and benefits are, but we can guess where they could end up being, and so that would cause pause. The other thing that I would say is that, given what we're projecting in terms of a deficit now, and what we would have potentially after we go through our next round of labor negotiations, it would make sense to me to have the flexibility of continuing contract work, as opposed to bringing staff in where you lose that flexibility. You gain a long-term permanent cost to your budget with really no flexibility. So especially in cases where we once did the service in-house, and then through, say, the recession, we decided to, we analyzed it and ended up outsourcing that to then go and bring that operation back in-house would not make sense to me at this time, given what we are about to head into in the next year or so. So specifically, if I heard you correctly, one of your main concerns is the liability, the long-term liability, especially bringing the department or the service back in-house. Yes. Thank you. I have a couple of questions here, and then I'll go to you, Council Member Rogers. I noticed on our bonds that some of them were AA rated, AA plus, but there were a couple that were AA minus. Is there any thought about going back out and refinancing now that we've appropriated money to offset some of our liabilities to see if we could get a higher rating to save taxpayers' money, or is there any way to do that under these specific types of bonds? For the record, Scott Wagner, Deputy Director of Finance. So our bonds do have different ratings when you look across our debt portfolio of the city, and that's really based on what type of debt instrument it is versus going out and basically refunding it to get it into a better rate. The credit agencies are doing continual evaluations of our city as part of our ongoing disclosure process through the SEC, so we wouldn't gain any rating benefit per se by refunding any of our bonds at this point. They stay and get updated by the agencies. If you see a difference in how they're rated, one may be a revenue bond versus a general obligation bond. That would be really what's causing the difference in ratings. Thank you. I just realized that bonds are going down as far as interest rates, and so I just thought I'd ask the question to see if we could actually capture some of that as savings in our own funds. Absolutely, and your point's well taken, and what I would bring up is that we certainly are always looking for opportunities to gain arbitrage within our debt portfolio to save us money. I can't imagine us getting to that environment with rates as they are for honestly a very long time. We did a lot of refunding through lower to interest rates. I don't see us getting there, but you can rest assured that staff's gonna be constantly looking at that. I appreciate that. On page 107 under the risk management budget, I see that there was a pretty large increase. Could you just tell me a little bit about that? It looked like it had gone from maybe a couple million dollars to a pretty big bump this year. And just to clarify, since I don't have it in front of me, is that in the general fund or the risk management or is it overall? Let me get back in the budget so I can see what that is on page 107. Yeah, I'm not sure exactly which fund it is, but across all lines of coverage, the interest, well not the interest rates, but the overall experience modifiers have gone up within the experience, within the pool. So we're seeing rate increases along all lines of coverage. And so based off of our funding, we double up the SARs and our SAR has moved from $500,000 to a million dollars in the liability program. So that increases it to $2 million just right off the bat. And then whatever the premium is. Thank you. I wasn't sure if it was fire related or if this was workers' compensation related. I'm not sure. So again, like I said, it's kind of going across all lines and I'm not sure exactly which line item it speaks to. But if we're talking about workers' comp, as salaries go up, our premium will go up because that's based off of salaries. And then if we're talking about property insurance, which includes the fire, that has also increased due to urban wildfires and the exclusions and just all losses across the state. And so I think most property programs are seeing increase of like 40 to 50%. And even our SAR on that, I think when we have the Tubs fire, our SAR was only like $25,000 or a deductible and now we're up to 250 and they're looking to move it to 500,000. So it's increasing across the board on all lines. Thank you so much. And then my last question is on our reserves or our portfolio. So you stated in our reserve portfolio, we have about $49 million. Do we have an additional investment portfolio and how is that money actually invested back the interest that we get from that? Where does that go? So we do have a separate investment portfolio. It is, I'm trying to think of what the last reporting of it was, I don't know, $600 million, something like that. So those are all the funds that aren't currently being used are invested. So they are a mixture of water funds, general fund, whatever any, if you think about it this way, when we pass the budget, the budget year about to pass, come July one, we don't spend every dollar of that on July one, right? So we spend, so as we spend the budget, those funds are then used at that time. When they're not used, we invest them. We earn interest, that interest goes back either to the general fund or to whatever fund that's tied to that, the source. So that's completely separate from our unassigned reserves. Although those unassigned reserves are also invested. Thank you for that clarification. I wasn't sure if they were just going back into another reserve or into an investment or if we actually take that money that we're capturing from the investments and putting it back into general fund. So I appreciate that clarification. So as we close our books every year and we're about to go into that process, we take the interest dollars and then they go back to those funding sources. Thank you, Council Member Rogers. Thanks Vice Mayor. I have a few more questions for the police chief, Kreegan, if you're still available. So one of the things that I know you've highlighted in this budget is the six over. Can you explain sort of what that is and what the significance of that is in terms of morale, overtime, standards of coverage, all of those sorts of things? Why is it so important for the city? So we worked and we've had strong support from our city manager of understanding and the police staffing, we started last July with 21 sworn police vacancies out of 181. So it was overwhelming and our recruitment team has done an incredible job and also our officers around the Bay Area are seeing the support they get here from our community and from our city council. So as of right now, we're actually gonna be entering into July and be able to over hire. So the over hire though is important to understand that it's not gonna allow us to be able to go that we have six operating officers more than that, but it's allowing like while they're in the, while they go through a 20 week academy and a 23 week in house training. So it allows us to start hiring and training the officers in anticipation for known retirements. But that's incredible for our armor row because now we don't see these huge upticks and then the law, the big valleys when we're waiting for almost a year for someone to get out of the training program. And it's gonna help us to be able to deliver a better service to our community with more officers out in the streets. So we're gonna go from, I think you said 20 vacancies last year to being able to over hire this year. Correct. And now to be quite honest, we have over 20 that are in training right now. So it's gonna take a while to get them with them in training, but the momentum's going we've been our patrol staffing has been critically low. So we're gonna be able to start building up that patrol staffing and then we're gonna work toward some of the specialty positions that have been vacant for years in our like our domestic violence, sexual assault or property crime or narcotic team. And then I'm also gonna use some of those resources to bring back our gang crimes team without asking for additional bodies. We're gonna use those bodies we're filing hiring to bring back our gang crimes team, which is eliminated in 2019 due to some of these low staffing numbers. We've heard from a number of folks in public and I'm sure we'll hear more when we go to public comment. If you had additional officers, where would you put them? What do you see is the most critical need? The most critical need is our downtown enforcement team. Right now that we see so many of the issues, not only they deal with a lot of the homeless impacts but they deal with a lot of the safety downtown. And right now we're seeing some safety concerns at the transit mall, not only for our staff, but our community at Simon Plaza's on the downtown area. So that's our greatest need right now. I think another area that we're trying to focus more is on our traffic safety in our accidents. We saw eight fatal collisions last year. So that's another area that we're focused. And then our overriding goal for this year is to reduce violent crime and to reduce our priority one response times. And we're seeing that right now taking seven minutes and seven seconds as our average to respond to a priority 911 call. And that's too long. And so we got to get better. And so we're focused on putting resources to reduce the violent crime, the priority one response times and fatal collisions in the city of Santa Rosa and improve the overall safety throughout our whole city. But especially where we're seeing some of the upticks is in our downtown core. And that's so important to the vibrancy of our city. And then my last question, you mentioned non-sworn civilian members of the department as well. Are there ways that those folks can be additive to address some of the backlog, if you will, or some of the areas that need a little bit of additional attention, background investigations or things that don't require the immediate presence of an officer? Is that a way that we can try to help mitigate and relieve some of the pressure or some of the stress? Absolutely. One of the ways we're looking at is with the filled evidence technician spot and they can fill a lot of roles, being able to not only processing the crime scenes, handling the reports, but assisting our investigative teams with things with investigations and going out. And so we've been finding ways to utilize them with our investigation resources on major investigations where an