 Good morning mayor. Thank you for bearing with us. No worries I'm just impressed Mr. Sawyer has been able to figure it out too. We are just waiting for Victoria Fleming and we'll get started shortly. The mayor please repeat his last comment. I think I only got a part of it. Something about something about my my um technical reality. No no it's my only comment was this wonderful scene you on this early Monday morning. I'm sure that's what you said. I just totally misconstrued it. Still haven't figured out how to get that nice background but I but I but you gave me the instructions I'm just afraid to use them. And I've upgraded those uh my backgrounds but I'm staying with city stuff here. Yeah there you go. Callie did everyone RSVP did the vice mayor say she should be able to attend? I believe Liz and Stephanie were in the process of trying to get a hold of her so I will double check with them real quick. Thank you. Mornings are a challenge for her. Good morning. He's asking a Fleming. Oh we're still waiting for Victoria Fleming. Did you hear she said she was going to attend and remember you're live in the meeting? Yep. I do I do I do I do. You guys are not on mute just FYI. Yeah we're gonna we're gonna try to call Victoria right now. Good morning mayor we just spoke with Victoria. She will be logging on shortly. Right as soon as she gets on we'll do a roll call and get the meeting underway. Perfect. Thank you mayor. Ms. LaCourse and Tony Gaza here if you can promote Scott Westrop and Scott Moon as well they'll be speaking to you. Thank you. Thank you to Scott. I have promoted Scott Westrop and I will promote Scott Moon right now. And I believe the vice mayor is waiting to be promoted to a panelist also. I am looking I don't see her yet. I believe it's the call in number. Okay we can give the vice mayor speaking permissions but we can't promote her to a panelist because she called in on a telephone line. All right good morning all we'll call this November 23rd meeting of the public safety subcommittee meeting to order. Madam clerk could you please do a roll call. Good morning councilmember Sawyer. Here. Vice mayor Fleming. Here. Mayor Schwedhelm. Here. All councilmembers are present. Okay I have some information to share with everyone interpreter services are being provided in Spanish for today's meeting. Can our Zoom host explain how that will work? Of course. One moment. Interpreter Charles can you please interpret what the mayor just stated? Thank you. Live interpretation can be heard on the Spanish channel. You can join the Spanish channel by clicking on the interpretation icon in Zoom toolbar. It looks like a globe. Charles. Live interpretation will be heard on the Spanish channel. At agenda item 3 public comment the interpreter on the panel will be prepared to assist anyone needing interpretation. Additional instruction will be given at agenda item 3 public comment. Interpreter Charles I will go ahead and I will assign you first. Okay thank you. Thank you mayor. Okay somehow skipping just to remind my two colleagues to keep your audio on mute unless you're speaking. Staff will remain muted until meeting to speak. As members of the public join the meeting you'll be participating as an attendee. Your microphone camera will be muted only today's panelists will be viewed during the meeting. If you're calling in from a telephone and choose to speak during the public comments portion of today's agenda. For privacy concerns the host will be renaming your viewable phone number to resident in the last four digits of your phone number. Madam city clerk could you explain how public comments will be heard during today's meeting? Yes thank you. At each agenda item the item is presented the mayor will ask for council comments and then open it up for public comment. The host in Zoom will be lowering all hands until public comment is open for the agenda item. Once the mayor has called for public comment the mayor will announce for the public to raise their hand if they wish to speak on the specific agenda item. If you are calling in to listen to the meeting audibly you can dial star nine to raise your hand. The host will then call on the public who have raised their hands. Public comments will be limited in three minutes and a timer will appear on the screen for the council and public to see. Once all live public comments have been heard the meeting host will play voicemail public comments. If you provide a live public comment or an agenda item I'm sorry on an agenda item but also submitted an email e-comment or a recorded voice message for public comment your email e-comment or voice message public comment will not be duplicated read or played during the meeting. Additionally there is one public comment period today on today's agenda to speak on non-agenda items on not agenda matters item three. This is a time when any person may address the council on matters not listed on this agenda but which are within the subject matter jurisdiction of the council. Mayor. Thank you and could you also explain how the Spanish translation feature will work. There is a special Spanish channel icon on the zoom meeting and the public may participate on that channel interpreters are in participating in zoom and will be translating the meeting on the Spanish channel during the public comment period will step in to assist translation of public comment per the brown act in additional three minutes will be added to the timer to accommodate the translation. This is the time when any person may address matters not listed on this agenda but which are within the subject matter of the jurisdiction. The public may comment on agenda items when the item is called. Each speaker is allowed three minutes. Mayor. Thank you and I will also remind everyone we'll probably be taking a break for the translation services after about an hour and a half or so. So we are now taking public comment on item three on agenda matters. This is the time when any person may address the council on matters not listed on this agenda but which are within the subject matter jurisdiction of this subcommittee. If you wish to make a comment via zoom please raise your hand. If you're dialing in via telephone please dial star nine to raise your hand. Madam host would you please facilitate public comment item three. Of course. One moment please. Talk about the delay. I am seeing no hands raised. No hands raised. Mayor. Okay so we have no public comment on item three. Then moving on to item four approval of minutes. Both 4.1 and 4.2 were draft minutes from our July 1st meeting and from our September 25th meeting. Mr. Soraya Ms. Fleming did either of you find any corrections or additions or adjustments? Neither. Nope. Okay we'll accept those as submitted. On to item 5.1. Fire Chief Gosner or Deputy Chief Westrop will want you to be introducing this item. Yes thank y'all be introducing it. Good morning Mayor, Vice Mayor and Mr. Soraya. We're very pleased to bring this item to this group. I'll remind you that in September 15th you'll see this as well as others at a study session but this is our initial plan to increase our wildfire resiliency and response. This is something that's been being developed over the last few years and this is one of those items that a lot of work has gone into and this is going to be very high level but I'll tell you Deputy Chief Scott Westrop he's wanted to develop this plan through discussions with our department. I've done a great job so when the presentation is over myself Deputy Chief Scott Westrop and our fire marshal Scott Moon will be available for any questions. With that I'll turn it over to Scott Westrop. Thank you. Thanks Chief. Good morning Mayor Schwedhelm, Vice Mayor Fleming and Council Member Soraya, Scott Westrop Deputy Fire Chief for the City of Santa Rosa. Today we're going to present to you the Santa Rosa Fire Department wildland resiliency and response strategic plan. Next slide please. So when we get into the purpose of this plan I need to move you all. The first of all the name is very it's quite a mouthful so we if you hear me refer to it or you hear it around the city refer to as WUI 2.0 it's our sort of internal mnemonic for what we're talking about so the wildland resiliency and response strategic plan looks at the risk and threat potential and threat potential of wildland fires and it'll adjust the prevention, mitigation and operational response components of the organization. This plan is a holistic assessment and adjustment of the organization to better prepare and respond to the increased threat of wildfires within or entering the city limits. This essentially this plan and the way I've explained it to people is that we are looking at from anywhere from the boots that we wear to the state and federal legislation that we'll be supporting in anything in between nothing's off the table and it's a very raw look at all of our programs moving forward. This plan is a five-year living document and over the course of the five years we'll continue to make progress in all these strategies that we're going to present to you today. After those five years we'll take a look at the plan and the the enhancements that we've made the improvements that we've made see where we're at with the threat matrix at that point and then a new plan will be created through a spot analysis or a strengths weakness opportunity and threat analysis and of course this plan aligns with the city council goals crisis response through early 2021 public safety reform and priorities. Next slide please. So it was sort of interesting developing this plan in relation to the recruitment and diversity strategic plan because it kind of feels like everybody understands the background of this and understands the purpose of this plan. There's really nothing shocking in here I don't think for everybody who's lived here for the past three or four years so but to give some more background prior to 2017 the threat of wildland fire within the city limits was very high. It's been called out in our local hazard mitigation plan for years it's part of the general plan but the realization of a large-scale event was kept relatively minimal since really since 1964 and and one thing I really want to emphasize is the Santa Rosa fire department and the city has remained an industry leader in wildland fire prevention and response throughout the the course of its history but as we all know since 2017 Sonoma County and the city of Santa Rosa we face this continual onslaught of large-scale wildland fires we'll get into more details on those later we've all lived through them and really what we've seen is a major shift in the weather patterns to a much longer hotter drier and windier fire season which we've all seen as well. So after 2017 the department looked at itself and and really we couldn't build our entire department based off of a single event and I think we all can agree at this point 2017 can no longer be looked at as an anomaly or a 50-year event because year after year it seems like we're facing a new wildland threat. So wildland fire threat or the realization of the wildland fire threat is unfortunately the new normal that the community faces and we as an organization need to adjust our modeling in order to protect our citizens carry out the mission of the department and adhere to the goals of the city council. Next slide please. So I want to sort of talk about where we were pre-2017 so before 2017 and the the implementation of the best practices that we employed prior to the Tubbs Fire. Our fire fire prevention bureau has the the best building codes and standards that meet or exceed state or federal guidance. We have the obviously defined WOOE or wildland urban interface standards for prevention mitigation response. We have very strong mutual aid and automatic aid agreements and we're part of the California master mutual aid system which basically I think everybody knows but just to make sure is that that's where we can send resources out to help our neighbors and then neighbors come in to help us and we've all seen that work very well and it's a very strong system throughout the state of California. We've always been very aggressive in our firefighting strategies and tactics and we fall in line with Cal Fire procedures. We have industry leading particularly in the region for wildland fire command fire response and mitigation practices and we always have the top-of-the-line Cal Fire spec wildland firefighting personal protective equipment. That changes over the course of time based on their their science and technology but we always have that and we always protect our our personnel very well and we deploy one type three fire engine one type six fire engine in a water tender so the type three fire engine is the the one you see on the top left of your screen very short wheel base can handle pump and roll capabilities it's lighter it carries a little bit less water different tools than you see on the on the fire engine to see on the street every day the type six fire engine which is even smaller four-wheel drive pump and roll capabilities very agile piece of equipment but that's what you see on the bottom left of your screen there and water tender is essentially it looks like a regular fire engine to see driving on the street but it carries 1500 to 2000 gallons of water so in areas where there's no hydrants we can use the water tender or multiple water tenders to supply our fire engines with water next slide please so post 2017 after the tubs fire we have made a lot of catalyst improvements to the both to the city system and the entire fire system throughout the region the fire departments developed and implemented a community wildfire protection plan through the fire prevention bureau the fire prevention bureau has developed a vegetation management and specter position it's still pending being hired through authorization but this is a limited term position and this was created through an internal reorganization and it funded internally so it's just the the bureau has really tried to get grants and tried to move the vegetation management program forward and so they had to find a way to get something in place and so through this internal reorganization funding mechanism they're able to get a vegetation management inspector in place that is not an entire program that's just the inspector and again it's a limited term position one major improvement is the city now has the ability to send ipos emergency alert messaging so that's the emergency alert system wireless emergency alert system so now we have the ability to send those out which we exercised in the glass fire we have access to an advanced wildfire camera system and weather station systems we use these on a daily basis to monitor what's going on it was a a huge component of our response to the glass fire or the shady fire at the time and the picture on the top left of your screen was a picture I took of the computer screen in the emergency operation center and that is the minute that the concave fire was reported and started in the geysers so that's that was within a minute of dispatch and I was able to send that picture to all of our crews that were pre-staged for that for the weather event and they responded and did what they could we've developed and implemented the pre-pollined evacuation zones which were exercised in the glass and shady fire the picture on the bottom left is the evacuation zones and we've really enhanced our communication and cooperation with federal state regional and city partners we've enhanced and changed some of our firefighting strategies and tactics based off the lessons we learned out of the fires that we faced in the last four fire seasons and really one of the big catalyst changes for for us internally is the aggressive up staffing programs due to critical weather conditions within the city and the region so as you all know when when we face a red flag or a severe weather warning we'll put additional fire engines and digital overhead on the street to make sure that we were better protected. One thing I want to bring up that it actually came about after these slides were created was we were just informed last week by Cal OES that we now have the access to a all hazard incident awareness and assessment fixed wing aircraft essentially it's a king air that has a high-level FLIR system the ability to send real-time situational awareness and data to the field it comes at no cost to the city or to to anybody they're available seven days a week 12 hours a day out of the Sacramento International Airport so there was an incident on the glass fire where because the glass fire was already burning and when the shady fire started that eventually became part of the glass fire we actually had a night air attack and that gave us the situational awareness and the intelligence we needed to plan our firefighting strategies and tactics and evacuations that's not available to us all the time but now we have a new tool through the state where we could actually request that aircraft if it's available and not being used elsewhere to come and give us that real-time information that we need so that's really a huge win for us in regard to situational awareness. Next slide please so when we get into the actual risk assessment looking at what our risk was pre-tubs and post-tubs this is this is really a telling slide for us in fact every time I show this to any of the managers or any of our personnel they're like wow really and it's it's really telling what we're looking at here so it's sort of a weird time frame from 2003 to pre-tubs 2017 and the reason is we change reporting formats in 2004 so extracting data pre-2004 is extremely difficult so that's why it's kind of an odd year and something to keep in mind as we look at these numbers is this is just fires that started and remained within the city limits this does not account for fires that we go to in our immediately adjoining jurisdictions or within the state responsibility area so in looking at the top fires that we had by acreage in the top box 2003 we had the lofty perch fire which obviously led to the fireworks ban in Santa Rosa it was 42 acres it burned essentially in the same area that was just burned in the glass fire um san Miguel was 14 acres in 2004 and we had that in avenue in 2017 august 2017 that was six and a half acres pithy and elizabeth five acres and kelsey nulls four acres so what that shows is by acreage we've kept fires very small so our prevention mitigation and operational tactics were working it's just the the climate change and the conditions that we face have obviously um brought bigger fires into the city we don't really start them here they just come to us and we end up absorbing a lot of the energy in and damage from them looking at fires from a dollar loss perspective again lofty perch was the highest dollar loss in 2003 there's three structures lost and keep in mind when we when we tabulate structures within our reporting system that can be any sort of building so for instance in lofty perch it was one home that was lost and the others were outbuildings and sheds for a total of $750,000 um san Miguel