 We'll call this study session of the San Rosa City Council's March 26th agenda to order. Madam Assistant or Deputy City Manager, would you like to introduce the item? Yes, thank you, Mayor. Item 3.1 is the Casa Compact and Legislative Update. Rebecca Long, I believe, is here to present. Good afternoon, Mayor Schwedhelm, Council members. Rebecca Long, I'm the government, excuse me, government relations manager for the Metropolitan Transportation Commission and the Association of Bay Area Governments and appreciate the opportunity to be here today to give you kind of an overview of what the Casa Compact is, the process, and really pivot to talking about housing bills that are currently under consideration in Sacramento. So we'd like to start this presentation with some context for why the Casa process was launched by MTC and ABAG about 18 or so months ago. And so as part of the long-range transportation plan process that MTC and ABAG engage in, we were looking at what is the forecast of housing affordability, what is the forecast of traffic congestion 25 years from now, and in large part due to the huge mismatch between housing production and job creation over the last decade or so, we were seeing very concerning forecasts in terms of overall cost of living, the share of household budgets being dedicated to transportation, and housing was reaching two-thirds for lower-income households, and in large part due to this significant mismatch between housing supply and job growth. This slide really illustrates the differences relative to different income quartiles. So the Regional Housing Needs Assessment, or RENA, allocates shares of housing that's needed across different income spectrums for the region as a whole. And you can see here the blue bar is the housing need under RENA for different households by income, and the gray is the job growth. And you can see that, especially at the lower-income and higher-income share, the supply was very much not keeping pace with demand, and so what you have then is significant displacement pressures as higher-income households start to move down sort of the housing supply ladder, if you will, pushing more pressure on lower-income households. In short, as the title says, the region has not built enough housing to meet demand, really at all income levels. So CASA was formed in late 2017 by MTC and ABAC to come up with game-changing ideas to address the housing affordability crisis, and the idea was to put the key stakeholders in a room that would be needed to reach any consensus on significant changes at the state level. So the panel included representatives of the business community, labor, housing advocates, social equity advocates, as well as local government representatives. The basic foundation of CASA was this premise that we failed to produce enough housing for residents of all income levels, as I mentioned, really the supply issue, that we failed to preserve the existing affordable housing that exists and that we failed to adequately protect current residents from displacement, and I'm sure we can all think of friends or family members that either have had to leave the region or that can't remain in the region due to the high cost of housing. So the CASA Compact was adopted in December of last, what should I say, 2018. Sorry about that. I just caught that typo today. You always see something new. So it was adopted last December and it includes really 10 elements, and just to orient you, I am going to briefly walk through each of these, but the first three are really addressing the protection part of the 3P. Element 4 has to do with accessory dwelling units, which could be categorized as a production item. 5, 6, and 7 are production-related, really designed to accelerate the rate of housing construction. Number 8 has to do with public land and making that more readily available for housing, and then 9 and 10 have to do with identifying new revenue sources that can be used region-wide to pay for all 3Ps. And then finally, establishment of a regional housing enterprise that would oversee the distribution of the revenue and provide technical assistance to local governments. So next I'm going to walk through each item pretty quickly, because I do want to spend some time at the end to talk about legislation, but since that you have dedicated this time to, as a study session, I will go through each one. So again, just to orient you really, the idea of the 10 compact items is that they are all needed to address all 3Ps. And so this first one is just cause eviction policy, which is commonly viewed as essential to be part of any kind of tenant protection. So the idea here is to basically establish in state law what are the reasons why a tenant can be evicted, what are the just causes? And there can be fault and no fault. An example of fault would be failure to pay rent. An example of no fault would be landlord wants to sell the house. And so both are permissible, but there's a proposal basically to require that tenants be notified in writing. What is the reason for their eviction? Many, many times that tenants are evicted in the Bay Area. They don't even receive that, and that obviously makes it much more difficult for them to contest their eviction. The next piece which is really goes hand in hand with just cause eviction is a rent cap. This is often referred to as anti-rent gouging, trying to differentiate it from regular old rent control. And the reason for that differentiation is that it does propose quite a bit higher of an allowable increase in a given year. So what CASA recommended was the CPI, Consumer Price Index, which give or take it's around 3%, plus 5% in any given year. And so what the group was really trying to balance was the concern that with rent control, you potentially create a disincentive to build new housing. You potentially create a disincentive for a person to rent their housing. And so what can be sort of that sweet spot, if you will, that allows tenants to remain in their home, not subject to what have been not that unusual 20%, 30%, even doubling of rent in some parts of the region. It's highlighted here as a bullet, but it's important to note that for all of the CASA compact recommendations, they were framed as an emergency proposal for 15 years, not unlike the Sonoma County provisions related to rebuilding post-fire. And so this one as well was proposed to be in effect for 15 years. Another important just nuance is it does allow banking. So the notion that if a landlord has capital improvements to make, those can be passed on. And also if they have not taken past along those types of increases, that can be done in a future year. The next item on the protection side is a proposal to use some of the additional regional funding that would be generated to pay for emergency rent assistance and also access to legal counsel. This is already done in a number of jurisdictions and the idea would be to make this available region-wide and to take that cost off the books for local governments and something that would be provided for at a regional level. The proposal is that the access to counsel would not be means-tested, but the emergency rent assistance would. The next item is essentially trying to extend best practices related to accessory dwelling units region-wide. So there have been a number of bills passed in Sacramento in the last few years to try to encourage local agencies to make it easier for homeowners to build ADUs. I think there's a sense that, you know, there's some ambiguity. There's some lack of clarity. It's not necessarily enforceable. And so this is trying to just make it that much clearer what should be allowed at the local level with respect to ADUs. The proposal also requires the impact fees be assessed on a per square foot basis and recommends establishment of small homes and a building code. All right, the next item is one that's probably one of the, gains the most, garners the most interest, and that is to minimum zoning near transit. And so building a lot on Senator Wiener's bill from last year, SB 827, this proposal was finalized before SB 50 was put in print, but that is Senator Wiener's current bill. I am going to talk about that in more detail at the end. There are quite a few differences. I'll just note that at the outset between this recommendation and SB 50. The CASA recommendation was to allow for up zoning near high quality bus service, as well as major transit stops defined as rail and ferry stations with height increases up to 55 feet allowed near rail and ferry and up to 36 feet allowed near high quality bus. And the bus frequencies are pretty stringent, and so there are not a whole lot of places that qualify as having high quality bus because it does require 30-minute headways on the weekend as well as 50-minute headways during the weekday peak. The recommendation is to retain all other local development standards such as setbacks, et cetera, as long as it doesn't conflict with the increased height allowed, and then to defer up zoning in certain sensitive communities. Excuse me. So the CASA committee had a working group that looked into how are we going to define sensitive communities, and they didn't actually reach complete consensus, but as far as they could get was the intersection between MTC's communities of concern, which are defined on the basis primarily of socioeconomic factors, as well as the Bay Conservation and Development Commission's vulnerable communities. And so the intersection are the areas that are outlined in red that you can see somewhat better on the zoomed-in boxes to the right there. You can see that Santa Rosa actually does have a fair number of sensitive communities that do actually overlap with some of the rail stations in the area. So the idea in terms of how sensitive communities are treated differently is the up zoning that would be allowed, and this is similar with SB 50, and the CASA recommendation is there would be a deferral period to allow the community to come up with kind of a context sensitive plan and figure out exactly how they're going to meet the intent of higher density in that area as opposed to being subject to a change right away. Can I confirm that deferral is optional based on what the entity, the municipality wants to do? That's correct, yes, and the same in SB 50. You don't have to take advantage of the deferral, but if the community wanted to they could. This next item is framed as good government reforms to the housing approval process, and the idea here is to just make it a lot more transparent to developers. What are the rules in this particular community for building? What are the fees? What properties are designated as historic and requiring that those types of things be set at the point when a development application is submitted, that the ball not move over time after that? It also recommends limiting down zoning and moratoria on building and standardizing impact fees sort of at a regional level so that they aren't sort of arbitrary across jurisdictions. This next item is really trying to get at the missing middle, namely housing and households, I should say, that are not traditionally considered low income, but more in that 120 area median income all the way up to 150, and so trying to streamline projects that are zoning compliant that are already zoned for housing, but meet certain restrictions in terms of providing a certain degree of affordability, paying prevailing wage, using apprentice labor for those zoning compliant projects, providing that they be CEQA exempt, and that there be no more than three de novo public hearings for the project to move forward. A de novo public hearing basically means that the project hasn't changed, so if the planning commission were to hear the project and recommend significant changes to it, the clock would restart, but if the project basically stayed the same through three different local bodies, that would be considered the three that the project would be entitled to. As a way to help pay for the affordability, this item recommends various concessions be allowed similar to the density bonus. One of them that is recommended in the Casa Compact was to provide tax abatement. However, the legislative council for the state of California that advises the legislature has indicated that that is not constitutional, so that piece, which has been of some concern to local governments in terms of reduced tax revenue, is off the table. The next item has to do with unlocking public land for housing, so basically making it more possible to build housing on public land. Of course, we're not talking about protected open space, but land that would allow housing as an underlying use would be allowed to be used for that purpose. And then lastly, funding to finance the compact. Casa did an analysis to look at what is the overall funding shortfall to provide the level of affordable housing that's needed region-wide based on basically our existing forecast of population, what was in Planned Bay Area, and given sort of the various funding sources that exist today at the federal level, at the state level to subsidize affordable housing, the gap is $2.5 billion. Not wanting to assume responsibility for that entire gap, the Casa Committee landed on a target of $1.5 billion a year, not a small sum, and took the approach that given that this is really a regional problem and it affects all of us, it affects us as individuals, it affects businesses, it affects property owners, the burden of paying for this should be spread across multiple parties. So this slide, which I'm sure many of you have already seen, is a menu of options. It's not a recommendation because the Casa Steering Committee really couldn't land on what is the proposed tax and how much should they be. So instead, they put forward these different options and you can see the different rates are associated with different revenue levels. Again, those are illustrative. And now initially, as this slide evolved, everything was set at $100 million, just and it made it more clear that it was just illustrative, but as conversations took place, various entities were more comfortable seeing different rates. And so again, as this is discussed in Sacramento and within the Bay Area, you might see some of these change. Maybe there would be a conversation about the sales tax should be off the table altogether or maybe people would feel that it generates so much money region-wide that maybe we should consider a half-cent sales tax, which would generate $800 million. So that's kind of the way in which to view this is it's a menu. There are Xs through the options, which have already been, again, eliminated on the basis of conversations with legislative counsel. So mandatory revenue sharing from local government to the region is not considered constitutional under the state's constitution. That was redundant under Prop 13, et cetera. And then the vacant homes tax imposed at a kind of regional level, it was not considered viable, primarily due to it being a mandate on local governments that would need to then assess what are the vacant properties, et cetera. So the CASA steering committee did get into, okay, so if we're generating one and a half billion, obviously, we have specific targets in mind. And so they proposed this allocation, which leaves still quite a bit of flexibility that would need to be addressed in any legislation, but settled on a minimum target of 60% for affordable housing production, for a minimum, excuse me, up to 20% for preservation, up to 10% for tenant protection services, such as the emergency rent assistance, access to counsel. And then last but not least, up to 10% as incentive funding to local jurisdictions to make up for some of the lost revenue related to potentially lowering impact fees as a way to drive down housing costs, et cetera, so that the regional housing entity would make those funds available back to local governments. This slide illustrates sort of the next step in that process. So you've got that box that just goes through those percentages I just described. And then to the right, there's a proposal to have 75% of the funds return to the county of origin in terms of revenue generation. So if you sort of imagine, you know, all the local jurisdictions, the funds are flowing up to the county, 75% would come back to the county, 25%, at least 75%, 25% would be maintained at the regional level to be distributed on the basis of kind of regional priorities. So, you know, one county might get, you know, at least 100% at the end of the day, another county might get less. But the idea being that to ensure that there is some flexibility and ensure that the funds are used for the highest priority needs in the region over time. The cost of compact didn't get into, you know, how often are these percentages met? Is it, you know, annual? Is it every five years? So conversations are ongoing about that. But, you know, having worked on a lot of transportation funding programs, I think you do want to have some flexibility over time to meet these types of targets. And lastly, a body to receive all this additional funding and oversee it and track progress. So the cost of compact recommended establishment was called a regional housing enterprise. It would not have any zoning, land use authority or play any kind of regulatory role. It's really viewed as, again, an entity to distribute the funds and a partner with local governments. You know, we have many big cities in the Bay Area that have still significant capacity in terms of entitling, you know, land, helping to fund affordable housing. But many don't, particularly with the loss of redevelopment. And so the idea here would be that a regional housing entity could really help provide that additional capacity to local governments that, again, have generally lost a lot of that when you're talking about smaller agencies. All right. So CASA is complete. The CASA document was finalized in December. The Metropolitan Transportation Commission took action to authorize their chairman to sign the document in December, which did not constitute endorsement of all of the ideas, particularly not all of the revenue ideas. Likewise, ABAC authorized the president to sign the compact, but was very clear that it was not an endorsement really for both agencies. It was about recognizing that housing is a huge concern, not only for the Bay Area but statewide, that it's going to remain a top agenda item in Sacramento and that the compact creates some kind of a structure by which to think about, you know, what kind of bills are needed, what a package might look like that addresses all three Ps. And as part of the ABAC executive board's motion, they requested that we not only do significant outreach, which we've been doing, which today constitutes some part of that, but also form a housing legislation working group of local elected officials from all nine counties who have not been a part of the conversation. We're not participants in the steering committee that worked on CASA, etc. So we're close to having a full set of members for that group. It's going to