FBT can be assigned to them to assist with that investigation and hopefully reduce some of the overtime that is being paid to a detective and that we could pay really at a more cost effective means to a civilian employee and then utilize their enhanced expertise in crime scene collection and processing. And for our officers that what I've heard from a lot of them is they don't mind overtime so much, they hate the forced overtime. And is there with this staffing model that you're presenting, does that allow you to free up some of the additional time for officers and make sure that we get real coverage? It'll certainly assist. And unfortunately, some of our overtime is unpredictable, such as the homicide we had just this Friday evening and other emergencies that may come up. But as staffing improves, we're certainly gonna be able to start seeing reduction in some of our overtime and certainly not some of the forced overtime that we've seen happen with a lot of just our high vacancy numbers. And we have minimum staffing to provide a safe level of coverage throughout our city. So we will frequently mandate officers to fill the meet our minimum staffing guidelines. All right, I apologize. I lied because I have one more question for you also. You and I have talked before about the downtown enforcement team, how during the week we seem to make progress. And then we backslide when we don't have officers on for DTE. What would it take to get coverage all throughout the week and the weekend to make sure that we really have downtown as a shining example of a safe place for people to be? Certainly. So right now we have six buzzard positions in the downtown enforcement team. What we're trying to do is get to at least eight on that team and then be able to have two teams of four. So one team working Monday through Thursday and one team of four working Wednesday through Saturday so that we have the full week coverage there when we have city resources here. And they work as a partner and then their overlap day is Wednesday where they really focus on some of the larger issues in the city, larger encampments and some of the issues downtown and coordinate their resources. So that's what my short-term goal is to be able to get them to eight and have two teams of four working six days a week and really being able to have that covered throughout the city. And that includes the focus on shifting folks to reconstitute the gang task force? Correct. I'm gonna use the existing resources that we've made by making the grounds and recruitment this year to be able to put four detectives that we're gonna move back and then one sergeant that's being funded by measure H is gonna be the crime scene sergeants and we lost that position. And then our goal is this fall, no later than January of 2024 to have that gang crimes team up and running. Great. I appreciate that. And I'm sure we'll discuss it further after public comment when we hear from folks. My one major concern is that we aren't pulling between the two and putting resources into downtown that get pulled away constantly or putting resources into the gang task force that then also get pulled into other priorities from the city. I'd like to see how we do both. Thank you. Absolutely. Council Member Staff. Council Member Rogers very helpfully asked both of my questions. So no more for me. Thank you. Seeing no further questions from council we'll go ahead and open up the public comment 845. Thank you. We are now taking public comment on 15.2. I'm sorry, my computer is frozen. I think I'd have this down by now. If you are in council chamber who would like to comment but have not provided a speaker card or your name please make your way to the podium. If you are participating via Zoom please raise your hand or dial star nine. You will have three minutes and a countdown timer will alert at the end of that period. The first public comment will be provided by Dwayne followed by Hugh. I don't see Dwayne in the room. Hugh if you can please make your way to the podium followed by Stephen. We are allowing two minutes for public comment on this public hearing. Good evening members of the council. Thank you for the opportunity. I'll be brisk Hugh Futrell for the record. Here is chair of the downtown action organization which does encourage the council to add the two additional people to the DET team as the council is aware. Although there are six currently frequently to a great degree they have to be pulled out of the downtown. This will help assist a more permanent presence in the downtown. The issues of public safety and perception are exceptionally important. I want to add another aspect though from a budget standpoint. The downtown is the economic engine and to the degree public safety gets in the way of tax revenues then in fact you have a budget deficit that can be increased. These two positions people often say gosh if you'll just do this position or do this program it pays for itself and most of the time that's just not true. That's just propaganda but in this case it very well probably is true. For example, you have about 10 million dollars coming into the budget from the two different sources you have for hotel taxes. 60 to 70% of those dollars come from downtown hotels. These two positions that we're talking about right now equal about 6% of those dollars. So it's an insurance policy, perceptions get bad, hotel occupancies fall, you lose $400,000 like that. Similarly, if you have a vibrant downtown you're not only your hotel tax but your sales tax increase. I'm not telling you anything you don't already know but it's important to emphasize that sometimes decisions to invest in personnel are very, very prudent. Thank you. Thank you. The next public comment will be Steven followed by Nicole. Please go ahead Steven. My name is Steven Stankovich. I'm with San Rosa Plaza and Simon Property Group. I'm also a member of the DAO board. The reason I am here today is to speak on behalf of adding to downtown enforcement team members to SRPD. There are a lot of tenants that frankly feel unsafe at the mall when they arrive in the morning or when they're leaving at night. We also get a lot of comments from the public with this sense too. We have increased our security staffing levels dramatically. We've also tried to hire off-duty PD to help out with the perception issue with the downtown. Unfortunately PDs suffering with staffing issues as well. So having these two extra members would dramatically help us. We've also over the years kind of to go along with what he was saying. We have lost six permanent tenants. That would have been national tenants that would have come to downtown Santa Rosa due to a safety and perception issue. They literally, they walked the center with us. They loved it. They came back another time by themselves and they felt scared or threatened due to issues of homelessness or due to other safety concerns that they were experiencing. Finally, as many of you know, Catholic Charities Open the Caritas Center which is a dramatic increase in public and homeless items downtown right next to the mall. As part of that, I think that it's very strong for the city council to increase policing if they're going to be putting such amenities downtown. We are also going to be having public housing downtown or not public housing, low income housing but also a homeless portion as well that will have persistent and severe mental health issues are going to be half of the people living down there. So we really do need this increase in public safety to provide a safe community for all especially for our retailers, our shoppers and our employees, thank you. Thank you, the next public comment will be from Nicole followed by Joe. Good evening council, my name is Nicole Gaddis. I'm in California luggage right at the heart of downtown Santa Rosa. I am also here to advocate for amendment to the budget to add the two additional downtown enforcement officers. Right now they are doing their best and they're doing a great job but they're often pulled away to other parts of the city. So having two officers designated, two more officers and officers that are designated in the downtown core will not only increase the perception of safety but will in reality create a safe for downtown which I have watched many businesses leave our downtown for other locations like Montgomery village or Healdsburg places that don't struggle with the same unhoused population that we do downtown. And so I'm nervous up here, can you tell? So yes, I ask for myself and for our community that we add these officers, thank you. Thank you, the next public comment will be from Joe followed by Terry. Mayor Rogers and council, my name is Joe Deetson and I urge council to support an amendment to the city budget to include two additional officers for the SRPD's downtown enforcement team. Now my background is that my wife and I have lived in downtown Santa Rosa in the St. Rose district since the 80s. At the same time I've worked downtown literally across the street in that same period of time. Currently I serve on the downtown action committee as the treasurer, but I believe because of my time and working downtown that I have a unique perspective. And I wanna tell you, my family and I love downtown but we want it to be better, we want it to succeed. I think the addition of the DET officers focused on the downtown will help in restoring a safe environment. And I think as it's been mentioned, I think there've been some negative impacts caused by unfortunately caused by some unhoused individuals in downtown. And I think this has had an impact on residents. I've seen it have an impact on tenants downtown moving out because they felt unsafe for staff. That's been unfortunate and certainly we've seen the impact on merchants. So why make the investment? Well, if reality or perceptions change, the word will get around. Hotels, occupancy increases, TOT tax increases, merchants come back in, sales increase, sales tax increase. It's a payback to the city. Recently we've seen a number of players start residential building in the downtown. And that's a tremendous, it's tremendous. 