with six structures lost so I can I can tell you firsthand that there was no homes lost enough fire those were chicken coops and storage buildings and sheds um seven street one structure lost obviously was on the home at $26,000 and then parkard hill court and lana road were uh were other smaller losses that we've had so looking at those numbers compared to what we're going to look at at the next slide obviously we've uh we've managed to keep things relatively in check based on our prevention and operational standards um but these things just keep coming into our community and creating more damage next slide please so unfortunately these are statistics that all of us within the city or within the community know all too well um I'm just going to look at the the top four up here which is the um tubs and nuns which was part of the lnu central lnu complex in 2017 the concave fire in 2019 uh wallbridge mires in 2020 and of course the glass and shady which was september of this year so with the nuns and tubs fire there was 24 fatalities within that incident 36,000 acres over 56 500 structures destroyed 300 damaged within the city we had nine fatalities and over 3000 structures destroyed as we move along through the progression of these fires one thing I you know I'm not going to go through and read all of the all of the statistics but one thing I'd like to highlight is the fatalities um while the fires are getting bigger in acreage the fatalities are going down and the number of structures destroyed is growing down quite frankly that's not good enough for us we want this to be a net zero across the board and uh but we are making progress in how we're doing things and how we're addressing these large-scale fires that come into the city of santa rosa a couple other fires to note is really we start to see a major catalyst change in large wetland fires around 2014 and lake in mendicino county uh you recall the fires that were in through middle town and and lower lake and then obviously the mendicino complex was right on our borders at the time part of this year that was the largest uh fire by acreage in in california state history um that's been surpassed by the august complex and then the campfire of course in 2018 as well which was the fire in paradise next slide please so this didn't take a whole lot of analysis i didn't have a calculator out or anything but uh the the wildland fire threat and when i say threat i really mean the realization of a large-scale event to the city of santa rosa suddenly and seriously increased starting in 2017 has continued throughout the course of the last several years and we've really worked on a lot of enhancements throughout the last three or four years well in the midst of continual fire recovery continual crisis management of pandemic we have made progress we haven't just been sitting around resting on our laurels we've really been trying to make catalyst changes to the entire system but it's become essential that the preparedness of the city the community and the fire department were at a point where we can proactively improve to enhance factors of prevention mitigation response so we're approaching this um to take on these challenges by sort of looking at it from a zero-based budgeting approach where we're starting from ground zero and building our way back up looking at everything that we possibly can so we're going to adjust all factors across all bureaus of the fire department all of our programs so the the wildland resiliency response strategic plan is going to assess six major strategies that would comprise our programs and make adjustments to each one of those strategies and the enhancement of these strategies will holistically improve not only the fire department but ultimately the city and the community so we can collectively face this new normal that we're uh we're engaged with next slide please so as we get into the strategies here there's there's six strategies and we'll get into them more in detail but it's legislation capital enhancements non-capital enhancements operations staffing and community engagement one thing you'll see as we go through these slides is that there's two things two major things that are not covered number one is the fire department infrastructure needs those it would it would have been sort of redundant to bring those up again they're outlined on our strategic plan and they're outlined on our deployment analysis and then the other part of that is as you won't see any request for personnel in here that's all outlined on our staffing needs assessment and again as the chief referenced you'll be seeing this as more of a global picture in the in the December 2015 study session where we're going to bring you a very global look at what the what the entire fix looks like next slide please so the first strategy we're going to look at is legislation and it's just sort of an overarching term that captures everything that's going to have to do with really revolves around prevention alerting some aspects of response our utility partners things like that and we really made a lot of advancement in this area we made a lot of significant progress on local prevention and mitigation factors including the community wildfire protection program at the state level we've increased our ability for alerting and we continue to work with the state on alerting and response capabilities and obviously at the federal level the mayor has been involved with this the vice mayor has been involved with this but working on FEMA policy change working with the FCC on cell tower resiliency cell phone cell phone reciprocity and obviously improvements to the iPod systems sorry it's early for me to so some of the things that we're going to focus on and continue to focus on as we move forward here is local fire prevention statutes and ordinances to improve those local and fire local state and fire code changes we're going to continue for progression on the community wildfire protection plan development of a vegetation management program and i'll call this out a couple times but i want to make it clear that this was presented to you on the september 25th public safety subcommittee meeting by fire marshal moon it's a standalone request because it's such a big topic and a and a big item but it is part of the entire global picture but it won't be called out necessarily in this plan as as a request for funding that was done as a standalone item on the 925 meeting we're going to continue to work on state policy and standards related to prevention alerting response and recovery federal policy related to alerting communications response and recovery we're going to continue to work with our utility partners on their safety and the safety of the community commodity distribution methods and resiliency and then we'll we're we need to figure out and work with the city on what we're going to do as far as utilization of funds from state web proposition propositions for instance prop 19 regional measures which is the fire service public sales tax which would be a countywide sales tax that that may be we may be looking at next year measure g which may be like next year and then how we're going to use local tax revenue next slide please so capital enhancements and and really what this strategy is it's putting the right tools in the hands of those who need it when it's necessary and it's a crucial element to our success since 2017 the fire department has not added or replaced any capital items particularly regarding apparatus dedicated directly to wild land fire prevention or suppression so when we become drawn down drawn down on equipment if we send out strike teams to other areas if we're upstaffing if we do a department recall whatever the reason may be throughout the fire season we don't have the proper amount of fire engines to put in service or the proper type of fire engine to put in service so again the fire engines that you see on the streets on a day to day basis or type ones they're very long they're very low they're set up for structure firefighting and rescue so it's better to have the the right tools out there at the right time and we're not we're not having to make do with what we have so you'll hear me say this again this is a snapshot in time and really looking at bolstering our current situation to where it's going to be much better moving into the future but it's going to be part of an ongoing process of involvement improvement and enhancement so we're going to be focused on purchase of type three wildland fire engines which you saw in the first couple slides there they're the the bigger of the two fire engines that are dedicated to wildland firefighting type six wild engines which are the smaller very agile firefighting equipment tactical water tender which is a shorter wheelbase four-wheel drive type water tender so it can get out into the into the wilderness where it needs to be pick up trucks with skid-mounted pumps so one of the realities that we face is that when we upstaff or when we do a department recall we literally have people out fighting fire in our community education minivan and in pickup trucks with shovels and no no way to actually fight fire put put water on the ground so there's an ability to put a skid-mounted pump in the back of a pickup truck and that becomes a two-person firefighting tool so in the future any pickup truck that we buy will have the ability to have a skid-mounted pump inserted to it you slide the pump in and you can go to work and that's a two to three person firefighting tool right there so and the need for support vehicles this is like um steak size to deliver equipment it could be a passenger van to deliver personnel and move personnel around so just generally support vehicles and we have some different ideas on what that looks like so one thing I want to draw out is these items can be considered one-time expenditures to do the fact that they have a replacement time of anywhere between 12 to 15 years based on usage and it will be part of the fleet replacement system next slide please so for non-capital enhancements um really this the strategy doesn't change is putting the right tools in the hands of those who need them when they when they need it um and again again our ability to upstaff and perform department recalls um is very important to us because we really only have 39 people on the street on a day-to-day basis when we upstaff during red flag events that goes up to 48 we put two additional engines and battalion chief on the road and then again when we do a part department recall which really never happened pre 2017 and now it's happening at least twice a year um we ran out of resources and supplies very quickly so the idea behind this is we're going to build supply caches um and with the additional apparatus we'll have the ability to put a lot more effective firefighting forces onto the streets um when we need to so efforts are going to be focused on looking at our personal protective equipment um we need to upgrade to the current Cal Fire spec and build some variability um into our our wildland pp based on what the the threat or the task is um wildland firefighting tools and equipment i won't go into the details because i don't want to bore you too much more than i already probably have but um this is going to be a cache of hand tools hose modules firing equipment things like that so we can send those additional apparatus to get more stuff and go out and actually be more an effective firefighting force and then mobile and portable radios and we need the ability to dual band our radios which is which is a pretty expensive venture so we can talk on different networks across different frequency bands and then we need to meet new Cal Fire and OES radio specs which we're really sort of just muddling our way through right now trying to piecemeal it together so this would be a holistic replacement of our mobile and portable radios to make sure that everybody on the street has the ability to be in communication so we don't have a failure there next slide please so operations in general we've always prided ourselves on on really being on the cutting edge of of operations and response and we're really proactively engaged across all threats into advancing command strategies and tactics in in every threat that we face but we we can't go into this assessment and i'll look at ourselves internally and say are we doing the best job that we can fighting these fires when they come under our community so we're going to use lessons learned we have a lot of internal subject matter expertise we'll look at best practices used throughout the state of california and enhance our operational aspects of our wildland program so we'll look at our response matrix which kind of broken down is our daily responses what you would get on a one alarm vegetation fire reinforce response would be a multiple arm vegetation fire an extended response would be a a conflagration or a campaign fire like you see with the shady glass tubs all these types of fires and how we're going to respond to that we'll look at our wildland training and our company standards which are which are integrated together and see if we're we use like utilizing the best strategies and tactics out in the world right now and then we'll we'll look at our strategies and tactics holistically is as far as um are we deploying the right equipment at the right time to the right place are we doing things that are the most expedient and proficient and and putting fires out as quickly as we can and we'll look at command and control and make sure that we're commanding a trolley these incidents appropriately uh the picture on the the screen right now is the fire that we had earlier this year um directly above carl newman while it uh occurred in the large field area so within the tsunami county fire district response area um the the ridge line that you see in the in the the power poles and power lines that you see on the ridge line above it were actually it is actually city limits that's flint ridge and so one thing that we did even though this fire wasn't in the city limits we were in unified command we had fire we had our fire engines engaged i actually putting the fire out and fighting the fire but then proactively we took fire engines online flint ridge with fire engines to keep it out of the city limits so our command staff and our personnel are so dedicated to the city and so dedicated to protecting it that um that we're taking those proactive stances like that it's like it's not coming back into our town if we can prevent it so just a quick story about that picture next slide please so as in everything people are the most important asset to an organization across the board and this part of the plan looks at enhancements improvements that we can make with our staff at our current staffing levels i don't want to take away from the fact that um we need the we we need additional personnel but that's called out in our center as a fire department staffing needs assessment so again this is just a snapshot in time looking at um how we can make improvements with the current staff that we have so um we're going to use lessons learned industry best practices internal subject matter expertise to build staffing models and policy that provides additional staffing when necessary and really the biggest thing that we have to for us internally that we have to build in is consistency and safe work hours it's there's so many variables when we up staff or when we get into a staffing model or when we do an all call there's so many variables on the who what when where and why that we're doing things we need to build some consistency in there and then we end up with people that are on duty for far too long so we need that's one of the focuses on this is making sure that we're giving people uh breaks where they need breaks and that we're we're still protecting the city and engage where we need to be engaged so this is a bit of an uphill struggle for us but we have all these policies in place it's just going to be building something that's modular enough that we can adjust it to every every need that we have based on the the varieties of situations that we face next slide please so community engagement and education is really the key to success here and it's arguably where we've already made the most improvement um throughout the course of the last three or four years but to me it's sort of the bedrock for success it's developing and improving the two-way relationship between public safety providers in the city and the community that we protect the better that we can protect we can prepare the community to protect themselves the better off we're going to be because we can get into our job and we really saw that during the glass fire when we did those large-scale evacuations early on the community was prepared they were ready they were engaged they were out of the way before that fire impacted the city and we were able to fight fire or we need to fight fire so this is really going to look at the relationship and the communication features of both the organization and the community and really really what I've told the the manager and the and the labor rep that are in charge of this strategy is I want to look at how we listen and speak to the broad and diverse community that we serve and regardless of demographic socioeconomic status access or functional need we need to be able to talk to everybody and listen to everybody so that's really what this is focused on so we get in sort of the nuts and bolts of the strategy we're going to look at evacuation planning again we have the evacuation plans in place we need to do better education we need to exercise those plans better alert and warning capabilities again this is where we need to make improvements on language and access and functional need barriers recently our emergency management team received a grant for no weather radios which can be tied into the ipod system so if you don't have a cell phone or if you don't have a landline or whatever the case may be this no weather radio will go off and it will it will alert you the same way that the the ipod system would if you had a cell phone or had the ability the nice thing with the no radios is they can be tied into bed shakers or light systems so those with vision impairment or hearing impairment now have a better way of being alerted as well so that's that's a big one for us moving forward community outreach you know we're looking at more listening sessions more community meetings more preparation tools we're looking at low tech and we're looking at high tech so low tech for instance right now we're looking at the old smokey the bear signs with the swinging arm so when we're engaged with the community during a red flag event you know we put it out on social media we put it out through the city website we use all these high tech tools and that doesn't hit everybody in the population so we need to make sure that everybody is driving around in the especially in the wildland urban interface areas has a visual hue that there's there's something different about the weather and so we're even looking