include two representatives for cities for each county and one representative of the county. So 27 members plus the legislation committee chair for ABAC and the MTC legislation committee chair as well as the vice chair. So that's kind of a structure that we're putting in place to review all of the bills that are percolating in Sacramento and then MTC, ABAC staff will be going through our usual process where we bring bills to our legislation committee for action. We aren't sponsoring any of the CASA bills. We are watching them carefully and engaging, you know, sort of on a technical basis, but until we take action, we're not advocating for them. However, I have been reading them carefully, and so I am going to give you some insights into kind of some of the ones that are much more substantive. So this is just the first page of two tables that just highlight some of the big ones that are again on these sort of three P's. So there are a number of bills on the protection side. You'll note that quite a few of these members are from the Bay Area, though not all. Assemblymember Bloom from Southern California has proposed a bill to loosen the Costa Hawkins prohibition against rent control for newer buildings and also for single-family homes. So that's AB 36, AB 1481 and 1482. These are still spot bills, so if you were to look at them now, they don't really have any substance to them, but they will be the bills that will propose some kind of just cause eviction and also anti-rent gouging. For all of this, I would just note again that the Costa Compact recommended 15 years and the bills were, or the recommendations were really specific to the Bay Area in an acknowledgement that the Bay Area has the worst housing crisis in the state, but these are legislators working in the state legislature and right now they are proposing statewide items of legislation that most of which do not have a sunset. AB 68 and AB 69 by Assemblymember Ting have quite a bit of resemblance to some of the recommendations in the Costa Compact with respect to ADUs. 1483 and AB 1484 by Assemblymember Grayson also have quite a bit of resemblance to the good governance recommendations, so the idea of not allowing fees to change after a development project has been submitted requiring that local agencies post on their website, what are all the rules with respect to housing, et cetera. AB 1486 is Assemblymember Ting's bill. He's been interested in surplus land for housing for some time, so this is very similar to a bill he had last year. Senate Bill 4 by Senator McGuire is an upzoning near transit and also has a neighborhood multifamily component in it that is a lot more modest than SB 50. SB 13 also has to do with ADUs prohibiting some parking requirements, limiting fees. SB 50 I'm going to get into in more detail in a minute. SB 330 by Senator Skinner is, this is actually a limited term proposal, so it declares a housing emergency statewide for 10 years, and then within certain areas which are not specified yet in the bill, but there are areas that have very low vacancy rates and that have much higher rent than statewide average, there would be a prohibition on any downzoning or any kind of building moratorium, and it essentially locks in whatever your zoning is now, you can't downzone in those particular areas, and it includes not just a prohibition on local governments downzoning but also the voters, because there have been a number of proposals passed by voters in recent years that have put a cap on population, for example, or new housing units, so it would prohibit that. The bill also has some provisions related to housing building standards, so for example, buildings that don't currently meet the state's building standards but are inhabited, asking the building standards commission to come up with kind of a lower standard in recognition that people may be living in those homes, maybe they're not optimal in terms of the standards but can we have a slightly more health and safety type of standard for buildings that actually are inhabited today. Senator Glazer has a bill SB 621 that includes some sequestream lining for affordable housing, and then next, on the funding side and preservation, I've lumped together with funding because you need funding to do housing preservation. There are a number of different bills, ACA1 by Assemblymember Aguirre Curry would lower the vote threshold for local housing measures, including infrastructure as well to 55% instead of two-thirds. Assemblymember Chiu has a bill related to reauthorizing redevelopment. AB 1487 also a spot bill right now, but this is Assemblymember Chiu's bill that would basically establish that regional housing enterprise and authorized funding measures on the ballot. We don't know yet what measures will be included in that, but that bill is intended to kind of carry both of those elements together, both the funding and the entity. Senator Bell has two bills that would be important in terms of raising new revenue for affordable housing. One has to do with allowing the ERAF, the Education Revenue Augmentation Fund, I believe it is, that is currently transferred local property taxes going to the state for schools, allowing a portion of that to be held and then applied for essentially by local governments to pay for infrastructure to pay for housing, you know, capped at their particular contribution to ERAF. So it's very convoluted from a finance standpoint that the essential idea is to allow more local property tax to be available for affordable housing and local infrastructure projects. SB 128 is similar to the governor's proposal and it would allow issuance of tax increment financing bonds without voter approval for enhanced infrastructure financing districts, which were authorized in a bill by Senator Bell that really haven't been used much, I think in large part due to the voter approval requirement. I also wanted to include in here the governor's trailer bill related to housing because it is a significant source of one-time funding. So the governor's proposed 750 million, 250 million of which would be focused on planning for local governments. Half of that would be distributed directly to local jurisdictions to do zoning updates, environmental review, specific plans, general plans, et cetera, all the work that you know goes into planning for new housing and then a portion would stay at the regional level to do kind of more of that on a regional scale and then 500 million would come directly back in flexible funding to local jurisdictions as a reward essentially for building new housing. The details of which are kind of TBD in the bill and then lastly more of a stick approach. AB 1568 is the McCarty bill, which is I would say the stronger version of what the governor has also proposed in his trailer bill which is tying transportation funds specifically local street and road funding to housing production. So in the McCarty bill it ratchets up over time but if certain production levels aren't met relative to the arena targets then a local jurisdiction would lose access to those funds. So that's kind of the high-level overview. Now I'm just going to go into a little bit more detail on some of the ADU bills, SB 50 and SB 4. So I mentioned excuse me that Assembly Member Ting has two bills. AB 68 would require an ADU of at least 800 square feet and 16 feet in height to be allowed just across the board. It requires that the permit time be shortened from 120 days to 60 days and basically if a local jurisdiction has not adopted an ordinance consistent with the bill it requires that junior ADUs be approved ministerially. A junior ADU is a ADU that's within the single family home or the main house entirely. AB 68 is the bill that requires establishment of small home building standards that I think a lot of folks have found that the lack of that does impede more development of ADUs. It also has an enforcement component that HCD can notify the attorney general if they find that a local ADU ordinance violates state law and then it allows a local agency to amend its ordinance to comply with state law or adopt specific findings on why they disagree. Okay so now I'm going to go into SB 50. I won't read every one of these bullets but I did want to provide some detail on this because it's such a complex bill. So this bill has also changed quite a bit so it was amended on March 11th and it now not only has a transit component relative to trying to incentivize additional housing but also a job-rich designation. So in those areas that are either considered transit rich or job-rich a developer that meets certain requirements and there are a lot of labor requirements there are affordability requirements so there are a lot of requirements attached to a project that is to get these incentives but if they have met all of those then they're allowed up to three incentives under the state's density bonus law so that could allow them to for example have a mixed-use project have a waiver from development standards such as setbacks they're also allowed a waiver from any parking minimums over 0.5 per unit and then the next piece so that's for any the next piece is it gets sort of more stringent if a project is within a half a mile to a quarter mile of a major transit stop so those first ones would apply to job-rich areas or or high quality bus but if you're close to major transit stop within a half a mile you're allowed up to 45 feet and 2.5 floor area ratio if you're within a quarter mile you're allowed up to 55 feet so this has definitely come down a bit from where senator wiener was last year I believe it was 75 feet but it still has a height component included but the height component notably does not apply anymore to the high quality bus or bus stops so the job-rich areas we don't know exactly what they are yet I think we can all you know take some guesses but they have not yet been mapped we understand senator wiener's office doesn't tend to provide a map before the bill is heard in committee but there's really two components they are areas that hcd and the office of planning and research would determine are associated with positive educational and economic outcomes across all income levels within an area and also would allow new housing to basically shorten one's commute so if there were houses there people would not have to commute quite as far uh affordability requirements in the bill um they're only applicable to projects with more than 10 units um all projects would be allowed to pay in lieu fees um projects over 20 units could provide onsite inclusionary um and then if it's off-site there's a desire expressed that it be within close proximity to the main project um but if not if that's not feasible somewhere within the jurisdiction um similar to uh the casa compact there's this uh sensitive community designation within um sp50 and in fact um in the most recent version of the bill senator wiener specifically references the um definition that was used in the casa compact for the bay area so um basically this intersection between mtc's communities of concern and the bcdc is what's proposed um for the bay area for the first five years of the bill and then it's um there's a process to update that um i think by the by mtca bag in in coordination with hcd so similar again to the casa compact to the sensitive community areas would have any kind of development deferred uh more consistent with the upzoning deferred for five years while a plan is developed um and i think what's not totally clear yet is what does it mean to then demonstrate that the plan is consistent with um the intent of the bill so it's i think there's going to need to be some um additional work there because obviously i don't think the intent is just make a plan and it doesn't matter what's in the plan um there's protections related to uh tenant uh tenants that are living in the area you know uh that's adjacent to transit so basically there would be no demolition allowed in any kind of parcels um that have had tenants in within the last seven years so that's that's sp50 and now last but not least getting into a little bit of the details on sp4 so um senator maguire's bill has kind of two parts there's a neighborhood multifamily project and then there's a eligible um tod project for the tod project there is a height allowance um and again this is within a half a mile of existing or planned transit station so rail or ferry um there is a height exception allowed relative to current zoning of up to 15 feet above the existing highest allowable height there's also uh some some modifications to parking requirements so um no minimum parking for projects within a quarter mile of existing or planned uh transit station and then the minimum density for metro areas is 30 units an acre and 20 units per acre for suburban jurisdictions um excuse me there's uh some qualifiers a lot of qualifiers in sp sp4 uh one of the sort of definitions that's relevant is what is an eligible parcel and so that has to be a parcel in the jurisdiction that has not that still has unmet regional housing needs um it also needs to be on a site that allows residential use is infill and for the neighborhood multifamily projects that NMP their new acronym that has to those are only apply on parcels that are currently vacant land and they would be subject to all zoning requirements such as height setbacks and lot coverage but the main change there is that the neighborhood multifamily would allow um duplexes um in kind of urban areas I believe it is um and excuse me duplexes in a non-urban setting and four plexes in an urban setting that meet basic zoning requirements and for these projects sp4 recommends a sequo exemption so that pretty much wraps it up and maybe I will leave things uh with this long table in case you want to get into more details there so I know that was a lot of information shared and I look forward to your comments and your questions again uh as mtca bag staff we're really in the mode right now of analyzing all of these bills and we're going to be convening this housing legislation working group to um hear the insights and ideas that um local elected officials like yourself have so that that can inform uh suggested amendments and positions that we recommend to our board thank you great thank you so much for that presentation I really appreciate you coming to santa rosa and I also want to acknowledge many of you in the audience who are representing other jurisdictions because this is clearly a regional issue I know we have several electeds and other representatives and boards and commissions so thank you so much for that presentation council questions go ahead jack thank you mr mayor I have a couple of questions you know one question I had is how was the five percent rent cap kind of arrived at was some of the thought process that occurred to get there so I would say it was really just a give or take you know a give and take I should say uh process right I think that many of the folks who were part of the steering committee and technical committee on the developer side and the business side were opposed to any kind of a rent cap um and so that was the sort of compromise that was um landed on so again it's five percent plus cpi okay so developers actually had input into the process begrudgingly said we'll accept five percent that's right and that's kind of the nature of the the cost of cpi of the cost of compact I mean everybody who was part of that steering committee walked away unhappy with certain aspects of the compact and it really was viewed as all of this needs to move together um now that we're in the stage of you know Sacramento that's much harder because these are all individual bills but that was the idea that if we can get you know some of these streamlining ideas um address you know acceleration and and reduce some of the impediments to housing production we're willing to acknowledge that you know there is a displacement problem and that when you do up zone there are pressures that can um result in unfair rent increases or very difficult rent increases okay my second question was I think it was an element seven was on the labor side it indicated prevailing wages and apprentice labor is that apprentice 20% is that apprentice higher percentage is it apprentice journeyman what's the the defined labor of of that I don't know the answer to that question sometimes you know I wasn't part of all of the CASA negotiations in some cases where it's unstated it's because they didn't reach consensus right so certain details aren't there for a reason um but I'll try to find out if that one did have a specific um level in mind okay let's get back to you thank you um also on the uh I assume this might not be a question that you're prepared to answer but I am curious the 75 return to the county that's going to go through I assume the county tax assessor's office and then does that get a portion to the city at the current tax share rates at that point or is the county administering all those funds so great question I think that does fall in the category of they didn't get far enough along to determine exactly how the county portion would be administered I do think it was a return to source to the county by design it was not intended to be returned to source all the way down to the local jurisdiction simply because you know there's no guarantee I think we all would like to see if we're raising new money for affordable housing that's actually getting used and you know there's no guarantee that every jurisdiction in the Bay Area is going to have projects or needs in terms of tenant protection etc at the exact rate by which they generate revenue and so the intent was really to provide a you know close to return to source to the county and then determine within the county how that would be developed one of the ideas being discussed is should it go back to the county housing department in some cases the county housing department might love to do that and might have sufficient capacity to do that in other cases maybe it would make more sense for the regional agency to administer that through you know a competitive grant process so that the regional agency could ensure that every county is getting its 75% return to share but they would administer down to the jurisdictions within that county all right thank you my last question my my limited understanding of the cost of compact is that in the end it ultimately comes as a take it or leave it package or was that my misinterpreting the intent we won't be able to basically take an olacart menu here and say we like that we don't like this I think that was the idea behind the cost of compact yes in that we think that all of these are needed and so they didn't for example prioritize and say you know these are our top three it was that we need in order to address the housing crisis in the region when you progress on all three Ps and these are the ten items that you know they as a group felt made the most sense to move together as I mentioned you know how that works in practice is going to be really tricky politically but that was the idea that it's