4th Street, Mendocino, Morgan and Fifth, out by the railroad square. That's a tremendous investment and we should welcome that. The city should also make an investment in the DET team. Thank you. Thank you. Terry, do you mind raising up the microphone in the podium so that we can hear you better for public comments? Thank you. I will max it out. And it's still too short. Thank you, council. I'd like to also echo some of the sentiments of previous speakers and urge the council to amend the budget to include the two additional downtown enforcement officers. And I understand that, I think we all understand that the budget is predicting a deficit, but the officers will have a positive impact on the general fund by creating a more visibly safe downtown area with more people likely to visit shop and thus increasing TOT overnight hotel stays and sales tax dollars. In addition, it's in line with the council goals and priorities with one, helping to reduce homelessness and its impact on our downtown businesses. And I always say that our downtown businesses, they're us. They're people trying to make a living, sending their kids to the same schools that we all send our kids to. So we don't wanna make that more difficult for them. And also promoting economic and community vibrancy in the city's economic center. So you know that I'm on the Wednesday night market and it's just, I know this is anecdotal and anecdotal is not evidence, but we've lost two young women employees because when it gets dark outside, they don't feel safe walking back to their car and they're volunteering their time to participate in an event that they don't get paid for to make our community a vibrant place, to make our downtown a place that people feel comfortable going to. And they don't feel safe walking home, walking to their car. Please, please amend the budget and please include these two officers. It's vital for our downtown. It's vital for vibrancy in Santa Rosa. Thank you. Thank you. Is there anyone else in council chamber wishing to provide public comment on item 15.2? See no one rise to the podiums. I'm gonna turn it over to our Zoom host or we have three hands raised at this point. Thank you. We'll start with Tom followed by Leanna. Tom, you're being asked to unmute. Go ahead when you're ready. I'm ready. It's just Tom Robertson. Our community has been involved in downtown Santa Rosa since the early 1990s and we've had the building at 625 Fifth Street rented to the county of Sonoma. And I want to tell you a very specific issue which is arisen because of the lack of sufficient policing in the downtown. The police are doing a very good job with resources they have. But the issue is garage, the garage on Fifth Street, very explicitly the leaders of the Department of Health Services, which is our tenant, have told me they're going to leave the downtown because their employees do not feel safe parking in that garage and in particular their cars are frequently broken into. And then, you know, to pay the deductible and it's just not right. I urge you to add these two positions back into the budget. You're going to lose the county. We're going to build, we own an acre of ground. We're pursuing two projects which would bring 230 units of market rate housing or even more into the downtown. Some of the people who are going to live there are going to need to park in that garage. How can we explain to developer that there's a problem with the parking from a security standpoint in that garage? So we need your help to turn the perception around and the reality so that we know that we can tell people they can park there and that their cars and they will be safe. Thank you very much. I must commend the staff. Terrific presentation, but we need your help if we're going to get this, these projects going. The property taxes alone will be a substantial addition to your budget. Thank you very much. Thank you, Tom. Liana will be followed by Marianne. Liana, please go ahead when you're ready. Yes, hi. Can you hear me? Yes. Okay. Greetings, council members. My name is Liana Kane and my family has owned Osiello's the street grill downtown for over 23 years now. I'm also a member of the downtown action organization known as the DAO. I'm here to echo the need for two additional officers for the DET downtown enforcement team in effort to achieve a seven day a week presence of enforcement downtown. The short-sighted view is that we are asking for an amendment to the budget, which would increase spending, but the long-term goal here is to create a more visibly safe downtown, which would result in more people shopping, more tourists and more sales tax benefiting in the general fund. The key word here is visibility. Having officers present downtown would help in reducing the unwanted behaviors of the unhoused population. Their presence would promote economic and community vibrancy. Others have mentioned downtown's reputation through the eyes of consumers and tourists, but I would like to relay a unique perspective of operating in a business seven days a week into the wee hours of the morning. Safety is one of my biggest concerns for my employees. They refuse to use the parking garages because they won't walk a couple blocks away that late at night, and they strongly feel they need to be closer to work when they get off of their shift after midnight, and I don't blame them. It's not news to anyone that our downtown's reputation is struggling, but we are at a pivotal point in time where we believe our downtown is at full capacity for potential. We can only go up from here. We ask that you help us achieve this goal of increasing visible security. Thank you. Mary Ann will be next, and if anyone else on Zoom is wishing to speak, please raise your hand. Go ahead, Mary Ann, when you're ready. Yes, this is Mary Ann Neufeld. I am a property owner in Rebels Square, and I've been in business there for 15 years. I think the downtown area, I'm also on the board of the Rebels Square Benefit District. The downtown area is the most vibrant as I have seen it in 35 years have been a property owner. It's important we're hearing from the different hotels that are concerned with the conditions that some have to put up with. The two additional officers will help. I'm not sure it's enough. I would like to see more, but at least we will have two. So please amend your budget to hire those extra two people. Thank you for the opportunity to make my comment. Thank you. They know additional hands on Zoom. We do have a few prerecorded messages I will play. Good evening, Mayor Rogers, Vice Mayor McDonald, and members of council. This is Kayton Pinkle-Allinson, the executive director of the San Jose downtown district. I'm sorry I can't be there with you today, but I'm calling in to request that you consider amending the budget to include the addition of two new members of the downtown enforcement team. I've had the opportunity to work closely with the DET under three different sergeants, and I'm consistently impressed with their dedication to all members of the community. Their knowledge about complex subjects and their ability to compassionately address quality of life issues in the downtown core. I understand that there are many competing requests for limited budget dollars, as that these positions have the unique potential to generate further revenue for the general fund by making downtown feel like a safe place to shop, dine, and visit. And encouraging people to spend money and increasing overnight visits. We know from many of our business owners that customers have started to perceive downtown as an unsafe place, and it is critical that we address this now. The addition of these positions is also very much in line with two of council's goals, helping to reduce homelessness and its impacts and promoting economic and community vibrancy in the heart of the city. The DAO's three team has expanded our hours and team members to help mitigate the impacts of added trash, bulk objects, human waste, cleanup, and other impacts that business and property owners are feeling as a result of the unsheltered population residing in the downtown. But being able to expand the DET's presence to seven days a week will make an incredible difference. It'll be critical to ensuring that members of the public feel safe when spending their money in the downtown core that our unsheltered population has consistent points of contact and care. And it will begin to reduce the impacts of homelessness and help downtown reach its potential as we continue to grow and develop in the area. I hope you'll consider amending the budget to include these two positions. Thank you so much for your time. This is Dan Tamasi calling regarding item 15.2. I'm the city of San Lorenzo, resident of principal TLC, the architecture in downtown. I'm calling to urge council support amending the budget to include two additional officers from the downtown enforcement team. Adding downtown enforcement team and visual replacement back in general plan that will help reduce impacts of homelessness in downtown and will help promote economic vitality in the core downtown core. As a downtown business owner and many other businesses that have moved out of downtown were expected not to locate here primarily because of employee safety concerns. Adding these two officers will make a substantial change in addressing these concerns. Thank you. Caitlin Karasek commenting on item 15.2. Good evening, Mayor Rogers, Vice Mayor McDonald and members of council. My name is Caitlin Karasek. I am the owner of LaRosa's Keillery and Grill downtown Santa Rosa, as well as the board member on the downtown action organization. I'm calling today to request you consider amending the budget to add two more DET members. I know budget dollars are limited but I feel that the addition of these two positions will prove their value and generate revenue for the general fund. As a restaurant owner, I have had multiple conversations with multiple people from various demographics and a very common theme is the perception that downtown is not a safe place to be. I strongly believe that the additional police presence would appease some of these concerns and help bring people back downtown, shopping, dining and bringing money to all businesses, promoting economic and community vibrancy. Expanding the DET coverage to seven days a week is critical to improving the perception of downtown. More often than not, the issues we experience at the restaurant occur outside the current coverage schedule. Having those off days covered would be a massive win for all of us downtown. I hope you will consider amending the budget to include these two positions as the impact will be exponential. Thank you for your time and your consideration. This is Chris Wilson. I'm the executive director for the Historic Railroad Square Association and I'm calling to voice support of the item number 15.2 to strongly request the council amending the budget to include two additional downtown enforcement officers. As executive director, I hear from our businesses, our merchants, our restaurants and their issues and concerns are valid. My role here is to help support business in our district. And by adding additional officers will have a positive impact on the general fund by creating a more visibly safe downtown area where more