at low tech ways of doing that and then obviously engage the community with high tech versions of community meetings listening sessions and so we're trying to we're trying to bridge the gap and make sure that everybody's approach the same way community preparedness that would be education on all the programs tools their own preparation we can hold seminars classes we provide materials so there's a lot of a lot of better ways that we can approach community preparedness one thing I wanted to call out is that we just received a grant for seven remote automated weather stations that will be strategically located throughout the city they will be public facing and so the community can watch the weather within their own community and see hey we're really getting to a critical stage maybe we should prepare differently maybe we shouldn't go out and do that mowing or do that wheat eating whatever the case may be and then excuse me um coperser program feasibility we have a cop program and what this is it's it's looking at the feasibility and what type breadth and depth of program that we need and what I've told the the manager and the labor representative they're in charge of this strategy is this may be a feasibility study that needs to be done by an outside company to look at those things um but just to be clear clear with you all is this is this is the feasibility of what it looks like to build this program out and that would turn into a standalone study session and request for ongoing funding we don't have the current capacity within the organization to build out a really strong solid cert or co-program so that would be a separate ask in a later date once we get the feasibility done on what type of coperser program that we're looking at next slide please so looking at the this plan's costs again I want to call out that this does not include infrastructure and does not include personnel um there's no timeline correlated with this like you saw in the research and are the recruitment and diversity strategic plan because it's directly correlated to funding number one and a lot of it's already in progress so the no cost or low cost items are already in progress we're already making good headway there but um that's why there's no timeline here so looking at these six strategies under one time funding and then under ongoing funding we'll just go down the list here so for legislation under one time funding the vegetation management program you already represented that again on 925 it's a standalone ask for 5.25 million dollars that's a five-year vegetation management program that fire marshal may present it to you on on september 25th under capital enhancements the request would be for one time funding of two million dollars that will get us two type three fire engines two type six fire engines the tactical water tender to pick up trucks with skids and the support vehicles we need at this time non-capital enhancements seven hundred fifty thousand dollars that will cover the radio upgrades additional radios the new protect personal protective equipment and the wildland tool cache and operations staffing and community engagement there's no one time asking those would all be handled separately under additional ongoing funding so the total four one time funding ask is 2.75 million dollars in addition to the 5.25 million dollars for the standalone vegetation management program under ongoing funding which would be something that we would input into our budget during the budget cycle our quest for increase to our budget in certain areas under legislation legislation would be a we're looking at an increase of fifty thousand dollars per year and that would be dedicated to time and personnel that are spent on legislative improvements to the organization under capital enhancements it's uh fifty thousand dollars per year to the enr and replacement fund essentially to balance the cost of the additional apparatus under non-capital enhancements it would be an additional twenty thousand dollars per year to balance the increased list of equipment that we would have on the on the streets under operations i just you know it'd be staff time materials and then five thousand dollars per year they could be used for additional training materials operational materials outside training and the staffing is really an internal look at how we we do things again with what we have right now and so there there's really just staff time dedicated to that as an ongoing cost then our community engagement it would be the staff time with the staff that we have now which we have one community outreach specialist and then an additional hundred thousand dollars per year and that would be dedicated to increasing access to all community members through community meetings education materials preparation supplies but really it would be focused on the the ability to increase our translation and access materials so that we are hitting everybody throughout our diverse community so the the total ask on ongoing funding and again this will be in our our budget request would be two hundred twenty five thousand dollars per year next slide please so just in summary this is a again this is a small part of what will be a systematic improvement to the city and region you'll see what that's going to look like more holistically on the december 15 study session and again this is just a snapshot in time but this funding this one time funding would make significant strides and significant advancements on where we're at as an organization to be better prepared and better protect the community so with that that's the end of my presentation i would turn it up to you for any questions thank you thank you deputy chief and for a monday morning it was actually i really appreciate this information it's very comprehensive and thorough um and some of those slides they are they were eye opening pre 2017 and post 2017 so thank you for that important information before i check with my colleagues for any questions they might have um what federal funding assistance might be available for wildfire mitigation because that to me that seems like it's ultimately going to be a dollar amount and um i don't know if that'd be chief gosner are there any options that might be in the works you know they're we're always looking at at granting opportunities for this type of funding i know the congressman uh congressman thompson is looking at some additional funding opportunities to help us and we are currently engaged we're setting up a meeting with him so we can discuss what that looks like moving forward for the city and quite frankly it's got to be a regional approach we're dealing with the city here but a lot of these fires are coming to the city so i keep harping on the the regional aspect of it but we are doing everything we can at the federal level but thompson's office to to get what we need as a city uh to help us through this time as well great thank you for those efforts because i know when uh far marshal moon made his presentation you know you see this here's our jurisdictional limits and like what deputy chief westrop said about the newman fire i'm not sure if that's the correct name but it's uh these things are happening outside of jurisdiction so we have to take that regional approach so i really appreciate all those efforts and i agree i i know congressman thompson actually totally gets that now we just need to find some additional support so let's go to the subcommittee for any questions that we have mr sorry i'll start with you any questions thank you mayor i don't have any questions just comment okay uh vice mayor phlemi do you have any questions on the presentation i do not thank i do not thank you thank you um i do have a couple questions uh the first one i'll try to kind of go in the order that they were presented um on slide five you talked about some of the evacuation some of the best practices you know pre-17 and post-2017 because i know we had a lot of comments specifically about the evacuation and i know fire department police department put a lot of efforts into identifying evacuation zones but yeah we still heard a lot of people specifically in oakmaw what why did it take so long it was gridlock but it's my understanding things did change and you did implement some things so could you talk about the differences that the fire department incorporated in evacuation from the 2017 experience to the 2020 experience that we had absolutely so in 2017 um like i spoke about we did not have access to the ipod system so the city didn't have the ability to use that integrated system where we were hitting emergency um the emergency alert system and the ipod system we also did not have predesignated evacuation zones at that point so really we were at the mercy of the county at that point and when it came to evacuations we didn't have enough warning that this fire was coming in town again it traveled 12 miles and just under three hours and um and so we ended up dedicating a lot of our resources to doing evacuations versus actually engaged fighting fire um this year when we got to the glass fire we had the predesignated zones and with the additional situational awareness that we had via the cameras the weather stations we had additional resources on the road already for upstaffing because of the weather conditions that we were facing um we actually started pushing evacuation warnings and notifications out before we even left our homes to report to the EOC or to the command post so we were much further ahead of the game in this scenario and while there was gridlock it was all part of sort of a timed process we did in phases through the evacuation zones that we had dedicated um already and so we were able to give people out of the way and there there was some gridlock and we pushed them out early because we knew there was going to be traffic and we knew there was going to be that that problem that we were working very coordinated with law enforcement and both the sheriff's office and in san rosa police department to make sure that that process was out of the way by the time the fire got into town which ended up being successful so was there traffic yes but was there traffic when the fire was encroaching upon those vehicles no or upon those homes no so so using the evacuation zones gives us the gives us the ability to already have pre-designated zones loaded into the the eye puzzle learning system or the so-called alert system so it's very quick and very rapid people know where they're at or they can go to the short url and find out where they're at very quickly we push them out very early and then the traffic flow you know succeeds the seeds and we end up with a with a clear situation where you go and engage the fire we need to engage the fire so we're continuing to make advancements there and I think you're going to see on the December 15th study session you're going to see some recommendations for even more advancement in that area particularly and the streets department through tbw has some very good ideas on how we can make that even better and you'll see that on the 15th so I would say that the evacuations were holistically success in 2020 and we're just going to continue to make those better great thank you I do like the little teaser you'll see that on the 15th can hardly wait and then could you also explain the difference you mentioned early in the presentation about the vehicle replacement and some funding for that can you explain I'm somewhat familiar with vehicle replacement but I also know sometimes some of the larger equipment like the ladder trucks because that's you know million plus explain the difference about what we're talking here with the wildfire equipment you're talking about those are ongoing vehicle replacement vehicles or one time cost similar to the ladder trucks so they're they're one time cost because it's 12 to 15 years to replace them and so there will be a replacement cost so it kind of depends on how you define one time right and so we're considering them a one time cost because of how long we'll be able to use them and then we need to inject that ongoing funding into the vehicle replacement fund in order to in 12 to 15 years we can start replacing them a little bit better so we don't have to come back and ask for a one time huge capital item like a ladder truck so that whole system needs to be improved and we've been working on working with TPW on how to improve that and what that looks like and a lot of times we're using strike team reimbursement funding to buy fire engines and fire trucks we were down in that area last year but we're obviously going to be much higher in it this year so we get a little creative on how we have to buy those things but in the future we really need to have everything laid out and we have we have the ability and we already actually have it done to where we can amortize those costs and make sure that when the fire engine needs to be replaced where we're built we have the ability to replace it so it just it's it's going to be the request for additional funding going into that program so we don't face those big one time capital asks in the future great and I appreciate that strategy and my last question on slide 15 you mentioned the COPE program because you know those of us on council frequently get questions about that where would we direct folks for that because that wasn't really clear as to the current status of the COPE program the current status of the COPE program it's it's alive and well it's very much a community-based program at this point so some might call it a catch-and-release program is sort of the generalized industry term for it but it's essentially giving the community the tools to build their own program that can be done through our emergency management division here in the fire department so emergency manager Bregman or Brittany Miller have the ability to get that information out but in looking at building that program out making it stronger and really building resiliency in the community that's going to take additional personnel because obviously those two have a lot on their plates already and then so does our community outreach specialist and some people in our prevention bureau so we don't have the ability to really build that out and if you know if the council wants to see a hardcore very very involved COPE or CERP program we're going to need bodies to go with that okay thank you those are all my questions so we're now taking public comment on item 5.1 the Santa Rosa fire department wildland resiliency and response strategic plan if you wish to make a comment via zoom please raise your hand if you're dialing in via telephone please dial star nine madam host would you please facilitate public comment on item 5.1 of course a countdown timer will appear for the convenience of the speaker and viewers the first speaker will be acknowledged and invited to speak please make sure to unmute yourself when you are invited to do so your microphone will be muted at the end of that countdown or at the conclusion of your comments if you are participating in the meeting from the spanish channel in zoom we have an interpreter interpreter on standby on the english channel to insist during your public comment if you wish to make a public comment please be sure to pause throughout your comments to allow for interpretation those using interpreter support will be afforded additional time for your public comment as required by the brown act for spanish speakers at the time you hear your name called turn off the spanish channel to make your public comment this icon may now look like a circle with an es in the middle and the word Spanish underneath may or i'm not seeing any hands raised at this time okay thank you for that um mr rostro did you need any specific feedback from this subcommittee i know mr sir said you wanted to make some comments did you need any information from the subcommittee or is this just information about what will be coming in future council meetings it's really just information it's it's i wanted to or we wanted to be able to present to you what um this ask look like so when it comes to the december 15th um study session you're in your scene really the global picture what we're asking for we wanted to make sure you understood the specific nuts and bolts of what this 2.75 million dollar ask was and why it was apart from the 5.25 million dollar ask for the vegetation management program so nothing specific it was more informational and make sure that you could explain to your constituents or to your other council members exactly what that ask was and what it means to them and we can explain that more that data as well great thank you mr sorry you wanted to make some comments sure i will be re thanking mayor and thank you deputy chief for a really comprehensive and informative presentation which included some numbers with some costs involved which of course are always very important to hear up front and thank you mayor for bringing up the the what we learned for from oakmont and the early and organized evacuation i've heard a number of times how important that was for the protection of oakmont and and which led to a very um relatively speaking a small loss of structures and um so i thank you very much for that it just proves that we you know that we learn from from our experiences and we'll continue to do that as we move into the future and just my thanks for for a great presentation thank you my senior flaming did you have any comments you would like to make on this item yeah thank you mayor um what i wanted to say was that i really appreciated um the special focus on vegetation management and um that i thought that the presentation was very organized and thorough so just wanted to thank you at all thank you for that um i also appreciated this information because and again as mr soria said seeing the actual data i think it would really help inform future council decisions about what our new reality is so with that we will uh take a 10 minute break before we go on to five item five point two so reconvene at 1015 1015 reconvene all right there's mr soria um madame clerk could you we'll reconvene our subcommittee meeting can we do a roll call please happy to council member soria here vice mayor flaming here mayor schwedhelm here all members are accounted for okay we'll call item five point two uh police chief navarro this is your item i believe mayor if i may interject can i please um have a brief moment to set up the interpretation again absolutely let me know when you're ready thank you one moment i'll assign you to the spanish channel if you wouldn't mind turning your video on and just giving me a thumbs up so that um i know that you are on the channel perfect thank you very much and the spanish channel is now open and those wishing to rejoin the spanish channel may do so now thank you very much mayor okay chief i think you're on thank you mayor uh uh so mayor uh vice mayor flaming and council member soria thank you very much reyner navarro chief of police um so we have um popping up right now our presentation and this presentation is really a presentation to provide