a it's a package thank you no further questions other questions thank you for your presentation I have a couple of questions about job growth in Sonoma County and in comparison with with housing growth one of the bills suggested and I don't know that it will go through said that you know that we wanted units to keep up with housing and I was wondering if a ratio had been set if it was at a one to one or if it was a more realistic number that not every person who has a job requires one whole unit right I think that this is something I've certainly talked to our planners about I think the general sense is some somewhere around 1.7 jobs per household you know makes sense it's not certainly not one for one target set in the cost of compact I think those those charts are really just to illustrate that you know across the board while there's huge differences particularly in terms of net jobs relative to housing in the south bay in San Francisco you know even some of the northern counties have a big mismatch between job growth relative to to housing and so it's not trying to target you know this sort of ideal 1.7 we're very far from that but just trying to narrow that gap and recognizing that that's a big source of the crisis that we're in I can imagine that there's a significant mismatch and that there's a lot of diversity in that mismatch across the nine barrier counties right are you aware of what the mismatch is in Sonoma County I think it's on that slide this is you know I do we don't have it as part of this presentation one of the things that is a little uh it's the right word not one sided but it's not a complete portrayal this slide in the sense that it's it's talking about the housing boom or excuse me the job boom that we've been in you know in the last decade or so it's not talking about where we are today so for example taking Santa Clara County they have a 8 to 1 ratio of jobs to housing permitted but if you look at what's their overall number of jobs um relative to housing units I just want to say they're around three um a three to one um so that's kind of and you have by contrast in the east bay um it's it's very low they really even though they haven't they've created a lot more jobs than they have housing they really could use more jobs in the east bay right a big part of their challenge is that they have um a lot of their residents are commuting to San Francisco and Santa Clara County so so this these numbers are based on permitted units do you in the county of Sonoma or the city of Santa Rosa I think our staff do have that I don't have that on me now to give you that do we could we potentially get that that information in terms of my change that ratio because when I see 12 to 1 I'm wondering what the methodology is and I don't mean to put you on the spot but I'm curious and though does that mean that you know a hundred jobs or a thousand jobs because you know the scale of of that number versus the amount of of project approvals that we have for residential units might kind of impact our our understanding of the magnitude of our of our problem our mismatch right the scale is shown on the the um wide axis there so you can see it's you know around less than 50 000 jobs um so there is there is some scale shown here but to your point I think you know it's important to know overall how are we doing not just within that 2010 to 2016 period and I'm sure that there's been um you know a lot of growth recently within the county thank you other questions mr rogers thank you mr mayor and while we're on this slide I do have to say this is the second time I've seen this presentation I had a chance to see it at snow mechanic snow mechanic transportation authority a couple of weeks ago and this slide to me is fairly disingenuous and part of it is for the reason that councilmember Fleming brought up housing permitted versus housing approvals and I do I don't have the number exactly on the top of my head but I do believe Santa Rosa's somewhere around 2500 units that have been approved but have not actually been built so those wouldn't be reflected in this and yet most of what the cost of combat is geared towards is trying to figure out how to force cities to build we don't actually do the building we do the approvals the other thing that I hate about this slide is the start at the 2010 year and I'll ask sort of specifically if you have a different slide that shows the number of jobs prior to the Great Recession because this slide would seem to be construed that the job growth that comes back at least a significant chunk of it would be folks who had jobs lost their jobs in the Great Recession and then were rehired into it either the same job or another job when the economy started to increase that would not necessarily mean that they needed an additional housing unit to be created for them since they were already in one so I'm I'm wondering if you have any type of historical data that goes back beyond back before the Great Recession yeah we can definitely provide that okay I did hear from from colleagues sort of around the county I know that runner park has tried to take a pretty good stab at the funding what the actual cost is going to be to their budget and I know that it I don't have the number exactly off the top of my head but it was somewhere around 14 million dollars for them do you have any city specific information if taking from the menu of options how much we're talking relative to each city's budget that we're actually talking about for housing so we we did see the runner park analysis and we did provide sort of a an analysis of that as well I think it's very difficult to to do a a meaningful analysis right now because of so many uncertainties one of them is we don't know exactly which revenue measures would be proposed as I mentioned the revenue sharing piece is not on the table and I think that was part of the runner park analysis so that's already changed in addition we don't know what any given city would receive in terms of the the revenue generated right so to councilmember tidbit's point you know is every jurisdiction going to receive exactly 75 as a minimum we don't know some may receive you know 110 so it is difficult I understand that that you know is not a totally satisfactory answer if you're really focused on exactly what is this going to mean to the to the bottom line of the city's budget but we are trying to do a more kind of comprehensive fiscal analysis but as I said with a lot of moving parts it's difficult and I would be really interested in seeing that I'm looking at slide 17 that has them the menu of the funding sources a lot of this is publicly available data so we would be able to I would think with a little bit of effort be able to back into some form of an answer which is my understanding is how runner park got there was looking at what in each category would come from their budget should that be chosen to be used as a way to fund it and then they put it all together in sort of a likely menu of what could be chosen even if it was a plug-and-play for cities I think that that would actually be really useful for all of us in this conversation right and again the the main piece that would have been a direct transfer from a local jurisdictions budget is off the table now and so it really it wouldn't make much sense and I would really encourage you all and anybody listening to not spend too much time on this slide because the legislation that's moving through the process soon on this we don't even know what revenue measures are going to be put forward there and so you know it just makes more sense to see what what's actually under consideration in Sacramento at what rates etc well and with all due respect I think most folks that we've talked to when we talk to them about this proposal the first question is how do you pay for it so I get that they there aren't real numbers yet but we can't really just ignore this slide last question I have and it's sort of a fundamental one that was raised at scta I believe developers when they say that their projects are not penciling out what is the assumed rate of return for a developer on their project I don't know the exact answer for that okay so from a transparency perspective I would be really interested in knowing that number because if we are going to throw public dollars at it I need to be able to explain to folks how it's not just lining the pockets of developers right there enough other questions you get it you can save the comment for the end if you if you have no questions I just my understanding thank you for coming I appreciate it and I very much appreciate that we received a rundown on some of the legislative pieces clearly that's where things are headed I have a couple of questions one of them is you mentioned that outreach meetings were requested specifically by a bag and other entities if this is an example of one what will you do with the comments raised here so I'm certainly taking notes we also have a consultant here we've we've been working with a consultant who's been sending staff to all of these meetings and taking notes because obviously it's it's hard to make sure that you're capturing everything that's being said when you're presenting and so we're going to be going through all of that and synthesizing it both kind of by region sort of sub region north bay east bay south bay because there are differences and then kind of by by theme by by topic area and we'll be bringing those comments back to this housing legislation working group kind of to start the conversation and say you know we're not we're not starting from scratch here we have been out there talking to to many of you and this is what we're hearing and so one example would be we've heard a lot I mentioned from the east bay that they feel that there really needs to be more of a jobs housing balance focus that that's something that the CASA compact kind of missed and so you know we might bring that idea into the conversation we also have heard a lot about concerns around fiscal impacts to budgets so that's something that I think you know we would be bringing forward okay let's talk about the different revenue options that CASA recommended which of these are you most interested you know which of these would you like to see off the table and building on what we've been hearing already with that if individuals are listening we have a fairly vibrant tv viewing group if any of them are listening and they want to make comments obviously they can communicate directly with me or with my fellow council members but how would they reach you if they wanted to share comments directly with with whatever entity is compiling the comments sure they can contact me directly I guess I'll just have my inbox get even more filled than it is already my email is rlong at bay area metro dot gov that's our long l o n g at bay area metro dot gov you can also just contact mtca bag through our direct public information lines and this particular working group is going to be subject to the brown act and so people can attend the meetings they can listen via webcast and they can make public comment at these meetings and again this is an advisory body but it will be informing staff as we make recommendations to the abag and mtc legislation committees and then of course anyone who has been following sort of the legislative process over the years knows they can engage in that process whether it be through the league of cities contacting their own local elected official excuse me statewide assembly member and state senators to to share their views on specific bills thank you great we have several cards here so let's start with Anne Sealy followed by Anne Colichitas mayor and council when my the organization that I chair was formed in 1986 we were worried about Santa Rosa growing too fast and too much there were 2,500 units being built every year and we were facing the tremendous decision about what to do with the wastewater for the region the world has really changed not only as a result of the fires but as a result of the cumulative inaction by the city council to provide affordable housing or possibilities for affordable housing I have watched for three decades as people sitting in your chairs have heard the cry of the most pernicious of statements it doesn't pencil out to relieve developers of the need to build affordable housing and that's why we're in the pit we're in this process looks like it's an opportunity to make it print pencil out and I hope it does I have a few concerns however I want to relate the parts that concern me and I hope that you are dogged in clearing up are the squishy terms in some elements such as for instance elements seven as it suggested that impact fees be capped at quote at reasonable levels unquote with great debt to overcome in public services and water and sewer service somebody has to pay a very public assessment of how cost will be spread is really critical in the menu of funding sources slide 20 I believe in the presentation the suggestion of a variable commercial linkage fee needs much more elucidation in the section on the new decision-making group regional housing enterprise governance agency is proposed to be made up of metropolitan transportation committee and association of bay area governments representatives plus so-called key stakeholders who are those people the proposal asks for a mountain of public trust in your upcoming decisions and conversations please do not use acronyms but instead make clear which organizations and agencies are doing what and when with Santa Rosa's huge homeless population and the funds necessary to provide shelter for them there their needs must be balanced balanced with for instance the needs of middle-income buyers and against the needs of the larger low-income population good luck to you council thank you for your response and call us followed by Dave ransom good afternoon council so I was at the MTC building the night that this Casa compact was finalized and I can only characterize the room as grim although there's other people who are sitting on that board in this room who might characterize it otherwise I would I'd actually be interested to know but that's how I saw it because really as I was mentioned today these members were not required to endorse this compact they were just required to sign it so so that left a lot of room there was a bit of levity because the director of the MTC was retiring on this night of the vote and so they had a big birthday cake so that really did make things a little festive but in the end you know when you take a look at these these items you've got item one through three which is kind of a feel-good move on the part of Casa but these things are all got to be passed as bills and you know you can see what happened with tenant protections the only outcome pretty much of the proposition 10 is that rents have skyrocketed and so now we've got this now we've got this cpi plus five percent I mean do the math even on a $1,300 rent we'll be talking about an annual increase of about $110 a month what what kind of income I mean you know people don't get raises like that wages don't go along with that kind of increase so but anyway that that's an aside because really we're talking about legislation this year to streamline and accelerate the development process and we can imagine those bills will go through because there's a lot of juice behind that and then and a lot of exemptions that go with it you know and how are we going to determine if this stuff's actually ever going to get built when it gets entitled I mean you know it's there's a lot of questions there but we know that'll go through but what about the tenant stuff you know the tenant representative Amy English from tenants together was on the technical committee and she had to she had to not endorse this she didn't have a vote but she did not approve after many times of negotiations on this item the tenant item and then also the process which was a lot of this stuff was done on weekends and at night so there wasn't really any transparency to the process and so let's see yeah so that's where that's how I see it thanks bye thank you Dave Ransom followed by Dwayne Duet Dave Ransom 905 Silva in this town I'm also here for the Sonoma Valley housing group I think it's important for us to put this castle in context I think if you lift the stone up and look underneath it you'll find the Bay Area Council the regional big business chamber of commerce and the Silicon Valley leadership group that Dave Packard set up in the in the in the 60s to speak for the expanding industry you probably don't know but the Bay Area Council is convening a global conference on developing tech hubs in later this spring the tech hubs are the Bay Area London New York London Tokyo Sydney and Gwendong and the co-sponsor of the conferences the China People's Daily so they are looking into how do you develop regional tech hubs and this this CASA is a very important part of their their project for years the Bay Area Council has wanted to be has wanted to create a regional government they were formed in the in the 40s after World War II and that was one of their initial ideas we will have a regional government so far the MTC and ABAC are it but that's the the the other part would be this regional housing authority that's one other part they are already talking to their members about how they want to be a major voice on the regional housing authority so we'll be up against them in in having our druthers done we already have a sense of what this expansion of the tech hub will mean for the north bay in the small city the station complex that's being planned and and implemented in ronard part it's primarily luxury housing with with all of the other aspects of a small city and in this week's bay area excuse me north bay business journal there's a long interview with the fellow who's behind it talking about how he wants to bring folks up from marina to a bar on the smart train to this this thing in the in ronard park that's the direction that we're going in particularly if we get involved in a regional housing authority i think san oj just doubled its height allowance and doubled the value of the land that the that under under the height allowance and significantly put money in the pocket of michael covarubias the who who once chaired the bay area council and was one of the three leaders of the cassa thank you davis so duane duit want to be you all thanks davis take your time on this one duane duit followed by jake mckenzie hello my name is duane duit i'm from roseland within santa rosa while the cassa proposal could be helpful there's the devil in the details political will needs to be required don't trust verify two things that i'd like to speak of today yes to preservation of existing housing units and no to any new tax increases anywhere on june second 1992 the city of san aroza adopted two key ordinances which were created to address the chronic scarcity of affordable housing so this was already known 30 years ago this plan was written as the comprehensive housing affordability