people are likely to visit and shop which would increase the TOT overnight hotel stays and sales tax dollars. We want to help reduce the homelessness as it impacts the downtown core and promote our economic and community vibrancy to the city's economic center. This is, we don't get a second chance to make a first impression. It's lasting and we must expand our team in order to provide really the needed safety and security for residents and our visitors. Please, I strongly advocate to amend the budget and add two additional and very essential officers to the downtown enforcement team. Thank you. Thank you. The next public comment will be from Zach. Zach, I've enabled your speaking permissions. If you can please unmute yourself. Thank you. Sorry. My name is Zach Berkowitz. Sorry, I couldn't be there in person. I wanted to thank you all for what seems to be going in the right direction. I'm a longtime property owner and developer and landlord to the downtown police department when they were on the square. Our downtown has gotten away from us and we need more police presence to serve as a deterrent for the graffiti, reducing the homelessness, helping the homeless people out and making people feel safer when they are downtown. Downtown's the heartbeat of the city and we need your help in bringing back both the economic and community vitality. Please amend the budget and add two police officers to the downtown area. Thank you. Next, we have Nica. Please go ahead when you're ready. Thank you. Can you hear me? Yes. All right. Well, thank you again for hosting this. This is Nisha Weyland, an executive at a large main box retail store that is located in downtown Santa Rosa. I'm asking the council to increase the budget to include two additional DET officers to support safety of not only my employees but our core customer. Our shoppers are cautious to spend time at our location as they don't feel safe due to the flex of professional shoplifters, homelessness, and including those who are struggling with addiction. My employees have experienced physical and verbal assault weekly. Customers have been robbed or threatened. It is not an environment we should expect. Investing in the DET will provide further presence and visibility to everyone to feel safe to bring additional assistance and foster faster response time to our downtown business owners. So I do believe that it will make a positive impact to our beloved city. Thank you. Thank you. And we have no additional public comment. I'm sorry for clarification. Was that the end of our public comments? That includes the public comments. I apologize. I didn't hear you. Okay. Seeing no more public comments, I'm going to go ahead and close the public hearing and we will bring it back to council for final questions and comments. Council Member Fleming. Thank you to everybody who took the time to call in. I know that there's a lot of issues in our town and the downtown certainly gets a lot of attention because it is in my mind, the economic generator should be the economic generator, even though I was reminded earlier today that it is not the economic generator that the council would like it to be. And it's a shared and long-term priority of this council. I just want to take a moment to talk about the stream and the cycle of how things work as far as I see them, which is that there's a cause and effect and there are reasons why there are folks in the downtown that are causing trouble and making people feel fearful and causing us to need what I agree are two more dedicated officers and probably, not probably in my mind, two more field evidence technicians. And the reason why I feel this way is because we need to get ourselves in a good financial place and in a good appearance place in the downtown. But that is one end of the stream. To my mind, there is the upstream and there is the downstream. We cannot ignore any place along the stream. And that's why as we go forward with our negotiations, I want to encourage the council to have some ideas. I'm just going to put out a frame here for us to think about it, but there are ways that we can help people before they get to the place of loitering, harassing or doing drugs or making unsightly appearances in our downtown. There are lots of things and interventions that we can do most notably in our recreation programming for younger children, allowing families to work and be more self-sufficient. There are things we can do for people like reinstituting our gang tattoo removal program. Fairly low-cost things that we can do to make sure that people who want to get out of the cycle of poverty, trauma and general antisocial behavior can do so prior to them landing in our downtown. So I'll be as supportive of what I hear from the community and what I believe is a really good short-term solution and I'd like to see it paired with upstream investments as well. And I'd like us to have a balanced approach to both prevention and addressing challenges as we see them in our community. Mayor Rogers. Thank you. So I could not agree more with council member women. I think just speaking to my fellow council members like this is a time to show our residents, civilian officers, sworn officers, bicyclists, pedestrians, everyone in our community that we support them. I'm so big on upstream investments, but when we don't make the upstream investments that we need to make, then we have to make investments downstream. In a lot of this, we are definitely downstream. So I will be supporting having two additional DET officers and two field evidence technicians. One of the things that I asked when we were going over the budget was, you know, why do I see so much? And when we see violent crimes, we see that, but we also see people running red lights. We see, and we want people to get out on their bicycles. We want people to walk, but then they're not really safe, are they? So there's just so much going on in our city. And I can't see Allen's face and I can't see city manager's face very well, but I do know that both of you deal with challenges head on and you're very innovative. And I'm sorry to spring this on you because that's not me. I don't like to spring things on anyone, but I do think that this is needed. Thank you. Council Member Rogers. Thank you, Vice Mayor. Before I go to the discussion topic on officers, I did want to ask a couple of specific questions about economic development. And I brought this up in the last study session. Do we have adequate funds earmarked in this budget to both fulfill the work that we're doing around enhanced infrastructure finance districts, which I know is a big priority. And then also on the tail end of our discussion at our last economic development committee meeting about developing a comprehensive economic development strategy. And again, I'm asking the questions because as we talk about deficits, as we talk about long-term fiscal stability of the organization, we typically have two options. Focus on economic development and grow the pie or ask the public for more money through tax measures. And I found us $250,000 earlier, so I figured. And that's appreciated. Do you mind? I'm sorry, I don't think I caught the first part of your question relative to the EIFD. Yeah, I want to make sure, given that we've put so much work into developing the EIFD, that we are adequately budgeting for staff time to be able to get it where it needs to be to be fully functional by the end of the year, right? So we've got our folks who have been appointed, the county is appointing their folks. There is some additional work that'll need to be done at a minimum staffing the meetings between the joint entity, but probably more so working with consultants and making sure that all of our teas are crossed and eyes are dotted before it comes online. I just want to make sure that we don't drop the ball at the 11th hour by not budgeting adequately for that. So I believe that we are, and I would look at it this way, is that between the resources that are in the economic development department and planning and economic development, the resources that are in the finance department, meaning myself and Scott and other admin staff that we can, we understand the priority and I would much rather pledge those resources rather than adding new. And that's going to be the theme that you'll may or may not hear from me as we go through this, is that for me at this stage of where we are, given our budgetary constraints, is that for as much as possible in instances like that, is that we are looking internally to figure out how we can use our existing resources to be able to make those things happen. That's got to be our first question. And then if we can't, then obviously we have to augment. So I think that probably answers that one. And then I'm sorry, I lost your second one. Yeah, no, and I really appreciate that. What I'm trying to make sure I avoid is that three months from now, we check it and we say, why didn't something happen? And the answer is we had no staff capacity for it. So I could appreciate the desire and the need to look internally first, but I wanna make sure that we're also not blind to the actual impact of the organization if we don't have adequate resources. Right, and I'm probably gonna get daggers in my back from the other departments that I'm speaking from for, but I do know that where we are at this point, our tasks are out of what we need to do in order to get that to the finish line. It's a priority for our team to make that happen. So, and honestly, if something slips, we can always come back and ask for it then. But at this point, I think doing it inside and making sure that happens, I know that we do need to augment our consultant budget. And I'm not sure that that's in this or that is probably a separate item that will come to you, but from staff resources inside, I think our plan is to have that as a high priority and move forward with that. Right, so that was item one out of three for the economic development priorities. We also had a comprehensive economic development strategy that was being developed. I wanna make sure that that won't fall by the wayside. And then the third was the potential for annexation in South Santa Rosa, and I wanna make sure that that also doesn't disappear if we don't have adequate resources. And I, again, maybe I missed that it's a long document, but I didn't see any of those three things called out in the proposed budget. Right, so the economic development strategy is moving forward. I'm getting nods behind me. And do you have adequate resources? Okay, so there's that. I can't speak to the South Santa Rosa annexation. I honestly, I forget where we left that. I'm not sure if... We do not have any budget allocation for