historical information and current staffing and future needs as we move forward with our staffing issues if we'll go to the next slide please this uh this next slide is a general overview of our organization as you can see we have three main divisions and then we have administrative division which is our aso and a few um of our admin support teams but uh we have 254 uh staff members currently 177 of those are sworn and 77 uh our civilian employees the uh we have about 54 uh employees in the technical service division that includes records dispatch and um our it area and crime analysis and then we have 43 employees in special services which includes all of our investigations and uh uh background investigators uh the bulk of our staff is in the field services division and that includes uniform controls uh our support teams with that and um what's what you don't see is the numbers uh that are really affiliated with some of our collateral assignments that our our staff is a part of so we have uh about 23 field training officers who address our our training for new recruits that are coming in uh into the department we have 18 SWAT members who are trained on a regular basis to address emergency needs that may come up throughout the year and we have 17 hostage negotiation team members who work with SWAT uh to respond to calls for service uh that uh such as like barricaded subjects or any type of significant uh search warrants that we have to go through in case they're needed uh we also have 38 officers who are on a collateral assignment with the mobile field force so they work their normal assignments and then when needed they are uh reassigned to the uh the mobile field force and then the other uh piece uh that is not really really brought out on this uh org chart is the incident management team and this is uh it's a team of 10 people who are pulled from their different assignments so it could be special assignments or it could be patrol to plan and prepare for large-scale incidents and emergency planning uh this IMT team played a significant role in our rollout of all of our COVID procedures and protocols when we first went into the emergency for for the pandemic back in early 2020 they also play a huge role in the planning and preparation and execution of our response to the fire emergencies over the last several years uh next slide please so this slide uh shows a historical overview of our staffing since 2005 as you can see in 2005 we had 271 budgeted positions 184 were sworn and 87 were civilian in 2006 we hit our the highest point with our staffing where we had 190 sworn officers and 91 civilian positions and since then we have seen a significant reduction throughout the police department so since 2006 we've lost in total 27 positions 13 sworn and 14 civilian employees in 2009 there was a significant dip and there was where we lost 23 employee positions and that had a direct impact on our services that continued to this day these cuts included 10 sworn and a variety of civilian positions one example of the significant change that occurred back in 2009 was at our records bureau which used to be a 24-7 operation went to basically business hours with Sundays off and some of that or or the work that was lost for the some of the overnight business that they were doing such as taking on low priority calls in the middle of the night doing warrant and want confirmations those were moved to dispatch and taking missing persons went to went back to patrol and that that workload remains in both patrol and dispatch since 2009 in the past two years you can see that we have lost 12 positions so in 2019 uh we our budget was reduced and we had to cut three community service officers our research and grant uh i'm sorry research and program coordinator which handled grants in our department we also lost a police tech and a personnel supervisor who was handling our recruitment and in our human resources piece of the of the department this year earlier this year in July we ended up cutting four officers a communications dispatcher and our it supervisor position in addition to that we have frozen to measure officer positions because of the reduction in revenue from measure realm so our challenge as a command staff is to look at how we do business and provide quality safety for the community with the the increasing demands that come with the with our with you know public safety and the reduction of the staff that we have and it becomes very difficult so we are value we reevaluate how to best provide the services at every rotation which is pretty much it's every six months and the staffing reductions do make it difficult to address the strategic priority that we have within the department next slide please so this slide provides a synopsis of our calls for service in relation to our staffing over the years as you can see there's been an increase in calls over the years and that is the the blue line the gray line shows a increase steady increase in our population within the city and then the the dark line is our staffing so we have seen an increase in both calls and population in a decrease in our staffing for the last 15 years overall the studies we do staffing studies we'll get into that in just a bit but our studies estimate that our calls for service will increase at about 2.7 percent per year we did check with the city's planning and economic development department and the head projected the city's population will increase at about 3.6 over the next five years there are plans for higher density housing in the downtown area we're seeing rebuilding continue in the fire burn areas and there's additional construction with high density housing throughout the city the other the other things that we're saying they're happening is with smarts you know being coming into the city now and with the the future airport expansion we do anticipate that that's going to bring more people to santa rosa to visit into in the tourism the tourism realm we are seeing a increase in legal mandates and workloads and that makes it difficult for our staff to complete work in a timely manner and this work is impacting both sworn and civilians throughout the department one example of this is that our department goal is to maintain a high quality of response time and so that would be responding to emergency calls which we deem priority one calls to respond to those in less than six minutes the average for the some of the larger california cities both northern and southern california are around five and a half minutes in 2019 our average response time for priority one calls was six minutes and 48 seconds so we are seeing the the decrease in our staffing in both in both our sworn in our dispatching dispatcher the bureau is directly impacting what we're doing and how we can respond to these calls for service next slide please so over the last 10 years or so mary you you're sure you're familiar with this we have used a staffing study that has been recommended by law enforcement associations and the department of justice it's an allocation study and what it what it looks at is to how to best allocate our resources for maximum efficiency and what we're looking for are for patrol officers to have an even split time of 30 minutes reactive so they're responding to a call for service that's coming in dispatch and they're going out to address those calls and then 30 minutes proactive time where they're working on beat projects they're they may be working on traffic issues in their particular beat involved in community engagement or anything else that might be coming up that they need to be take a proactive role in the last staffing study was or the first staffing study that we did was in 2015 which covered 2010 to 2013 and the last staffing study update that we did was in 2018 that included data from 2015 to 2018 that study at the time so two years ago showed that we our patrol officers averaged about 31 and a half minutes of reactive time and so we were we were doing pretty good however in order to maintain this level of service we have had to continually cut in other areas of the department and that's having a direct impact on some of our specialized teams that address priorities for our department and for the city the reduction of staff requires overtime to address these priorities and what we're seeing right now is some we're experiencing fatigue and difficulty in managing overtime for the department we're looking at a lot of different ways to try to you know minimize the impact on patrol and we're looking at technology to try to address you know how calls for service come in what calls for service may go to a maybe a telephone report writing or be handled by you know records and we're also looking at a mental illness and homeless response team that would be outside of sworn a sworn response allocation but what we will continue to see is even if patrol stops handling some of these calls these calls will still go into dispatch especially as our population increases and with dispatch we're already averaging overtime at about 158 hours per year per dispatcher so we have we are we're in a situation where we have to use overtime to meet the demands in throughout the department if we can go to the next slide please so this is a this is a slide showing our comparable cities this is another way of looking at staffing and how you how you address the needs this is not a you know this was seen as not as an efficient as efficient as the allocation model but it is another way of looking at it the national average for uh for police departments per the department of justice right now or as a 20 2017 was 2.4 officers per 1000 residents none of our comparable cities meet that goal and if you look at the comparable cities here the if you look at the average if I did my math right the average is about 1.2 and we're at about one point actually right about one per thousand based on our current estimated population and as you know we just went through a census and so we're you know we're looking forward to hearing the information that comes back regarding our 2020 census data the current staffing that we have does not include two frozen measure O officers or the staff who are out on injury at this point the other thing that we use these comparable cities for is is to show you know who we're competing against because we these are our main we believe our main competitors when it looks when we look at recruiting and then we have several other local departments that are also basically in the hunt for the same qualified professionals as we you know when we address attrition rates and we'll talk about recruitment in a few slides but what we are seeing is that there are less applicants that are coming in for all portions of our department next slide please so this slide provides a visual on how much our special assignments are impacted by staffing shortages as I had stated before what we do is we try to maintain that that 30 30 split in patrol but in order to do that we we have to take from other areas of the department or do it through overtime and so over the last several years we have really used our additional resources in our special assignments to really take and and help patrol out to maintain that 30 30 split so we you know command staff continues to try to balance the department communities and community priorities and try to figure out you know which special assignments are needed at the time and how we best augment patrol but these shortages do reduce our capacity to address homelessness mental health traffic community engagement and our other areas such as property crimes narcotics and gangs the our current staffing study that we have it also it doesn't show the entire picture because it doesn't allow for you know what happens when we have those large events such as increasing side shows on a weekly basis some of the B projects that we may have to deal with the the increased issues with homelessness that we're dealing with and our IMT teams that come out and deal with events on a regular basis so our events we have a contract overtime that we utilized where officers will go out and they'll be assigned a large event such as the the iron man or the fair or you know things of that nature the Wednesday night market but there's a lot of work that's done in the back in the background which is not being paid for through contract overtime and we have to take that we have to take those resources and we basically you know utilize our resources without somebody else paying for that and that's the IMT coming in to make sure that we're putting everything in in in place to make sure that the event is safe for our community the next staffing study what what what we're seeing is that our next step study needs to include information for our special teams to see how we adequately keep that information and or keep the information so we have so we know where to adequately staff our special assignments without without burdening them when we have to address patrol shortages you know and then with the several fires that we've seen over the last several years you know that's another major event that we have just really not been expecting and that's an all call for all of our staff that come out for those events and then we end up going on a 12 on 12 off shift for multiple weeks next slide please so again our reduced staffing impacts our investigative units and other collateral assignments and this causes this to cause a delay in our investigations or some cases not or and sometimes cases not being actually assigned some of the things that we've had to do over the last year was number one we just recently pulled our detective out of the Sonoma County Auto Task Force and we have done so several times over the last several years to help with staffing as needed the other thing that we've done is earlier this year was we had to disband our gang crime team to address shortages in patrol and we have also done the same or we are doing the same now with our school resource officers moving them back into patrol for the next rotation an example of our investigative impacts can come from our property crime team I would check in with our our supervisor for that and our clearance rates have fallen about 12 for property crimes and again to meet the demands of our emergency periods in 2020 2019 and 2020 including Kincaid the Kincaid fire COVID and then also the recent glass fire detected are are commonly reassigned to patrol to assist with those duties next slide please this is a quick overview of how our worker comps claims and sworn disability retirements impact our staffing levels over the year the current 2020 data that you see in front of you is through October 1st of 2020 as you can see the sworn disability retirements we've seen an increase and we have we've had seven in 2020 and we average well into the 40s for worker comps claims throughout the last five years the other thing that this does not show is how COVID is impacting what we are doing and with COVID again you know I'm sure you're well aware that we had a few positives at the very beginning of the emergency and we've done very well at keeping the keeping the virus out of our department since April but we do we do quarantine our officers when if and when they do come in contact with somebody who we feel may be positive or is exhibiting flu like symptoms and or family members are exhibiting symptoms our staff will quarantine and so that's not included in these particular numbers here but it does impact our our staffing levels and we respond by again addressing it through taking people out of special assignments or through mandatory overtime we do our best to anticipate attrition rates and again we'll talk a little bit more about that in the last slide which is related to recruitment before we get there though if we can go to the next slide so this is a visual on what we did as a command staff we did a broad SWAT analysis strengths weaknesses opportunities and threats of our department related to staffing under our strengths I think the biggest thing in and is that you know our our employees are the most important asset that we have we have a very dedicated team of employees throughout the department in every single division who are experienced and they're very quick to respond to the many emergencies that we have and we've seen that again most recently during the class fire where it it became an on call or an all call out for all of our staff and they were they were coming out within the hour to go out and evacuate people in the Rican Valley and the Oakland area our officers are cross-trained and so again these collateral assignments they're not specific assignments where people are assigned to and and it takes up 40 hours of their time they are collateral and so they're doing their their normal jobs and then take on these added this added workload to address the needs of our community safety so we do a really good job there we are also very good at recruiting people when we have the ability to do so and we are flexible so again that comes back to the dedicated employees that we have what we have seen is with the reduction in staff our staff has been flexible and we have been able to move people around but that does come at a price the staff shortages are significant and again we are it's causing overtime throughout the department and it's impacting these teams that we talked about which focus on city and department priorities I'll be completely honest with you our morale is very low and the morale is low largely because of the added workload the mandatory overtime to address the staffing shortages within patrol and then also the lack of special assignment opportunities so on an annual basis we will test for potential special assignment openings and we've continually adjusted and pivoted because of the needs of patrol and so we go without having new people move into these special assignments we do we do see some opportunities again we have a strong community engagement which does help us when we want to recruit new staff we've we've had opportunities in the past to work with some of our nonprofit teams and to to get the word out that we are recruiting we are seeing a or we're searching for the new response model the mental illness and homeless calls to to do that with a crisis team and you'll be hearing in another presentation on an update on cahoots with Captain Cregan after we're done here but that's an opportunity for us to make some changes and to take a little bit of the load off of our of our patrol teams however as Captain Cregan has reported out before it's probably three to five percent of our calls for service and we have an opportunity to continue to look at how do we consolidate services with our other agencies you know we've had some strategic conversations regarding our dispatchers and you know we have you know we're currently at 23 dispatchers our staff and study has stated that we need to have 28 the other you know the other thing that i neglected to mention was that our last stuff staff and study that we had showed that we need to add we needed to add four officers in 2018 and we've continued