 Thank you for those who are joining us we assume for today's city center as a city council meeting the city council meeting will start shortly thank you for your patience. All right welcome to today's city council meeting. Apologize for being a little bit late here we had our closed session run just a few minutes overboard but recognizing a quorum now I will call us into regular session Madam City Clerk would you please call the roll. Yes thank you mayor council member Tibbetts here council member Schwedhelm here council member Sawyer here council member Fleming here council member Alvarez council member Alvarez vice mayor Rogers here council member Alvarez have you joined us okay that the record showed that all council members are present with the exception of council member Alvarez okay thank you so much council just says a little bit of housekeeping before we start our study session remember to please keep your audio on mute unless you have been called on to speak staff will also be muted until they need to be addressing the council for members of the public who've joined the meeting you will be joining us as attendees in zoom that means that your microphone in your camera will also be muted you will only have an opportunity to speak at the appropriate times when the clerk will unmute you and give you your three minutes in public comment as a reminder the city of Santa Rosa is committed to creating a safe and inclusive environment free from disruption we will not tolerate any hate speech or actions and are well staffed to monitor that everyone is participating respectfully they will be removed if they are not if necessary we will also end the meeting now madame city clerk can you please explain to the public how they can be heard at today's meeting on each of these items yes after each agenda 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 mayor will then call on the public who have raised their hands public comment will be limited to 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 provided a live public comment on an agenda item but also submitted an email e comment or recorded a voice message public comment your email e comment or voice message public comment will not be duplicated read or play during the meeting additionally there are two public comment periods on today's agenda to speak on non-agenda matters items 13 and 17 this is the time when any person may address the council on matters not listed on the agenda but which are within the subject matter jurisdiction of the council all right thank you so much Stephanie and with that Mr. City Manager let's go on to item 3.1 our first study session of the day item 3.1 county of Sonoma strategic plan and I would like to welcome Catherine de Pasqua to lead us off Mr. Pasqua it does not look like your audio is working you're not picking up on our microphones let's try this how's this better yes thank you apologies so good afternoon council members thank you for having us my name is Catherine de Pasqua I am an administrative analyst in the Sonoma County Administrator's office and the project leads for our five-year strategic plan joining me today is crystal Kia Harrow the deputy county administrator next slide please the goal of today's presentation is to hear from our city partners before we finalize the county strategic plan we will be presenting the revised goals and objectives and will answer any questions you may have so to give you some background on our strategic planning process the Board of Supervisors approved the draft strategic plan on August 11th knowing that the plan would evolve after we launched our community and stakeholder engagement process the revised plan is going back to the board on January 26th at which point the board will review the feedback we've gathered during their engagement period and then also provide direction for any further revisions to the plan the final plan will go back to the board on March 2nd for final adoption to the extent that the city council has formal input it would like to share with the board we are recommending that you submit written input prior to the January 26th board meeting or the latest February well your slide says the 12th but actually we're going to ask that you submit at the latest February 5th so that we can make sure that the materials get included in the final board item on March 2nd our board agenda items the deadlines have changed a little bit so that's the reason for the change in the date next slide please the purpose of the strategic plan is to inform which county policies and projects are prioritized for the next five years county leaders have been working on developing the framework for the strategic plan since late 2019 strategic plans tend to have different terminology for components of the plan so here's a quick overview of how we've set up ours pillars identify the most strategic priorities for the county to accomplish over the next five years those five pillars are helping safe communities organizational excellence racial equity and social justice climate action and resiliency and resilient infrastructure so under each pillar there's a set of goals and these are the outcomes that we want to achieve and then under that under each goal there's also a set of objectives and these are the measures of progress needed in order to achieve that goal beyond that once the plan has been adopted by our board the assigned lead for each objective will then work on developing an implementation plan and that's what will be needed in order to meet each objective next slide please so the county has made a significant effort to gather feedback from both employees and community members and really the goal of that was to get input and reactions on the draft strategic plan before it was finalized by our board we also wanted to discover if there are any additional goals or objectives that should be added to the plan and finally we wanted to understand the relative priority of the objectives in both the eyes of our county employees and community members in both employee focus groups and community sessions we've pulled participants to see which objectives they think should be tackled first by the county this information will be really helpful for us when we start developing our implementation plans for employees we hosted several focus groups multiple drop-in open house sessions and we launched an online survey to gather feedback for community members we hosted several community sessions in both english and spanish made presentations to numerous community stakeholder groups developed a session in a box for organizations who wanted to host their own focus groups and we launched online surveys in both english and spanish as well next slide please so up next what we're going to do is we're going to dive into each of the strategic plan pillars each slide as you can see here contains all the goals and objectives for that pillar what i'll do is i will read the goal and pause and give you a moment to go through each of the objectives on your own and then at the end we'll let um we'll pause before moving on to the next one to see if you have any questions on this particular page so up first is healthy and safe communities provide quality and equitable housing health and human services for all goal one expand integrated system of care to address gaps and services to the county's most vulnerable goal two establish equitable and data-driven distribution of services goal three in collaboration with cities increase affordable housing development near public transportation and services goal four reduce the county's overall homeless population by 10 percent each year by enhancing services based on coordination and collaboration and finally goal five continue to invest in public safety so that residents and visitors feel safe in our community so with that i'm going to give you a moment to kind of go through each of the objectives and then as you have questions just please call them out so council i think what might be uh effective here is if we start with goal one and i'll ask council if you have any questions and then we can move on to goal two and so obviously you've got your your hands that you can raise on zoom so i'll start with councilmember schwethelm with goal one if you have any questions on that section am i aware of goal two and three or two and four okay all right council any questions on goal one all right councilmember schwethelm you had a question about goal two yes so goal two specifically the objective i'm really interested in the results based accountability how is the county planning on tracking that and making that information available to the public we'll just refer to crystal to see um her response to that one well i think part of that is just making sure that we're um have the right uh systems to track the data and make sure that the data that is shared is allowed to be shared as you know we have many um privacy rules around that but there isn't already an existing system to do that um the primary integration and sharing of data will probably happen mostly within the county departments um and i'm not going to pretend to know all the details as to how we share it with outside county but even within the county family um you know we're trying to reduce the level of redundancy and people having to complete information and provide information um to ease the process overall um but that that is where we're trying to make our initial improvements um unfortunately we don't have a subject matter expert on that particular system with us on the panel today to answer more specifically but the the primary reason is to improve that efficiency within the county and will that rba process be used across the entire strategic plan because i'm not sure if i saw that specific language for some of the other goals and metrics no my understanding that's mainly related to the safety net services but i could see you know as we have obviously our health department has connections with behavioral health connections with justice departments i think there probably is some linkage there um i wish i could speak more to the details of it but that is the intent it's kind of in line with that one door approach um that people aren't coming in needing services and having to give their information and you know being able to collect that data in one place um rather than having you know it's a service impact but it's also an efficiency impact internally so just feedback from my perspective just what i've looked on rba the basic three questions are you know how much do we do how well do we do it and is anyone better off and i think if that's the metric that the county will be using to be nice for the other cities we're having our goal setting in february if we all have common language because residents of snoma county really shouldn't have to decipher the way the city of santa rosa we use smart goals you know now the county's doing um rba it'd be nice if we actually saw that that that language is uh user friendly just a suggestion thank you fantastic feedback thank you very much and then that's why one of the principles in our strategic plan is to have you know good good partnerships with the cities um you know if we're all trying to serve the community we want to do that in the best way possible and having three different terms for the same thing is not helpful um so thank you for that comment counsel any other questions on section two on goal two i excuse me so i did have one uh the overarching goal is establishing equitable distribution of services uh and yet all of the objectives seem to just be the data driven is there any room in this goal for discussions around geographic equity in where services are delivered as well um like i said i don't see it in the objectives but i'd hope that that would be part of the conversation so it's uh actually really interesting feedback and thank you for bringing that to our attention uh the and what you're not seeing necessarily here today but is included in our strategic plan document itself is these kind of guiding principles that are kind of an umbrella over all of our pillars and one of those is geographic equity of service and um you know you will see when we get to resilient infrastructure there is an objective that speaks to kind of regional and neighborhood service centers to kind of make make service access a little more equitable to some of the more far-reaching areas of the county but um it's good feedback for this perler in particular so thank you for mentioning it great counsel we'll go on to goal three are there any questions on goal three not seeing any hands from council members um i i just had a quick question about to what extent the county would be coordinating with Sonoma county transportation authority in the collaboration around affordable housing development and public transit in that nexus as well as our renewal enterprise district which are two entities that are already set up to provide some of this conversation space uh in an integrated way between our cities and the county and i'll let crystal add uh what i would say is that uh some of that falls into kind of the implementation plan arena which will be at the um at the determination of the department leads that are assigned to implement this so i think that is something that's kind of under development and will be kind of dependent on how the department decides to implement this goal but i'll see if crystal has anything to add no just say absolutely we would be working with Michelle Whitman in her group there for the renewal enterprise district as well as you know we have board representation on the scta so i again i'll just reiterate that that is absolutely one of our guiding principles is to be working with the right partners on things that affect all areas of the county so um yeah it's interesting when you make it the comment and it's if it's not clear here i you know this is the kind of feedback that we're looking for but you haven't either emphasized something strongly enough um but it certainly is the intent okay yeah i just wanted to make sure since we do have a number of regional partnerships that are ongoing uh that it is reflected uh in this strategic plan that there are other spaces where the conversations are taking place and that it all does need to be integrated uh that you do have it in here at certain aspects but i want to make sure that it's a very strong indicator as you go through it council any other questions on goal three uh and uh council member sweat how many you had a question on goal four yes on on goal four it's interesting just reading that it looks like the county is doing uh reducing homelessness 10 percent each year on its by itself um where does the continuum of care fit into this um because i know previous uh leadership council we're trying to make it a uh one body that would be responsible for any homelessness in the county all of Sonoma county just not the uh unincorporated reading these specific first three objectives it seems like the county is doing it on its own can you elaborate a little bit more or how does the coc interact with these first three objectives i would say that if the language isn't clear that there's a connection with the continuum of care then that's um something we can bring back to our steering committee to kind of refine and flush out a little bit more i don't have a specific answer unless crystal does um yeah i see the point it does seem like that maybe um but but it clearly in a bit of two we're we're partnering um i don't have a specific answer on the connections that continue with care but i i do anticipate that that partnership along with other partnerships on sort of services around homelessness um will be addressed in fact we're having a consultant look at that looking at that those services across our um multiple agencies right now right so objective two gets the cities but on continuum of care we also have persons with lived experience and service providers the sub-matter experts on this very topic um so it just seems like what's missing is that continuum of care which is the HUD recognized agency for any homelessness in the Sonoma county and to get funding and again i think many of our efforts have trying to uh been to align the strategies throughout the county and the cities uh so all the funding's going on this towards the same efforts and then i was interested where did the year 2024 come up for the strategic plan for homeless it seems rather long i believe that the the steering committee members who drafted the um this plan just felt like given everything else that's happening with the county in terms of you know COVID response and stuff like that that the um that this was uh an achievable timeline if not they could potentially achieve sooner but they didn't want to um overstate so my recommendation to be and again this is planning with continuum of care um i think it'll be by 2021 we need to get a strategic plan if we're hoping to achieve those results it's a priority for uh i think Sonoma county thank you thank you great feedback and my questions aligned uh pretty strongly with with councilmember schwett helms my expectation would be that uh the continuum of care which is already viewed as the partnership between the cities the counties and as tom mentioned other partners uh impacted by homelessness that they'd be the ones who would be conducting the peer review of successful models and really coordinating uh efforts uh whether it was this the development of a strategic plan or creating of housing resource tools for for folks so uh just is feedback to take back again there are regional efforts that are already underway and i would not want the strategic plan from the county specifically to undermine those partnerships or those efforts that are ongoing um council any other questions on goal four okay we'll go on to goal five are there any questions on goal five all right i am not seeing any additional questions from council members okay so we can move on to organizational excellence so next slide please we'll do it the same way i will read through just the goals we'll go through as a feedback one by one the organizational excellence being innovative effective engaged and a transparent organization focused on quality programs and services goal one strengthen operational effectiveness fiscal reliability and accountability goal two increase information sharing and transparency and improve county and community engagement goal three become an employer of choice with a diverse workforce that reflects our community and an employer with a positive work culture that results in engaged and developed employees and finally goal four speak out grant funding to enhance programs and improve infrastructure okay council are there any questions on goal one saying none are there any questions on goal two i just have a quick plug here uh this council just recently passed our sunshine ordinance which better outlines uh how we will interact with the public and to what extent the public will have early notice to be able to know what's coming up on our agenda i will put in a quick plug that the county uh look at that and adopt some of those best practices so that that way whether it's council members or whether it's folks in the public we have more advanced notice about what is coming to the to the county's agenda so that we can better partner rather than just the 72 hours that is current practice great thank you yep we'll go on to goal three any questions from council any comments all right and finally anyone for goal four okay let's keep going the next pillar is racial equity