the annexation at this time. That was not a direction we were given, so that's not included in the next fiscal year budget. If that's something council wanted to move forward with at a later time, it would be brought back to council and appropriated then. So through the Vice Mayor, Councilman Rogers, I believe the last direction that we've received on that was we were waiting on the grant. So we applied for the grant and we also submitted municipal services letter to LAFCO, and LAFCO is actually working on the duck. So at this time, I believe that's all we have been required to do at this time. So unless there's other direction that I'm not aware of, I believe we're moving forward on South Santa Rosa. Now, that sounds great. And I know that there's also a discussion about if there was additional work that needed to happen that the applicant might be interested in offering resources for a dedicated planner. And so I know we'd have to make an adjustment to the budget at that time if they actually did that. But I just want to make sure that we are not the barrier to them being able to move forward expeditiously. And I'm hearing that the answers know that we're fine on that end. Great. All right, thank you. Now to the police. So I am definitely supportive in concept, but want to hear some specifics because I keep hearing two police officers plus two field texts thrown out. What is the actual budget impact if we were to put those positions in? So two police officers, they each run about $231,000, all in with salaries and benefits. So two of those you're looking at 460,000. Field and evidence texts, salaries and benefits together is about 160,000. So if we were to add two police officers and two field and evidence texts, just the staffing costs alone brings us up to about $782,000. In addition to that, there would be support costs required for training, equipment, that nature, that things of that nature. Those run usually about $10,000 per FTE. And for the downtown, we'd have to double check to see what types of vehicles would be needed for the officers. It would be a motorcycle, police car, et cetera. So from there, there would be ongoing costs associated with maintenance and repair and gasoline as well. So about 850,000. That's, I think, a fair estimate, yeah. Okay, what does that do to our measure O baseline formula? So that would bring, so police and fire are well above baseline. That's not a concern. It's violence prevention that's running a little close. We would probably have to add additional general fund budget to the violence prevention neighborhood services programs, but it wouldn't be much. I believe it's 0.04% of our general fund expenditures. It breaks out to be about, what was it, it's $40 for every 100,000 we add, something like that. Wouldn't push us over the edge significantly. All right, so we're just to be clear in what we've sort of heard conceptually for adding, we'd need to find almost a million additional dollars. For, yeah, for two officers, for two field and evidence texts, additional support costs and baseline, I'd say 150, $900,000 about there. Okay, and Alan, remind us, how much are we over the council policy for our current reserves and understanding we're doing contract negotiations and these are ongoing costs and understanding all of that? We are, yeah, 15.6 million. Okay, and that's over the 17%, yes. All right, great, thank you so much. Council Member Flinney. I'm just curious to know what the, given sort of what Council Member Rodgers set up, if the council has an appetite at this time to hear about some specific programming ideas that were brought forth that we could add on both neighborhood resources and recreation, if there's any interest in balancing that out with addition to our law enforcement side. And before I get down into the weeds, I just wanna see if there's even support for the idea of doing all points along the stream. So I guess I'm looking for a straw poll before I begin to waste anyone's time at 9.30 at night. Love to hear my ideas. I wish I could say they were all mine. But one thing is that during the great recession we lost drop-in sites in our city parks. There had previously been six park sites that during the spring and summer had drop-ins for families and children where you could go between, for a few hours in the morning and a few hours in the evening. That program, which provides childcare, opportunities for parents to work and children to recreate without necessarily having to plan in advance if we were to be stood up during the spring and carried through to the end of the summer. It's aimed at elementary school age children and allows for middle school children to have a more leadership role in it is about $375,000. A neighborhood revitalization program which would take kids to the snow, to Safari West, to the ocean and so forth. That program costs about $50,000. Scholarships for children to attend regular city programs which I think is a great idea because I hate the idea of us separating out low-income kids from regular kids because at the end of the day kids are kids is about $25,000. Most of these programs would be started next summer, next spring, we're not talking about right now. The purchase STEM curriculum is about $25,000. And then one that is particularly close to my heart is the, not that I've ever had a tattoo, but is the tattoo removal program. I think anybody should be able to leave a troubled past behind. We can get nurses and doctors to donate their time, but to oversee the program and the equipment, we need about $100,000. And then there had been some thoughts around reopening Finley as an after-school site, not all after-school. So for example, at my child's center as a city school program, previous to her getting a lot of kids weighed on these weight lists and they use other services. And at her school, prior to her getting on site, care at her public school, the bus from the Boys and Girls Club would come to her school. But at my friend whose kid goes to school half mile away, in the middle of the day at two o'clock, she'd have to get in her car and luckily she could work from home, but she had to go pick her child up and drive him to the same site that my child was getting cared for because there was no service. So one idea would be instead of standing up a fairly expensive program at Finley, which we could consider doing, but we could also work with the city schools to add additional transport or Boys and Girls Club or any of these sites to help bridge the gap so that parents and mostly moms in this case can work a full workday. Anyway, if we were to take all these programs, the Finley one I adjusted a bit, but in my talking to you guys, but if we were to take all these programs without amending them, we're looking at minus administrative fees, which I'm guessing would not be unsubstantial, it's about $725,000. What I would propose is that the council allocate a dollar amount to recreation and to tattoo removal, since I'm guessing recreation doesn't administer tattoo removal, that would probably be a different department, I'd have to ask someone here, but that we allocate a specific amount to match the investment in our police department. And the reason why I would suggest that is because, not just because of the streams and the upstream downstream stream approach, but also because of our reserves. I understand the city manager and our CFO's position that we do have a lot of headwinds coming. At the same time, we are constantly asking our public for a handout in the form of taxes and fees and all sorts of things. And I do believe that at some point, we have a responsibility to distribute the funds in ways that generate additional dollars without generating additional asks. And I think that if we were to allocate, between these two programs would be a little shy or these two suites of programs would be a little shy of $2 million, which is by my estimation, about 15% of the overage on our reserve. And I think that that's a prudent, reasonable reinvestment of the community's dollars. So I'm gonna put that on the table for discussion and see what you guys think. Council Member Alvarez. I love the idea. I love the, when we speak of equity and equality, I think you spoke about exactly that right now. Thank you. Yes, well, I appreciate the sentiments around some of them. Some of them I would be cautious around. I'm not sure around investments in STEM education or curriculum, where we would be at and how that would coincide with education. Same with wraparound services, working with Four Seas, some of our other partners around the Findlay Center idea that you had. I would be curious to talk first with the City of Santa Rosa Schools to see how we would transport them. I understand that we're in the middle of a budget process. The one that kind of speaks out to me the most is the $375,000 program that you spoke of early on that was a before and after school program. So just so I'm clear, would you be asking for that so that it would start in the fall when kids would go back to school or is that something in the summertime specific? So that's actually not an after school program. The Findlay program I'm less wedded to. I mean, I'm actually, besides the tattoo removal program, I'm not actually suggesting a specific program. What I wanted to do was suggest a number of different ideas and then the notion that we allocate a general amount to recreation for them to come forward to us and let's say a month or six weeks with a suite of programs for us to choose from or they can give us a presentation rather than me as not a staff member and not a recreation specialist trying to present to you my limited understanding of these programs. So I don't think that we need to necessarily dive super deep in the weeds today. If we're comfortable with just saying that we want to make an investment upstream and then staff will come back and we can choose from it on a menu. Thanks for that clarification. That wasn't clear to me. I apologize. Council Member Staff, then Council Member O'Crepkey. I'd like to add my support for making investments, particularly in public safety and I'm certainly not adverse to making upstream investments also. I would like to come back to the budget headwinds though because when we're talking about these investments, we're talking about making multi-year investments. So once we're putting say a total of $2 million in this year, we're really hoping to fund that for three years, five years at a minimum and in reality potentially in the perpetuity. So the $15 million budget, or the $15 million overage with respect to the surplus. I mean, in point of fact, most of that's probably gone with the upcoming budget negotiations. So the $2 million