continued to reduce that number as we've moved so the so we're looking at consolidating services you know the other thing that we've done is in the past we've had shared resources with other county agencies for again the auto task force we used to have a gang unit a county wide gang unit but again we've consolidated some of those to address some of the staffing issues that we have right now some of the threats that we're seeing moving forward against lack of special assignments that that impacts our recruiting the the the staff that i've hired over the last year when i sit down with them and ask them why do you want to be here at the city of Santa Rosa or the Santa Rosa police department you know number one they they a lot of them are from this particular area and they want to come back where they want to start their career here but the other big thing that comes up especially with laterals is that they see us as one of the larger agencies and we have the ability to have specific assignments to give them a lot of opportunities to do different things and to be challenged into to work in areas such as narcotics which we're we're having significant issues with fentanyl or addressing homeless issues and working with nonprofits there or working in traffic and addressing our our priorities there and so so we really see our our special assignments as a recruiting tool and it becomes more difficult when when we lose those lose those teams we're also seeing a increase in mandates that impacts both our officers who are out on the street our investigators because they have to add more information in either their reports or provide more information to either a victim or a witness and it it takes up more of their time when they're doing their investigations the other thing that we're seeing is an increase in PRAs public record acts and also more mandates in our record section so our civilian staff and our support staff that that that assist our officers and civilian field personnel their their their duties are starting to increase past the point of our ability to to meet certain timelines and thresholds one of the other things that we're dealing with right now is the current perception of law enforcement you know we've been for several months we've been working on a community empowerment plan and meeting with community members but the perception of law enforcement right now it's very difficult to hire or have people come in as a new officer again we compete with several other agencies to recruit qualified applicants and as far as numbers go we used to average we used to cap our trainee applicants for officers at 500 because we would easily get to 500 or more people wanting to be come into the law enforcement profession we now have less than 200 applicants over the last couple years for for new trainee officers who are applying to become officers again part of that could be perception but we've already realized last year that we were facing a trend of people who want to be their own bosses want to be entrepreneurs we're going into some type of private sector so we're seeing some difficulties in the number of people that are coming into law enforcement the other thing that we're seeing is that we do have more staff that are looking at retiring early or leaving the area the trend across law enforcement is that officers are moving up to retirement dates and we see a potential to lose a vast amount of experience as people leave earlier we're currently aware of we just had an officer leave last month for out of state and anticipate having at least another one that will be leaving very soon for going out of state to to another law enforcement agency and then the other thing you know what the other thing I wanted to point out as far as the thread is you know being able to maintain that competitive recruitment ability with the budget concerns that we have so you know how do we address you know competitive pay and how do we address the the reduction of staff that we have because of the budget concerns that we're currently facing right now next slide please so what we're doing in terms of recruitment we are currently recruiting for two dispatchers field evidence tech and a couple of police officers right now the I think we've talked about this in other in other meetings but it takes a very long time to recruit people for the law enforcement profession it can take up to six months to recruit and complete the hiring process for our department new officers take about four months at the academy and then spend another four to six months in the training program and have an 18 month probationary period the next police academy is in March 2021 so by the time we send you know you know three to three to four officers in the march academy they are not going to be available for solo status until 2022 probably and then new dispatchers can even take longer their training program because they have to train on channel one which is our dispatching dispatching officers and radio or collecting information from phone calls and all the technology that they have to deal with they can their training program can last up to an over a year sometimes if we do have to prioritize a large recruitment we can do that we we did it last year we can borrow it from our patrol and special assignments to work on backgrounds and we can also contract with an outside background agency or company and what we usually see is that about one out of three will pass the background so it takes a large number of people within that pool to get qualified individuals again we anticipate we do our best to anticipate attrition rates in the next 14 months what I can tell you is that we have about 25 sworn officers who are eligible to retire it's a little bit more difficult to to try to strategize on the civilian side and and again some of the sworn may not leave right within these next 14 months but we do I do anticipate several probably up to eight to nine at least leading in the first six or seven months of next year we have updated our recruitment materials to try to assist in our recruitment efforts our dispatchers they have a new testing platform it's called critical which helps us streamline the the recruitment process last year for our trainees that we currently have 15 trainees in our field training program we worked with Sonoma State in the Santa Rosa Junior College we went over to those classrooms to try to recruit people from the colleges we worked with Los Yen and we started a program called run with a recruiter so people got an idea of some of the physical nature that they may have to deal with when when when going through the academy and becoming a new officer and we still hope to establish a thriving internship in the next few years to help with the the recruitment efforts let people get a very firm understanding of what police work is like or law enforcement work is like and to hopefully see them come back to Santa Rosa in the in the future so again a synopsis of this this is really largely for information we are we have lost several positions over the last several years we are dealing with the shortage right now we are not where we where we should be based on the 2018 educo study which showed that we had to actually increase by four officers and we've actually lost lost several over the last couple years so with that I that is the end of my presentation and I am happy to answer any questions that you might have thank you all right thank you chief for that presentation and again just to confirm feedback that you want from the subcommittee this is more just information but is there any specific feedback you'd like us to provide to you this is really towards really really more information for you we've had a lot of there's been a lot of dialogue about you know budget not only citywide but specifically directed towards the police department and law enforcement and we wanted to give you a an idea of where we are and what we've been dealing with and we have seen a reduction in our budget over the last several years and it is impacting our public safety so I think the direction for us you know part of it is information but part of it is if there's a specific direction in priorities that that we're going to have to deal with because we are limiting and reducing our special assignments which is going to impact some of these you know high pro high profile issues that come up on a regular basis okay thank you for that we'll go to the subcommittee first uh mr. sorry do you have any questions thank you mayor I do and and thank you chief tomorrow this this has to do mainly with the recruitment I'm curious about how much the reduction in the academy pool has affected not only recruitment but our ability but our hiring ability because you can recruit and then there's then you ultimately have to make a decision as to whether to hire um so how much is is that the reduction in those participating in the academy affecting our ability to hire so the the academy has seen they've had to delay some of their academy classes because of covid and um move things around a little a little bit um but what we try to do is they they reach out to the law enforcement agencies that usually partner with them and try to get an idea of how many spots to reserve for that particular agency and so based on our um when we start recruiting we're trying to recruit very far in advance and we can give them an idea of how many spots spots that we that we want so the last two academies that that occurred earlier this year that were delayed we had six and one and seven and another and we anticipate based on our current recruitment that we're probably going to have maybe four four to five in the march academy but then again that those those four officers are not going to be seen until 2022 the impact on our recruitment doesn't necessarily have to go along with um with the uh the academy uh it's really what we're seeing as a trend and so we are seeing a lot less people uh putting in for uh being a police officer so again we we we used to average we used to cap out of 500 because we couldn't take any more now we're seeing a less than 200 apply uh for for the police officer training positions so those are trends and even if you took out uh took out covid you took out the current police perception last year we only had um we had less than 200 so um as far as uh you know as far as the academy most of them um you know we don't uh that doesn't particularly particularly address um or have an impact on what we're how we're hiring most of the people in the academy are sponsored so um or sponsored by agencies so it's mostly the issues that we're having is that we're having less and less people come in and so you know how do you address um you know how do you how do you tell people this is a great profession uh and uh you you know it's challenging uh but uh there's also you know we have to look at you know what opportunities do they have here as opposed to another agency uh you know what are they getting paid you know what are the what are the benefits uh financially to become uh to go into the law enforcement profession and balance out with uh the other mandates and the the added duty that we have thank you and and my next question has to do with the public perception of policing um and I know Santa Rosa has always maintained a very high level uh very high bar of which to before you can be hired by the Santa Rosa PD and I and I think that continues to serve us well because we want the best of the best wherever we can find them um how is that uh how would you say that the public perception of policing um is affecting not only the the um cadets willingness to come into the program but also our laterals well it's again it's having a uh a huge uh it's having a big issue I mean we had so we had one trainee uh that decided to um uh to decided to quit basically during the academy um and I just felt that it was uh too much and so uh we lost one one trainee uh while he was in the academy um over the last uh over the last um over the spring and summer he was affiliated he was he was our he was one of ours so we had uh we we had sponsored him in and uh he decided not to pursue law enforcement um after um after the first week or so of um of his academy experience um the again the other issue is uh with you know the the added issues that are going on um it's it really what I think we have um I think there's there's a uh there's a silent uh I think we have a very good relationship with most of our community um and but there is a lot of uh there has been a lot of backlash with law enforcement in general uh our officers and our staff uh we do a great job and they they put 110 percent um in their efforts every day and we still have a um we still have a very good reputation um but it becomes difficult uh when you know um you know when when you're competing against the same pool of uh or with with other agencies within the same pool of of uh people who are looking on where they're going to go and then they have to decide whether they're not they're going to move based on uh the their financial situation or potential um you know if you reduce staff um are they going to come to Santa Rosa and there are they going to be the first person that's going to be laid off you know that sort of thing so it does impact um the number of people especially number of laterals that come in uh when we are looking at uh trying to recruit and hire qualified people yeah thank you very much for that um my next question has to do with the diverse workforce and I know that um since I've been on the council one of the each each of our chiefs has been has tried very hard to create a diverse workforce and of course you can't force people to work for you and and there are all sorts of issues around um recruitment anyway it's an expensive place to live Sonoma County in Santa Rosa and then that doesn't that doesn't help um in any of our recruitments what what unique or specialized um processes are you using to try to um to attract a more diverse workforce in the Santa Rosa PD uh yes or so again I briefly touched on uh some of the things that we had tried to do last year uh number one we uh we had reached out and attended classes over at Sonoma State University and uh Santa Rosa Junior College uh to try to get uh you know um just uh look at um potential people uh with some education uh the other thing that we did was work with Los Yen to have them push out information to uh their stakeholders to provide um to try to to try to increase the number of Latinx uh applicants to come into the police department and then uh you know what was really exciting for me is last year we had an officer who came up with the run for run with a recruiter program and uh the first the first morning where we went out and we ran with probably about 10 individuals who were looking at uh you know wanting to come into the process uh I met with a there one of the people that one of the people that was running was a female from the west side of Santa Rosa who grew up in a largely Hispanic neighborhood and she had brought two friends uh the second time we went out running and so um those are the you know I could see that we're having success and starting to push out more information to some more local local neighborhoods um to to address some of that so um but it doesn't it doesn't change the number of qualified people we are still we're trying to increase the pool of people to recruit but we still maintain a level of uh of uh uh you know that level of quality that we're looking for thank you I'm almost finished I'm there was a time when we were moving out of state and actually um uh interstate to uh certain um uh organizations or or groups of people coming together that have have to do with employee pools that kind of like a what specialized gatherings of people that are looking for particular employment are we going out of state or going out of county at this time of I know that it's expensive to do that and we I think we we did use to um go into trade fairs etc are we currently um able to afford that kind of outreach well right now it's kind of difficult and we're doing any of that with um you know with COVID uh we are using social media as much as we can we have a large uh a large amount of uh you know people following us and so we're using that uh to really expand outside of our particular region uh you know the other thing that we do are are going to be doing is we're going to be working with um the office of community engagement and um and we're going to be working on a um you know what the what the future holds with the city diversity uh equity and inclusion consultant that we're looking at and so that's going to be part of our policing practices how we how we hire people um and how we hire that diverse workforce so we're we're looking at several different methods and again we're we're continuing to reach out uh to some of our community stakeholders to find out how do we you know how do we get more information out there I appreciate that and of course um sticker shock for in living in santa rosa insinoma county is always an issue uh once we leave our the basic surrounds of this county and finally has to do with competitive salaries and it really does kind of tie into our ability to to to bring uh to recruit how much is the issue of competitive salaries um and just our cost of living in general how much does that contribute to our inability at times to recruit uh it's a significant uh issue especially when it becomes um when we're looking for lateral officers again you know when we put a trainee into uh you know into the academy it can take up to two years from the recruitment process at the time they go solo and so as we're looking at attrition and and if we have people you know leaving in the next few months you we're trying to we're trying to entice uh lateral officers to come and so um it becomes difficult when you know they're looking at how to balance the their um you know competitive pay uh or or what what we're paying um to you know how do we you know are they going to be able to move to sinoma county um or are they going to be able to make that jump from their last department uh to come here and live here so um it does play a role um in in how we address uh especially lateral officers and then also you know even with you know our civilian staff you know anybody that comes to sinoma county it can be very difficult like that sticker shock like you said so uh competitive pay um and benefits plays a huge role in in how to attract uh professionals who can come in and help us immediately do the job um and then from a you know from a new employee standpoint you know if somebody's uh brand new dispatcher who's never worked uh a dispatching job or a new officer uh or a new technician you know you're still looking at you know what they you know can they get a job in you know uh nabato or or in uh um up north in mendicino county or you know going east of us um and make uh make a living there as opposed to um coming to sinoma county so we're continuing to compete it's it goes past those 10 comparable cities that we have there it's it goes it's regional and