and social justice achieve racial equity and county service provision and ensure a workforce reflective of the community that we serve goal one foster an organizational culture that supports the commitment to achieving racial equity goal two implement strategies to make the county workforce reflect county demographic across all levels goal three ensure racial equity throughout all county policy decisions and service delivery goal four engaged key community and internal stakeholders to develop priorities and advance racial equity council any questions on goals one let's go ahead and just take any of these four goals goals one two three or four are there any questions or comments from the council okay i'm not seeing any next slide please so climate action and resiliency makes Sonoma county carbon neutral by 2030 goal one invest in the community to enhance disaster resiliency and become carbon neutral by 2030 goal two make all county facilities carbon free zero waste and resilience goal three maximize sustainability and emission reductions in all county fleet vehicles and goal four maximize carbon sequestration through land conservation work and land use policies okay councilor that any questions or comments on this section uh council members let him thank you mr mayor i'm not sure if it was in this area or the next one um but it seemed what was missing from the five-year goal or a strategic plan is more about the fire resiliency so i know objective one mentions it and i know there's one mentioning uh floods and the next strategic objective um that just seems like lacking because one of the things that we've had here in san rosa is wildfire protection plan we're having some discussions about how to fund that um and what's been interesting for the city san rosa the fires that have greatly impacted us none of them started within here in other words we need to work with our county partners and i just didn't see that specifically called out anywhere especially given our last three years i thought something should be there specifically about fire resiliency um again i don't have more specifics other than that overall topic what are the plans to address that over the next five years and and that's the helpful feedback for us because the uh the draft plan that we had brought during our employee and community engagement we had less um fire resiliency and we had made an effort in this revised materials to include it more but it's good to know that it's still not coming through strong enough so we can we can definitely take another look and i just had a question under goal one i think it would go under goal one there seems to just be a lack of acknowledgement of new science and new technology five years is a long time particularly within the climate space and in fact yesterday at the regional climate protection authority we sort of updated our goals to be more and better informed in the line with current and existing and future science uh that's coming in it might be worth touching on that in this section or throughout this section to make sure that the strategic plan isn't too rigid to be able to seek investments in areas that might be more beneficial anything else from council okay let's keep moving so our final pillar is resilient infrastructure enhance all hazard resiliency for the community by investing in county roads buildings and property communications and flood protection so goal one invest in county buildings and technology solutions to enhance service delivery and improve employee mobility goal two invest in capital systems to ensure continuity of operations and disaster response goal three continue to invest in critical road infrastructure goal four implement countywide technological solutions to promote resiliency and expand community access and finally goal five support fund and expand flood protection anything from council I didn't know if I should make this comment in the last section or in this section but one of the things that is noticeably lacking in the strategic plan is investments in multimodal whether it's bike pedestrian infrastructure as well as non-single occupancy vehicle planning that both meets the resilient infrastructure need as well as the climate action need and it should I to my perspective it should be reflected somewhere in the plan those levels of investment not just excuse me there there's one section in objective three but some of these other sections I think should call out specifically creating a walkable a walkable bikeable infrastructure plan for your employees as well as the broader county okay thank you for that anything else from council okay I do see councilmember Sawyer thank you mayor what I do is I have it's just a final question um you know this is I want to commend all those who worked on this um rather grand plan it's there's a lot of work involved in this and a lot of issues that are touched on I'm curious about the review of the goals and objectives and how often it will come before the county board to not only look at where there have been successes and objectives that can actually be eliminated because they've been achieved or even goals that have been satisfactorily achieved how often will the board be reviewing this strategic plan and identifying areas that need attention or successes that have been achieved crystal do you want to respond to that that's a great question because of course the what you see here in the goals and objectives doesn't speak to you know even budgeting and implementation but Catherine has prepared a draft plan that will go to the board on the 26th that does include some discussion as to what does the tracking of it look like how frequently in the same way we we have updated on any other plan we've done but I imagine minimally annually but also um probably at least twice a year and in addition to that there Catherine has been working on a dashboard Catherine might want to speak to how some of the specific goals and objectives will be tracked and shared yeah so uh right now we are we're working with our information services department to develop an online dashboard that will be up on the county's website so it will be publicly available where we're going to be tracking progress made towards each of these goals and objectives so um we're going to be tracking both just you know has uh has the policy been created yes or no but then also tracking some expenditure information how many dollars have been spent or how many grant funds have been awarded that sort of thing so that is going to be updated if not quarterly at least uh twice a year with the current information so that will be an ongoing public reporting on the status of the plan and uh yeah Crystal mentioned it too I mean uh you know we can do our best to kind of identify you know what we think will be the highest priorities now but things will come up and so we're not necessarily intending for this plan to remain static and we will you know work with the steering committee and with our board to make updates as needed you know I appreciate that and one thing that I'm unless I missed it one thing that I did not see was prioritization are all of these um all of these pieces to the plan and all of the goals and all of the objectives are they all a number one priority or have you gone through the at the very painful exercise of prioritize prioritization so they are all priorities in the eyes of the steering committee and the county and the community but we did in our engagement process we did ask both employees and the community what they thought the county should prioritize in terms of which objectives should be accomplished first we recognize this is a five-year plan so it's going to be certain things will be pushed forward over others that was the goal of everything being completed by the end of 2026 um so to your answer is your question we have some data on what our employees and public think but our steering committee and our board have not gone through the process of saying okay this needs to happen in the first year that needs to that has not happened yet that is probably the most painful piece of any kind of strategic plan is that this that exercise of prioritizing and five or you know five years is a flash um that's one of one of the things I've learned is you can five years can go by very very quickly and all of a sudden you're there and you take a look at the and a strategic plan and realized um whoops um a number of things have fallen through the cracks because this is very um it's quite lengthy and I wish you all the best in in getting through that that prioritization exercise because it will it will help guide the decisions of the of the electives uh all of the board and and it will also I think it would also help bring the cities um to the table when they see a priority that they can all agree with and they can help through communication and um well through communication um better your odds of success in all of these in all of the elements of your plan so um it's a lot of work congratulations and good luck on on the implementation any other comments from council okay so we'll just go to the last slide go ahead go ahead and get council member sweathelm I tried both electronic and went old school too first of all Catherine Crystal thank you so much for coming and sharing this information with us I think this is a huge step that you know 10 years ago they never would have fought county employees would be coming updating you know the city of Santa Rosa and other cities with what your plans are because I think it'll be very helpful for us as we go into our goal setting plans if we can align some of our uh priorities with I heard what you just said with your priorities I think the odds of success are so much greater the one question I did have you had mentioned at the very beginning that if we want to send comments directly we could do that by January 26 would that include the conversations that we've had already provided to you or if we provided to you today does that suffice oh thank you that's a great question I have been taking notes on the questions that have been raised during the course of this conversation and so for you it would be if you have any additional formal input that you'd want to submit in writing to our board that they would be you know presented during an upcoming uh board item then that is what we would be requesting you submit but if you don't have anything beyond what we talked about today then no you're not required to submit anything great thank you so much I really appreciate your appearance today very helpful thank you for your time yeah and just again on behalf of the county and go ahead Catherine oh I was gonna say you know behalf on you know uh there's a lot of people you know behind both Crystal and I that put a lot of work into this plan on behalf on all of them thank you so much for taking the time today to to meet with us and hear um about the status of the plan and provide your feedback we really do appreciate it absolutely and we will before we let you go go to public comment on this item to see if anybody who is watching the meeting has feedback questions comments uh as we move forward and I do see uh one hand raised so we'll call on Jen first Madam City Clerk if you could uh unmute Jen and Jen you'll have three minutes to address the council Jen go ahead unmute sorry about that I'm I'm mousing with my left hand today and it's super challenging as it turns out um good afternoon Mayor Rogers members of the council and county Islamist staff Jen Close executive director of generation housing thanks so much to the county uh for your presentation to the council um and and great work on this draft strategic plan plan I have a couple of comments um first uh Jen H was somewhat surprised not to see housing called out specifically as one of the priority pillars since it's been a priority and high level need for several years and often the state of housing in Sonoma County is referred to as a crisis that said I think we are all of like minds that production of more more diverse and more affordable housing falls squarely under each of your pillars and I'm happy to see it pop up in some of the goals um second we love seeing the county and city here together and we want to encourage you to continue being as bold and collaborative in your efforts to solve our housing crisis as you were when you created the renewal enterprise district the city has an opportunity to be bold and collaborative by matching the county's generous commitment of ten million dollars to the red housing fund and we urge the city to do so um while I've got you here we have got to solve the developer math program problem to get housing built in downtown Santa Rosa and the red fund can be that solution um and the city and the county have an opportunity to do something really special really exciting and working together to create a true civic center in downtown Santa Rosa by relocating the county complex to downtown and we're happy to see the supervisors give direction to staff to start looking into the possibilities there and then of course rebuilding city hall as this council has discussed and maybe even including centers of city schools and that this would create three great sites for housing development and one place where our community members can access their federal state county city maybe even school government in one place giving unprecedented access to services here in Sonoma County and access means equity thank you everybody for your service and we look forward to partnering with you on solving our housing challenges okay thank you Jen i'm saying no other hands raised from the public uh madam city clerk did we have any pre-recorded public comments yes we did study session item 3.1 the way you live from roseland regarding the county's strategic plan the city should be working to implement a comprehensive collaboration with the county specifically on the healthy and safe communities and the racial equity and social justice approaches environmental justice is a part of the racial equity and social justice concerns with the city of santa rosa preparing to do a new general plan which has already been an exclusive effort practicing virtual exclusion and leaving many of the lower income disadvantaged residents of the city out of the process there should be an effort for both the city and the county to work together to hold some actual meetings in which there could be social distancing in the bigger city and county venues this would be possible it's been done at state levels where the state legislators are meeting and continuing the city could do this also it's vitally important action many people they feel that the city is ignoring them and leaving them out of the process and that's leading to some social unrest hopefully the city will become more inclusive and work to have that open government that equity that also entails transparency and openness that'd be a wonderful thing to actually have happened we talk about it all the time but it rarely occurs thank you good new year too mayor concluded the voice message public comments and we received no additional email or e-public comments on this item okay great i will bring it back then for any last thoughts from the council all right seeing that i just want to thank you both for being here and as was mentioned just really appreciate the county including the city in these conversations and really having that conversation about how we can continue to work together since all of these are regional issues and regional priorities and there's a lot of overlap between what we're working on and what the county supervisors are working on so if you could just take back from us our gratitude and a promise to continue to work and we'll keep going at it thank you very much mayor council members all right mr mcglenn let's go on to item 3.2 item 3.2 review of temporary sick leave requirements and options for certain employers riasa delarosa w director economic development presenting good afternoon mayor rogers and members of the council as the city manager said i'm here to introduce the study session issues related to the city's recently expired covid related temporary paid sick leave urgency ordinance next slide please to bring you up to speed i'll start with a reminder of what the federal act was that was uh that inspired senator rogers's ordinance and that was the family's first coronavirus response act or ffc ra that was passed on april 1st of last year that and that also included the emergency paid sick leave act or epsla what this federal act did was require employers with up to 500 employees to provide paid sick leave for their staff so long as the leaves fell under any of the five outlined categories you see here on the slide and those are met the employee was subject to a government mandated quarantine or isolation order had been advised to self quarantine by a health care provider was experiencing experiencing covid-19 symptoms and seeking medical diagnosis was caring for an individual subject uh to an order described in reasons one or two above or was uh caring for a child whose school replaced of care is closed due to covid-19 next slide please this benefit added up to 80 hours of paid leave for full-time employees prorated for part-time employer employees and it was available immediately upon hire and could be used before other paid leave if the reason for use was was applicable employees were paid at the regular rate of pay though epsla capped payment at $511 per day or $5,110 total for caring for oneself and at two-thirds of an employee's regular rate of pay excuse me regular rate of pay up to $200 per day if the employee was caring for someone else or for child care reasons the act allows employees to receive a tax credit for this expense but only up to the specified caps and because we received a number of comments about the rate of compensation after the Santa Rosa ordinance was passed I just want to take a moment on this because to be clear the vast majority of businesses in Santa Rosa and the county as a whole are uh employers with less than 500 employees and so most of the county's businesses were subject to the federal act and the um federally set payment caps prior to Santa Rosa's ordinance and the cap only means that for example anyone earning more than $64 an hour or more than $5,110 over the course of 80 hours would be capped at the stated amounts so for example an employee working 40 hours a week at $15 an hour which was last year's minimum wage rate if they took the full 80 hours of paid leave they would receive a total compensation of about $1,200 which is of course well under the cap for caring for oneself and then that same minimum wage employee if they took the leave to care for someone else for child care reasons they would receive only two-thirds of their rate of pay or about $800 which again for that piece of that was well below the federal maximum cap next slide please to address a gap in coverage and in part in response to a push from labor and the model ordinance they submitted to the city in July council adopted its own emergency ordinance so like EPSLA the Santa Rosa ordinance expired on December 31st in short what it did was expand the federal criterion requirements to include businesses with 500 or more employees and also covered employers of healthcare providers and emergency responders that were formerly only optional under the the federal act also it applied only the higher compensation rate cap for both caring for oneself and for someone else so it eliminated the two-thirds federal cap this higher cap applied only not