strategy this is from the annual report comes from 1993 we've had a housing authority here for 60 years it came about because there was the need to deal with affordable housing as redevelopment was occurring in san aroza so miss steely specifically pointed out that from her view on the concerned citizens for santa rosa that for over 30 years it's been a cumulative lack of action on the part of the city council here locally dealing with our problems so i can't look deep down into the bay area and all these other situations but we can speak here locally and what i think could be helpful besides saving the housing stock we have because the number one threat to that is actually governmental agencies the junior college district buys houses and tears them down the city of san aroza buys houses and plans to demolish them the sonoma county water agency owns houses which it leaves vacant so that's part of the problem we should actually look into getting an article 34 under the state constitution approval to have public housing here in san aroza we've got only three large tall buildings here in san aroza they're for housing bethlehem towers and silver crest they came after the 1960s redevelopment you could repeat that process along the smart rail and have taller buildings closer into the city center and get the housing that we need this is all going to come down to though right there on the council as miss cily pointed out so clearly if we don't have the political will no matter what happens down in the bay area isn't going to happen up here in the north bay we have a nice train financed by taxpayers we've got all the things in place and sense so how about public housing how about our housing authority becoming more proactive they're in a sense missing in action and the guy that's the current chairman was the former head of the housing authority department he's been in it for 40 years let's solve the problems now thanks join jake mckenzie followed by george uberti thank you mr mayor council members it's with some trepidation that i stand up here in front of you but i have played a role in the topic that you are workshopping this afternoon so i thought it would be handy just to let you know what it was that i was authorized to sign when i was chair of mtc i stepped down from that role about three weeks ago so now i'm totally blameless but back on december 19th it was moved to authorize chair mckenzie to sign the casa compact subject to the following understandings this was after a lengthy debate this authorization does not constitute an approval of the compact itself this authorization will enable the commission to be proactively engaged as the process to implement the compact goes through the state legislature you've just heard from my colleague rebecca long this afternoon that this process is now underway and there already are significant impacts this authorization should be accompanied by a comprehensive program of outreach to local government with adequate representation from local elected officials the mtca bag legislative committees should include local jurisdictions and the development of the compact advocacy so now the county representatives will be chosen by the city select committee on the evening of april the 11th other jurisdictions have already submitted their membership the housing legislation legislation working group will be chaired by julie pierce past president of a bag and current chair of their legislative committee she announced last week somewhat prematurely since new chair scott haggarty hasn't appointed me yet to be chair of mtc's legislation committee that i would in fact be the vice chair of this working group so we'll see if that happens i won't know because i'll be up at kaiser hospital been operated on so but no doubt somebody will tell me when i wake up the fourth the authorization does not constitute an endorsement of any potential revenue source for funding if i were still on scta i would have been at that meeting and i would have not agreed with the comment about this runner part analysis the runner park analysis was conducted by one person it did not it was the worst case analysis including every possible funding source mentioned as we've already heard two of them are already eliminated i rest my case mr. mayor thanks for giving me the opportunity to speak to y'all thank you jake georgia birdie how are you you know we're talking about uh we're talking about affordable housing here right now something can't be afforded if it doesn't exist all right nobody builds anything in this city without the city granting them a permit okay now there are certain facts that everybody in this room is very anxious not to mention okay i'm going to list one of them for you right now that's in between 2011 and 2016 the median price of a single family home went from 285 thousand dollars to 485 thousand dollars in a six-year span all right that's not something that happens accidentally that's not an invisible hand that's the result of a very consolidated effort all right now in the same time the city's granting of permits right and these these figures come from hunt the city's granting of permits you can look at the slides yourself they declined they cut in half all right there's i have slides from off the city side itself that say there is a lack of transparency and accountability in the permit streamlining process now that's santa rosa city dot org all right that's not an outside party coming in and accusing you that is the city itself that you represent confessing to not having transparency or accountability you know what you need transparency to see crime all right you know what you need accountability for the things that you have done wrong all right there's nothing accidental about the state of the housing market right now okay it's the result of a very consolidated effort people benefit okay the price goes from 285 thousand dollars to 485 thousand dollars that money goes somewhere all right and the person whose pocket it goes into has absolutely everything that they can do getting done to get that money in their pocket all right now we can get we can just sit here and act like this is something that fell from the sky that everybody in this room is confused about how it happened okay but no one in this room is confused about how it happened okay i'm going to give you another fact all right now this is from the ffi ec all right uh that's the luther burbank right savings and loan uh received poor penetration in lending right mortgages to lower income people all right now translated what that means is that one of the primary banks around here that grants home loans doesn't lend money to poor people to buy homes all right now that is a flagrant solidification of the class system all right it's not an accident somebody looks at a piece of paper and says now you're poor i'm gonna make sure you stay that way all right we can't say that and more than we can't say it we can't act like we're not saying it all right that's what everyone in this room is saying by omission okay and it has to stop it cannot be omitted anymore all right what we're doing is not receiving a housing market that's ballooning without us okay what we're doing is being a room full of adults silently pushing poor people down and that has to be over all right thank you thomas else followed by daisy piste line wow that's tough act to follow um i want to say thank you for addressing this and and seeing this and having this uh study session housing is an equilibrium this is a new frontier so in economics it's called building out the frontier this frontier is an area of cooperation so there's land labor and capital this area is cooperation so you're going to make laws and it's going to change zoning it's the area of cooperation and changing what you can do with land so they didn't increase the land they didn't increase the capital per se no tax um and they didn't increase the labor really it's but it's changing the equilibrium so as was mentioned in the south bay they have an intention they want to go up they want to change the dynamics this will make more money for developers you're right it's not wrong when that does when that happens all their boats rise then they have a lot more money in their pocket it's called wall street you get a lot more money in there and they go that's sonoma county looks real cheap i'm going to move up there and i'm going to knock all those guys out so what we have to do is respond to that the first thing that hasn't had responses successful and i know what that means that the point is people didn't want to sell their house they didn't want to sell their house at 280 thousand dollars that's why the price didn't that's why the price stopped there right because they stopped selling they said i'm not going to sell it 280 i want money but and i and i got to leave but i can't sell it at 280 so i'm not going to sell it and then it went up to 450 because they said i'm not going to sell it 350 i'm not going to sell it till 450 and it's not going to sell it now till 600 right that's where the average goes because they won't sell it it's the markets determines that except what we create what we build so if you build it they'll come but they're only going to pay the market which means if you make affordable housing if you make affordable housing here then it won't extract everyone from here when they come because they see it as a bargain because no matter what this equilibrium for them is going to rise prices are going to rise the whole economy is going to rise they're going to have more wall street in their pocket down there they're going to look up here but what do we do we have to build more affordable housing in order not to displace the people here thank you very much for your time thank you jones daisy pistiline thank you good pronunciation mayor um so daisy pistiline sonoma county conservation action um i do want to be clear that the conservation action board has not yet taken a position on costa we did have a presentation last week from jake mckenzie very graciously and we're currently working to put together some suggestions so these comments are a bit informal and and personal but um one thing um we're really glad you guys are taking the time to listen and understand costa and that each of the city councils in the county is doing that um it's very important that we are thinking about housing as a regional issue and so while costa may be imperfect i don't want the baby to be thrown with the bathwater the reason that a regional plan was put together is that housing and transportation are regional issues and we up here in sonoma county can sometimes forget that we're connected to a whole web down there in the bay and if we don't um support things that make it easier for housing to be developed in san francisco in oakland in san jose then we are going to continue to get more and more pressure up here um and we're going to continue to see the housing prices rise making it harder for the people who work here to live here so we must continue to think in that regional context and i hope that the city council while you are only technically responsible for the city and the citizens in it that you do rise up to that level of thinking um we're very glad to see the protections in costa for rent caps for justice cause eviction rental assistance and accessible legal council and even though this is going to become many pieces of state legislation we hope that you guys continue to engage with that legislation and ensure that those protections remain in place um and while some city councils in this county have just flat out opposed costa we would hope that um whatever position you take it's a nuanced position and you explain the oppositions that you might have and things you don't agree with so that those can be carried forward into state legislation we're going to have a lot of opportunity to debate these pieces of legislation during this cycle and the more specific and concrete your suggestions are in the ways that they can be put into that legislation the more helpful it will be i believe um and um one thing that is not adequately addressed in costa that we have huge problems with here in Sonoma county is the issue of second homes and vacation rentals it's mentioned as one of the financing tools but it's not actually called out as a problem and there's no policy mechanisms to address it so something we might think about suggesting is how do we actually ensure that the homes that we build have people living in them and that the people who live in those homes are actually members of this community because that is i believe one third of the problem in Sonoma county with our lack of housing is that there are homes that aren't occupied most of the time so those are just a few comments we'll be submitting putting together more of a concrete memo in the coming weeks and submitting that to all the cities and hope you'll be able to give your suggestions to the state level process thank you thank you dizzy did you do have any more cards on this topic all right bring back to council any final comments or questions for rebecca was that you mr vice mayor all right i guess i'm the only one with comments so i will mention i'm on the i'm the city's representative on the mayors and council members legislative committee and we have heard this item and we did end up voting unanimously to oppose it and i do want to sort of explain sort of why we did that even though in santa rosa you'll see that a lot of those elements are things that we've already done and i think anybody who has studied public administration will quickly realize that this conversation is the outcome the inevitable outcome of the fiscalization of land use that we see here in california and when we are capping property taxes without capping property values you create this sort of imbalance where cities those taxes and then what do you do with those sales taxes once you have them and here in santa rosa we've taken a very concerted effort to make moves to try to stimulate our housing production i remember one of our first council meetings that we had when i came on and when jack came on we had a conversation about everybody being a little bit uncomfortable and having public conversations about how we were going to get towards developing places for folks to live and whether you are a strong environmentalist or if you're very strong on housing we figured that we would find sort of a middle ground where everybody could agree that we needed to move forward and just if you'll indulge me we have reduced impact fees for housing and ad use we have passed incentives for infill development we've streamlined our permitting process that's our express permitting we've passed higher density residential incentive program it's a 67 reduction we defer water and sewer rates excuse me fees until homes are occupied we are increasing building heights we're reducing parking we have advocated for and have been approved for a federal opportunity zone actually to broslin and downtown we've created a 100 density bonus we are utilizing city property to try to stimulate housing production the metro chamber of commerce has created a employers housing council to try to do their constructed this renewal enterprise district that has enhanced infrastructure financing as well as going forward with tax increment financing as well we're taking this seriously here in santa rosa and i think for me that the challenge really comes down to the the financing we can talk about the loss of local control and we can talk about how that'll impact places like katati or sausalito or particularly smaller cities and that one size fits all doesn't work but really the story from santa rosa for me is that we're asking the public to help fund things that we are already doing in places that have not taken this as seriously who have for a long time tried to bring business in and not build their share of housing as the 75 percent share 75 percent return to source with the ambiguity of if it even comes back to santa rosa or if it gets gobbled up by the county and understanding we could still compete for more than more than that 75 percent but we just went to the public and we asked them to fund housing here in santa rosa we couldn't get them to say yes and i couldn't figure out how i'm supposed to go out and sell to the public we're going to not only tax you that's really why we we went through we can walk through some of the additional there are a lot of things in there that are a challenge there is i will point out a perverse incentive to decrease your public transit use when you are tying your housing production to public transit i don't like that and in fact i know that we have already seen in some communities that they are having discussions about whether they need to reduce their public transit time so that they don't fall under a cassa that's backwards as far as i'm concerned and quite frankly if i can editorialize a little bit the places that don't want housing typically are the places that don't want public transit either so it's a it's a challenge and then finally for us it was the the lack of enjoining language within the bills in sacramento if we're asking everybody to be a little bit uncomfortable to say that we're going to give up a little bit of our local control in exchange for getting things like tenant protections we know the way that this is going to play out going to play out in sacramento with the 72 hour rule for legislation the final bills will be done 72 hours in a minute before they're actually able to be passed and the things that are really easy to do from a go pro push for housing standpoint are going to get through and some of the more complicated some of the more uncomfortable conversations are going to be left by the wayside so that's really why we ended up opposing it and again it was a unanimous vote from the eight cities that were represented at the time the flowing java comment you'd like me yeah i'd like to echo everything that council vice mayor roger said and i wanted to add that you know santa rosa does not exist insinoma county does not exist in a microcosm and we're well aware of our you know that we exist within the bay area however you know as of february as of last month we did have 1800 multifamily units approved and we had 1300 single family units approved our city staff has been doing yeoman's work especially in the wake of the fires to you know triple quadruple the number of adus being built and to really stimulate and and get out of the way of anybody who wants to develop responsibly within our city we can't compel anybody to build what we can do is we can approve projects and so to that end you know we are doing our part and want to just thank our city staff for doing that and acknowledge that santa rosa is pulling its weight on this count comment smooths comes and then jack thank you um as has been well illustrated um our city has either done or has tried to do versions of almost everything on this list we attempted to do tenant protections we attempted to raise funds um we have at i will