we do we do uh it is something to take to to factor in yeah thank you and final comment i know i know that our stats used to indicate that we would hire about one out of every 100 applicants um i'm hoping that that's one way or another we can maintain that high bar um because we we need and we deserve um the best we can find when it comes to our law enforcement officers and i'm hoping that that that one out of 100 uh kind of you know it's as difficult as it can be to jump over that hurdle i think it it it pays off um highly when we recruit and hire the the best of the best um of our in our in our police officer so thank you chief i appreciate the presentation thank you vice mayor phleming do you have any questions for the chief i do um thank you chief navarro and i do appreciate that it is difficult to recruit um where i'm my questions are around is like lining up the different data points that you put forward um on a timeline in terms of what makes it difficult to recruit and from our last conversation i remember you stating that the most recent recruitment was in february of 2020 um is that still um the most recent recruitment uh yes okay that's correct so um so then you know what what i'm wondering is you know if we're not conflating a couple of different data points that we can't really disentangle until there's a recruitment that takes place during covid and so my question for you is um do you believe that um you know what you stated before um in a previous meeting around um increase of people um wanting to uh be their own bosses and be entrepreneurial um while we had a record unemployment during february and that people tend to be more drawn toward um you know government and public safety careers during downturns um that we can really tease those out and accurately provide a picture without doing a recruitment during covid well our um yeah i'm gonna i'll try to pick out what i think i'm hearing you may have to clarify that a little bit but our our lateral recruit our lateral recruitment is ongoing and so uh we are seeing a reduction in numbers and laterals so um again we had uh we had about we we did have three laterals come on uh this year but right now we it doesn't uh we're not seeing a lot uh our entry level recruitment that was the the ones going into the academy that was in february and so um you know we um we we don't have uh you know again we're looking at right now uh maybe four people that um may be able to get into the march academy but uh you know i think that we have a you know we'll have to look at this whole year of 2020 and uh it kind of do an analysis analysis on what that looks like and what that means for us as we move forward but i can't tell you that we're seeing it there is a reduction and um it is becoming more difficult and i think the bigger issue is that we're seeing more and more attrition so we're seeing more and more people uh we're there's more and more people talking about leaving um again i have a couple of uh staff members who uh we're not of age and um i do know that are leading uh leading the department okay yeah i guess where i'm going with this is that you know this has been such an unusual year and so i think that um you know what i'll be curious to know is how our recruitment goes going forward because you know we've had some factors that might lead one to think that we'll have increased um interest in the academy for new recruits and some factors that would um you know lead us in the other direction of decreased interest so i i think at this point in time which is very difficult to know um for for new new applicants and the the other question that i have is um well actually i have one more question regarding that one which is do we have um a planned recruitment um for the the foreseeable future again we have a continuous open recruitment for our um for our lateral officers we're always looking for uh officers to come in uh we are looking at um one coming up hopefully for july some of that will depend on um you know if the academy can actually operate so you know there is some of that but um we are we're hoping that we can open up a recruitment soon uh for the july academy and we will um you know we'll we will be we will be using again our uh social media posts uh our our partnerships with the community to to get that information out and then we're going to be again i think the other um you know the other tool that we had that we didn't have last year was we have the officer community engagement that we can also lean on and some of the um um you know opportunities with the diversity and equity um program that we are looking at in the future but for for the july academy we should be opening up fairly soon um and we're hoping to um uh you know we'll be seeing what the uh the pool of candidates are uh with that well i do think that that will be very informational um in terms of this anomaly of a year and that will have to track these things for a little bit of time to to get a good snapshot of whether the pre-existing covid pre-covid trend um is a trend or if it might be reversed or in some way um the next question uh the last question i have is you mentioned that morale is low and i can certainly understand why i'm wondering um if that is anecdotal or based on some metrics that you and your department use uh we have not done a survey yet uh we um it is anecdotal but uh i've had many people you know i have an open door policy and i've heard uh from several people and um although they you know they they love the law enforcement profession it's uh just very difficult and we've had again increasing mandates uh you know mandatory overtime uh the um um and then with uh mandatory overtime and again just with all of the emergencies coming up um and the information does come from again it's it's not a survey but uh i have monthly meetings with each of our labor groups and um the uh those labor groups have um they are providing me the information from uh from their groups about the low morale and the reasons and um thank you and um have they they stated um the causes uh anything apart from the mandatory overtime that is contributing to low morale uh mandatory overtime uh shortage of or reduction of special assignments and uh the the ability to uh to do you know do other um to do other um um you know duties within the department outside of the uh the main patrol uh the um you know there there's always a pay uh that uh um the pay conversation so pay and benefits um and they just feel that uh the other big thing right now over the last several months is that uh they're they just feel that there's a lack of support um you know uh for the work that they do and um you know the work that they do is they do a tremendous job they uh i think they've shown time and time again uh both sworn civilian their response um through all of these emergencies and uh with the you know the um the perception right now they just feel that there's not a lot of support uh within the city um that that goes to them and so that's the other piece of the uh the low morale issue okay and when you say within the city are you talking about um city leadership in and the residents of the city or both one or the other i think i i think i think it could be i think it really is is both and they're they're not hearing a lot um i think uh you know they you know we you know it's been very important to listen to the community over the past several months and um it's it's difficult when uh you know they're uh we don't when there's not an opportunity to really talk about the the great things that we've been doing and so it's it's so we you know we're looking at how do we get our the information out about what our teams do we're looking at uh you know social media posts uh but uh it's it's difficult when um we're silent on uh what's happening and and um and you know we we were waiting for uh reports to come out and so it's uh you know it's we want to we want to get through this and uh we you know we know we can learn and and do and continue to uh you know strive for for excellence and but they do a great job as it is right now and it's just difficult for them uh to to hear the negative you know a lot of negative comments okay thank you so much for the information thank you i've got a couple questions on during your presentation on the department staffing from investigative and special unit totals it was helpful information regarding the breakdown you had for motors all the way to narps and you just haven't how many positions were vacant but there i couldn't find any information about okay how many are still there because i know we still have motors um so would you be able to provide me and i don't want to put you on the spot right now but get that information just to how many positions are actually in each of those special assignments to put it kind of give us a little context so when you're down three motors since pretty much 2016 we went from you know what have we been to what happened because i know traffic has been one one of the large contributors of calls for service in the city yeah so i do know that um you know for traffic you know we have five motors right now and so we are down we're down three and so the traffic department you know they are they are key in addressing some of our again number one traffic complaints you know we you know we deal with traffic complaints throughout the city they are the ones that handle our grants so officer traffic traffic safety grants they are instrumental in addressing some of our larger issues like side shows so they were the you know they were the point the point team basically to address some of the local are the more recent sideshow events and so we really rely on them to to work on traffic safety we we have a full dvsa team right now we if you look at i believe it was slide eight dvsa is always busy right there are busiest team the other i'm sorry we're we have one we're missing one detective in dvsa which is domestic violence sexual assault we have three in property crimes we used to have six uh we don't have anybody in gangs right now and we had at one time we had seven gang officers and a sergeant we've been reducing that and then we currently have none but then we increased and we have a full violent crimes team by moving some of our detectives over there to reprioritize in that particular area we downtown enforcement team we have sticks because of some of the issues and we know that that's been a priority with homeless issues and so we try to maintain that you know again we had we had five school resource officers last last year we had we had taken one officer we couldn't refill the one that officer morse and when she retired we went down to four and we we we uh covid then hit so it was right at the beginning of the year we went down to four we maintained that four we've recently just frozen two positions and then the other positions are going to be going back to patrol with the the shortages that we're having then accident investigators I think we have I believe we have all four right now they work nights and they work mainly DUIs and I think the other the other area we used to have two background investigators we currently have one background investigator in that particular area so we are filling the we're filling the pinch in in all areas also narcotics we have four we used to have we did have six right so thank you I would just ask especially if this comes to the full council if we get that the information you just shared because I think it puts it into context as to what we had been versus what we are and I know staffing studies are difficult for investigative units but the actual work that these teams do the very specialized work that they do I think is important for us to recognize and on that when you talked about the staffing numbers you know my understanding of the obligated unobligated time it's two things if you want to keep it half obligated and half unobligated again with the community police and philosophy you can either add additional resources to keep that number 50 50 or stop responding to some calls for service and I didn't see that as one of the opportunities that command staff potentially could say well we're going to stop going to these type of calls which will reduce all car our calls for service by x percentage points which will get us back to that number have you guys have been having those discussions at all we have and actually that's you know when you did ask for you know what kind of feedback do you want I think the feedback you know I mentioned that you know we're looking for you know what are the priorities that you know council has and how that you know it comes down and when we set our priorities so when we do that we look at you know what calls do we not go to and you know we you know it you fight you struggle with the desire to you know when somebody calls the police they're calling for a reason and you want to go and that's the that's the quality service that we've seen in the past and you know the reality is that we are very very busy you know going to 140,000 calls for service a year and so we are looking at how do we address that and so cahoots is one of those things that we're looking at from a mental health standpoint you know we have we still go to calls for service regarding you know found property you know can we do something in a different way there you know how do we you know responding to traffic accidents and again traffic is one of the main main issues in the city but when we start going to a traffic accident that's you know property damage you know the you know how do we how do we manage the expectations of to be honest with the council and then also with the community on they're not getting an officer to come to this particular call so and then the other thing that we've had to deal with is you know we've had to limit our community engagement because of the calls for service that we go to so I've been asked numerous times over the year you know can we go to a particular event and my response is we'd love to it's going to depend on the capacity of our teams because we can't take somebody off the street or you know do we you know do we use discretionary overtime to put somebody out somebody at to an event for three hours right and so you know trying to balance the you know good steward of our resources and you know with with the ongoing and increase in demands makes it very difficult but we are looking at that and again some of the areas that we said no to is there have been some events that we said we can't go and we're we're looking into the future on some of the other other calls that we may not be going to great thank you and I think that would be a help helpful conversation not just for council but the entire community based on some of the community conversations about reducing their level of funding there are consequences for that and I guess I'm just a proponent let's be very deliberate and conscious that if we do this this would be the potential consequences of that and on that same line you talked about civilian and lateral or entry level versus lateral officers coming in you just very briefly just talk about their return on the investment about okay if we go to the entry level route that officer that we hire will not be the solo officer until X number how long does that take versus a lateral which I think again plays into the dollar investment which way do we want to focus on the retention recruitment of new officers can you help me out mary with the specific question on that you know so again there's return on investment I know a lateral officer typically will be operating as a solo officer in a certain amount of time versus an entry level it would take them a longer period of time I'm not sure I want to make sure every member of this subcommittee and any listeners understand there is a difference because you use that term entry level in laterals frequently but there is a difference and I would just like you to explain what those differences are and I use the term return on investment which is one way you know where are you going to put your recruitment strategies to get that solo officer to our community yeah we can definitely include that in a in a future presentation but that is a balance that we try to do and that's what we maintain the ongoing lateral or the experienced police officer recruitment throughout the year so we can you know we can jump on you know somebody who shows their interest rather than you know waiting and doing the the recruitment for a new trainee who has to go through the academy and then ends up being two years down the road who's helping us out and so so we can come we can come back with the actual from a financial standpoint of a budgetary you know what that looks like but the return on investment definitely with a lateral officer is it's immediate it's it's within probably a couple months where we can get that person on the street to help facilitate or help reduce the impact of calls for service whereas the other one is the trainee level is going to be two years down the road great but we can come back with some numbers great thank you I appreciate that okay we're now taking public comment on item 5.2 senator was police department staffing if you wish to make a comment via zoom please raise your hand if you're dialing in via telephone please dial star nine uh madam host would you please facilitate public comment on item 5.2 of course a countdown timer will appear for the convenience of the speaker and viewers the first speaker will be acknowledged and invited to speak please make sure to unmute yourself when you are invited to do so your microphone will be muted at the end of that countdown or at the conclusion of your comment if you are participating in the meeting from the spanish channel in zoom we have an interpreter on standby on the english channel to assist during your public comment if you wish to make a public comment please be sure to pause throughout your comment to allow for interpretation those using interpreter support will be afforded additional time for your public comment as required by the brown act for spanish speakers at the time you hear your name called turn off the spanish channel to make your public comment this icon may now look like a circle with an e s in the middle and the word spanish underneath may or at this time i'm seeing no hands raised and uh one moment zoom our go ahead for for interpretation sorry about that our first public comment will be from calling that cal followed by lee call and i have given you permission to unmute yourself can you see the timer on your screen yeah i can see the timer can you hear me perfect we can and please identify yourself for public record if you so choose and your time begins now hi my name is calling that cat i'm a lifetime resident of san rosa and obscenum county in general um i just want to start by uh identifying uh uh one of your one of navarro slides i that i took issue with um i i don't know if your interpretation of the word threats is threats to the police department as a whole or just threats to uh your staffing levels i think listening public perception