just to the the newly covered businesses but also upon adoption it applied to those already covered under EPSLA the ordinance allowed for an offset so if an employer already offered COVID related leave they could apply that to this new requirement and here I'll point out a couple of the frequently asked questions we got once the ordinance was passed just because we did get asked these questions a lot so one the first one was more of a consternation related to the increased compensation cap for caring for someone else and that the tax credit was only allowable up to the federally mandated caps meaning that an employer did not get credit for the difference in cost for an employee taking a leave to care for someone other than themselves which otherwise would have been capped at two-thirds the rate of pay the other most common question was about who qualified for example the ordinance only applies applied to businesses operating within Santa Rosa city limits so if your business is physically located outside of the city but you have staff who work within Santa Rosa at least two hours per week then the hours those employees work in Santa Rosa would be subject to the ordinance pro rata similarly another question we got was if you have multiple business locations both within and outside of Santa Rosa city limits the ordinance would apply only to those employees working at the Santa Rosa business location next slide so as I noted in the staff report I don't have any data on the use of the program by employees the impact of the program on businesses or employer compliance and this is true both for the Santa Rosa ordinance as well as for the federal act however I did compile some information that I hope will be helpful to you in your considerations firstly to get a sense of where the greatest impact of COVID cases of COVID are in Santa Rosa per the county dashboard the zip codes with the highest number of cases are in the west and southwest parts of town which include council districts one five six and seven I mean obviously they're all over Santa Rosa but the highest per the dashboard are in these areas well I didn't dig into where residents in these areas work or commute to out of curiosity I did a very quick and dirty analysis on the businesses within these districts and found using Esri's data allocation method there are almost 5000 businesses employing around 42 000 people in those districts in those council districts so by far the bulk of the businesses in these areas near the county's dashboard on cases by employment sector so the services and sales sector ranked the highest in the county with the number of cases and those are mostly predominantly what we saw in those council districts another source I looked at was the december jobs report from the bureau of labor statistics as well as summer reports stemming from that BLS report the report indicated that with the resurgence of COVID cases the labor market recovery which was already slowing down has actually gone into reverse of course not all parts of the economy or all jobs have been affected but basically the pandemic has undone any advances on economic equalities that that were gaining prior to to COVID which is a really long way of saying economic disparities in the nation have has widened this matters because as the department of labor recognizes when lawmakers left out the guaranteed paid leave in the latest stimulus act the impact will most significantly be felt by low-income workers although the latest act extends the tax credit through march of this year paid leave is a voluntary option for employers and it's assumed most public-facing industries like food service or retail will not continue to provide it one of the things we heard from businesses last June leading up to the passage of the center as the ordinance was the presumed burden on employers specifically the question they posed was whether it was better to keep people employed or to put businesses in the position to lay off workers and while this question has been asked again in reaction to the study session I want to reiterate we have no data on the effect of the ordinance on businesses nor have I heard even anecdotally if any employers lay off workers rather than provide leave I can speak to the jobs report however which noted that more and more people who've lost their jobs because of the pandemic are not getting rehired despite early hopes that employers would be able to rehire as the economy recovered which you know they initially did this trend has stalled and has started to reverse long-term unemployment is rising making it more difficult for those who have been unemployed for over six months to get a job over time but as I mentioned earlier not all job sectors are equally hard hit lesion hospitality which is of course big in our area which includes jobs in restaurants bars hotels the arts this sector has been hardest hits with one in four jobs lost that are assumed to be gone forever but on the other hand manufacturing and construction have recovered almost all the jobs they lost early in the pandemic and show signs of continued growth next slide so again the question before you really stems from the fact that the federal laws under the FSCRA expired at the end of 2020 when that expired so did the laws that were created to expand coverage including the state supplemental paid sick leave as well as of course our own ordinance next slide what remains in effect are seen here on this slide at the federal level lawmakers passed a new relief package that again failed to extend the guaranteed paid sick leave but did continue to provide the tax credits through March 31st of this year to employers who voluntarily choose to offer the leave though again there are no longer required to do so and at the state level the standard leave laws that were available to certain employees pre-covid still exists so I put them on here but the only new law comes from the Cal OSHA emergency regulations that keep employees in paid status if they got if they got COVID or were exposed to COVID through work there is no time cap pertaining to these requirements but I should point out that there are certain exemptions or exceptions to the regulations that include hospital health care services next slide okay so basically you have three options before you do you want to let the expiration of or dash 2020 dash 06 stand and do you want to re-adopt the ordinance as is but simply select a new expiration date or expiration criteria or do you want to re-adopt and expand the ordinance to include those employers not covered under the Santa Rosa ordinance re-adopting the ordinance only continues our local provisions which apply to what you see here on this slide it's employers with 500 or more employees employers of health care providers and emergency responders regardless of size it applies the higher cap of $510 per day per employee it continues to allow an offset for leave already provided and continues to be enforced only if an employee brings an action to the superior court next slide should you choose to re-adopt and expand the ordinance we've laid out some considerations for you on this slide which beyond needing a new expiration date the questions are really about who to include and how so that is do you want to include the actual covered businesses with less than 500 employees and should businesses with less than 50 employees continue to have the hardship exemption do you want to continue to include health care providers and emergency responders also the city center as it was included in the federal act so our local ordinance does not apply to our own organization would you like it to do you want to continue the offset or is your intention to provide a new bank of leave for employees and at what pay cap I put item eight on here only as a reminder that should you decide to re-adop or expand the ordinance the federal tax credit only applies to the epsilon covered businesses and is only available again until March 31st of this year next slide if you do move forward to re-adopt and if you want to do so using an urgency ordinance it does require five votes to pass and would take effect immediately next slide you well those of you who are on council when we passed this may recall that we were not the only city or county that adopted an ordinance to expand the coverage of epsilon some examples of what other jurisdictions have done include our own county of Sonoma so the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors last week directed staff to bring an urgency ordinance back to the board on January 26th for re-adoption without expansion so the county's ordinance like ours covered employee employers of health care providers and emergency responders and required employers to pay the higher cap also last week the city of San Jose extended and expanded its ordinance to include all employers though they did not provide for a new leave bank and their ordinance has the lower benefits cap San Mateo County the city of Sacramento and San Francisco all extended their sick leave ordinances so none of these agencies actually expanded the scope of their ordinances to include employers with less than 500 employees and also they did not provide for for additional hours and then I believe that LA County and the city of Oakland will be meeting next month I think to discuss their ordinances next oh before we go on I want to point out here that the at the federal level president like Biden has pointed to paid sick leave as a critical tool for stopping the spread of the virus democratic leaders who of course now have control of both the house and senate have called for passing another economic relief package this year that could possibly reinstate the paid sick leave benefits with the support of course of the president and next slide please unfortunately there was an adequate time for me to do effective outreach or to gather input from the business sector I did send a detailed email alert to the business organizations that are listed on this slide outlining the considerations that council would discuss and encouraging them to participate in the meeting labor did reach out to council members including at least one member of the economic recovery task force so we have a good understanding of their interest in seeing the ordinance expanded or extended if not expanded and next slide before I read the recommendation I should note that this item was discussed at length in the economic recovery task force however the task force does not have a recommendation for the full council and so it is recommended that the council consider whether to re-adopt and or expand ordinance or dash 2020-06 with added which added chapter 10-47 to the center was a city code to establish temporary sick leave requirements related to COVID-19 for certain private employers and had a sunset date of December 31 2020 and that does conclude my presentation but I will say we have assisted I'm sorry chief assistant city attorney Jeff Burke and other staff members on the line to help answer questions. All right thank you so much Raisa I really appreciate the the thorough presentation and walking us through that before I jump to other council members for comments or questions I didn't want to know in your discussions with folks and in discussions that took place in other cities was there any leeway or conversation regarding vaccinations and and to me when I look at where we're at now versus where we were in July that's the biggest wild card or the biggest change that I see is that you do have this rollout of vaccinations and in particular I guess my question is did anybody give consideration for whether or not an employee who was eligible and able to get a vaccination chose not to and then became sick on the back end of it? Well I asked the host to allow Jeff Burke into the conversation he's had more of the conversations with the other cities but that question did not come up in any of my conversations with businesses locally and did not come up when Jeff and I were talking to them. Jeff would you like to answer that? Sure good afternoon all Jeff Burke with the city attorney's office so I've had several conversations with my counterparts and other city attorney and county council offices I listened to the San Jose adoption last week and the county's direction that was given last week I've never heard this issue discussed. Okay thank you it is something that I don't know how we would discuss it but I think that it does given where we're at needs to be at least attempted to discuss at some point. We would not be prepared I mean we are still getting our hands around the vaccination protocols they are changing almost daily I'm going to be giving a little bit of an update ahead of that. I'm unsure how we would get in that conversation we really need to talk to the county because the allocation of vaccines is coming to the county so that's a much deeper dive than we'd be prepared to get into this evening council member but not not not an unexpected question because it does tie into how do we get back into recovery but those those criteria are changing and the process is changing almost on a daily basis around vaccines. Yeah and I do recognize that there are also HIPAA issues that businesses would run into but it also strikes me as potentially unfair to an employer if there is this this opportunity for their employee to to have a safer experience and they choose not to and then they still bear the the brunt or the cost of it further down the road so that is something of interest for me. I also recognize that the other difference between July and where we sit now is with our healthcare professionals where our regional ICU capacity is at 0.7% rather than significantly higher in July did you receive any feedback from any of our healthcare providers about any type of impact this that this ordinance had had on them or would have on them going forward? Not in this round again this came we just didn't have adequate time to do outreach and to receive input from businesses but I will I imagine that their opposition to the initial ordinance would stand that is what most commonly I was told particularly from the Center of the Metro Chamber that they recognize the need for paid sick leave but they they were opposed to this process in this method. Okay and then for the for the reimbursement that is now in the existing is it a one-to-one dollar match? Well only for those who recovered originally under the the federal act and only up to those cap amounts so again with the one-third you know addition that we added to the caring for someone else or caring for a child that is not not only does it have the lower cap it also doesn't address the the gap that we that we addressed does that make sense? Yeah so essentially under the federal if somebody is in compliance with the federal our our ordinance out of the way they would be covered dollar for dollar for the coverage that they are required to provide to their employee. That's correct yeah I mean up to the up to the cap yeah up to the cap yeah okay councilor are there any other questions on this item? Councilmember Sweatham. Thank you Mr. Mayor. Raise I just had a question obviously I'm struggling with a lack of data did we contact any of the contact tracers because I think that might be a source of information but again as the mayor mentioned I don't know if they they're prevented from given this information but I would just think that might be a data source that if they are backtracking someone who's had the positive experience did this have an impact one way or the other? Is that a potential means or a vehicle for? I can I can certainly look into that. We can look into that but we have run into some real challenges in in beyond general categorization of sectors and the data it becomes really sent and that's just on the testing side councilmember you know we're happy to look at it but there is some real data gaps here. I would just offer because I've heard several presentations from Dr. Mason about the challenges of this but I leave you mentioning the contact tracers this is what we're trying to evaluate could you maybe just see because they may not even be looking at it from this perspective it just might be helpful because the counties we're all dealing with the same thing and if they are there with people who have been exposed or have to make those decisions that we're trying to assist here it might just be helpful to let them know of our interest in this data. I will do I also try to find national data I mean I think partly it expired December 31st so there's not up there has not been a lot of time to really pursue that element of to dig into the analysis so it is not I could not find it even on the national level to to to share with you. Great thank you. Councilmember Sawyer. Thank you mayor and thank you right you said good report there's a lot of information here it's it can be rather confusing it was one of the I got a communication from one of the larger nonprofits here in town and one of their concerns was the how the complication the complicated in a nature of this all the language inside of these these various proposals and then it can be a bit confusing on slide eight number four the employer offset this is under the readoption analysis employer offset allowed for COVID related leave already given am I am I reading that to say that you that under that situation the 80 hours would not be reloaded but that they would whatever is still left in their bank would continue. So slide eight is specifically if you readopt without making any changes and so our currently yes our ordinance allows for that offset and so we wouldn't be making changes and that would be true should say for example on slide nine you choose to expand the ordinance to include the employers with less than 500 you do have the opportunity also to decide if you want to reset the the bank or you know all those other elements but if you only extended it that is true it would simply be a new a new expiration date. Okay and then just to respond to that one of the one of the in my conversation with this nonprofit they were they understood the need for the program but it was understanding that they were they were very clear that it was a financial burden on them but would be but would be supportive of the program that they didn't reload not having we really don't have all the information necessary about the impact of business and one of my concerns has always been if you if the hardships become so so great that people start getting either laid off and the business goes out goes out of business then they're then they don't have any they don't have employment they don't have any payroll so just they were they were pretty clear on their support for the program but would like a little relief in them in the reload so it's just something that I'm considering so thank you any other questions from council okay let's go to public comment then on this item if you are joining us and like to speak you can hit the raise hand feature on zoom your bottom right or if you're on your phone dial star nine to get in the queue and see clerk first I see jack if you could unmute jack and jack will have three minutes to address the council good afternoon honorable mayor roger's esteemed council members and city staff my name is jack parkour executive director of the orc base labor council and i'm here to ask that you revise and extend the existing um mentioned paid sick leave ordinance to include all employers especially those with less than 500 employees as was mentioned that represents the majority of the uh employees