not repeat the the prior list um the governor has recognized us in his speeches for the efforts that our city has made to move housing forward i think it's very important that as we look at the legislation we make sure that it does not harm our progress uh and i want to make sure that that we hear from everyone cities our residents our staff we need to hear from everyone um how we can move forward to address the housing crisis without the negative consequences that appear to be within this document um one of the questions that i would like to ask as a detailed question getting into the weeds a little bit is that we already have the red we already have an entity in which the city and the county are working together as a regional entity to finance housing and development is it possible for us because we already have this to move legislation in such a way that we are exempted as a county from participating because we already have an entity that is doing regional housing um that's a conversation that i would be interested in sharing uh and in and in proposing uh within the legislature um we have the ability for all of our cities in our county to raise the funds and keep them here and it makes sense to me for us to to do that um i would like to clarify again that i am listening and i'm very eager to take comments uh and i hope folks will send them to me and to our council as well as to you and i want to thank you for coming mr to this mayor this question is actually for you do you want us to clarify and give some direction to your staff and the presenter this is just information from the presenter she's not city of santa rosa staff so if you want to make comments she's been taking notes feel free i'll just quickly chime in with my feedback you know i when i did go through your list um it's i really appreciate the level of work that went into this um by your staff and all the people from all the communities throughout the bay area there's a lot in here that i really like and there's a lot that i hope that this council can look at on a policy by policy basis to advance um and so for that i i really do want to thank everybody who put you know years of work into this and um it's somebody who's been on the same side of that table where you put years into something and you try to push it forward it's tough but um it is tough for me because i'm one of the members who sits on the renewal enterprise district for sonoma county and and i think that we're in this stage of where we need to see that actually take flight or realize that we have it's more advantageous to go with with a more regional approach um i think that the red is is poised to achieve just about everything that is laid out by mtcna bag i really do um only our big hitch in the giddy up is going to be our ability to fund it as vice mayor rogers highlighted 62 percent of our voters approved um a housing bond measure here but that was four percent shy of what we needed so put us in that odd limbo if we need to keep driving that narrative the voters majority of voters approved it but we we were short of funding anything substantial so i think that the red needs to try to crack uh that nut and if we can't do it then i hope that costs is in existence or some amalgamation of it and we could look to potentially joining at that time but but we have a course right now and i think that the the council ought to stay it goodness comes i just uh also wanted to give you all a heads up that i will be applying for the housing legislative task force uh as a follow-up on your comments to me on this topic right once again thank you rebecca for that and i i do want to remind council also later on in our council meeting tonight i'll be naming a subcommittee that'll address be working on our specific goals from our tier one priorities one of which is a comprehensive housing strategy because i'm really interested in putting some teeth to what we're talking about here rather than be generic and i think vice mayor rogers did a great job of outlining all the different steps we've been doing but we need to put numbers to that by doing these different incentives what type of impact are we trying to make we haven't done that yet i don't think this council has um ever taken that on so once we start forming that we'll have some numbers and hopefully we'll be consistent with some of the information gd of us that's going on in sacramento so if there's nothing else thank you so much uh we'll be recessing until four o'clock to start a regular city council meeting thank you okay we'll bring to order san rosa city council march 26 city council meeting uh madame city clerk could you announce the roll at the record show that all council members are present with the exception of council member cohen's thank you uh madame city attorney would you like to report on closed session yes a council met in closed session on items 2.1 and 2.2 and on each of those items gave direction to staff great thank you and miss hertado would you like to report out on the study session we just experienced yes mayor the council hosted a study session on the cost of compact and legislative update and provided input to the guest speaker great thank you we have no proclamations uh is there a 7.1 fire recovery rebuild update presentation yes mayor jason nut is going to provide a summary of the um meeting hosted by congressman thompson great thank you welcome mr. nut good afternoon mayor and council members jason that director transportation and public works uh last tuesday i had the opportunity to uh join a number of colleagues from around sonoma county uh to meet with congressman thompson to talk about the upcoming reauthorization of the federal infrastructure bill um the congressman's interest was to try to find out what local interests we had uh what key areas of concern relating to our public infrastructure and what sort of uh recommendations we might have for him as he moves forward through the process uh to help devise the plan that best suits our community um we had representatives from four local agencies including the city myself as well as fire chief tony gosner uh and adrian mertens uh we had two other fire departments that were represented uh we had uh two water districts including the water agency represented uh sonoma county transportation authority was in the room um our santa rosa chamber of commerce as well as the sonoma county labor council uh and the uh i can't remember the name of the environmental group um but they were also in the room and we spent quite a bit of time going around the table talking about infrastructure issues that were specific to each of our jurisdictions or things that we felt uh were appropriate for the congressman to take back uh to dc um from the city side of things we we we pretty much let off by stating it was we felt it was it was uh important for uh the congressman to understand that that trying to utilize the disaster as a method of helping prioritize future investments uh would be something of benefit to our community as well as communities across the country um to be able to give us a level of prioritization when we submit applications or make a specific request so that we can benefit beyond our current fiscal portfolio uh and help us recover the way we need to not just from the standpoint of this current disaster but for preparation for future disasters uh we we really strongly feel that that's an important criteria to utilize we went further in talking about a couple of other projects that were important to us the hern avenue interchange being a project that will be completed and designed here this summer ready for construction uh we are actively working with our local partners as well as our congressional and senate uh representatives to support a bill or to support an application to the build grant which we did this last year and we and was granted a highly recommended rating and we want to package that even better and send it back out to them in hopes that we'll get full funding for for that project moving forward we also identified the need for additional fire stations in our community to provide for long term fire support uh not just these those areas that weren't affected by the fire but also rebuilding the firehouse that was damaged and looking at where our expansion of our community might be in the south side of town where where fire stations either are not appropriately positioned or need to be positioned uh in the future we talked about road maintenance and what what wasn't occurring in road maintenance the fact that we have about an 18 million dollar need just to stay status quo and we only have about nine million of that 18 to spend towards it and that's only once sp1 becomes fully authorized and implemented so we we tried to put a number of different items on the table we tried to give the congressman a number of ideas for the city of santa rosa that he could assist on our behalf with that said there was at least one common theme and that occurred among almost all of the entities which is highway 37 is probably the single most important piece of infrastructure for Sonoma county at a price tag of nearly five billion dollars uh it everybody rallied around that this was a critical component not only for our community but for our residents in our community but also for our businesses in our community and really asked the congressman to rally around that specific project and try to help support different types of financing initiatives that would help bring it to some level of reality so that was the nature of the discussion it was a very good collegial conversation it was almost two hours long and i think the senator the congressman walked away with a number of great ideas and and areas of concern that he could take back with him to dc i'm happy to answer any additional questions you have thank you let me get that figure do you say five billion for highway 37 yes all right and i do want to thank you and the rest of the team that went there i had an opportunity with congressman thompson later in the week and he is very complimentary of staff's efforts in the conversation so it's very helpful uh council any questions for mr. nut and seeing them thank you so much thanks are there any other fire related presentations no other fire related okay city manager city attorney reports who would like to start i'll go first i do have a couple items first i want to introduce to the council amy reeve who's our new human resource director right here so a yes we are very happy to have her on board she has extensive experience in human resources most recently with the city of petaluma she comes to us with a bachelor's degree from in psychology from sacramental state in a master's degree in organizational development from usf this is also homecoming for her for her because she's originally from san rosa so we are very happy to have amy join our team second i do want to share with you that transit appreciation day is tomorrow march 27th and the transit division will be celebrating each march transit agencies across the country mark this event by taking a moment to acknowledge and thank dedicated professionals who operate buses trains ferries paratransit vans and other forms of public transportation san rosa city bus drivers don't have an easy job they just make it look that way for hours on and our city bus drivers manage to keep a schedule check fares give directions announced stops remember requests and more all while safely maneuvering an extra large vehicle through unpredictable traffic tough weather conditions and some really tight spaces our bus operators are a highly trained group of professionals who combined have over 500 years of experience behind the wheel last year city bus drivers offered 2 million rides and covered an impressive 930 thousand miles as they transported people safely and efficiently to work school shopping medical appointments and various other destinations in san rosa so please join us in giving them a much-deserved thanks on transit driver appreciation day which is tomorrow great thank you for that and where would that be isn't there a location where's the car by is it msc or transit building 45 starting point road thank you so much and welcome amy thank you for being on board that's for me i have no updates for this afternoon great thank you council statements of abstention seen and i will be abstaining from item 12.4 on tonight's agenda mayor council members reports who would like to start mr. Sawyer thank you mayor we did have a meeting of the snow mcconnor waste management agency on the 20th of march and a few things going on we did approve a draft budget and i wanted to mention a couple things that that were a little different in moving in to our next budget they were we are looking at the explorer exploring the household hazardous waste facility in north in the north county it's something that they've been considering and hoping for for quite sometimes they're looking forward to that we also increase the in the budget increase the outreach programs in the community for zero waste food scrap encompassing goals so that's very active in in in some pretty good pretty large goals there the draft budget was approved and then we'll get final adoption on april 17th in addition there was we did have a small increase in the processing of our organics disposal that fee will go up by 63 cents depending on service size and jurisdiction so there's a minor increase there but we continue to have to deal with our composting outside the county and and that's going to go on for some time until we have our own processing which we all look forward to okay thank you mr vice mayor thank you mr mayor uh so last week the mayor and i had an opportunity to go down to san francisco and talk with commissioner randolph who is the cpu c commissioner assigned to the gendings crossing myself and a couple of staff members had an opportunity to really impress upon the commissioner how important the crossing remains to be uh to santa rosa uh in particular talking about critical access points for bicycle and pedestrian uh and with our bike bridge going over 101 how critical that is as an update i do know director nut is working on addressing some of the what we have heard from smart as safety concerns and we'll be seeking an extension on the crossing as well notified the commission of that and we'll keep the council posted on what additional what additional needs we have thank you great thank you do anyone else on the side mr jibbitz thank you mr mayor i heard from doug mckenzie who's my appointee to the bicycle and pedestrian advisory board uh and one he reached out pretty concerned about what's going on the two deaths most notably on stony point road over there uh and he had a suggestion and one of those suggestions to make an immediate impact to enhance the safety for bicyclists in that area is to get a police officer to patrol the area a little bit more frequently um i don't know if that's something that we want to take action on or maybe refer it to the to b-pad for them to discuss but i think it merits investigation since there have been two fatalities in the exact same location in the last six months so i would recommend i i don't think it'd be appropriate for council to take action i think our chief is here was here um to actually extra enforcement of this i know they're aware of those tragic incidents so maybe even if your b-pad rep would just make that formal cross with the police department requesting that extra patrol and i know they'll get that taken care of and they're probably already doing it all right thanks i will advise them great thank you jillie do you have a comment or thank you we had with my colleague mr tibbitz the first meeting of the renewal enterprise district also known as red uh basically we established the entity during the course of that meeting and began a discussion of how to prioritize housing developments that may come before the red um david rabbit was elected chair and i was elected vice chair so just reporting out on that um and i'll hold on 10.2.1 until later great miss leming yes thank you uh i wanted to let you all know that yesterday i attended the first five uh sonoma county commission meeting and sonoma county first five commission is changing its structure as anticipated from being a county structure to an independent nonprofit structure and uh but one of the greatest things is that we had one of our newest commissioners uh linden hot linden hopkins was there and it was quite quite adorable but um at any rate the um the first five commission presented a couple of things which is uh the sonoma county community indicators snapshot as well as um the strong start index and i'm pleased to announce that uh sonoma county is slightly um ahead of other counties uh many other counties i'd say weren't about the top third in sonoma county i mean uh in california here in sonoma county in terms of having indicators that are predictive of child and adult success when babies are born and those are things like uh the status of parents legal immigration or employment or educational history but that we have pretty significant disparities amongst children who are um african american or latino and that we need this is something that you know we need to continue to keep an eye on additionally uh the first five commissions in support of a b 1004 which will make mandatory screenings for children at this point they're uh it's not clear that they're mandatory and uh we uh they believe that uh that this type of screening is uh absolutely necessary in order to protect our most vulnerable children and then we have acr uh by rob bonta which is changes to the federal public charge regulations which um would be helpful to us as well and then finally um sv 234 which would allow us to have child care facilities and apartments and uh zoned more flexibly we have had a number of new child cares pop up in the last year but we've lost more than we have retained and as many people know mary hill uh closed and many many families lost their child care with no no plans and it's one of the biggest impediments to our economic success so anyway i have lots more information if anybody's interested in this and uh chris rogers his mom is one of the commissioners and i'm sure she can help us out too thank you for that report uh so a couple things um about two weeks ago i had my shoulder replacement surgery and i really appreciate all the well wishes and positive thoughts for my recovery it's been quite the challenge but i really appreciate the support um last friday home sonoma county leadership council met again this is the group that will with our realign continue of care uh we had about 14 million dollars in funding available and about 28 million dollars in request this is all for homeless services in sonoma county uh we broke it into five different categories and went through four of those categories such as front door program shelter and services rapid rehousing and we made tentative recommendations for about half of the funding about seven million dollars and at our next meeting