plus a year that we're talking about, which is really $6 million over three years, $10 million over five years, whatever the number is, that's gonna have to come out of somewhere. And I'm a little bit nervous about that point. All right, respond to that. I'm gonna let every Council Member at first make their comments and then I'll come back to you, Mayor Rogers. Oh, pardon me, I'm sorry, Mayor Rogers. I went to Council Member O'Crapkey first, then to you. Thank you, Vice Mayor. I'm kind of leaning towards where Council Member Stapp is at. The comments about making downtown more hospitable, about reducing response time are things that we can do directly without having to fund them for years down the line, but I actually see a result immediately. I do believe that the downtown enforcement team, the DET officers would pay for themselves over time, and that's why I'm a little bit more comfortable with it. I'd also like to say with not that I'm averse at all to upstream investment, the budget head wins, yes, being what they are, but I also want to, you know, to Council Member Rogers' point, we have a work plan, and while it's not set in stone and it can shift, I don't want to task our staff with more stuff to kind of decide if we maybe kind of sort of want to do something now to come back in a month or two months to pick it off of a menu when we could have had those discussions during the goal setting process, and we can have those discussions during the goal setting process next year. But for me, if we're looking at our work plan and our workflow for our staff and our departments, if we're putting something like that on there, then we've got to be prepared to point out something that we want to take off, because we only have a finite amount of bandwidth for our staff without stressing them out too much. So with those two things, I guess three things, the budget headwinds, the staff, limited amount of bandwidth, and as well as the ability to see returns with the public safety investment, I'm a little more wary of doing the upstream investments right now. Bear Rogers. I think upstream investments are definitely great, and I think that I would definitely like to hear what parts and wrecks would do with additional funding, maybe not as much as we're giving to public safety at this time. I think that we see an immediate need, an immediate need that's going on, and we're trying to, I think someone else said it, like put a bandaid on it or do something right now, even though we know that this is not a permanent fix for some of the challenges that we're facing. And I really do like the integration of the programs. That's something that I've been trying to say that we need for a while. So I am not opposed to hearing maybe not in six weeks, but maybe mid-year or something, what it is if we gave additional funds to parts and wrecks, what they can do with it. Council Member Fleming. Yeah, just a couple of responses to some of the comments from my esteemed council members. One is the notion that the suggestions that I'm making would be multi-year programs. I would put that back to y'all around the police investments. It's not as though next year we're gonna turn around and say, wow, that was a resounding success. Let's, we're done with that. We're gonna keep on making that investment, that million-dollar investment as long as we can afford to. We're not gonna turn it around if it works, and we're probably not gonna turn it around if it doesn't work. And the upstream investments have been shown to reduce need over time. And so the notion of saying we're not gonna do it now, let's look at it next year is probably not gonna be really as helpful to us. If you're gonna make an investment, the best time is now. So while we may not choose to make an investment of the same size, I think that the investments that we make now are more likely to be profitable for us. I hate to talk about children in that way, but they're much more likely to pay off the sooner we make them. So I just encourage you to perhaps step outside of your comfort zone. If the programs that I'm suggesting don't work, I hope that we don't continue to fund them for many years. I think that we should be nimble, be willing to make a mistake. If something doesn't work, we can turn it around. Offering children, services, recreation is a pretty low-risk proposition. Worst case, some kids have fun and we can't pay for it again next year. Council Member Alvarez. Thank you. I do support that EIFD. I support adding police to downtown corridor. I understand how important that is to the city of Santa Rosa. But I do understand that this is what Councilman, Councilwoman Fleming stated, was a long-term investment with long-term solutions. For myself, when I think of removing the blight that transients are to downtown corridor, where are we going to send these folks to? Where have we sent these folks to? District one. When we're talking about creating a unit to arrest folks, who are we arresting? What's the long-term solution? Repetitive in and out of jail? Historically, that's proven already. So for me, it is an additional investment. It could be a great investment. And as Council Member Fleming stated, kids had a lot of fun. Maybe they learned a lifelong lesson. But it has to be a long-term solution. So for me, it's the solution, not the investment. So I just want to say, as far as upstream investments and looking at that, there's a lot of data behind what Council Member Fleming is saying around investing in our youth in after-school programs in particular, in recreation programs in the summertime that keep them out of trouble and off the streets, which we can correlate with the need for law enforcement and interventions as well. What my concern is on tonight's implementation is we're not giving staff enough time to even take a look at what programs they would want to have. And I think when we look at goal-setting and work development plans, that's our opportunity to say, these are the six programs that we feel we need to bring forward so that we can really target our youth in these specific areas. I feel like this is a bit last minute going into this. And in a few months, we're gonna be back at work plan and goal-setting. So nobody has probably worked harder to make sure that these programs are in place. Well, I don't want to say nobody, but I've worked really hard to make sure programs are in place for kids in our community. But I want to make sure that we're doing it in a way that it's thoughtful with our budget as well and that we're not just throwing money at something. And then in five, six months, we actually don't have anything in place because we don't have the staff to put it in place and we don't have a program that we've really made sure that we are able to stand up. So I would be more comfortable having this discussion as we go into goal-setting so that next budget year we can actually look at, we want to invest even maybe a million dollars in these upstream programs. I just think it's a bit more last minute going in tonight. That said, I'd be comfortable allocating probably a smaller amount, not the $700,000, but maybe a smaller amount that maybe staff feels that they could work with. So I'm not sure if that would be an agreeable thought process on that. Perhaps if you and the city manager, we might be able to hear from recreation about whether or not these suite of programs would be feasible within their current staffing. That would be, that was one of my main concerns that you point out, Council Member Fleming is, do we even have the current staffing to add additional programs to recreations at this point in time right now? So by adding programs that to me means staff time as well as maybe stepping back from some of the current programs we have in place. Director Tibbets is here. So could you speak to that and Assistant City Manager Nutt? So good afternoon, Assistant City Manager Jason Nutt, Director of Recreation and Parks Acting, and Jeff is here as well as the Deputy Director of Recreation. I think the challenge we'll have is trying to make sure that we take the information vetted in a way that we can provide you with feedback and data and a complete roster of what it will take for us to implement certain programs because it will likely involve increased staffing as well as increased resources. So it's not an unduable product. It's a function of we know that there are other aspects that are gonna have to be put in play in order for us to be able to create that program that you may be looking for. Jeff, do you have additional information about kind of? Yeah, good evening, Jeff Tibbets, Deputy Director for the Recreation Division. First, I wanna start off just as Deputy Director of the Recreation Division. I wanna say thank you to Council Member Fleming for bringing this forward and to the Council for having this discussion. Before we talk about the resource that is being discussed, I just wanna say what it means to me as someone who's been in the department for over 20 years and what I know it means for my team who works incredibly hard. It's not just a discussion of resource. Regardless what the decision is on the resource, it means a tremendous amount to myself and to my team because it is a discussion of trust. It is a discussion of validation for the work, for the continued stepping up that the team has done incredible work through fires, through pandemics and the value of just kids having fun, right, I mean, as worst case scenario. So I wanna start off with that and just say how much that means to me that this is a conversation that is seen as a conversation to have at this setting and tonight. So thank you for that. Looking bigger picture and as far as the city is concerned, right now there are some resources that we are blessed to have. We've been supported by this Council. We've been supported by our community. So we have Measure M, the County Measure M Parks for All. That is giving us a unique resource that we are really just grasping, coming out of the pandemic and everything on the implementation of programming side. We're just grasping some programs that will start to, the community will start to see the benefits of this upcoming fiscal year. In addition to a funding source through Measure H, we have a general fund baseline contribution on the violence prevention partnership side. As we become more intertwined again with this restructuring and reorganization, that is a resource that we are looking to, to Council Member Alvarez's point earlier, the opening of the meeting tonight around, you know, really trying to rally with the community and get more services back out there. We have 400, about $425,000 in that fund, an additional 190-ish thousand being