in santa rosa employers uh who have less than 500 and they are the ones that are in the most need uh when it comes to data the data is clear we're in a surge of the pandemic right now with thousands of active covid cases in the city of santa rosa right now and hundreds of new cases each day those workers are in need of any relief really possible so we need to uh extend this uh merchant paid sick leave ordinance and make it retroactive to january first i'm fine with um giving the relief that was asked by the nonprofit to not refill the hour bank and maintain the offset that would be i think appropriate but we really should cover all employers we should make it retroactive they should take advantage of the tax credit and we should do what we can to help workers who are struggling mightily right now and there's another data set that we're aware of the ppp provisions have also been um that bank account has been filled up again and there will be another round of help were employers of um of all sizes so um thank you for your time uh this afternoon and again i would ask that you uh extend revised and expand uh to include all employers thank you very much thank you jack next we have ananda followed by marty uh good afternoon mayor roger's members of the council my name's ananda suite i'm with the san rosa metro chamber first i can't emphasize enough that we completely agree that employees should not be put in a position where they have no option but to go to work while sick if the city finds existing employer coverage and ongoing state law and coverage is resulting in gaps so that people are left with no option but to go to work while sick uh and requires a local solution we would really like the opportunity to be a part of that solution to engage employers and to be part of the process it's important to ensure ensure that any policy solution that comes from this process is meeting the intended purpose while avoiding unintended negative consequences we particularly urge you not to add costs and requirements to employers that go beyond preventing employees from working while sick about 87 percent of sonoma county's businesses are small family owned employers who have been particularly negatively impacted by COVID-19 and they're struggling to remain open additional social safety net programs that are needed as a result of COVID-19 health crisis such as paid leave for parents due to school closures really need to come with an identified public funding source putting this financial burden on the shoulders of employers now while businesses are closing or struggling to remain open and maintain local jobs will only magnify the impact of COVID-19 on the economy and slow rather than aid our recovery thank you thank you ananda next up we have marty hi my name is marty Bennett I'm with the union right here local 2050 and our union is also affiliated with the north bay labor council I'm here to urge that you renew and amend the emergency paid sick leave it is absolutely essential and critical to combating this virus and particularly when we look at hot spots in the county such as nursing homes or other industries such as home care and farm labor it is critical that these workers have access to emergency paid sick leave I also want to emphasize that emergency paid sick leave is a racial equity issue apart apart from two week emergency paid sick at the local level or the three days that are provided by the state workers who have access to paid sick leave are those that have the most access tend to be predominantly anglo and higher pay those that have less access to paid sick leave tend to be lower paid and latino workers and I want to reiterate what jack said that the amendments we would like is to cover below 500 which was not covered in the original santa rosa ordinance and there is a federal tax credit to offset any employer who provides two week emergency paid sick we believe those employers above 500 as with the first ordinance have the means to provide two week paid sick leave if their employees contract the disease we think it asks with the city of san jose the ordinance should be retroactive until january 1st of this year it should cover employees below it should cover employers with less than 500 employees and the city of san jose their ordinance expires june 30th 2021 and that would be up to your discretion as to when you want it to expire thank you thank you marty is there anybody else in the public who'd like to give live public comment okay not seeing any uh do we have any voicemail may or we did not receive any voice message public comments in order to receive email or e-comic public comments for these items okay thank you i will go ahead bring this back to the city council then council member tippants do you have a question uh yes thank you ma'am um risa can you tell me what the financial delta is between the high cap and the low cap yeah it's um the low cap is $200 a day um or $2,000 a week and the high cap is $510 a day or $5,110 i think i did that right over 80 hours yeah it's $200 to $510 sorry um so it's $5,000 i'm trying to figure out what's $5,000 minus the $2,000 number what that delta is well okay so the daily cap um it's a difference of $310 and then the 80 hour cap is a difference of 3,110 okay 3,100 okay thank you um mayor do you want us to roll into comments or wait yeah go ahead and kick us off okay thanks um actually before you do council member just risa if you could reiterate for all of us what direction you were looking for and in particular if there are touchstones that you would like us each to hit on in giving direction okay so um you know you really again have have three choices um so the choices let the expiration stand re-adopt uh just extending the timeline or um expand re-adopt and expand the um the uh ordinance so um slide nine has if you choose to re-adopt and expand uh slide nine has all the considerations for inclusion on that option so one do you want to let it lie two do you want to simply extend three do you want to expand and if you expand then these are the slide nine shows the the issues to consider okay council member tibbetz and if if you don't mind um yeah council member tibbetz go ahead okay and risa to be clear if we expand we're actually just continuing what we have right because we're covering the employers under 50 current or prior to january i'm sorry if you did you say extend or expand if we expand if you expand then you have the option to cover employee employers with less than 500 employees you also have the option to continue or discontinue the um the the pay cap um there is the question about um allowing the hardship exemption uh for businesses with less than 50 employees again i don't know how many people took that um but that that those are the opportunities that presented i'm presenting what i'm driving at i'm sorry for adding to the confusion is expansion in our case actually means status quo what we've had over the past that's how i'm i'm reading well expansion um means what you've status quo is is yes um expansion means it's our ordinance plus what epsilon provided and anything in between that went beyond our local ordinance so so with that understanding i just want to excuse me communicate that i'm supportive of continuing that and because the reason being is there's two things going on i think one is that um we haven't hit the full effects of the virus yet or just now starting to in terms of cases so it's going to be an important tool to have in the community i'm also suspicious though the fact that we don't have a lot of data is not because there is a lot of people that didn't get sick over the past six months but because there is a lack of a knowledge and understanding throughout the community this is available to them i i don't really i can't think of any other reason why somebody wouldn't step forward to claim up to five thousand dollars and and paid sick leave with that said you know i had some thoughts i heard marty say continue through june 30th 2021 i think that's a pretty fair time i think hopefully most of our citizenry will be vaccinated by then or at least a significant portion uh i am interested in including the city one one criticism that we fairly received is that we are you know asking all these businesses to do it but we're not honoring that hardship ourselves and making ourselves um vulnerable to that hardship and i think we ought to uh the other thing is is uh i i like the idea of you know maintaining the offset do not reset the hours bank that concept that john brought up i think that is important uh retroactivity to january 1st is important and i'm going to say something that's probably controversial but i think it sends a very important message and that is that i think that the city should allow businesses uh to file with us for reimbursement for the delta in the cap so that's that three thousand one hundred and ten dollars up to one million dollars which we can set aside through pgne funds the reason that i bring this up and i hope that it can be supported uh is because the way i look at the coronavirus pandemic is you know first i feel like our job is to save lives second i believe our jobs are to make sure that people's homes are maintained third i feel as though it is our jobs to make sure that their livelihoods and therefore the businesses at which they work remain open when the pandemic is over and i know that's a narrative i've been harking for the past almost year now but this would be an important show of solidarity with the businesses that we do understand their financial pain we do understand that everything helps so i'll throw that idea out there through my colleagues and i think the other thing it will do is if we start getting reimbursement requests we now will have data we will now start to understand directly what the need is uh mr mayor may i add a comment here absolutely so um just to be clear on the tax credits item i understand the delta piece of it does that does your intention include the um if you go to uh june 30th the difference between march 31st and june 30th um there is no tax credit would it include um offering the tax credit for that time period and then uh so question and then the other piece of it um is i just want to speak to one thing on um the data there is no requirement for businesses to report and there's not a means for them to report how many people are taking the leave um so i understand the desire for that we don't have um the superior court actions and we don't have uh a means by which to at this point require uh um reporting on use or compliance so i just like to put that out and then lastly um just because uh council member tibis brought it up retroactive to uh january 1st um we do have some legal concerns about that and um uh city attorney berg might want to address those before we go to to uh to far down thank you so retro activity is something that is generally disfavored in the law and i will say that san jose did apply their ordinance uh retroactive uh they they met on january 5th and they had it at those those four or five days they made it retroactive the earliest we would be able to adopt the ordinances the 26th and i think that that is a pretty significant gap in time and in addition to the the uh that the law disfavors retroactivity i think that time frame is is somewhat significant i'll i'll let rice or others perhaps speak to the issue of um uh the practicality of what you do with with a big gap like that in terms of how employers would deal with it if it is meant made retroactive but i do have the the the legal concerns well um and even if employers didn't um comply they would the employee would have to um go to court to um which are the expense of their own to um to get it to apply i'm sorry for interrupting but we're talking about retroactive to january 1st 2021 or did i miss that are we talking about to 2020 no january 1st 2021 that's when the first date on which the um the ordinance and the federal acts uh no longer existed thank you y'all then councilmember okay councilmember fleming thank you so much so um you know council member soire and i worked on this one and you know we really struggled over what the right thing to do was because again it's been noted there isn't a lot of data and you know when i speak with business interests and i speak with labor interests um you know what i don't get much more than anecdotes and so um it's it is really difficult to make a decision and so i appreciate that it's frustrating for people and know that you know primarily what we're trying to do is protect people's safety and um protect the economy and so we get it imperfect in the execution i think that that's to be expected and dealing with a pandemic that likes of which we've never seen so um but to to your questions miss delarosa um i'm in favor of something that's a little bit might be a little bit convoluted if for folks who are not really um steeped in the weeds of the ffc ra but um for for people who don't know out there um the ffc ra you know intentionally targeted small businesses and left out large businesses which benefited tremendously from tax credits under the trump administration and what we try to do although and perfectly was to try to balance that out and reduce the disparities for people who work for smaller businesses and for women and people of color and um so to that end you know if we were to go forward without any federal backing one thing that i would ask is that we have this whatever new ordinance goes forward sunset if the if and when the federal government comes in with anything that meets the minimum standards of whatever we set forward so um so that we wouldn't continue because likely that would come with some tax credits or some relief for business so we wouldn't have our ordinance in place um except for the parts that perhaps extend beyond it and i think at that point it would be worth reconsidering where we're at additionally um arming that event i would tie the sunset of this to the um the expiration of the the state of emergency and um rather than a certain date so that we're not back here again unless we need to do something to this and um i'm but as for the details of what i would expand or not expand first thing is i would not um re-upload lead banks because i do believe that puts a significant burden on businesses i would in lieu of that um ask that we consider protection for employees who um may need to take unpaid sick leave that um business barring some you know hardship um hold that position so that somebody has a job to return to after taking unpaid sick leave because i when i when i talk to people that's one thing that workers say is that they um they are genuinely afraid that they're not going to have a job um to return to um even if they can make it financially through that period of taking that time off so i'd like to see that be in place and then what i would propose going forward is a little bit of a flip on how things were before where i would have um the the skeleton of the fscra applied to businesses of 500 or fewer meaning that um that we wouldn't put the um extra requirements that we put on um businesses when we did our city ordinance on them and then for businesses of 500 or more i would apply the additional protections because i do believe that they disproportionately represent um employees who are more vulnerable and they also can afford it so do you have any questions i know that that was a little bit convoluted i have a question on the last point you just made about how to treat the employers different based on their size so the two things that come to mind for me are under the federal law that expired healthcare providers and emergency responders were optional our ordinance that expired required all employers regardless of size to cover emergency responders and healthcare providers are you saying you want that to still apply to both yeah so i'm taking out of this conversation the different sectors um that um and not out of the conversation but out of my feedback the different the various sectors and just saying 100 percent of all employers are subject to this the main differentiator for me is size um invariably what i heard from small businesses is that they they were really you know upset about the delta and um i'll wait to hear what other council members think about mr tibbet's proposal on the delta for employees i certainly would be open to that as a an idea but i'm not open to subsidizing you know businesses with more than 500 employees so are you saying then that for the smaller employers that the smaller cap will apply i'm floating that out there we'll see what other thing but then the larger employers would um still have to to maintain that and if you did that at least through march 31st if you extended it to that date you eliminate the need uh under council member tibbet's proposal to to provide a gap a pay gap because if you went with a lower cap for the under 500 you wouldn't need it because they would have the full tax credit they would have the full tax credit um the larger businesses um wouldn't because they were not never covered by that correct and health care wouldn't because they were never covered by fsc r.a but that's true but if the if the i believe that even though health care providers and emergency responders are optional if an employer chooses or in our cases required to provide it i think that they would still get the tax credit yeah i think that in the weeds there you know that um some health care employee employers would be under 500 and someone be over obviously our large hospital groups would be over and you know smaller specialty clinics would be under but at any rate my interest is in trying to protect our small businesses and provide some amount of protection for our workers was i simply clear on the points you needed to be back yes i mean i think that i'd have to um take a moment to go back to understand the difference between the over 500 under 500 and to um really pinpoint what those differences are um having a hard time doing that on the fly um but i would uh and then perhaps if we do that we could take that back to the economic development subcommittee um to to discuss until um to make sure we get it right um the other thing that um you did bring up is the um the protection for employees and i believe with the exception of the exempted uh health care related providers i believe the cal osha regulations allow for that um so uh mr burk do you want to speak on the cal osha requirements um you know specific to the uh the ability to retain your job without a duration if you get a work related uh COVID incident sure so uh the cal osha regulations that are in effect now and now went into effect on November 30th among many other things do require all employers regardless of size in california if you have uh tested positive for COVID or you were in close contact with someone who tested positive for COVID you're required to keep that employee in a paid status um and you're either required to pay them for the time that they're out or uh they can you can require them to use their sick leave but you are required to hold their position um it does have to be work related there there i should also mention uh that there is uh an exemption uh folks that are covered by an air uh aerosol transmissible policy protection program it's a lot it's fair amount of the health care industry because they're subject to much more rigorous standards in terms of health and safety uh they've been exempted from that requirement that i just mentioned so to that point you know um i think that it's really important that we provide a greater