of policing as a threat is a very dangerous direction to be moving in um we've seen how you respond to the public perception of policing uh the way san rosa police department uh responded to protests over the course of the summer shooting people in the base with rubber bullets and tear gas canisters and rounding people up and chasing them down in the streets like they're animals yeah yeah it definitely seems like you think that the public perception of policing is a threat so i think you need to change your framing around that um gratified to hear that you're having issues with staffing uh i would love to see your staffing drop to zero i think there's a lot of situations that the police respond to that they're not equipped for that we should be replacing with other services instead uh i was really gratified to hear earlier this year that uh san rosa is moving towards more of like a food state model to respond to homelessness and mental health issues uh that'll be great to hear about on the next item as well um to the individual who dropped out of the police academy congrats you made the right choice um i think a lot of this is there's a serious issue with this and i understand that you're viewing this as serious losses to your department uh and i get that you know i'm sure it's scary to be the commander of a department where you're losing individuals where you feel like you have this um public safety mandate um but we're in the middle of a significant change and the way the public wants to see public safety enacted and i think maybe you could reframe your thinking towards more cooperative approach rather than seeing this potential significant change in society as a threat to your job and your department you could see instead just the way society is changing and work along with it instead of fighting it thanks the next public comment will be from lee followed by michael lee i have given you permission to unmute yourself can you confirm you see the timer on your screen i can thank you perfect please identify yourself for public record if you so choose and your time begins now hi i just um i want to uh i gosh i'm not sure where to start i'm going to start by saying um i think the public i think in the last you know several months the public has i had an opportunity just to have law enforcement truly revealed in a way that it hasn't been in the past to many people and so we've seen a a change in the entire culture of instead of tolerating the inconsistencies um that law enforcement that we've now seen um um and the danger that so many people have to encounter all the time and we've seen cities and counties all over the country demanding defunding so that um people who are better equipped and better trained and better educated can be first responders i'm thrilled that you're looking at the cahoots um possibility that's very hopeful i'm hopeful that um it is hard to recruit because what that is means is it's possibly changing and we have the opportunity to actually educate those who do stay in law enforcement for for to have better education um bigger education and education that would include um understanding deescalation we need to be very careful about having um the very people that many people in the community fear for real reasons be the people who are also doing trainings doing recruitment it's it's very upsetting it's upsetting to see that our city is still talking um it is still kind of holding on to this when it was pretty much a mandate from the community in this last election what most people really want it has been an overwhelming opportunity to watch and listen as hundreds of people in our community have called in and said this is not okay with us anymore it is not okay to move officers who have committed violent acts on people from one place to another it is not okay it is not okay to have uneducated people responding to calls for people with mental illnesses for homelessness it's very dangerous and i hope that we move the funds into the community and out of law enforcement for the safety of everyone thank you and i yield the rest of my time our next public comment will be from michael michael i have enabled your speaking permissions can you please confirm you see the timer on your screen i do perfect please identify yourself for public record if you so choose and your time begins now hey this is michael to tone um i want to echo what the last two speakers said i feel that public perception i it's not i i thought that i feel this i i know it to be true and i know that you know it to be true too um public perception of police is not the problem the problem it's an effect of the problem the problem is the things that police have been doing that have been giving themselves a bad reputation the public is just responding to those things and so what needs to happen in order to address that is some actual reckoning with the practices the uh incidents that have caused there to be distrust in the community not um superficial programs which are designed to make the police look like they're part of the community um thinking of the ethnic studies facilitated by police program um you know this i feel like these are ways of trying to make the police look like they're good when it's not an attempt to address the things that people are are are actually having issues with the treatment of the homeless the treatment of protesters police brutality um these are these are the real issues and it's not just the police too you know the way that the the city handles the homeless is is actually part of the problem too so they bear a big part of that responsibility and the community does too but the police specifically need to address those problems it's not activist's fault for creating a bad reputation for the police they're really just responding to what's going on um and i i think it's really important to start doing that in order to actually start building trust in the community is to take those problems seriously and not treat them as if they're just this thing out there that is happening to police um so i'll yield the rest of my time our next public comment will be from daniella delario daniella i have given you permission i have enabled your speaking permission can you please confirm if you can see the timer on your screen i do perfect please identify yourself for public record if you so choose and your time begins now hi thank you so much i'm daniella um i am a local spanish teacher i've been in cinema county for 30 or so years on and off um and i just wanted to say thank you for this meeting and um i wanted to echo what some of the other callers have said as well specifically about the societal change that we're really seeing and that so many people in our community are calling for um we really do want to see the city of san aroza and really all of cinema counties start to invest more in community um you know investing in teachers social services um services for the houseless in our community affordable housing uh these are all things that most people i don't think i don't think anyone would really argue that that is what makes a community more healthy and that's what will help create positive changes here um and yeah if we can have less police i think that's a really good thing um to invest in cahoots um and other programs like that so we have first responders who are trained in um de-escalation techniques not just as you know a weekend's training or maybe a week or so that a training that like police could go and do to say that they completed a de-escalation training but people's social workers crisis workers who really that's that's their job that's their specialty they have years of this training so that they can be the first responders when um they're better equipped to handle situations such as homelessness um and um you know mental health crisis domestic violence all these different situations that studies have shown that social workers and trained crisis workers are actually better at handling than um sending you know police with guns and who um the way they look is actually intimidating to people who are having um a mental health crisis or other crisis so um yeah i'm just i'm really thrilled to hear that we are hopefully going to be doing a program such as cahoots because i think it will it's it will help our community and just again i want to say investing in our community investing in teachers who you know i heard talk about um competitive salaries for police teachers don't make enough money to live in sonoma county and we're really um you know we're trying to to create more opportunities for the youth of our county um so really investing in teachers social workers affordable housing i think that's going to create a more successful and um healthy community here in sonoma county so again yeah thank you so much i yield the rest of my time mayor at this time i see no further hands raised and we received no voicemail or email public comment okay thank you for that i'll bring it back to the subcommittee uh any final comments uh i'll start with you mr sire no final comments just my appreciation for the presentation thank you vice mayor philemi any comments or additional questions yeah thank you um i did have one um piece of feedback you did ask um chief about you know any areas of special concern and one of one of your staffing um data points that i did find concerning was around um particularly the reduction in domestic violence sexual assault um staff assigned to that special assignment and so um i was just curious to know if that had impacted um our ability to be responsive to um people going through those difficult situations yeah so again we um the domestic violence sexual assault team is a priority because of the high number of calls that we get um they are um they get the most call-outs um in relation to any of our other special assignments we have a we have a detective who is on call every week so we do respond when needed um the initial response to a domestic violence or sexual assault call is always going to be patrol and they're going to be the first ones and then um the rds a detective will be called out so we do have a mechanism to um address all of those um again we have made we have been intentional in keeping those as um all as as staffed as as uh possible uh the one area um again so we can respond to the domestic violence sexual assault investigations the one thing it does impact us is uh we in the past have done um i guess uh operations on child exploitation operations to try to to try to find offenders and and um those have been reduced based on the number of staff that we have okay i'm going to have certainly troubling to hear um the other question i had was uh was have since the legalization of cannabis a couple of years ago and um coupled with increase in fentanyl sort of two different very different types of narcotics situations but has that changed um the net need in your department for um responders to those types of calls um so our um the we don't we we don't deal with um really with um investigating marijuana uh calls but we do have um so we don't proactively seek out marijuana investigations but uh we do have um calls that come in regarding home invasions you know when people are doing their own grows uh that sort of thing and they're getting um they're getting um they're getting stolen or they're being robbed by um by criminals uh we've had some burglaries that's some of the dispensaries um and uh but but outside of that uh the biggest issue that we have are opioids and fentanyl is the biggest concern and so we've uh we've the biggest thing that we've done is pivot um on on how we address some of these things so we're we're pretty much entirely our narcotics team is entirely addressing the uh the opioid fentanyl issue right now and they're um it's it's very very busy for them so the the amount of calls and amount of investigations the only thing that uh has you know we we uh we reduce the number of cases that are assigned because we have uh we have less people um but um but we still get uh we get a lot of a lot of complaints and a lot of uh of crime around those and so that that's the biggest I think that's the biggest area that we've got uh we're not really dealing with uh the the legal the legalization of marijuana we're dealing with some of the uh the effects of people who aren't are permitted and are are are dealing with those um on the back side and so dealing with those home invasions that sort of thing okay thank you that's helpful information that's all for me right and I want to thank you chief for the presentation and I would just ask that you please keep this in front of the city council because as as we evolve here these are going to be challenging times um and the more information that you presented today I think is good for all of us so with that um we need to take another break and we will reconvene at 12 o'clock noon reconvene at 12 noon thank you um madam city clerk are we ready to roll um yes mayor okay can we uh we'll then reconvene the public safety subcommittee meeting can we do a roll call please yes council member Sawyer council member Sawyer vice mayor Fleming here mayor Schwedhelm here council member Sawyer here all members are on record do we need any other adjustments for the interpreter or are you ready to move forward uh yes I have assigned interpreter Charles to the Spanish channel Charles as you wouldn't mind turning on your video um and just give me giving me a visual thumbs up please perfect thank you we are set mayor all right thank you um and just for everyone's understanding we do have a hard stop at 12 30 we will lose our quorum at 12 30 so just be conscious of our time frames so with that I will now call item 5.3 uh police captain John Cregan you'll be doing this presentation it's my understanding yes thank you please proceed good morning everyone my name is John Cregan and I serve as a captain with the Santa Rosa police department I'm going to give you a brief update today on our ongoing efforts to reform the Santa Rosa police department's mental health response model this is truly a transformational moment for our police department and our community as a whole our priority for the police department as we develop this program is strong collaboration with our community members and city leaders on this critical topic we want to ensure that we're meeting the expectations of our community as we work to develop a better service model for responding to those experiencing a mental health crisis as well as donor members of our community who are experiencing homelessness I've already given a comprehensive update in the past to the public safety subcommittee on the cahoots model but today we're going to dive a little bit deeper into some of our goals going forward and the timelines for this important project so if you look here on the slide one of the biggest things we've done since we last spoke with the uh council on this topic is that we've been on ongoing uh negotiations and talks with the white bird clinic and the white bird clinic is the local non-profit in Eugene, Oregon who runs the uh not or the group called cahoots which manages the mental health response there for Eugene and Springfield Springfield so uh we're near uh the completion of this signed agreement with the white bird clinic to be able to be a consultant to the Santa Rosa police department in the city of Santa Rosa as we help to develop our own program model africa hoots right here in Sonoma County so some of the goals that we have going forward in our anticipated timeline is we're going to be having a series of meetings not only with the white bird clinic consultants but our other city leaders and that's going to include representatives from housing and community services also some of our local non-profits that were already engaged in on these efforts including catholic charities buckaloo programs social advocates for youth we'll be working closely with the Santa Rosa violence branch in partnership as they're one of the greatest uh collaborative groups of local non-profits and uh going to be able to present to them on some of our efforts and also to see what assistance we can get from many of the local non-profits that are represented in that group as well as many other key stakeholders we're also one important thing is that we're going to be facilitating some community uh stakeholder groups and be able to and during the time of covet we're going to have to do that via zoom but we're going to be facilitating that to be able to hear more from our community about what do they want to see in this important topic and have our community be a part of the implementation of this program with us in the meantime as we're waiting to facilitate these city and community meetings we're going to be continuing our efforts to create the program that's going to be right for our community right here in Santa Rosa and the cahoots program has actually been tremendously successful but they've had 31 years to evolve that program and to make it what it is today so we're not going to try to reinvent the wheel our hope is to be able to take a lot of the strengths of what they're doing there in Eugene and be able to implement that without our program part of our agreement with the white bird clinic will be getting their job descriptions and their training models for their staff and then we're going to be incorporating that another big thing though that's going to be different for us is identifying the equipment needs but also the cost and the funding sources for our program right here in Santa Rosa so that's going to be a citywide project as we examine that and determine what it's going to cost to be able to get a program as successful as the cahoots program running right here in Sonoma County the next big item that's going to be going out is we're just starting the process of developing our RFP our request for proposals and this will be a formal proposal agreement that goes out citywide and for local nonprofits and other interested groups to be able to submit proposals that will come before the city as we try to select the nonprofit that has the capacity and the ability to get this program off and running so our timeline for that is to have this draft of what our program is going to look like and this formal request for proposals going out for local nonprofits by February of 2021 so that's a robust amount of work that needs to be done and a lot of city time effort has been going into this over the last couple months but we're hoping by February to see this RFP go out and then to be able to start identifying our nonprofit who's going to run this program and get the formations of this program by the end of July of 2021 and we're understanding that it took Eugene 31 years so it's going to take some time for us to identify the the capacity to have 24 seven seven day a week coverage and that's our goal to be able to have that and have this new model of responding to mental health crisis helping us with our the homeless issues in our community and we're just excited here at the police department for the possibilities it's going to have not only for the police