allocated to it. The 425,000 that's are rolling over, it's in a project account. We are equipped right now with some unique tools that are gonna allow us to expand and do more this upcoming fiscal year. Obviously, the more tools you put in the toolbox, the more that we can do. But also, what we're presenting to you tonight is an opportunity to, again, invest and show value in recreation and parks, not just recreation, but recreation and parks as a department again, to invest a director in our department, to work on a business plan with that new director, and to really give us that guidance of what is our direction, where are we headed, pulling the violence prevention partnership in with Neighborhood Services, that they've always worked together, but to pull that all under the same umbrella again, I'm very excited about where we already are for this upcoming year. Again, you put more tools in the toolbox. I know my team is gonna find some way to use them. They're too passionate not to, but we have a lot of tools in our toolbox for this year. We're talking about reserve funds, we're talking about projections of deficits, those types of things. I think we have a lot of tools to use this year. And if, you know, certainly, I don't think anyone's projecting that the reserve funds are gonna be gone by next year. Thank you again for having this conversation. Thank you again for, I can't stress how much it means to recreation and parks as an apartment to have those conversations and to give that validation. But yes, with more tools, we'll do more, but we have plenty of opportunity this year with what we have right now. Council Member Alvarez. You spoke of tools. So I wanna thank my colleagues for collectively taking one from the Carpenters, which is measure twice cut once. Thank you. Council Member Fleming. Yeah, so to your point about that you have a lot, I'm glad to hear that you have a lot and I know you have a lot to balance too. And I understand the delicacy of trying to get it all done in a way that meets all your constituencies. That said, some of the programs that I was talking about, for example, the drop in summer program, that wouldn't be done, that wouldn't be this summer, that would be summer of 2024. Is that something that you would have the resources to stand up without additional allocations? So yeah, the program you're referencing was called the Playgrounds Program before. Near and dear to my heart, it's actually a program I started as a temp staff in. So there's a lot of strategic conversation that's taking place right now and allocating those funds that we do have between Measure M, Parks for All. We are already working on a Camp Wattot's program, which would serve as schools start serving younger youth, trying to catch up with that gap of our services. So that's something that we're already putting in place. That is not gonna use the fall allocation of our Measure M Parks for All, not to mention we also have reserves building up in that from not having pulled that during the recovery from COVID. But a program like that to stand up the infrastructure, all of that, we could run some form of it, the full form that would be several hundred thousand dollars of a spring Saturday Playgrounds Program, which actually we knew we didn't offer that in the past, but the idea with that would be if we bring it back at some point to have to try the Saturday programming and then run through the summer to run a full program like that. Do I think we have the resources with some of the other goals that we have? No, I don't think so. Okay, that's helpful to know. I'm hearing just a general support but more caution from my council members than a full matching of what we're going to from when I hear allocate to the police department. I wanna suggest that we consider this program because if we wait till goal setting, then it will be stood and we decide we wanna do this drop-in summer program, then it won't be set up till 2025. It would be a $375,000 allocation. I recommend we do that and that we also look for ways to bridge the lunchtime before and after gap so that if a parent needs to work a full day that they're able to do that. So that's something that maybe need to be a little creative with if we only allocate $375,000. If I'm gonna make a paired back proposal, I would suggest that and I'd suggest the tattoo removal program and then strongly encourage you around the tots because my goal for this was to walk away with something for tiny children, for mid-aged children, and for older children slash young adults. And I think that the combination of that while not being on par with the same level of expenditure would leave us with a win for a little bit of something for everybody, including working parents. Council Member O'Crepkey. Thank you. Just to get the question out of the way, where would the tattoo removal program be placed? What department, would that be REC? Would that be VPP? Through the Vice Mayor. So in the past, Valence Prevention actually managed the program and they just worked with a local provider. Okay. So we'll keep that separate, but in regards to this department, Jeff, I really appreciate your candor. The one thing that you brought up that I wasn't even thinking about is that I'm hesitant to put more on REC's table than they already have considering that should we pass this budget as we think we will tonight, God willing. That we hope to have a new director for the Inevitable Parks and REC department in three to four months. In three to four months. So I don't want to, if we say like, hey, can we stress our resources here and do this and do that and then bring someone into a situation where they have no latitude to do the job they wanna do until we free something else up. Like I heard you say basically, if you give us a task, we'll find a way for most things. Wow, that's great. I'd prefer to have you focused on what you're trying to focus on right now and do that well instead of trying to do multiple things pretty good because we give you more. And I think because we're waiting on an Inevitable new director, I wanna give he or she that ability to have some latitude within their department. Any further comments? Okay, seeing none from my colleagues, we're gonna go ahead and start on the votes of the resolution. So we're gonna start with the first two are going to be full-time equivalent staffing for parks and recreation changes as well as the resolution for parks and recreation department budget. Those two will be put on the floor. I will be passing the gavel to council member Rogers to facilitate those two and be stepping away from the dais as I have a conflict of interest from a personal relationship. Thank you. Thank you, Vice Mayor. All right, council member O'Crepia, I believe you have the motion. I do. There's two resolutions. It's okay if we take them both at the same time. Is that correct? All right. So first I'll move a resolution of the council of the city of Santa Rosa recommending the city salary plan and schedule for parks and recreation and authorizing the city manager to implement these changes included in the fiscal year 2023-24 budget and a resolution of the council of the city of Santa Rosa approving the parks and recreation budget within the fiscal year 2023-24 operations and maintenance budget. I'll second. All right, we have a motion and we have a second. Do we have any additional discussion? I have a question. Would this be the appropriate place to suggest additional funding for recreation? Okay, I'm gonna move that we allocate $375,000 to stand up the, I can't remember the name of the program, Playgrounds Program, the Playgrounds Program as a one-year pilot and see if kids have fun and if they don't, we will remove it. So that's a substitute motion from council member Fleming. I'd like it to be a friendly amendment. See if we can get it going that way. Okay, well, substitute a motion then that we take the language as written and add in that additional funding as I set forth. Thank you. All right, we have a substitute motion and a second. Is there any discussion on the substitute motion? All right, we'll take a vote on that first. Madam City Clerk, if you could please call the vote. Thank you, council member Stapp. This one's a tough one for me because I'm conceptually supportive. I mean, who's opposed to Playgrounds? But I am concerned with the budget headwinds, right? And I'm also concerned about how this motion, how this idea is coming up at the very last minute. I too would prefer this would come up in goal setting or at a different time. So on that measure, I'm gonna say no, again, while being conceptually supportive of the upstream investments that you're trying to make. Council member Chris Rogers. No. Council member O'Crepkey. No. Council member Fleming. Yes. Council member Alvarez. All right. Council member McDonald is abstaining. Mayor Rogers. Hi. Let the record show this was a split three, three vote with one abstention, the motion fails. All right, we'll revert back to the original motion which was council member O'Crepkey's motion. Is there any additional discussion on that measure? All right, let's call the vote. Council member Stapp. Aye. Council member Rogers. Aye. Council member O'Crepkey. Aye. Council member Fleming. Aye. Council member Alvarez. Aye. Vice mayor McDonald is abstaining. Mayor Rogers. Aye. Let the record show that passes with six affirmative votes. All right, council member O'Crepkey. We may wanna give. We bring back the vice mayor. The vice mayor may return. If you're okay with that. I was really gonna rearrange the dates while she was gone, but yeah. You wanna quabble with me some more tonight? We'll go back to you, council member O'Crepkey. Thank you. All right, this has six parts, so bear with me. I'll move a resolution of the council of the city of Santa Rosa approving the budget for the city of Santa Rosa for fiscal year 2023 to 24, the capital improvement program budget for fiscal year 2023 to 24 and establishing reserves for the 2023-24 fiscal year and a resolution of the council of the city of Santa Rosa amending the city salary plan and schedule and authorizing the city manager to implement these changes included in the fiscal year 2023-2024 budget and a resolution of the council of the city of Santa Rosa approving certain projects within the fiscal year 2023-2024 capital improvement program budget year, CIP projects 2264 and 2456 and a resolution of the council of the city of Santa Rosa approving certain projects within the fiscal year 2023-2024 capital improvement program budget year, CIP project 2424 and a resolution of the council of the city of Santa Rosa approving certain projects within the fiscal year 2023-2024 capital improvement program