level of protection for for employees and i'm not you know i think that that it's kind of a shame that they left out atv um certified workplaces because um that's where we're seeing so many cases arise um so i you know i'm not a huge fan of that um and i would like to hear a proposal that included all workers not just cherry picking them um here and there so that's the benefit of writing our own ordinance and then the last thing is um you know i talked to some workers who would have taken this but they just simply didn't know it existed and that's kind of heartbreaking and so one thing i would like is if we could have a posting requirement that we could produce a simple sheet and employers could print it and put it in a common room with other labor related guidelines and then um employees and employers could reference that um if it's necessary that depends on my comments unless um they need clarifying okay councilmember tidbits did you have a clarifying comment did thanks mayor for reading into that i just wanted to share that when i brought up the concept of covering the delta this was only uh germane to employers under 50 all right that's a helpful clarification thank you uh and uh for for context council the the one million dollars with a delta of about three thousand dollars means that it would cover three hundred and thirty three employees uh before that fund is maxed out councilmember alvarez could you elaborate on on the liabilities of of the program being retroactive please sure so um and thank you for asking that question because they did want to add because i mentioned san jose did allow it and they only had a four day gap there's no other agency that i'm aware of that is making it retroactive the county is not uh they will be coming back on the 26th to adopt an ordinance which if we have five votes here today that they give us direction to go forward i'm assuming that would be the date we would come back as well so again retroactivity is generally disfavored under the law and the concern is um you know the the the the passage of more time uh just makes that argument much more compelling against us in terms of trying to make it retroactive councilmember any additional questions or are you ready to make some comments all right i'm going to go on then uh to council members i'm just going to start calling on people councilmember soyer thank you mayor and i want to appreciate um uh councilmember flaming forward heard um thoughtful description of the challenge that we found ourselves in when we were discussing this issue because there is there's a lot of detail there can be a lot of confusion um and there is there are all sorts of of not only roadblocks but opportunities as well and we try to take you know in our discussions to take advantage of those opportunities my guess is that this may ultimately it's there's a potential for this to end up back at the economic development subcommittee where we might need to hash out a couple of of issues but i'm inclined until i hear the rest of my council members and until i see the the direction i'm inclined to continue moving forward with our our current provisions um except to not reload um i i i'm wondering about the impact of including employers with less than 500 employees um but councilmember flaming's comments about the reality of the workers that work for small businesses that are at most risk um resonates with me so i'm i i i continue to be torn at this point until i hear the rest of the council but um what i heard from the non-profit that i spoke with at length was the the issue of reloading um and there's a there are seems to be a great deal of confusion about the the requirements and um so i'm the that same um paper that or that same same you know information sheet that could end up on employees uh bulletin boards um i'm hoping we can come up with a real clear and understandable information sheet for our employers as well especially if we move to employers with less than 500 employees because there are a lot of um um mom and pops although hardship exemption for employees that you've got to prove the do you not have to approve the exemption or approve the need for the exemption metham city attorney or is that are there an automatic exemption for businesses with less than 50 employees so let or oh yeah jeff well whomever sorry that's okay so let me clarify that exemption because it has been discussed the way it was crafted under the federal law is that exemption for businesses less than 50 only gets that small employer out only for employees who are wanting to use it to uh because their child uh doesn't have child care that's right it is limited to that um what the employer would need to show is either a it would jeopardize their businesses a going concern their expenses are exceeding their revenues or they wouldn't have sufficient staff or three that employee who's asking for the leave is a key person all right that's right and you're reminding me of that and it does concern me if we expand it to employee employers with less than 500 employees it opens up a really big door to a lot of employers that could find themselves in a tough spot um so i'm at least in the beginning i'm just gonna i'll make it as simple as i can i'm in i'm in favor of continuing with our current program um without a reload of the of the bank um and i'll just leave it at that for now until i hear other comments and it's i'm kind of my brain is um full of information at this point that i rather just kind of sit on for a few minutes thank you thank you council members what i just heard is somebody is gonna get to try to sway john and convince him uh so let's start with council member alvarez uh go ahead give your comments i understand that there's not a lot of data in respect to businesses especially with new hires as a business owner and from business owners that i've spoken with in the community it is the fear of hiring someone who is infected who does uh transmit to the fellow employees that will later mean that there will be a shutdown of the business that seems to be a very uh invalid in my opinion uh cause for concern with that said i do believe that we should uh extend the program uh but i do agree with with councilman soyer in regards to replenishing the the bank for the employees i believe that councilman victoria made a great point in regards to the assuring that they're able to return to work into their position so i'm happy to hear that cal ocean uh does have language that provides for that type of protection um in regards to revisiting i'd almost suggest revisiting either at the end of the first quarter or the second quarter depending on on all my fellow council members say uh it is it is uh ever-evolving situation and when we take into consideration the the federal uh credits and and and assistance i think this is an issue that definitely has to be revised uh frequently i do believe in the protection of employees and that is why i do advocate for the extension of of the program thank you okay councilmember sweatham thank you mr mayor you've been a difficult one i totally feel the pain of the task force and one of the things i did was read our actual ordinance there and section one says the council finds based on evidence and records presented that this ordinance is necessary for protection of public peace health safety and welfare um i haven't seen that evidence and that's a struggle i get the numbers are increasing but that's that the lump there if someone were to ask me what is the evidence that you believe needs to continue this um it's a struggle with me but um where i'm kind of landing is i think we should continue it as it is no new leave it uh balance and um i would also like to add the city of santa rosa into that because i really think it's does not seem fair for the city to be excluded from this and quite frankly we might learn more efficient or effective ways of tracking this or operating if it actually was incumbent upon us to follow the same rules we're asking of other businesses so that's pretty much where i landed thank you thank you councilmember did you have a suggested date of how long this would last yes thank you i think it should be consistent with the federal tax credits march 31st of this year okay thank you uh councilmember timmits did you have another comment or question okay uh vice mayor rogers okay so going down i think that the expiration should be the expiration of the state of emergency with the acknowledgement that we can go back and visit if needed before then yes to the hardship exemption um continue with the current leave balance it should include all employers including the city of santa rosa and i don't know it just feels great to hear the the comments and to know that the council were all on the the same page about protecting uh not only the workers in our community but the small businesses and prior to jeff speaking i was in favor of uh having it go back retroactively but i it seems like the burden would be posed more on the worker than um the employee to do so so i'm really considering that all done all right thank you uh so i will uh expand on the the comments made by many of my my council members i too am going to be in favor of extending and expanding this for me though one of the metrics that i'd like to see built out in it is and this is one of the key distinctions that congress did is congress made that tax credit optional or for made it optional for businesses and then expanded that tax credit i want to make sure that any business that actually can uh under that uh that law uh access that funding for the tax credit that we no longer have it be optional but actually required uh and i am sensitive to the conversation around impact to businesses and to me that's a significant chunk of it is if we if those folks have access to the tax credit there is no significant business impact to them in the long run on it we just need to make sure that they are doing their part as well to to both access that funding and to keep our community safe uh i completely agree with the comments made that we need to apply this to the city of santa rosa if we are asking businesses uh to step up and do it as well and then i do want when when we bring this conversation back i do want more information or more clarity and i and i'd hope right so you can do a little bit of outreach on this to the health care uh industry because that was uh something that this council chose not to to pursue in the last one was the exemption for medical workers uh that we know that other jurisdictions had done uh i am still given that we're at the point seven percent icu bed capacity and to be clear that's that's not beds that's medical personnel that they have available i would still want to see before we continue that path some level of outreach to our to our health industries to make sure that we are not short changing our community uh in in this ordinance now so i'd want to better know when we pass this ordinance what that impact is going forward as it stands right now absent data and absent uh some of those stories i'm inclined to continue the direction that we've been going with not providing that extension but i do want to give them an opportunity to to step up and provide us some of that info councilmember soyer did you have any additional comments now that you actually if i may ask a question mr mayor yes so when you talked about requiring the tax credit may perhaps i misunderstood you but one point i wanted to make and rice or anybody please correct me if i'm wrong but that the tax credits are still available for employers under 500 if they provide the benefit and so um councilmember fleming mentioned and i'm not sure i heard any other council members speak to this our ordinance eliminated the lower cap but if you reinstate the lower cap there'll be a full tax credit at least to march 31st for employers under 500 if you want to have the higher cap uh councilmember tibbet suggested that the city i guess would pay the difference but if you use the lower cap at least till march 31st and you expanded to include employers less than 500 i believe that they will then get a dollar for dollar tax credit yeah i appreciate the clarification jeff that's exactly what i was intending in my comments is that right now folks have an option of whether or not to provide these benefits and can receive the tax credit if they do so what i'm saying is i'd like to see us not have it be an option but be a requirement for those who do have access to that tax credit because to your point they have the dollar for dollar match they have those public dollars that the councilmember tibbet was looking for to be able to provide the to provide the benefit to their employees so i'm not trying to make policy for council believe me i am not but one option would be to have you know you could roll it out in a variety of different ways that i know we're getting into the weeds here and it's complex i acknowledge that uh you know uh but the tax credit ends on 331 whether you want to have the ordinance go till 331 for small employers or you want to change the uh the lower cap higher cap uh i'm not quite sure we've gotten direction in that area um so i just mentioned that yeah and and my intention was for it to run to the 331 where the tax credit is available to folks and for us to reconsider at that point what additional changes we would need and in particular the conversation that i brought up around the potential vaccine and where we sit with uh that rollout throughout our community because that could significantly change where we find ourselves and to be clear i hope that that significantly changes where we find ourselves with hopefully a smooth rollout so just to confirm that i'm understanding it correctly you're suggesting that the ordinance go to march 31st we cover all employers and we have the lower cap yeah all employers who are eligible for that tax credit council member Sawyer so just i'm gonna have um look for just reiteration on this so um what i'm hearing is if we have a sunset at march 31st and let me address the sunset for a second one of the things that i was concerned about is we've told that we told the people Santa Rosa that we were going to sunset at the end of the year we were doing that as an in in anticipation of things being really different with COVID-19 so think that the the stage has changed and i think we need to respond to that to that change as far as the date so as much as i um dislike telling the vote the the our citizens one thing and then changing our mind on the sunset um the things have changed and we i do need think we need to respond to it back to the question um what i'm hearing Jeff you say is that if we if we do embrace the concept of employers with 500 or less employee including 500 or less that they would have an opportunity in tax credits up to march 31st and that in essence if they as long as they apply for them um there's kind of no harm no foul to those employers correct i understand okay that's that changes my um a couple of things um so i i'm still with with the uh a continuation of our of our current um uh provisions with the addition of i agree with the march 31st um deadline for the reasons we just discussed and um i also would like to include the city center rose i think that is uh that's a good example so those two those two pieces or those three pieces march 31st include all the all which includes all employers so that's really what's what we're saying um and the um uh let's see march 31st oh and set city center rose uh and the one thing that i didn't uh hear definitively so i got the march 31st i got the less than 500 um so covering everybody that includes health care got the city um got the hardship exemption i got the no to new leave bank um the lower cap i heard a couple of different things on that one do we want to um keep the lower cap for childcare and care for others or did you want to have a single cap um as it relates to the tax credit could you um raise it could you we um go over again the um the the cap conversation that's one of those things that i kind of my head starts to spin when we talk about the caps sure um so um again um for reasons of taking me let me just get uh get to that slide um okay so um for the federal act um the compensation allowable um that um employers pay to employees uh links itself to the amount that the employer can get in tax credit um and if you an employer takes an employee takes leave for caring for themselves um they are eligible to be reimbursed up to $511 per day um if you take leave uh for uh child care reasons or for caring for somebody else then the uh the compensation rate is only $200 per day um and so what our local ordinance did was eliminate that lower cap and they treated caring for someone else the same as caring for oneself um and so um i heard a couple of different conversations as to whether to keep the single uh compensation cap or to revert back if we expanded to having the lower cap for caring for somebody else or for child care purposes i'd have to see it any chance of getting a straw poll on the council with that with that one piece yeah we can definitely do that i can i can have us come back to it uh once other comments are done if that works for you jack john sorry thank jack go ahead uh jeff are you absolutely 100 percent certain that the tax credit is going benefits are going to apply to uh our city program because my understanding is that they do not apply to programs that go beyond the federal program um and so what i bring this up is i'm seeing the council basically say we shouldn't entertain supporting businesses because the tax credits will support the businesses but our ordinance is beyond the federal program so can you are you absolutely certain that they're gonna get these tax credits that they're gonna need so when you say it goes beyond we're going beyond it i don't believe that we are if we keep it within uh the lower if we reinstate the lower cap um i think your question though is a good one and and i i i don't know if 100 certainty if an employer is providing the let me back up so when the federal law sunset on December 31st congress said if you employer with less than 500 employees choose to continue to pay the benefits we will reimburse you at those caps that we had put in place i think what you're asking is if the if it's the city of santa rosa now that's saying you must provide that benefit do they still get the tax credit um my understanding would be yes because they're making the payment it's true we're taking the option out from under them because we're requiring them to but nevertheless they're still making the payment i would think that the tax policy behind that would still apply but um i think the way i'm hearing the question is um if we expand it to include those that were not covered under the federal act um then oh with those uh uh businesses receive the tax credit and my understanding is no i agree with that of our lobbyists i asked us the federal um uh and looking at the federal things and so the only businesses that would potentially receive if they apply for it um the tax credit would be those that were eligible under the federal act only and so that's this is this is exactly why i bring it up because i'm hearing my colleagues say that we want to continue the program we had which did go beyond the federal requirements we wanted employers not previously covered to cover and so when when this goes to the economic development subcommittee i hope that the staff in charge will really you know educate the subcommittee on the tax credit law and then subsequently the council