department but our community as a whole and that's the information just kind of for our quick update today on where we're at great thank you captain Korean bring it back to the subcommittee mr. Sawyer do you have any questions on the presentation no questions great thank you vice mayor Fleming any questions from your perspective none thank you not on either I do appreciate um captain the information that you provide and keeping us appraised of the progress here so we're now taking public comment on item 5.3 the police department timeline for response to mental illness homelessness if you wish to make a comment via zoom please raise your hand if you're dialing in via telephone please dial star 9 um madam host would you please facilitate public comment on item 5.3 of course a countdown timer will appear for the convenience of the speaker and viewers the first speaker will be acknowledged and invited to speak please make sure to unmute yourself when you are invited to do so your microphone will be muted at the end of that countdown or at the conclusion of your comment if you are participating in the meeting from the spanish channel in zoom we have an interpreter on standby on the english channel to assist during your public comment if you wish to make a public comment please be sure to pause throughout your comment to allow for interpretation those using interpreter support will be afforded additional time for your public comment as required by the brown act for spanish speakers at the time you hear your name called turn off the spanish channel to make your public comment this icon may now look like a circle with an es in the middle and the word spanish underneath our first public comment will be from lee followed by bailey lee i have enabled your speaking permission can you confirm you see the timer on your screen i do thank you perfect please identify yourself for public record if you so choose and your time begins now hi um my name is lee and i'm a community member in santa rosa i'm also disabled um and from mental health issues um i'm also privileged and i am a member of a community of people who intersect at mental illness but i see people who are like me who suffer so much more because the response that they the people that they deal with at the first responders when they're in crisis are not trained they don't have the education they do not have phd's they do not have four years of psych they do not have the education to deescalate they can't distinguish between somebody who is autistic and having a meltdown and between somebody who is on drugs it is all over the country we have a an autistic black youth that has been pardoned but is still in jail because law enforcement cannot understand the difference we've seen we saw elijah mclean get murdered by police because he was having a reaction that they thought was drugs and was absolutely mental health if if you need 30 years to figure this out then you need to stop and absolutely hire people who already know right now who don't need 20 30 years who have the education this is a crisis when we see we and when we see online houseless communities become dismantled and people who have privileged and have had had hours and hours of mental health help and we see people who are our our people getting treated by people who have no education it is absolutely terrifying it is not okay and i this is a very personal issue for me as you can hear and i want you to recognize that when all of these people called in hundreds of people in the last six months calling in people were calling in to defund because of things like this because people are getting murdered and because because the mental health of a police officer isn't they can't handle their their response we've seen at countless times they don't know how to handle their response because they do not have education they do not have hours and hours and hours of de-escalating their own hearts and minds that's the training we need that's why we fund the the community we fund public mental health community so that people can de-escalate themselves or each other but this is not working and it's dangerous for everyone i yield my time our next public comment will be from bailey bailey i have enabled your speaking permissions if you could please unmute your microphone uh yes hello hi can you confirm you see the timer on your screen yes i can see the timer perfect please identify yourself for public record if you so choose and your time begins now cool uh yeah my name is bailey um long time snowman county resident and um i just want to say that yes i think it is great that you are wanting to implement um somewhat of a cahoots model um do i think that it's too late yes um there has been mental health crisis and untrained people especially law enforcement trying to deal with these crises and they always end up um they always end up in uh not it just isn't done right um people aren't trained um likely said before i want to echo what she has said um there's definitely people that are way more well trained for these types of instances um a little bit of my personal experience me being schizophrenic um in the past when i've had um pretty big psychosis it breaks um the police aren't the first people that i'm going to call um i don't want to call them at all really because um they are not trained to take care of people like me um and i want to say that um you definitely need to get people in there that are that are well trained for these types of instances and um if you are looking for um the budget and where to get it um there's definitely a few inflated budgets in this county the police department being one of them and i think you should take money from that um yeah so i yield my time thank you next public comment will be from daniella daniella i have enabled your speaking permission can you confirm you see the timer on your screen i do thank you so much thank you please identify yourself for public record if you so choose and your time begins now hi i'm daniella hello again and again thank you so much for that presentation and for this meeting um i first just want to express compassion for the last two callers that called in um you know it is it's really heartbreaking to hear what people are struggling with and um as we all know mental health issues have only um gotten worse and gotten more intense um during this pandemic so i just want to first express compassion for those two callers and just for our whole community that is um likely experiencing more mental health issues um i also want to express gratitude that we are bringing a cahoots model to santa rosa and to sinema county i think it is long overdue um and i understand the white bird clinic has had much more experience they have had 31 years to um develop this program into what it is today and i i'm hoping it's not going to take us that long since they've done so much work i'm hoping that we can make um big strides and really see results from what we from the work that we do because i do think it's it's logical it's the right thing to do to have first responders who have you know not just a weekend training not just one week a year or every couple of years but have years of de-escalating training and trauma informed care that that's their expertise um and that they're experts in that and they can really respond in a way that is not going to uh provoke fear to people who are having mental health crisis uh situations if they can respond in a way that is um compassionate and is informed um you know in a way that police just really can't so i am thrilled that we're doing this and i'm really looking forward to seeing what actually gets done you know that's we're taking the first steps and that's great but i want i i'm hoping to see results soon and not you know 10 or 15 years down the line because it is overdue um and yeah that's it i yield the rest of my time thank you so much that is the last of our live public comment we do have some voicemail public comment which i will play now one moment please um i need to adjust the settings one moment thank you for your patience we are having technical difficulties playing the voicemail public comment at this time we also received no email public comment for this item okay um absent that uh mr. Sawyer or vice mayor Fleming any additional comments for captain cregan no well just one comment um i'm glad to see that we are moving forward as rapidly as possible um i know that it's going to be great for our um our public public safety um part of our organization and also the community so as soon as we can get up and running the better off everyone will be and i appreciate the the effort thank you and um you know for myself uh same as uh councilmember Sawyer i'm looking forward to this program getting rolled out as soon as possible great i echo this is my fellow subcommittee members thank you mr. cregan all right item five point four chief navarro and chief navarro you've got about 10 minutes uh before we lose our quorum thank you i'll be very very brief um so we wanted to come before you uh with some information in december we were originally going to bring the after action report um to you um however um the consultants hillard hinds llc uh their your appointment with us was uh happened to be the week of the glass fire so uh there's been some delay because they were unable to uh meet with key staff and uh in review necessary information um and there was delay there um and uh we will not be able to get that information to you uh to this body by december we expect the after action report to be ready in january and um just as a reminder the after action report goes over a general operation in response of the entire incident uh throughout the week uh does not go into specific use of force incidents um after speaking with um getting an update from the city attorney's office it's my understanding that the investigation uh that relates to the use of force should be available in or around uh february and so we want to let you know what the delay was for the after action report and um i think we're looking on for guidance on guidance on timelines regarding when um when when uh this after action report should come and i believe the city attorney may have more uh information on the other report and other guidelines that's all i have uh yes thank you chief navarro um and i will as he described the after action report this relates to the protests back in june may and june last may and june um we do expect that that will be finalized probably sometime in december or early january and it is as as the chief described an overview of the city's response to those protests at the same time we have also focused in on the use of force incidences of use of force and that is on a separate track we have engaged an independent consultant to review all of the incidents of use of force during the protests and that consulting contract is being run through our office they are working with the department in the investigation and interviewing of of uh of staff and other stakeholders um and we'll be excuse me and we'll be focusing as i said on all of the incidences of use of force that occurred but they'll be particularly focusing on the four incidences of use of projectiles that resulted in injuries and also we'll be looking at the use of tear gas during the during the protests we do intend that when we bring that study forward we will also be bringing to the council the report that was issued last summer by the sonoma county human rights commission because it also focuses on those not on the general picture but it focuses on those specific incidences of use of force um so we are we do feel that bringing all of that together will give you a more complete picture all at once so it would be the after-action report the audit of use the use of force audit and the human rights commission report but that would likely cause a delay the as the chief mentioned we're anticipating that the use of force audit will be completed sometime in february but we do not yet have a date certain so probably would be looking at bringing that sometime in february or maybe early march so it is an option for and we're looking for guidance from the subcommittee as to whether you want to move forward with the after-action report it's probably sometime in january and then wait and bring the audit and the human rights commission report subsequently or whether you want to wait and bring them all together that's one piece of the question the other piece would be would it be your preference to have these reports come to your subcommittee first before it goes to the full council or do you prefer it simply to go directly to the full council and happy to answer any questions okay thank you for given we have approximately five minutes left um i'll start out with some comments and then we'll get as much public comment on the side as possible so for me the feedback would be i think it should be all together both reports because i think one on in of itself will not have the information that the other one provides and i know you know i've committed to we want to have this public con conversation when we have all the information available and uh since i think eventually it's coming to the whole council have the two reports together unless it's bring it to the entire council at the same time whenever those reports are complete uh mr sorry your thoughts now i agree with your mayor and for continuity i would like them both to come at the same time and i think there there's no reason to preview it with i don't i don't believe there's a reason to preview it with the subcommittee i think he could come to the full council um and so we would all be hearing it at the same time okay vice mayor phlemon your thoughts agreed okay we're not taking public comment on five point four if you're participating via zoom please raise your hand if you're dialing in via telephone please dial star nine madam host would you facilitate public comment on five point four of course a countdown timer will appear for the convenience of the speaker and viewers the first speaker will be acknowledged and invited to speak please make sure to unmute yourself when you are invited to do so your microphone will be muted at the end of that countdown or at the conclusion of your comment if you are participating in the meeting from the spanish channel in zoom we have an interpreter on stand by on the english channel to assist during your public comment if you wish to make a public comment please be sure to pause throughout your comment to allow for interpretation those using interpreter support will be afforded additional time for your public comment as required by the bound act for spanish speakers at the time you hear your name called turn off the spanish channel to make your public comment this icon may now look like a circle with an e s in the middle and the word spanish underneath our first public comment may i see no hands raised at this time okay thank you for that thank for that brief presentation uh vice mayor or councilmember soyer was there any other information you wanted to provide on this item no thank you mayor good job no thank you all right thank you um thank you chief and city attorney gallagher could we go back are we were we able to work out the public comment on our last item we had three recorded messages on item 5.3 do we work that technical difficulties yet out yes we did one moment in first and foremost i just wanted to thank the board and whoever has been working on implementing more mental health and homelessness solution um i know that a primary concern for many people is the fact that we are approaching winter about to get really really cold um it's going to be heavy rains and dropping temperatures so i think that we should not do any sweeps homeless sweeps i think that this is a very vulnerable time not to mention that it's going to be the holidays the tough time for people emotionally in general um that we need to take some serious steps to to help to help that population so um i know a lot of people are going to be calling about this because this is something we're all very concerned about thank you bye hi my name is Cecilia um i am calling about item 5.3 um i am in huge support of the city of Santa Rosa um doing whatever it takes to address the crises of mental health and homelessness but for the time being it seems imperative to completely cease homeless encampments sweeps and addictions because we're doing this on the regular if he has people in Santa Rosa who go and try to help the homeless folks when this happens and it's just heartbreaking to see them trying to put down roots and stay safe and to have them just be forcibly removed as though they were not human beings. Santa Rosa you need to be more compassionate than this please we have so many homeless people in our community and we must treat them better than this we have freezing cold temperature um it was already this mid-november and we've had freezing temperatures at night already and um what are we doing about that what are we doing to help these people who are our community homeless folks are our community they're not just being things on the side of the road there are people and we have to take care of them the expectation that people are going to start from scratch every couple of months after they've been kicked out over and over again that is insane and ridiculous and we have to start helping our marginalized communities otherwise we are not a good nor a strong city um our very own public health officers and RMA as well as the CDC have told us not to do these sweeps this may of this year how are we going to progress as any sort of compassionate and functional city if we're doing this against the orders of the CDC and we all know what happens when we ignore the CDC because we are in the middle of month seven of sales are in place and quarantine and lockdowns and it sucks um also talk to police thank you mayor due to time would you like me to play the last voicemail public comment i still see mr sorry there we still have a quorum if mr sir can you bring one more okay perfect thank you my name is gal alvarez and i'm commenting on item number 5.3 um i just wanted to call on and say that um i think it's fantastic that people are trying to help out the homeless community right now especially as we are in the middle of rain and the temperatures are starting to grow um but i definitely just wanted to say that i think that we should be stopping all sweeping of encampment moving people from place to place literally does nothing for them and it uproots them when people are just camping out on unused property what else what else is the property being used for really what is the harm in just letting people stay so they can gather the supplies that they need to be able to stay warm and stay alive in the winter so thanks and that concludes our voicemail public comment great thank you having no further items on the agenda to discuss uh we will adjourn this november 23rd meeting thank you mr sorry for hanging with us i know it's interrupting your next meeting um but meeting is hereby adjourned thank you all for your participation