budget year, CIP project 2269 and a resolution of the council of the city of Santa Rosa setting this dorm water utility budget and determining the amount of eligible funding that has been received from the flood control zone, one aid benefit assessment and fiscal year 2022-23, and based there on setting the stormwater assessment per equivalent residential unit for the fiscal year 2023-24, and amend with two officers to be dedicated to the downtown enforcement team and two field evidence technicians. I second. It's been moved in second at any discussion. Council Member Rogers. Yeah, I'm gonna. Oh, pardon me. I just wanted to clarify that those changes to add the officers in the field technicians would be into the first resolution approving the budget for the fiscal year 2023-24. Thank you for the clarification for the minutes. Vice. Sorry to interrupt. I did want to ask if council could please look at slide six of the presentation. We did have some proposed changes there for staffing that would result in overall savings to the general fund, eliminating the vacant assistant city attorney, adding an employee relations manager and downgrading that vacant community engagement coordinator if council would consider those or if they'd like to forego that at this time. Yes, so that's my bad. I didn't read my post-it note. I read this whole thing. Thank you. So yes, with the staffing recommendations amended to accept the staff recommendations and also the proposal by council member Rogers to come back for labor negotiations to review the cost. Just so I'm clear on that specific amendment. Council member Alvarez, are you okay with that as a second? My second stands. Thank you. So now we're back on the motion as amended by council member O'Crepkey and now we're at discussion. Did staff have something else that they needed to clarify for us before we move forward on council discussion? I do, thank you. One question about the labor negotiations. Did council member O'Crepkey, I didn't catch that part. Are we reducing the labor negotiations professional services or? No, it was the recommendation from council member Rogers to come back to make sure he can, he'll eloquently put him far better than I can. When we go to discussion, perhaps he can clarify that in the motion. Thank you. Thank you. So council member Rogers. Yeah, the clarification was that if we exceed the initial 250 that it comes back as an information item for council and for us to be able to continue to evaluate and provide oversight over that contract. I was going to offer a friendly amendment though. Just what I heard from staff was that increasing the police budget could potentially put us out of compliance with measure O. So there'd be a corresponding, if when the final numbers are run, that does happen, that additional funding, whatever we need to become compliant was added into the park's budget to maintain what we have agreed to with measure O. If I could make a point. So for the $250,000 for contract negotiations, you're not giving me what I need to be successful. I understand that we want to manage it. And so do we on our end, but with no city attorney, no chief, coming in with a new HR director. While I'm not excited about having anything over $500,000 or a million dollars for contract negotiations, $250,000 does not allow me to be successful even opening up the contracts. So as a possible compromise, what if we left the dollar figure where you proposed it with the agreement that quarterly you'll report back to council on how much we're spending on those labor negotiations? Does that work? Great. Just so we're clear on the motion, are we going back to increase the cost for that contract or do we need to stick with the motion that's on the table? That's, I'm offering that as a friendly amendment to council member O'Crepkey to remove what I had proposed around the labor negotiations and instead add in the oversight component to the dollars, but leave it, leave the city manager with the resources that she needs to be successful, at least initially. Is that clear for the minutes? Is that clear for staff? Thank you. Yes, I'll take that from the amendment. So I like to give a little bit because I know she's gonna be meeting me over the head of the rest of the staff later. Yes, the second still stands. Thank you. And might I add a friendly amendment as well? Let me make sure that council member Rogers is done with his comments. Yeah, I just wanted to make sure that we didn't find ourselves in any type of legal issues if we do increase the police side of the measure O budget without a corresponding increase if we need to on the park side. So I wanted to make sure that that was included in the budget so that staff has the leeway that they need in order to keep us compliant. I think that's clear for the direction. Yeah. Thank you. Council member 20. And to that point, I don't know if this would be useful, but what I would like to see, and I've brought up a few times, would be the $100,000 allocation to the tattoo removal program to help gang members who would like to turn their lives around. And that would go under the, as council member Ocrepe got clarification under the violence prevention partnership. Are you making an amendment too? I'm offering a friendly amendment. A substitute motion. No substitute motion. I'm offering a friendly amendment. Is somebody seconding that? Well, he has accepted to start. Which could, I'm assuming you're also saying that which could possibly be funded by any funds that has to be allocated to violence prevention to coincide with keeping it in. What I'm suggesting is right too. What council member Rogers is citing is that there might be an overage. It's something that I'd hope to add in. I don't know that the overage will add up to $100,000. So if there is a delta between the required addition per law and the 100,000 needed to re stand up the program that we make that allocation, I think it'd be relatively small. It's going to be less than $100,000. But it could potentially change people's lives. So if, if I may, I believe that the where we would pay for the tattoo removal is in the recreation budget that we just passed. Okay, I was given information earlier today that it lived in violence prevention. Which is in the recreation budget. Okay, all right. So I'm a little confused then. If council member Rogers is talking about adding more to the recreation budget, but he's writing more to the police, do we need to amend the recreation budget? So it just passed? So what he's doing is saying that if the additions to the general fund budget that would cause changes to our measure O baseline, he's just putting a blanket statement out that says, make the administrative changes to add money to parks to keep us within compliance with that ordinance. Okay, I understand. Thank you. Okay. Is there a way for us to make this program happen tonight without going back to the budget item that we already passed? Well, I think in deputy director Tibbets could probably answer this better than me, but I would say that, as I've said before, if they have it within their existing violence prevention partnership budget to be able to stand up that type of a program, that would be where you would go at this point and then augment it out next fiscal year budget. So that program historically when it was funded has been funded through the choice grant application process. So it would be something that if we received applications to provide the service could be considered in any of our choice grants through the money that's already allocated for those grants. Okay, thank you. We'll move on then. Any more comments? Okay, we'll go ahead and go to a roll call vote on the motion on the floor. Thank you, council member Stapp. Aye. Council member Chris Rogers. Aye. Council member Ocrubkey. Aye. Council member Fleming. Aye. Council member Alvarez. Aye. Vice mayor McDonald. Aye. Mayor Rogers. Aye. Let the record show that passed unanimously. Yeah, we said we were going to clap after every item. Last one. I move a resolution of the council of the city of Santa Rosa amending the transaction and use tax implementation plan for gang prevention intervention services. Second. That was quick. I'll give that second to council member Alvarez. Council member Rogers. Is there any discussion? We'll call the roll call vote. Thank you, council member Stapp. Aye. Council member Rogers. Aye. Council member Ocrubkey. Aye. Council member Fleming. Aye. Council member Alvarez. Aye. Vice mayor McDonald. Aye. Mayor Rogers. Aye. Let the record show that passed with seven affirmative votes. Now we're going to be moving on to item 16.1. And just quickly I do want to say a quick thank you to staff for all your significant amount of work. I apologize. This was a little bit disjointed tonight and I just want to say thank you so much for your great presentations and for answering all of our questions. Madam city clerk, do you have anything to report out on item 16.1? No, this report was provided for information only. Anything on 16.2 for written communications? No. Okay. We'll facilitate number 17 public comments on non-agenda matters. Thank you. We are now taking public comments on item. If I could, Madam clerk on 16.3. I'm so sorry. Council member Rogers, I apologize. Just as a comment, I had a conversation with assembly member Damon Connolly. He's our newest representative representing basically Highway 12 South through our community. He did ask that the city review AB 99, one of his pieces of legislation that he's working on. It's related to communities having a say in pesticide use. Not asking us to take a position right now, just asking given our ability through the mayor and through our legislative platform for us to review whether it would be appropriate for us to provide support. We actually need to take public comment on item 16. If there's no more comments from the council. Thank you. Can you facilitate item 16? Thank you. We are now taking public comment on item 16. If you are participating via Zoom and want to make a comment, please raise your hand or dial star nine. If you are participating in council chamber, please make your way to the podium. Seeing no one in council chamber wishing to provide public comment. I also see no hands being raised via Zoom. We'll go to item number 17 now. We are now taking public comments on item 17, non-agenda matters. If you'd like to make a comment on non-agenda matters, please make your way to the podium. If you are participating via Zoom, please dial star nine or raise your hand. Vice mayor, there are no hands being raised via Zoom and no one making their way to the podiums for public comment. Thank you, Madam City Clerk. And with that, we are adjourned.