when this comes back for a vote because i don't mean any disrespect to the council but i don't think we understand this yeah and i i did want if i may break in mr mayor for a moment is i did want to emphasize this is a study session we will be coming back and and this area and if there are other areas that the council wants us to uh really delve deep into and and get a really solid handle on we can do that so this is the opportunity for for us to identify those those areas as well so uh i do appreciate that okay council member all right excuse me vice mayor rogers um it's going back a little bit i just wanted to make a comment about the sunset on march 31st i think that my my biggest fear with going with march 31st is that we will have a another gap um in protecting our workers and so i don't mind revisiting um the ordinance but actually having a sunset on march 31st it it appears that we would already have to start because we're already almost in february already start and know what the federal government is going to do um ahead of time in order to be in front of the you know what's going to happen if we sunset on march 31st so so i i'm again not trying to make policy but i have the some of the same concerns as the vice mayor i would rather have a reconsideration date scheduled and and have a longer sunset horizon because i am very concerned um with with our head times and how quickly the dynamic is changing to that that two months is the blink of an eye so i i would ask the council to consider when we go through the work of the subcommittee a longer horizon i'm more than happy to schedule something to come back before the 31st because i think there is going to be changing potentially some changing federal laws with the change in administrations as well we could schedule something but at the same time keep our options open um i i would just request consideration that that the subcommittee look at that very closely and and help us manage the schedule and the workflow for the for for the staff right councilmember fleming thank you my concern was exactly the same as the vice mayors and what i had proposed in my notes was that we um immediately start work on the next step for the subcommittee so that we can monitor the changes as they come down and have um you know that i would ask the mayor um to set a date for reconsideration during your um agenda review tomorrow so that we can avoid this i think that it's a bit of a moving target because um of the tax credit sunset as well as the new administration as well as another surge that is going to come as well as factors that we cannot see right now and so um you know to for the benefit of doing something really short term is that it doesn't lock us into um to committing to something when conditions are going to change down the road the downside is to the city manager's point you know two months is a blink of an eye and i i don't want to have another gap like we have now i think that back in late spring and early summer we simply couldn't have predicted these conditions as they are in this moment that i think we can predict that um at the end of march things will be different than they are now one way or another and so um if we if we're able to i guess where i'm going from this is i would like to know from the city manager and from um council member soyer if if you think that we could reasonably monitor this through the economic development subcommittee and um and then if the mayor would be amenable to reviewing um a recommendation from us with the full council in time for us to have a a recommendation for the sunset on march 31st so so my my request again would be the subcommittee look at this more holistically because there are just so many variables that are on our control but that we could schedule something now like you suggested council member uh working with the mayor to make sure we have something locked in the schedule we've got our work plan locked that we bring back for something for we can for additional consideration before this sunset date so that we can get up to speed of where we sit so i believe we can do that i just want to make sure it's locked into the work plan um and that that that we're operating from that assumption if we could let's do a really quick straw poll from the council and what i'll suggest is that the extension goes to the touching to the mayor check in sorry sorry one second council member through june 1st with the check in for council prior to the end of the the march tax credits and the economic subcommittee getting a chance to review this in early march go ahead council member oh i wasn't done with my comments but that's fine sorry about that it's okay but i'll start out um to answer your question which is um i think that sense setting this um at a date certain um beyond doing so for tax credits and not tying it to the um the emergency or some other specific metrics it just sets us up to be having this conversation again um while things might really change with the vaccination and we just don't know it still remains to be seen whether or not you can transmit this thing even if you're vaccinated and so um people may still need to um to to isolate and quarantine if they um have been vaccinated so i'm unwilling to go with the june 30 sunset i'm happy to go with the march 31 sunset of this particular iteration of it with the date certain to revisit it prior to march 31 okay council would that work for folks if we had the march 31st deadline with the date certain uh at least a couple of weeks prior to that for the council to review can i go ahead council member mr city manager um given what the mayor just said the wills will that give you any ease in your concern about the timing and our ability to quickly review which this test that wouldn't we as a task force we found ourselves um very nimble and very quick to action when necessary um as a subcommittee um i'm hoping that we will also find ourselves um as nimble and quick to action when necessary does the does that timing that the that the mayor just articulated give you any ease as far as the timing for the staff well i think i get the ease it gives me is that this is the priority right that this is where we need to to make sure we're keeping the time timetable ahead of us and um so that as we get in discussions about agenda planning and progress this is the primary thing we're focused on i mean i just don't want something else to get in the way of those conversations and so that's why i'm looking to make sure the council is in agreement that this is the path they want to go down because it will limit other conversations it is i think it's a priority but getting to this commitment that this is what we're going to do is critical so staff has guidance and inability to navigate the uncertainties here thank you and i think that we're actually only maybe a couple of areas that there are that are a little bit less than clear that we need to work through um and we may not you know it'd be great ultimately to have a unanimous vote we may not end up with a unanimous vote but um we ultimately we need to bring this we need to get this this issue behind us um for a number of reasons so if um i'd be willing to go forward with what um this Fleming mentioned as far as that that march 31st with with the knowledge that we are going to tackle it um well before that point and come back to the council for with a recommendation okay looking for other comments council member tibet through the mayor then um to be clear what we're approving through march 31st is the just continuation of the federal law we are not superseding it we are not covering uh the additional groups or are we you mean the 500 or less i think well from my mind i'm sorry for jumping in through the mayor i'm we need to we need to confirm i believe and be really really clear um through our legal department what are what if any are the impacts of what you just mentioned if we do if we go outside of the what appears to some maybe outside of the federal requirements are we are we dancing are we dancing in a dangerous area and if not that opens some doors um that we don't tonight um potentially have open to us so i appreciate that comment john you know my feeling in my observation is that uh we do need a lot more information normally i you know i'm the last person in the past four and four and a half years to say let's send this to subcommittee i'm usually the one saying let's do it now but this one really clearly i think you know to shawn's point i i think the economic development subcommittee should meet next week dive deep um come with uh you know a couple of options to council we heard a lot of options here tonight maybe simplify it down to three but definitely understanding those tax ramifications because what i'm seeing us do now is either potentially depending on what we choose to do uh it will not cover the large swath of people that we want to cover the presentation opened up with the large viral impacts to southwest santa rosa districts one three five and seven lower typically lower income communities um you know if we if we don't want to put those businesses at risk of tax credits those folks are not getting the coverage they deserve frankly that's my understanding of this um and if we if we do want to protect those folks then we have to have a discussion about where's additional reimbursements going to come from whether it's the city or cares act money or whatever so that's that's where i think that the staff diving deep with a subcommittee would help us greatly and so we just pause until ed subcommittee meets next week hopefully council could get it as soon as a week after that may violate our open government task force ordinance but i remember an urgency clause in there that maybe we could exercise yeah i think our posting requirements are easier for us to meet i don't think that that'll be a problem uh and you have my commitment that in our goal setting we can in our agenda setting tomorrow we can find that date for the full council uh and uh john you're the the chair i believe for economic development do you think you could bring this to the committee next week well i'd have to ask staff if they believe that they could that they could um end their complete their research to allow us a real clear um direction uh when we meet at as a as a subcommittee would are you guys ready to bring us um that that those kind of sureties that we're looking for if we make if we move in certain directions um well i know that uh in terms of hardcore data there's not going to be hardcore data what i can do is i can get um more anecdotal information um and as uh as much information that businesses are willing to share particularly as i heard i called out the healthcare industry um the in terms of the tax uh questions um i would uh have to look to our city attorney's office to see if we have a tax lawyer or somebody we we could call on um i'm the information i have on the taxes is only what i have read on legal sites um have been told uh from our uh our consulting groups um but i i i don't know if we have tax legal uh tax lawyers that to our avail and it's really that question about tax credits that we tell people that we tell our employers that that have 500 employees or less that they're going to be able to be reimbursed with tax credits and then they are not um we have done a major disservice and that's really what i'm talking about is we we need that question answered really clearly and i'm very trust trusting of you jeff and right now in your you have a um a pretty good handle on it but i'm i'm guessing that you probably like to confirm to confirm that information so that when we talk to the community we talk to our employers with 500 employees or less or less than 500 employees that we are being accurate in what we are telling them they are going to be able to they are we they will be able to access that's what that's what's important to me because i'm going to show you what i can do is i can reach out to the center as a metro chamber and um see if they have a member who would be willing to address the subcommittee um i think that would be faster unless uh city attorney gallagher has another uh another option uh i was just gonna say that that we are in the position unless jeff says otherwise we are a position to to do that research and find those answers and certainly working with rice uh and other resources in the community but we can we can get those those answers and i would expect we could get those answers by next week yeah i appreciate that great any concerns no that would be great because it's a it's a big it's it would be a big step for us to take and i think an important step and how did that information would be vital to be able to make an informed decision okay do we have consensus from the council i'm seeing thumbs up from folks the staff you've got what you need coming out of this item i'll certainly be rewatching this about five times to make sure i do i believe we do in the event that council members contradicted themselves go with the most recent one at the end of the subcommittee at the end of the study session uh and with that uh we will end the item council we're going to take a 10 minute break we'll be back at 425 here to complete the rest of our meeting okay madam city clerk it's 425 and i see a couple of council members here i think we have a quorum go ahead and call the roll thank you council member tibbetz council member schwethel here council member soyer council member phlemi here council member alvarez president vice mayor rogers president mayor rogers here council member tibbetz have you joined us okay let the record show that all council members are present with the exception of council member soyer and council member tibbetz thank you stefanie and council member soyer will not be rejoining us today but i do know that council member tibbetz will be back shortly uh with that madam city attorney do you have any report out from our first closed session as well as the study session as to the closed session the council met on item uh 2.1 concerning existing litigation and gave direction to to to its legal counsel right thank you we have no additional comments on the study session i was worried you were going to come back asking for more clarity mr city manager no proclamations or presentations today go ahead with our item number seven staff briefings so 7.1 covid response update i just want to give a couple of updates to the council and the community regional stay home order extended indefinitely on january 9th the state extended the region regional stay home order indefinitely for the bay area which includes santa rosa as a reminder under the extended order residents are directed to stay at home except for work shopping or other essential activities such as medical appointments all sectors other than retail in essential operations must be closed an outdoor recreation is allowed the restrictions will remain in place until the state's four week projections of the bay areas total available icvad capacity is greater than or equal to 15 percent at present bay area icu capacity is 4.7 percent sonoma county's icu capacity is currently 6.9 percent testing the county sonoma continues to wrap up covid testing particularly in neighborhoods most impacted by the virus the efforts now include two weekly sites in santa rosa run by the county's department of health services at andy's unity park and the rosalind library testing at these sites is free and confidential regardless of immigration status more covid testing information is available at the county's website at socoemergency.org slash test lastly an update on the vaccinations vaccinations are all are actively underway in sonoma county the most recent sonoma count most recently some sonoma county has partnered with safeway to administer covid 19 vaccinations to county health workers and eventually the broader public the county is hoping the vaccination services will begin to members of the public by the beginning of february but we you need to pay attention to updates as this situation is evolving understandably there are a lot of questions about the vaccine and it is there will be frequent updates available at the county's website socoemergency.org slash vaccine and that concludes the presentation on covid update thank you so much mr city manager and that last website that you gave the socoemergency.org slash vaccine i will also point out for the council that the county has launched a new dashboard so that we can also track how many individuals have been given the vaccine throughout our community so that's a pretty good tool for us to be aware of uh with that would you like to go on to the next item yes uh 7.2 we have a brief update this evening on the community power unit plan magali teyes deputy director community engagement to present good afternoon um mayor rogers the members of the council uh thank you for the opportunity to provide this update on the community empowerment plan we're going to start out with the community empowerment plan report we've completed the report which will be reviewed by the assigned staff task force to make sure that we satisfy the initial goals of the report once that takes place we'll submit a copy in english and in spanish to the community members that participated in the listening sessions to make sure that the information is in line with what they commented we'll also be working with uh cab members as well once participant feedback is received then we'll share the report with council on february 23rd through the recommendations noted in the community empowerment plan a few programs were born and i'll provide a couple of brief updates on those starting with the multicultural roots project the project has been going on for three months now we've highlighted 11 historical and current BIPOC leaders that's black indigenous people of color uh events and places in santa rosa stories are shared on the city facebook page um also the city connections newsletter and city website we're working with community partners such as Sonoma state uh santa rosa junior college santa rosa city schools and community action partnership as well as other nonprofit partners to further promote the stories we have received very positive feedback from the community about the project and hope to keep it going for as long as we possibly can another project is the low rider patrol car that is a collaboration between Sonoma county low rider council santa rosa pd and the office of community engagement we are on schedule to receive the car by the end of the month which will then be provided to the Sonoma county low rider council for the conversion process we're working with a local BIPOC organization fda productions to develop a documentary video of the project um as well as some of its members so um moving to the chief's community advisory board which is ccat um they've received 43 applications from a variety of community members and the staff is in the process of reviewing the applications and chief navara will interview applicant finalists and make final selections by next month lastly the ethnic studies with the cop pilot program on december 15th we held a culmination activity for the youth who participated in the ethnic studies with the cop pilot program the idea behind the development of this pilot program came about through the listening sessions that were held with various community groups via the community empowerment plan they were held from july to december of 2020 during those meetings it was frequently expressed that more positive interactions between law enforcement and youth