on april 17th we'll be taking a look at the capital projects which there's been approximately seven million dollars less left and i think the requests were probably around another 14 million dollars so it's going to be a rather robust discussion i invite your participation haven't 100 decided on the location of that because we had some sound problems at the ufo last week but it's going to be a very robust discussion and we're down to that last category of capital projects and then uh this last saturday i attended the habitat for humanity key dedication ceremony on west steel lane i know the city was very engaged to get that project up there but you have three new families moving into west steel lane and it's really a uh an emotional and great community wide event so if you ever see habitat offer making those offerings that new people are moving in it's a great ceremony because really is the community coming together it's not habitat on their own it's not the families on their own it's the whole community coming together to build those new homes i also want to acknowledge another housing milestone with our rebuild efforts we just recently passed the 200 number of homes of people being rebuilt and moved back in so i know we still have a long way to go 3100 is that key number but being up to 200 this far it's great and over half of those remaining homes are somewhere along in the process so rebuild is moving along quickly and lastly i do want to announce my goal setting subcommittee so those of you that went with uh or experienced with us our goal setting process we have five different tier one goals and so now this subcommittee which is going to be myself councilmember fleming and councilmember soyer we'll start identifying along with staff what the specific goals we mean by this so again as i mentioned earlier we have a comprehensive housing strategy that sounds great but this committee will be coming up what do we specifically mean by that what are we trying to attribute what are we trying to gain so this can be very specific goals so those conversations will be occurring in the very near future i know the city manager has been touching base with staff because council may have a lot of wishes but we also have staff capacity so we're blending those two different venues to come up with some very achievable relevant goals and with that we'll move on to item 10.2.1 councilmember combs you had brought this forward i did and i'm asking i appreciate the council's patience with this item it is my understanding that our fire department has a grant that is written in such a way that it can include the community wildfire protection plan uh it was whether or not that was included that had been a primary concern of mine um and i am glad to see that uh community engagement is planned to move forward so i am withdrawing the item and i want to say thank you to the fire department staff for their work on this issue thank you moved to 10.3.1 um the city selection committee will be meeting on on april 11th and there's a number of positions that i need to see recommendations from this body and so what i'd like to do is take each of these positions individually and i would entertain a motion get a second and we'll have a vote and we'll work our way through the entire list so the first one on 10.3.1 subsection one the airport land use commission moved to point sam saman second or a motion in a second mr vice mayor do you have a comment there's two positions here so we can do this individually if you'd like but i'd also like to nominate councilmember tibbetz for one of the two positions so let's do them individually let's handle the first one so mr sorry could you mention say that makes your motion one more time yes to um uh appoint sam saman from windsor to the airport land use commission okay i got seconded okay is there any additional comment on that position seeing none your votes please oops there you are and that passes unanimously mr vice mayor you had a second motion you'd like to make yeah i moved to uh support councilmember tibbetz for the other position for the airport land use commission second and who seconded that i just did councilmember combs any other conversations do we need to see if you were willing to accept that i already asked him there we go staying up position you want to try it your votes please and that is also unanimous 10.3.1 subsection two the local agency formation commission lafko we have one position one nomination one letter received from mark landman from katadi i'll entertain a motion i've moved to nominate mark landman to the lafko do we have a second second did you get that madame city clerk john can have it and your votes please and that passes unanimously 10.3.1 subsection three metropolitan transportation commission one position for a four-year term two letters were received one from jake mckenzie runner park and one from steven burdlebaugh who's not a member of snama county mayors and council members association or an elected official one of its member cities i think you're from everyone here is familiar with both those persons i'll entertain a motion i'll move to nominate or to quaint jake mckenzie i'll second we have a motion and a second any further comment just a sort of a quick question for the city attorney i know that there are some chatter back and forth that our requirement our requirement might be that we have to send three names do we have to send three names or can we only send one name you're not required to send three names okay thank you uh can we clear the and your votes please and that passes unanimously okay go to 10.3.2 this is subsection one the association of barrier governments regional planning committee one position two letters have been received one from julie combs of san rosa and one from susan adams of urna park i'll entertain a motion i move to uh nominate julie combs i second we have a motion and second any comment your votes please thank you and that passes unanimously in 10.3.2 subsection two north bay division league of california city's executive board one position one letter received from rachel henley city of sonoma i move to uh support rachel henley we have a motion second by councilmember tibet sanny votes that also passes unanimously thank you we have may i ask do we have time on the to set on a future agenda the recommendation for the housing legislative committee that is now moving through the the system as we heard during the study session that would be for a future agenda i would suggest if if we're able to because i know next week we also have some other recommendations to be made somebody if you could get that okay i just make sure that there's a timeline 11th meeting yes the timeline works fine we can put that on the agenda for next week great okay we have no minutes to approve consent items mr. todo and may i'll read 12 1 through 12 3 in amend 12 4 separately okay consent 12.1 is a motion contract award folton road reconstruction to occidental road to west third street item 12.2 a resolution fourth amendment to professional services agreement number f 001238 with r3 consulting group incorporated item 12.3 resolution approval of 2019 update to san rosa city bus title 6 program council any questions mr vice mayor i do have a quick question on item 12.1 good afternoon mayor members of the council i'm greg dwyer with transportation and public works i'm also the project manager for the folton road reconstruction project great i just have a really quick question for you and i know there was an article about this in the paper this morning i know we put it out to bid and we had two alternatives in it we have the hot mixed asphalt and then we have the roller compacted concrete bringing it back it was much cheaper to do only the roller the roller compacted concrete we didn't even ask for the hot asphalt i just wanted to know is there any concerns or quality differences between the two or length of life between the two i'm glad you asked it's it's a great product that we're really excited about some of the the history if you're interested with with roller compacted concrete it started its origins in northern california in the logging industry for sorting yards due to its durability it has since been used to do ports and airports in the last 10 to 15 years the technology has developed to a point where you can use it for paving and what we're seeing what we're expecting is a 40 year to 50 year life in the first 20 years 15 to 20 years you don't have to do anything to it if we were to do a full depth hot mix asphalt section we'd be out there doing treatments in seven years and over the life of the project we're anticipating reduced maintenance costs of 30 percent it's durable it also it's lighter so it reduces the heat island effect it's easier to see people at night crossing it just the longevity that the the lower maintenance costs and the lower initial project cost i think it's you know a lot of people are looking at us here as i mentioned in the article to see its success a lot of the contractors are excited about it great so it's cheaper will last longer great thank you so much okay thank you sir council any other questions i have one card here dwayne do it dwayne i'll ask you to use your three minutes to comment on both items thank you sir my name is dwayne do it i'm from roseland within santa rosa on the first item if you look in your packet you'll see you have a page that says the policy on public participation and comment known as the public participation plan it was revised this month on that front page number three ensure that public involvement is carefully and systematically included as part of the decision-making process one of the dilemmas and dealing and dealing with the way the city of santa rosa handles affairs is typically the decisions are already made and then the public's invited in to see what their point of view might be upon the ongoing decision that's contrary to what the federal government would like you to do under title six which would be to have the public be involved from the beginning all the way through until the decisions are made an example of this is right now with your downtown station area plan that's going forward essentially you're asking the public to be marketing people for decisions that you've already made and then have them be supportive of it and go out and tell their friends yeah this is what we're going to do i think that's totally contrary to what city bus title six should be doing i want that to be in the record thank you now involving this next item my pronunciation may be incorrect i believe it states phenotopia i've been a respiratory therapist starting as a medic since 1974 that's 45 years of watching people smoke all kinds of things i don't know if smoking something actually makes anything better in your lungs some people think smoking anything is a negative for your lungs so i can't necessarily be supportive of what these folks product is but i would like to state that all these folks that got rosalind on their shirts i hope you'll come over and help us in rosalind on the things we'd like to work on and if you're over there getting your dose of whatever you're getting think about doing something positive for rosalind whoever's getting the money from this thing that's over in rosalind could be putting some of it back into our community to be making rosalind better i'll also ask the council to please not allow any more of these dispensaries upon sabastical road because there's one down at the other end near stony point road and now there's this one up at the strip mall on the corner of dotton and sabastical road so people can come in from out of the community get their dose get out quick we'd rather have people be in our community helping rosalind to make rosalind a better place so if you're getting your healing going come on over and see rosalind we've got some nice stuff there it's a beautiful neighborhood enjoy the neighborhood along rosalind creek when you caught your buzz thank you thank you join georgia bairte the same thing for you georgia if you could comment during your time frame on both items sure i think i'm going to go ahead and limit it to uh item 12.2 i'm just going to read this here for you it was recommended by the city manager's office that the council by resolution approved the fourth amendment to professional services agreement number f 00123a with r3 consulting r3 consulting group inc to provide solid waste contract management assistance and support yada yada uh in an amount not to exceed 25 000 for a total not to exceed 267 000 now what i hear is that this is a contract that is being added to for the fourth time right and i hear that uh it's a consulting group that's going to help not with waste removal or anything that is ever going to actually benefit the public at all but with the management of a contract it sounds like this is an elaborate way to say we're going to find an excuse to give a group of our friends a bunch of more money for no reason i mean i don't i don't really see another show me 25 000 worth of value uh in this contract i don't think it's there uh i think that this is a made up way to pass money around under the table and i think i see something like this in this agenda every single week when i come here right i think there is an extraordinary amount of public money being passed out to a very small group of people this way i feel like there's a vocab word for it and i feel like that word is nepotism right and i feel like that is exactly the type of thing that undermines really basic democratic concepts like equality you know like uh i don't equal opportunity things of that nature right you need a basic level of equality in order for democracy to work all right votes have to count the same okay we have to give to people according to their ability not according to how well we know them or how much we just want to give it away to people all right that's what's happening here all right this is basic stuff all right this does not require some ingenious invention of civic institution okay this requires us acknowledging what it takes to make a society work all right and what it takes people with integrity okay that's what i'm asking you for all right it's what's bringing me here to speak to you and that's it all right thank you thank you uh mr rogers thank you mr mayor i will move items 12.1 through 12.3 wait for the reading of the text second motion a second your votes please can we get her there we go let's vote again and that's six eyes with councilmember tibet stepping away from the dais and vice mayor rogers did you hand out to the manager would you read item 12.4 please item 12.4 resolution resolution of the council of the city of san erosa granting the appeal of phenotopia app applicant b and selecting phenotopia applicant b to move forward in the conditional use permit process for a proposed commercial cannabis adult use retail facility located at 443 dotton avenue apn 125-111-039 file number c up 18-057 councilor any questions uh no question just a comment when we're ready all right all right yes i wanted to uh acknowledge that on march 12 i was the lone dissenting vote on this item and i did have the opportunity to express my concerns as far as why i was not supporting that and thank you all for listening i still have some of those concerns but as you know i'm also a very strong supporter of the cannabis industry so today i am going to join my colleagues in supporting phenotopias next steps in the conditional use process great i do want to acknowledge all the purple shirts in the crowd and thank you all for not putting in all of your speaker cards at the same time uh and with that uh can we get a motion so moved second and your votes and that passes with six eyes and council member spudhelm mayor spudhelm abstaining great thank you uh report items let's see 14.1 the appeal was withdrawn by the appellant and will not be heard by the city council today okay madam the deputy city manager 14.2 um we have public comment on non-agenda items it's not quite five that's not quite you are exactly right i'm thinking we can get this in very good report items uh first item 14.1 the appeal has been withdrawn so that item will not be presented tonight item 14.2 is report Sonoma county water agency 2019-20 water transmission budget budget and rate increase uh jennifer berke will be introducing the item good afternoon mayor schwaithelman members of the council um we're here before you today as we come each year to get direction uh to our water advisory committee or WAC member regarding how to vote which is an advisory vote on the Sonoma county water agency or as they're now known Sonoma waters budget and rates for the next fiscal year this is a very involved process where we work very closely with Sonoma water staff as well as a number of other representatives from the water contractors um that make up what's called the technical advisory committee or the TAC the TAC appoints a budget subcommittee and this year the budget subcommittee consisted of staff from the town of windsor the north marine water district the valley of the moon water district the marine municipal water district the city of katadi and the city of san aroza we worked very closely with Sonoma county water agency staff to review their budget and to look for ways that we could potentially cut costs or make more efficient recommendations the budget subcommittee came to a unanimous recommendation to recommend this budget to the TAC and the TAC considered the budget on march 4th and unanimously recommended that we consider approving or recommending this budget we also brought this to the board of public utilities on march the 7th and it was a unanimous recommendation from the board of public public utilities to recommend this budget as well I do want to acknowledge that over the last couple of years the water agency or Sonoma water has done a really great job at keeping rates down considering all the efforts that we had in relation to drought and reduced revenues and then also the fires that impacted our areas they really looked at ways they could reduce and and keep the budget down and so after those number of years this year you'll see a little bit of a higher increase that's kind of dealing with some of that deferred maintenance and other issues that they pushed off for the number of years so with that I'm going to turn this over to Lynn Rizali who's the finance manager with Sonoma water she'll walk you through a detailed presentation of their proposed budget and rates for next fiscal year and then I will close with the recommendation from the board thank you good evening mayor and council members thank you for having me Lynn Rizali finance manager Sonoma water I would like to thank both Jennifer Burke and Kimberley Zunino staff for their input and participation in the budget subcommittee and providing input I know it's a lot of work it's a lot of additional work in addition to the work that they already do and we greatly appreciate that the budget for fiscal year 1920 is based on 43,870 acre feet in water