particularly BIPOC youth can help to bridge better long-term trust and relationships the ethnic studies with the cop pilot program was born from these community conversations and was an opportunity for youth to interact with officers in a safe space and produce positive interactions that will help us to continue to create a bridge um 12th youth were uh participated in the distance learning camp parents were personally notified on three separate occasions of the program and its goals none of the departments involved received any objections from the participants or their parents the program took place after school hours the curriculum was written and carried out by community engagement staff who identified as BIPOC community so black indigenous people of color um the officers who participated were out of uniform and their role was to support the interactive activities post curriculum meaning that they did not teach the curriculum uh the youth were surveyed and some of the outcomes were the following 100 percent of the youth surveyed noted um three of the following items one they felt that through this program they were able to have positive interactions with SRPD two they felt like um it would like to continue learning about ethnic studies three they felt safe and welcomed in class 100 percent of the parents surveyed noted the following three items one that their child benefited from his or her time in the ethnic studies with the cop pilot program two that they were pleased that the city of san rosa offered the ethnic studies with the cop program three that they believed that this was a great way to increase positive interactions with law enforcement uh during their time the program youth learned about historical leaders such as rosa parks donores huerta lc allen as well as the women's uh right to vote the pilot program ended last month and we're in the process of creating an advisory group that contains educators restorative justice specialists as well as youth to brainstorm the next engagement opportunity and design um in terms of lessons learned by staff uh one would be to be sensitive about naming of the program ethnic studies is a unique and important term that came from the community um and those who have done the work um to decolonize education a more appropriate name would have been multicultural roots junior project which is more reflective of the content that was delivered there was a there were a few questions and concerns that came from community members outside of the participant group that i'd like to help clarify so this was a six-week pilot program and it's it's ended um there was never any mention of implementing this program at san rosa city schools the officers involved did not teach the curriculum uh we look forward to sharing plans for our next engagement opportunity once the advisory group completes shaping what the the next engagement will look like and that is the end of my report thank you thank you so much director council do we have any questions okay staying done we'll go on to seven point three seven point three glass fire recovery update and uh i believe it's mr lowenthal assistant fire marshal this evening good evening mayor rogers vice mayor rogers members of the council a quick update on the glass fire uh the community meeting will be wednesday the 20th at five p.m uh we'll cover the skyhawk park and open space update uh watershed protection update update on the trees uh that the issues with the trees as well as debris and then rebuild so we put the survey out which we talked about last week to understand what the needs are of the community and i've already had a lot of responses with a lot of good questions and rsvp is already coming in so looking forward to that community meeting we're down to one property left that to get into either a private or public debris removal programs or efforts are shifting over to the needs related to the tree program as well as all the other properties throughout the burn scar with the debris getting them cleaned up and their properties back in order regarding trees following up on our questions from last week pgne has still not yet scheduled the meeting related to the trees that they had offered uh with the city of santa rosa county sonoma as well as the other agencies and state agencies however uh we did just get confirmation uh this afternoon that the meeting with cpuc and legal is now confirmed and has been publicly recorded uh the president of cpuc uh accepted the schedule uh and the city of santa rosa and county of sonoma uh with the staff that have been designated will be meeting with the president regarding the concerns that have been raised on friday this friday at 12 30 p.m regarding stormwater a lot of concerns regarding the open space and the lack thereof for the fire damaged areas around skyhawk so legal was able to help expedite a contract and one contract and another contract will be moving forward soon to help expedite the process for the recovery so that's working on protective measures as well as storm drain repairs as well as city staff are going to be doing work in-house on the walking trails and other various repairs that need to be done to get that open backup for public use and that is our highlights right now from watershed and debris for the glass fire okay thank you sir questions from council okay mr city manager let's go on to 7.4 7.4 water and recycled water supply update jennifer burk water director leading us off thank you uh good afternoon mayor rogers and members of council we are here uh today to provide the council with an update on water supply conditions with me this afternoon is peter martin our deputy director of water resources who will provide information on current water supply conditions as well as our conservation messaging and water use efficiency tools that we have available to our customers and emma walton our deputy director of water reuse who will provide information on current recycled water supply as well as how we are working to outreach and assist our recycled water customers during these unprecedented dry times and first i'll be starting off with some background information as well as an overview of our water supply so if we could go to the next slide please so i wanted to start off with some general information about our water supply the city's water per water portfolio consists of three sources as well as a robust water use efficiency program which reduces water demand approximately 90 to 95 percent of our water supply comes from surface water which is provided by sonoma county water agency or sonoma water sonoma water is our region's water wholesaler providing water from the russian river to approximately 600 000 people in sonoma and marin counties to reduce water demand santa rosa water implements water conservation and water use efficiency programs by improving our water use efficiency and eliminating water waste it allows the city to use our existing supplies to meet demands as well as every drop of water that we save increases the reliability of our water system for our water customers and reduces the need to develop additional supply for future users we also have two groundwater wells on farmers lane these wells supply supply approximately five to ten percent of our water supply and are used during the supplement during the summer months to supplement our water supply to meet peak demands and finally the city has recycled water for non-potable purposes within the city limits we use a small amount of recycled water at places like finley park a place to play or business parks for irrigation purposes recycled water is also an important piece of our water supply because every gallon that is used is a gallon of potable water that we can save for other purposes in addition using recycled water for a beneficial purpose also reduces our need to discharge into local waterways to that end santa rosa typically reuses 95 percent of our recycled water many years we reuse a hundred percent of our recycled water to provide recycled water to the geyser steamfield to produce green energy to urban customers in santa rosa and rona park and to agricultural customers later in this presentation deputy director walton will provide an overview of our recycled water supply next slide please so focusing on our potable water supply as i mentioned about 90 to 95 percent of our water comes from the russian river the map on this slide shows an overview of the russian rivers system and the watershed the russian river system is operated by sonoma water and their operation is governed by state water resources control board decision 1610 as well as four water rights permits that allow them to divert water from the russian river store that water in their two reservoirs lake mendicino and lake sonoma release water from the reservoirs to maintain flows in the russian river and dry creek and then divert water from the russian river to provide it to our community the east fork of the russian river which is towards the top of the map is supplied by diversions from the eel river through the potter valley project which is currently owned and operated by pgne water flows through the potter valley project and then goes into the headwater of the east fork of the russian river which flows into lake mendicino lake mendicino is a much smaller reservoir than lake sonoma and holds approximately one year's worth of supply it typically fills up during the winter months and then throughout the year water is released to meet flow requirements as well as provide for water demand sonoma water releases water from lake mendicino into the upper russian river to provide supply for certain communities like ukia cloverdale and heelsburg but also to meet those in-stream flow requirements in the russian river the majority of our water supply comes from lake sonoma which is a much bigger reservoir holding approximately three to four years worth of water supply for the region water is released from lake lake sonoma down dry creek to meet in-stream flow requirements in both dry creek and russian river and to meet water demands for the region water from the russian river is diverted into the sonoma water system by reigning collectors located at maribel and woeller and that's uh that green dot on the map you see before you um as i mentioned earlier the operation of the system is governed by decision 1610 which is a state water board decision decision 1610 limits the amount of water that sonoma water can divert each year and also sets the minimum flows that sonoma water must maintain in the russian river and dry creek decision 1610 establishes different minimum rates of flow in the river depending on the time of year and whether the hydrologic index or water supply conditions are considered to be normal dry or critical if we could go to the next slide please so the hydrologic index or water supply conditions is defined by decision 1610 as cumulative inflow into lake pillsbury which is located in the eel river watershed or on the eel river actually upstream of the potter valley project the cumulative inflow into lake pillsbury is based on the water year and the water year starts in october 1st of every year and runs through september 30th the cumulative inflow into lake pillsbury is measured on the first day of each month starting in january and by rule conditions are considered normal unless there is a dry or critical dry condition as of january 1st of this year conditions changed from dry to normal based on cumulative inflow into lake pillsbury even though rainfall in the russian river watershed and levels in lake menesino are incredibly low so what does this mean sonoma water had to increase the amount of water released from lake menesino starting january 1st to meet those higher minimum flow levels in the russian river we have been working closely with sonoma water staff and based on current conditions forecasting and forecasting unless there is a deviation from the normal minimum flow requirements lake menesino is projected to drop to critically low levels by the end of summer next slide please in addition to the forecasting based on current conditions sonoma water was recently notified by p juni that they were approved to reduce flows through the potter valley project to help preserve water supply in lake pillsbury so this will also reduce the amount of water that is flowing into lake menesino due to the limited rainfall the current hydrologic conditions and sonoma sonoma water's projections taking into account everything including the reduced flows through potter valley project sonoma water made the decision to file a temporary urgency change petition with the state water resources control board last thursday to help produce water to help preserve water supply in lake menesino if approved by the state this will allow sonoma water to reduce the amount of water they have to release from lake menesino we do know from experience in previous dry years that applying for a temporary urgency change petition as well as messaging to our customers about using water wisely and eliminating water waste successfully allows sonoma water to preserve supply and meet conditions with that background information i will now turn it over to deputy director water resources peter martin who will discuss the current conditions as well as the outreach campaign we are launching and the tools and resources we have available to our sister customers with saving water deputy director martin good evening uh mayor rogers and members of the council uh as uh director berg mentioned i will just sort of cover some of the local conditions and some of the actions we're taking uh as a region and as a utility uh to deal with the ongoing dry weather excuse me um so this figure is a little bit outdated but um we did pick up uh maybe a few tenths of an inch in the last week or so but as you can see um we're continuing to fall behind with regard to percentage of normal uh for our rainfall so far typically this time of year we'd be seeing uh more than 12 inches of rain uh by january of the year so um obviously falling behind here in santa rosa and also in ukia in the upper watershed where we received the majority of our rainfall and water supply this is based on percentage of normal uh for prior 30 year averages uh next slide please so as you can see uh this storage uh graph shows on that black line there uh that water supplies are continuing to decline in lake mendicino uh hence why snow and water is taking proactive act measures uh in filing and temporary urgency change petition uh i think what's most concerning is that typically by this time of year you would see water supply levels starting to rebound however because of the increased flows conditions required by the normal operating conditions in a normal year uh snow water is continuing to release water and water supply levels are continuing to drop uh next slide please as you can see um water supply levels are also continuing to decline in lakes noma uh lakes noma is our uh three to four year water supply for the region as uh director burke had mentioned uh it is currently at about 64 percent of water supply capacity for this time of year um uh next slide please so um you know obviously california goes back and forth in between uh times of dry and wet weather so um santa rosa water is planning ahead uh we've been here before and we're prepared um so we have several tools available to us as a utility uh the first being the water shortage contingency plan it is a plan that is updated a five year basis or more often it's a flexible tool for responding to ongoing dry conditions and asking for customers to conserve obviously it's got flexible buckets of where we can ask customers to either sort of adjust their the need of the region as far as cutting back on water also as we're giving you this update today we're going to continue to provide ongoing updates to the board public utilities and city council we've already launched out some bill inserts and some little blurbs in the city connections newsletter which has quite a bit of reach and also are starting to prepare uh several social media posts asking folks to conserve this winter as it is continuing to be dry and you may have heard some of the wine country radio spots those have been running throughout the end of december and will continue to run throughout the end of january uh those are sort of messaging asking people to turn off the irrigation outside and take proactive measures during this winter to conserve water and then also we're continuing to sort of prepackage outreach and actions to respond as we continue to monitor the situation with this dry year and then further we continue to monitor and coordinate with our regional partners on the water supply and we will continue to adapt and adjust our consistent messaging depending on conditions so that we're aligned as partners in the region and partners in water supply next slide please so as i mentioned we have a water shortage contingency plan it's sort of a living document that is updated routinely and it describes how santa rosa water will respond to various stages of dry weather drought or any perhaps an emergency as well it's driven by a regional supply outlook and it has a variety of voluntary and mandatory levels of action or um progressive things that can be done depending upon the severity of the weather it also documents several actions including progressive water use restrictions prohibitions enforcement actions and other demand management tools that we can utilize as a city and a utility to respond to the need for reduction in demand also there's the implementation of a water shortage contingency plan of note to this council levels of action can only be determined by resolution of the city council so action cannot be taken without action of the city council next slide please as i mentioned we're working with our regional partners the sonoma ren saving water partnership is a partnership of 12 different cities and utilities in marin and sonoma counties we're launching a winter regional awareness campaign the tagline has been confirmed it is it's a dry year save water with us and also uh we'll continue to carry that dry year messaging and impacts in the region um is part of this awareness campaign um we'll provide water saving tips and also direct public to rebates of the various agencies that are listed next slide please so um you know obviously we're here to help uh it's always a good time to plug our water use efficiency contact here you can go to our web page at srcity.org water smart and learn about many of the rebates and programs also we have quite a bit of information about how to program your irrigation controller obviously right now we're asking folks to turn off irrigation because it is winter but also it's a lot of water smart saving tips for your home additionally you can sign up to get a water smart kit so you can take do a little bit uh DIY work in your home to chase down leaks and also become water smart with that this concludes my portion of the presentation and I will hand it over to deputy director Emma Walton thank you peter um as peter mentioned i'm Emma Walton i'm the deputy director of uh regional water reuse operations i oversee the operations of uh the regions wastewater treatment plant as well as operations of our recycled water distribution system i'm going to provide a brief update on the current status of uh recycle water availability for the region next slide please so just a brief overview of our recycled water program um through treatment of wastewater at the laguna treatment plant uh santa rosa reuses on average