deliveries that is a five percent increase in water deliveries over fiscal year 18-19 each of the line items you see on the table there generate revenue that allow us to operate and maintain the water transmission system implement the projects under the biological opinion implement critical infrastructure projects pay debt service on existing bonds and maintain a prudent reserve there's also the discretionary charge that's the capital charge it's an aqueduct capital charge the water contractors provide input on this this number this rate and it is used to not only build fund balance for future capital projects but it also acts as a rate stabilization tool and it helps defer it helps avoid rate spikes in future years when other large capital projects are implemented the total overall rate increase on the Santa Rosa aqueduct is 4.6 percent the rate is $918.30 and the city of Santa Rosa put together this table for us to show what the impact is of the Sonoma waters rate increase of 4.6 percent when it's passed through to the average family of four it's calculated on the water usage charge and it will be 87 cents per month when it is passed through that is the Sonoma waters contribution when it's passed through and that amounts to approximately 10 or 11 dollars per year and any questions regarding these rates can be I'm sure Jennifer Burke would be happy to answer them but we'll proceed with the rest of the presentation so the rate setting calculation is prescribed by the restructured agreement for water supply it's a fully volumetric rate it takes the cost of operations and maintenance divides by the quantity of water sold and gives us the cost of water per acre foot the restructured agreement also tells us that we have to take the lower of the last 12 months of water deliveries or the three-year annual average water deliveries and as you can see from this example because of the drought the three-year annual average is much lower than the last 12 months and when you do the math you can see that the rate comes out to $918 per acre foot it is very sensitive to water deliveries given the same expenses with water deliveries from just a year or two ago of 40,000 acre feet your rate increase would have been more than 14 percent which would have meant that we would have had to do some serious cutting of projects and deferring of maintenance and capital projects the rate is the budget the gross budget is 51.6 million dollars it's made up of 54 percent is operations and maintenance costs 20 percent is capital projects 17 percent is biological opinion compliance projects water supply planning projects and water conservation nine percent is debt service and we're offsetting those expenses with seven million dollars in grants bonds and bond proceeds and use of fund balance over the past five to seven years we have had 17 million dollars in grants that we have used to offset costs and all of the water contractors have benefited from those some of it was spent on the rogers creek fault san rosa aqueduct project other hazard mitigation projects as well and so we're happy that we're able to use you know to generate grant revenue and use that to offset expenditures going forward expenditures compared to fiscal year 1819 budget amounts again it's a 51.6 million dollar budget it is an increase of 11 million dollars over fiscal year 1819 the reasons for those increases are in part operations and maintenance costs are going up we have deferred maintenance on our 18 storage tanks that store more than 360 million gallons of water we have deferred maintenance on those we're entering into an agreement for 38 million dollars over 10 year period for tank maintenance including tank recodes and cathodic protection upgrades those the project is three million in the fiscal year 1920 budget for tank maintenance and we will have 10 years of tank maintenance going forward capital projects the main reason for the increase that you see there is the sonoma booster pump station pumping an electrical upgrade project which is not on the santa rosa aqueduct so city of santa rosa does not pay for that biological opinion compliance project is going up primarily because of the dry creek habitat enhancement project we i'll go into that in a little bit more detail but implementation of miles four five and six will will attribute be attributable to that increase and then debt service is actually going down a little bit even though there is flat debt service when water deliveries increase we're able to bring the rate increase down and also debt service is going to decrease because we're issuing bonds this fiscal year and the cost of issuance is included in this year and again we have seven million dollars in grants use of fund balance and bond proceeds to help offset those costs we like to show how water deliveries have have changed over time in 2008 we used to have 60 000 acre feet in water deliveries we went to a low of 40 000 acre feet in 15 16 16 17 that is a 33 decrease in water deliveries that's very significant and as i mentioned before the the rate is very sensitive to water deliveries so when so we have a situation where when water deliveries are really low we have to defer maintenance defer capital projects when the red line which is the actual deliveries is greater than the budgeted deliveries we're able to build fund balance we use that fund balance when the opposite is true when the red line drops below the blue line and we have actuals that are low we generate less revenue so we use fund balance to smooth the rate out we try to keep that rate increase within four to six percent that's informed by our long range financial planning process and we are lucky enough at this point in 1819 to see increasing water deliveries which allows us not only to implement the deferred maintenance and capital projects but also to build fund balance for the next drought which we know will be coming we just don't know when and some of the projects that we will be implementing the dry creek habitat enhancement project dry creek flows from lake sonoma into russian river our collector wells pick up that water after it infiltrates through the gravel and is cleaned by the gravels the dry creek habitat enhancement project is required mitigation under the biological opinion from the national marine fishery service miles one two in three or phases one two in three were completed using water aid to sonoma water funds from other funds outside of the water transmission system so the water contractors have not paid for miles one two and three however we're moving into miles four five and six and the water contractors will be paying for miles four five and six and we're estimating that uh there's approximately 20 million dollars uh in costs over then over six over a six year period um ending in i think 2020 23 24 um that is uh the sonoma water cost share of the project we are lucky enough to have the us army core providing a 65 cost share so the 20 million is the 35 cost share that we are contributing um this project is not a capital project so we can't get bond funding uh to support it and it's also required mitigation and many grant agencies do not allow funding their grant funds to be spent on required mitigation so we are very much um uh working with the core very closely to make sure we get that 65 cost share and to keep our costs to 20 million dollars over six years we're hoping uh that will there'll be a true up at the very end and that water will funds will come back into this this fund from the army core and that will help reduce rates at that particular time other capital projects warm springs dam hydro turbine retrofit will be occurring that will help us save energy uh going forward it's a more efficient uh hydro turbine the mirror bell dam bladder replacement project is a very important project to replace that bladder which helps us create a backwater behind the dam to infiltrate uh to create groundwater um uh to create groundwater uh supply uh wool or pump replacements another project that was deferred uh we have the caltrans petaluma aqueduct relocation that's on the petaluma aqueduct santa rosa does not pay for that there's also the sonoma booster pump station on the sonoma aqueduct and santa rosa does not pay for that and then again the tank maintenance program on the maintenance side and valve hundreds of valve and meter replacements um on the collector wells again another deferred maintenance project each year the water contractors ask us to compare wholesale water rates with other wholesalers we don't mean to compare our rates directly to others because there are a lot of differences in how different order of wholesalers operate but during the drought when other wholesalers were raising their rates more than 10 15 20 percent we were able to keep our rates within the four to six percent and in fact last year because of the droughts we uh we held our rate increase at 3.67 percent um and our rate increase or rate is 918 dollars we're on the far left uh san juan water district does have a lower rate than us but over two years ago they had a 16 percent rate increase last year was nine percent this year is nine percent and next year is nine percent um and they anticipate after that maybe they'll get back down to a five percent rate increase so we feel pretty good about being able to keep our rate increases within that four to six percent and then just to sum up the rate is 918 dollars and 30 cents on the santa rosa aqueduct and uh the rate increase is 4.6 percent and uh the water advisory committee will vote on monday april eighth and our board will adopt it before april 30th we're scheduled to go to our board on april 16th and with that i'll bring it back to jennifer burk thank you lin so just to wrap up the presentation so the recommendation before the council comes from both the board of public utilities and the water department to recommend that the water advisory committee member which is council member fleming vote in favor of the proposed budget and rate increase and we're happy to answer any questions you might have thank you jennifer and lin for that presentation council questions mr soyer thank you mayor and it's so nice not to hear nine percent anymore knock on whatever wood might be around you know i know that that's nothing we can guarantee but there are the years of those annual nine percent increases seem to have softened quite a bit and it's and it's due to all of among other things the great amount of work that's been done by the staff all the staffs involved and all of those that are that are a part of this responsible budgeting and i really appreciate it i am curious and then maybe not be something that you can answer for me but the dry creek habitat enhancement how how are things obviously you know during the first phase and there was some testing they decided that it was worthy to go on to the next phase how are things going uh things are actually going very well um we have been monitoring we have been submitting reports to uh to national marine fisheries and they are very encouraged by the results from miles one two and three and uh so that is leading us to continue with miles four five and six we have had some issues with flooding rains that have created some disruption of some of the features that were constructed and we're going back in and we're maintaining those and and and reconstructing what we need to reconstruct but so far it has been a fairly successful process and and nymphs is supportive of it it's great to hear because i remember when this first started and it seemed like it was going to be such a long haul to get some um efficacy from all this work and it's good to hear that it's that's moving in a positive direction and that it's that actually the there is light at the end of that tunnel thank you councilmember combs you want to comment thank you um i really want to thank you for the work you do to keep our prices down i appreciate it i recognize it i see it um and i know that our city has worked hard to provide a help to others program i want to do a shout out for the help to others program folks on their bill can i think round up or if you would explain that program a little bit i'd appreciate it absolutely thank you for the question um so in recognition that we would like to um provide some assistance um if we can in relation to low income residents uh we did put together what's known as our h2o or help to others program and the help to others program allows those that meet certain um income um requirements to apply for the program they go through a water use efficiency audit so we help them by looking at any opportunity they can to be as efficient as possible to really eliminate waste and make sure that they're bringing their bill down from that perspective and then once they complete that they're enrolled in the program and they get 50 off of their fixed fees both for water and sewer every month um so we do look at some funding opportunities through our um cell tower leases to fund that program as well as as mentioned if folks are interested there's an opportunity to donate to that program as well which will help um provide funding for the help to others program and information is available on the city's website including all the information about how to enroll if folks are interested I really want to thank you for that program and clarify that unlike the electric utilities which are allowed to provide resources and different rates for low income folks there is the state which is typically referred to I think is 218 uh precludes us from offering that extra help to low income households in the same way so I really appreciate our staff's creativity in finding a way to offer some assistance I I do want to be clear as I have done year in and year out since I've been on council that until the state changes its policy and creates a reasonable sufficient safety net water is an essential everyone must have water and we lack a state ability to create a state safety net for that um so I do not vote for water rate increases until we can get the state safety net in place and again want to very much thank our staff for their work solving the local problem and I hope we can talk more about bringing to bare forces at the state to change that policy because while electricity is often vital water is certainly vital and yet we are not allowed to provide a safety net for for poor families thank you great thank you did you have a question I would like to clarify and question I'm for all of our public and ratepayers out there I wanted to let them hear from our staff whether or not the results of the fires the benzene contamination was if any of this rate increase has gone to the fixing of the pipes that were contaminated with benzene I want people to know about how that was funded sure so in relation to this pass-through rate increase this is what's needed by the snowman county water agency and so we have to purchase water because there are a wholesaler and so this goes into what we call our user fee as opposed to the fixed fee there's two portions to the bill that affects that portion and that passes through so that will fund our additional cost to purchase water from the snowman county water agency starting next fiscal year with regard to the work that we did to resolve the benzene issue that came from previous budgets and in funding that we had we we looked at various opportunities to try and find the most cost effective and effective way that we could resolve that issue initially we were looking at something that was going to be significantly more costly but through a very thorough investigation and working with experts and regulators we were able to resolve that at approximately eight million dollars as opposed to the initial between 30 to 40 that we were looking at and we're doing everything we can to put ourselves in the best opportunity to be able to resolve for recoup as much funding from FEMA as possible through that process so just to be clear this this rate increase does not go to any of that and also will people who had who are rebuilding homes be assessed any fees for having hookups reestablished and was that is that associated with this cost increase at all no that is not great thank you so much okay one card on this topic george uberty i would just like to say that we're talking about rate increases right now i feel like you should probably get what you pay for now you know we pay for our water to be cleaned i feel like that's a pretty basic i mean you have to have clean water to drink council member com said it beautifully i thought um i used to be a city of santa rosa employee i worked at the ridgeway swim center it's a wonderful facility and it has excellent tools for testing among other things the ph of the water that's there uh my the quality of my water in my home is terrible i thought i would test that out i got a bottle of water i got santa rosa city tap water and i got some pool water and i tested them myself bottled water ph 7 on the nose uh pool water 7.5 that's what we wanted it to be santa rosa city tap water 8.8 um you know and these are with tools that the city of santa rosa uses to ensure the safety of its water for the public to swim in so i am fairly confident they're accurate i called somebody from the city santa rosa uh that works in water testing and i had them tell me that they and these are her exact words she said well alkaline is better than acidic but the highest we recommend for human consumption is 8.3 all right now that's santa rosa city tap water coming out of the faucet at a public facility all right now before that ever happened i did research into this myself okay santa rosa has the most water quality violations per capita in the state of california by a terrific margin we have 108 they are 100 unenforced all right the only place in all of california with more water quality violations than us in 2016 was los angeles county all right they had 180 all right now they have a population of 3.25 million all right we have what 300 000 something like that sinoma county i mean it's it's not even one it's not even a third we got 108 water quality violations they got 180 that's it's unacceptable it's absolutely unacceptable okay and that was before the fires hit all right the fires hit our water quality did not get better all right then 2018 and this is the last point okay so for my own testing of the water my own the stuff coming out of the faucet at my house the stuff coming out of the faucet at a public facility the public figures that are disclosed about the amount of water quality violations we have and now okay at the lagoon at the santa rosa rather than cleaning the water we have a water quality trading program water quality trading i don't want to trade the quality of my water for anything all right we're selling away our right to clean drinking water that is wrong any additional cards on this topic madams miss lemony of this item um i'd like to may i make a comment about yep okay um first of all i wanted to thank both uh sinoma water and our amazing water staff for working to keep the rates predictable and lower than cpi for our families also wanted to echo council member combs is noting our help to others in which case you can get a 50 percent reduction in reduced both water and sewer fees which when i look at my bill tend to be the most expensive portion and i wanted to say that if you're interested in you don't have computer access the number to call if you believe that you might be income eligible for help to others is area code 707-535-3395 i'll read that once again 535-3395 and i and i urge you to take advantage of this we are unique in california and having this program it's unacceptable that we don't have it as a state as mentioned by council member combs but we are very proud to offer it to our low-income residents and i really hope that everybody who's eligible takes advantage of it um so the other thing i wanted to um mention was that uh these you know that last year that that uh these costs were deferred in light of the fires and and also thank the staff for doing that and again i find that these 87 cents per month is is a reasonable amount so i will pass it back to the council for any other comments and seeing none okay i'd like to move uh that the uh the recommendation of the board of public utilities in the water department consider uh the proposed rate increase and provide direction to myself um to pass it on april 8th and i have any further reading of the text second we have a motion in a second your votes please and we have six eyes one no uh the no by council member combs thank you thank you for the presentation okay we'll move to uh item 13 public comment on non-agenda items first up is dwayne dewitt followed by nancy wong thank you sir my name is dwayne dewitt i'm from rosalind within santa rosa uh first i noticed that the picture of former mayor bob blanchard is not here on the wall and i was hoping that you'd honor that army veteran by getting his picture back up there on the wall so i just asked the clerk to hand out to you a letter that was sent to the city five months ago from congressman thompson and there's a typographical error in there that wasn't noticed at the beginning and that's that their staff neglected to put in rosalind veterans trail and repeated the word grove twice and so along with the letter that you've gotten there's also a notice about how the united states department of veterans affairs has a funding program now to help disabled veterans with various exercise activities during the master planning for the santa rosa city bicycle and pedestrian master plan we had been pointing out that the bike path just to the south of rosalind creek was where veterans had been hoping we could do the veterans trail and we'd been talking about this for many years so this letter came to the city five almost six months ago now and uh today vietnam veterans of america said that no one from the city has contacted them about this matter that congressman thompson takes pretty seriously and he's even stated on there that uh he thanks the city manager for careful consideration on these efforts so what the veterans are trying to do is not just get that uh bikeway greenway designated as a veterans trail and we'd be out there helping on it but also try to bring in funds from out of the area we've done some good things we helped the county get three hundred ninety two thousand dollars to do brownfields research so we know we can do some positive things but perhaps those amounts of money don't seem large to you we're hoping that you folks would reach out to the veterans groups and help us to get this veterans trail and all that we've been trying to do we've never asked for money from you we've tried to bring in something for you and we do that just for what howard schultz who's now a current candidate for the next presidency talked about in his book for love of country that's what veterans are about and i know some people look down on veterans but we're trying to help our community as well as our country and we hope that you folks will step up and help us to get a veterans trail in roseland thank you for your time thank you doing nancy wong followed by steve den right good afternoon uh my name's nancy wong um president of the railway and paris techniques association apologies for the late uh coming in to thank you for our new year event that was uh our mayor and uh city council i think uh victoria flaming john sorry and uh and let's store all of the rest um because i was all the time after the event next morning i took out five o'clock after i come home i contacted john he says no meeting last week so i apologize for the late delayed thank you we from our bottom the heart um we really want to thank you with all the busy schedule everybody have and you all bring your family to celebrate the chinese new year with this we we feel so honored to have that and this year we feel comfortable we only had 600 guests instead the last year we have a 750 that was a little overwhelming but we're going to continue uh sharing our culture thank you for the city always support us so um and also our board member was here and julie chang wanted really want to say thank you thank you again thank you nancy it's a wonderful event uh steve den right followed by kate cross bala has a bulk hazard good afternoon steve den right uh homeless action happy third tuesday in lint there's a few questions i don't know can you guys ever answer questions because i'm still wondering about are you guys doing an eva on catholic charities would be an interesting story let's talk that would come out and be amazing and why is homeless anything to do with the homeless on a non-agenda item is that they didn't all perish the day they're still getting water and air and where is the 583 thousand dollars that was coming down in twos last may as your secretary or treasurer said hey you got money coming and since there's all seven of you here right now we could have what would be called a unanimous motion and and all i need is four positive votes and maybe four porta potties could be out throughout the city in a few places where there's more than four pads have already been prepared for porta potties and i'll provide the homeless to use them up and make them feel appreciated and all you guys gotta do is say make this thing in motion and make a vote and finally something could be said there's a word called resolution and i've been speaking for a long time i've not heard any resolutions and be something for people to start clapping and i could guarantee i could bring a whole bunch of people homeless people here next meeting to say thank you very much thank you very much and some of them in different languages to say thank you for some generosity provide anything like that so if there's any way can we conduct a vote is is anybody here think that the homeless need a place to go to bathroom is there any public people that could raise their hands how about how about you guys if i didn't know about this meeting i i could bring how many homeless do you need to have something like this just we're asking for four places to go to the bathroom and maybe permission to put cardboard down once in a while because it's just it's really makes it poopy when you gotta wonder where the heck you can go at six o'clock in the morning because some of my i will admit i'm speaking for homeless and some of them i think have some some problems malfunctions but and then there's some good ones but they all have the same problems that you guys have i learned to tolerate cold or else how about you guys just give us free plastic bags why don't you guys do something like how about you come and show that you care and come every friday there's free oatmeal and raisins and we're giving a hot chocolate and coffee time when's the last time you did that to say we care that's the homeless right there it's very personal so if you guys could do anything like that i'll greet you personally happy second or third tuesday in lent may y'all be rewarded peace out god bless kate followed by victoria yannis good afternoon my name is actually pronounced grow bell tazar i should have written that on my card but um you're not the first to make that mistake um i'm here tonight with my 12 year old daughter um i have four children and i'd like to talk to you about the bus routes through santa rosa my family and i live um near this sonoma fairground in the new newer developments there up on the hill what i'm here to ask for is to place an item on the agenda to discuss the um usefulness and the practicality of the current bus lines um a number of residential areas i've noticed do not have access to the bus lines and my neighborhood is one of them um and so what happens for a family like mine is that if i'd like my daughter to ride the bus she has to walk underneath the freeway passed down by dunhower park underneath the freeway past the 7-eleven and then she can get on the bus to go to school well of course i won't have her do that because it worries me too much and so what i find is that the bus is not really helpful for my family and i think that's a great shame because obviously bus riding the buses is good for the environment it allows the children to develop health healthy independence from their parents my kids are getting to an age where they don't want me chauffeuring them around and i have too much to do to be doing that um and since the fires the concentration of our neighborhood has changed um my neighborhood was built before the fires but i noticed that there wasn't a reassessment of the bus lines and whether they serve those communities it seems the venue wouldn't allow me to i mean obviously you can access this but when i look at this the what i notice about it is that the bus lines are set up like the spokes of a wheel but sometimes you don't want to go all the way into town before you go back out and so it'd be nice if there was a circular rim on the on the bus routes um so uh i think that's pretty much my reasons for for asking you to put this on the agenda for some discussion and investigation um i think that our current system is a little bit the the layout is a little bit dated and it doesn't serve the residential communities really some of them at all that's all thank you very much thank you for your comments victoria yana is followed by elizabeth ridlington victoria yana is from homeless action exclamation point thank you very much for this opportunity to speak i'm speaking today to encourage the city council to have its representatives the mayor and julie combs vote no for catholic charities to have the one point over one million for the roof uh this is out of the heat funding the emergency funding for the homeless i'm here to ask you to uh make sure that catholic charities does due diligence in their seeking other funding because a roof that big i can't see how it's an emergency to fix it when this should have been planned all along it's and to bring that big of a capital project into the emergency funding realm to take most of our money is a big shame um catholic charities does not respect the grievance rights of their clients they totally ignore the grievance procedure and uh once somebody is once an organization like catholic charities takes public funding to help uh the government fulfill its duty those people uh those members of the public that are receiving the services have constitutional rights in when those um funds are discontinued or any benefits that for example a woman laying out in front of the homeless service center the other day was banned orally just banned we don't know when she's going to be allowed back in so we're going to try to use the grievance system to um get her back in there for services but you know this is very important for all agencies that are seeking funding that they respect the rights of their clients i would also like to thank julie combs for voting no on the rate increase because i think that the city council needs to stand up for poor people as well as you do representing the millionaires that live in this community uh just because it was a sunny day let's not forget the homeless that are out on the street it's going to rain overnight and they will be out there another thing is i'm sure you know that the police department is still going around giving tickets to people for blocking the sidewalk thank you victoria elizabeth ridlington followed by eris weaver my name is elizabeth ridlington i live in the junior college neighborhood and i'm here to speak about something that's not been happening in my neighborhood necessarily but elsewhere in town which is the alarming increase in pedestrians and cyclists who've been killed recently on city streets these deaths didn't have to happen such deaths are avoidable if the city designs streets that are safe for all users and if the city lowers speed limits and enforces those speed limits i urge you to make this a priority i asked that you work with city staff and with the police department to quickly develop a plan for how to address the most dangerous sections of stony point where four people have died in the last six months for the longer term i asked the city adopt vision zero which we talked about at the meeting two weeks ago at adoption of the bike and pedestrian master plan and overall that the city strive to reduce the impact of traffic violence thank you thank you eris weaver followed by tomas ells so just on stony point road alone five cyclists and pedestrians have died in eight months that's one every six weeks uh one of them since i was last year speaking at the uh when you spoke about the bike ped master plan about that uh that corridor how many more people have to die before we do something one of the things i have found particularly frustrating is that the only public official who's made any statement about any of those deaths every news story about every death an officer says pedestrians and cyclists should wear brighter clothes and be more careful about where you cross the street but nobody says drivers slow down put down your damn phone pay attention you're driving a machine that can kill people why do we keep blaming the victim why do we keep prioritizing speed over safety now i know that some of those um the salute some solutions could be simple i went and spent some time over the intersection where this last death happened and adding a hog pedestrian beacon would allow the people who live on the east side of stony point to get to the store that's on the west side there's three quarters of a mile between crosswalks or stop lights on that street where people drive far too fast i know the area around highway 12 or three of the deaths were clusters probably going to take a little more figuring out what to do there but other cities have committed to vision zero which is saying that we don't find any uh deaths acceptable we're aiming for zero what would our policies look like what would our enforcement activities look like what would our infrastructure look like if we stopped assuming that these deaths are just what happens and prioritized minimizing them thanks thank you thomas ells hi thank you for the opportunity to speak um yesterday evening was the shanae hospital community meeting um and i think that it seems like santa rosa is the lead agency for that development and i know people have been put through a ringer those people that were up there mentioned how inconvenient it was and how difficult it was in the previous uh let's say opportunity for them to speak on the development and it seemed to me after watching uh what was communicated and seeing it seemed to me that i believe that when the city has an application before it it's going to have to go through the very sane amount of public participation and offering and those people up there are not going to be happy the consequence of the third time around it's going to seem to them like they would said right there they said why are we here this seems like the wrong meeting we're meeting with the county and the city is the one who's going to have authority over the development why are we even having this meeting you know so i'm just i'm just the messenger on that one on the issue of these pedestrians they're very unfortunate this is terrible particularly the consequence on santa on stony point what's written in the paper is they're pedestrians but further down in the article that was a homeless man he was well known in the area they said he was the happiest person that they knew this guy was always happy he was and in the morning the guy driving didn't see him now i i'm a civil engineer and i study accidents and that accident with that car was not at 35 miles an hour that was heavily damaged that car was extremely damaged and the woman who said when she was raking her yard in the morning there very early before she went to work she was raking her yard and she saw she heard the noise and she turned she saw the guy fly into her mailbox and when she when he hit the mailbox post she said that was what killed him it wasn't wasn't the exact exactly the car because the car flexed and the car bent a lot but the mailbox post didn't bend that was in concrete she said that was in concrete and that's what killed him you know but he flew because of the car he flew because of the car because that car was speeding there's no doubt of i mean you could you can measure that you get the photographs you get binocular photographs and you can thank you thomas exact speed that he was going not sure i can't read it at all don't even have a good guess lovely um that's great i don't like it anyway um never mind that reminded me of something um i would like to thank julie's while we're in the mood of thankfulness today um for having a really good civic initiative um whenever someone comes in with a um something that is tangible and a good idea you seem to jump up and make it happen and that's very beautiful um and i'd love to just end it at that but i'm a chatty one so um yeah it's it's a shame that we don't have more people um working in and able to have a more diverse um pool of people working on street um safety constantly um and we could do that by upping our revenues and tourism and whatnot um by having more bus systems um uh Healdsburg has their um boozy route you know it goes around Healdsburg and picks up people um we could have a Santa Rosa sponsored um smart train shuttle from the ferries to the train you know um cozy maybe with a toast on it or whatever but get people up here there's plenty that we could be doing more um if you got more diverse people in your system with ideas i don't know but uh yeah um julie always seems to focus on that so if we could make her like the czar of sonoma county that'd be great thank you thank you meredith kaplan hello um i'm here wearing black today in memory of the people the pedestrians and the bicycle riders who were killed in santa rosa recently and i'm not going to speak long i just want to say i hope that you will create the infrastructure to make our roads safer for all people thank you thank you we have no additional cards for public comment no additional items uh we'll adjourn the meeting