about 6.6 billion gallons of recycled water each year we reuse this water in a number of manners about two-thirds of it gets sent to the geysers to be recharged and used to produce renewable energy we also have urban irrigation to irrigate golf and parks and we use a good about a third of it to irrigate um agricultural lands uh for fodder crops and vegetable growers and uh as director berk mentioned um during times when we have more water than we are able to reuse we are permitted to release water to the laguna um this we do uh very infrequently we are our goal is to reuse 100 percent of um our recycle water which we typically do we very rarely need to release release water to the laguna next slide please to recap our reuse for last year we reused about 5.7 billion gallons last year which is down about a billion gallons from our average as i mentioned about two-thirds of this went to the geysers about a quarter was reused for agricultural irrigation and the remainder for urban irrigation what's important to note is that the water that we send to the geysers as well as the water that we send to our urban users is bound by contract and we have uninterruptible contracts um in which we are obligated uh to send recycled water to these users um our agricultural users um take up the remainder of the water that we have available but they are um interruptible customers next slide please um the the recycled water that we produce is tied very closely to the amount of rain that we received each year as you can see in this graph this shows um the water year as director Burk mentioned is from october through september um this the gray line on top shows an average year of the water that comes to the plant as rainfall starts to increase in december january february our plant flows start to increase and as and that becomes recycled water that is then available for reuse and then as rainfall drops in march april may and through the summer our recycled water production drops last year you can see we were below average for the year and this current year you can see that we're even below last year which was substantially below um our average um and this this this graph here i wanted to show you first to just kind of get you oriented with um what i'm trying to show here um around averages but um if you flip uh flip to the next slide please um you can actually see that it doesn't quite show the whole picture what this graph is showing is the last 35 years of recycled water production um that the water that has come through our treatment plant the light blue lines there show every year for the last 35 years um you can kind of see the gray line which shows an average year last year in the dark blue was actually our previously historic low production of recycled water and you can see our current year of recycled water production is even substantially below that so we really are in a very uh unique year in that our our recycled water production um due to the lack of rain is is really just as low as we've seen it in 35 years next slide please we also keep track of the recycled water that we maintain in storage we um have about 1.4 billion gallons of available storage typically right now we would be seeing uh this storage gaining um as you can see in in the gray line there the average um line shows that typically about this time we are um gaining in storage and we would anticipate to continue to gain um in storage however because of the lack of rain we find ourselves flatlined in storage and without more rain we will continue um to flatline um in storage and not gain um which would really that's where we um see the production of recycled water occur which makes recycled water available for our users during the summer months so if this line doesn't start to gain uh we really won't have the recycled water available that we typically would have next slide please so with that in mind as we approach um the year we are preparing for little to no recycled water to be available for our interruptible customers um as you may be aware last year due to the the low amounts of rainfall we uh had to cut uh recycled water available to our interruptible customers by 30 percent um you can uh if you recall from from the graph the current production is even substantially below what we saw last year so we're looking at even greater cuts um for this year um so we're preparing um for that uh for another very dry year um we're starting to get messaging out to our customers as soon as we possibly can um in order to help as much as we can provide as much uh recycle water available we uh did cut our deliveries to the geyser system to 91 percent of our contract we are required to meet 90 percent of our contract and if we go below that we we face penalties so we cut our flows to the geysers as much as we possibly could and we were able to get it down to 91 percent of the contract to really try and free up as much water as we could for our agricultural users we are continuing to have meetings with our agricultural users we are planning a meeting on january 20th to make our ag users aware of the limited recycled water that we will have available this season as well as have ongoing conversations with our regional partners we are the largest recycled water producer in the region but there are um other recycled water producers like the town of winsor and some sonoma water who produce recycled water as well um and we work closely with them to make sure that we're optimizing how we reuse recycled water in the region and make as much recycled water available for our ag community as we possibly can next slide please so with that and be happy to open it up for any questions and thank you for your time all right thank you emma peter and jennifer council are there any questions on this item for staff so i just had one emma that in it was related to the conversation last year around uh notifying our interruptible customers have we already started to reach out to them to let them know sort of where this is this is headed uh or is that something that we don't typically do until we have a little bit more clarity on what's going to be available for those users we already have started to reach out to them we have um you know learning from last year have maintained consistent and frequent communication with our ag users we have shared all the information that we've shared here today with um ag users we will continue to share information um and and really try to get out in front of it and make sure that we're getting the message out as soon as we possibly can so our farmers can prepare for another dry year okay vice mayor you got a question uh not a not a question i was just gonna say in reviewing your presentation it definitely it seems pretty scary it reminds me of when i was younger and peter was talking about reaching out to the community i've heard it said before but i think the best way to reach out to uh parents sometimes is through their children because they definitely keep us accountable so when we educate them they are constantly educating us uh the older we get the more we tend to die hard with with old habits so just want to put that out there again thank you vice mayor council member alvarez yes we mentioned uh outreach to end with the wine country radio and my question would be what uh what outreach have we done in spanish that'll be my first question and the second question is by what point does it trigger uh coming back to the council to to ask that we do implement the the regulations the fines and and the more uh tougher sanction sure yeah i'd be happy to answer that question um and thank you for the question um yeah i neglected to mention that the wine country radio spots do include um several spanish language radio stations as well so uh so they are in in english and spanish and we'll continue to do that as time goes on um and then also any products that we put out as far as social media and also outreach for the region uh will be in bilingual in spanish as well so um and then regarding uh the urban water excuse me the water shortage contingency plan uh yes uh so it's driven by mostly regional conditions so we'll we'll get a better understanding um from sonoma water or water supplier uh on where they are and as time goes on but there are several triggers um one of the biggest ones is if they project that water supplies are going to fall and lake sonoma below 100 000 acre feet that immediately triggers a 30 percent reduction um in supply for the region and we would have to take pretty drastic uh measures to read that um additionally um anytime we see a temporary sea change petition filed like they did file in january um much like they did last year uh they ask that the water suppliers do take proactive measures to implement conservation so in those instances we would be notified uh and driven by regulatory factors in the state they would kind of give us that that not or prod uh to go ahead and start to implement conservation measures and we would uh respond hopefully uh in a unified way with our other contractors for sonoma water as well um and then you know also obviously um it can be driven by just what's going on um in the region uh just knowing uh working together that we are going to come up short uh and maybe we'd work on something more of a voluntary but typically start progressively some voluntary measures uh and then work your way up if things start to get pretty ugly and um if i can add councilmember alvarez it's a great question we do work closely with sonoma water we're continuously um in contact and coordinating and there is a um water shortage allocation methodology that's in place that uh if the water agency's forecasting shows that there's a need for them to start allocating water then we will use that methodology together to determine what those allocations would be and then that would then trigger the actions we would take and then we would work uh closely first with the board of public utilities to get a recommendation that we would then bring to the council uh before we would need to implement our water shortage contingency plan so at this time we have no uh need to implement uh but we wanted to make sure that the council was aware that we do have this tool uh it's available for us to use we used it last uh during the drought of 2014 through 16 it was very successful in getting our customers to reduce demands and preserve supply so um as Deputy Director Martin had mentioned before unfortunately we're used to you know wet and dry seasons and more often than not lately dry we've been through this before we are prepared to take action and help our community get through this and take the steps we need to uh when we need to uh right now we're just continuing to message that it's dry we want everyone to be water efficient use water wisely and making sure that we're getting that information out to our community thank you all right council members I see no other questions or comments all right Mr. City Manager let's go on to item 7.5 and then I will take public comment on all of our staff briefings 7.5 City Investments Allen Alton Deputy Director of Finance leading us off morning or good evening uh Mayor Rogers and members of the council um the item that we have now is an overview of the um uh the laws and and regulations that um relate to uh investments in local governments and we will also provide a overview of our investment portfolio just a little background before we kick this off um as you know we received a rather large settlement um from PG&E uh that those funds had no legal um uh restrictions on them so we've uh put those into our assigned them in our general fund where they where they sit and the question came up from council is about investing those funds so at that point we thought that it would be good to have members of PFN asset management who manage the bulk of the city's portfolio come in and kind of walk through uh those those regulations so with that I have Paulina Wu and Monica Spike who are managing directors with PFN and I'd like to turn the presentation over to them being uh mayor vice mayor and council um my name is Paulina Wu and as Allen uh has introduced us and we work with PFM who is the city's investment manager or investment manager um joined by my partner Monique Spike um as happening everybody and so what we're going to do is um go through a little bit of the we were asked to um really introduce what governs California uh investment uh public finance investment code um so we're going to go through a brief overview of that for the council um next slide um so what we have are the two this is the code citation again just uh for your reference here are the two uh main main code sections of California government code um that govern um all public investment um for operating in general funds um go ahead please um these codes apply to um local agencies so they're defined as county cities um public districts um school districts but they typically investor the county but again that would cover uh the city as well uh next slide please um one of the things that we'd like to point out and we always like to remind um uh when we talk about remind everyone when we talk about public funds especially short term funds um is that public funds have very specific investment injectives and the number one is the safeguard of principal um that's the most important and then of course meeting safe uh your liquidity needs um do you have the money when you need it and then third is to achieve uh an investment return um within the specific allowable legal parameters next slide please um the application of that specific government code uh so these are some of the big uh things that govern that come out of that code so first is the agency type um those are the public entities in California the second is the types of funds um so those would be operating funds general funds um sinking funds um that settlement money that you receive um came into the city's general fund so it qualifies under the general fund it would be governed by that by this particular code um and then of course some other um safety things like the delivery of securities you have to have a third party custodian it must be in the city's name um there are specific limits in the code as well as maximum maturities on the fixed income securities and all of these the city does follow um and is in the city's policy next slide please so here's the big um I know it looks like a lot so um don't don't be fazed by all the colors and lines but what this has meant the show is and we often get asked by the questions especially when we're in a market environment in the equity market like we are now you know why can't we go into the equities why aren't we making more money on these on our investments um well again I will remind you that our first um the first objective per state code per the policy per all of uh public investment is safety and so when we think about all of those outside things um we've got all the equities all of the ETFs all of the um hyal bonds private placements private equity they're not they're legally prohibited um for general funds um so all of those things um are not allowed um by state code um state code is specifically written um to keep money safe it really does concentrate um all of the general fund money in in two places one is in very very safe fixed income so the bond market not equities and the second thing is there are maturity limits so um generally you cannot invest past five years so even if you saw a 30-year bond that you thought was great um that would not apply that would be illegal under government code unless you had a like very specific approval or purpose for it so this is just a graphic version um to to sort of cover a lot of the investment in the universe that we get asked about um next slide please um we wanted to show you two um this is permitted investments so this is the list of fixed income that is in 53601 the government code we've laid it out so you have the government code the amount of the portfolio that can be in it all this is high quality fixed income or money market or liquid securities so very short deposit accounts and so those are the parameters set forth by government code you can see that city's policy is very much in line um with government code um and where the percentages lie so you're you're pretty much in line and there's some other specific things like credit requirements um there's a couple of technical things that are also in your policy ending government code that you do follow as well that apply to fixed income next slide please um the key takeaways from this is that the government code is inherently risk averse um the number one objective is to keep the money safe and to have it when you need it um the objectives of course are safety liquidity and yield and um finally the code's designed to protect public portfolios while providing a bit of flexibility to invest according to the goals and risk tolerances of your agency um or entity and but that is within very very narrow parameters of fixed income and then we have at the end and I know you all see it monthly and we just have the the last report the the 1130 report um next slide please of just um the city's portfolio just in case you had any questions about where it was invested and this this encompasses the entire portfolio the city does manage internally um some of the liquid funds again as they as they use for operations and then there is a larger portfolio that is in the fixed income market they also managed a a local banking and cd program that looks to put money in local banks um in for cds so that's what that fdnc ensured cd in the middle of the charter um with that I'm happy to take any questions council members do we have any questions council member tidbits thanks mayor um thank you for this presentation going back to slide five I was curious why certain um uh investments like money market on mutual funds and local government investment pools are only permitted for one day or am I misreading the chart no those are so those are not um so money market funds by their nature are are are uh liquid so they it's not that they have a restriction it's that you can get your money out the next day so when you do a waiting on them they're waiting in terms of maturity distribution is one is one day okay and in your experience anything here that's permitted what would the the highest uh yield be on a 10-year average just out of curiosity um I would I understand it varies and we've been through two in in the span of one decade we've been through two what we would call um lifetime events we had the great recession which really through interest rates we have what just happened last year um by and large you know the the the general rule of thumb is um the more risk you have so the more credit risk so um corporate bonds um or anything that's that's that's backed by the credit of a an entity um those would be the higher yields because they arrest they are higher risk and um the longer they're out so for instance a one-year corporate bond would yield less in in a normalized environment than like a five-year corporate bond um so by and large those um that's what you're looking at in terms of relative value um I would have to look I don't have a specific number for the 10-year average of it would be it would have to be the 10-year average of a corporate index that is a single layer above okay yeah I think if if you happen to come across that that answer and you know throughout the course of this presentation I hope you'll volunteer it um because I was the council member who who asked if we could have this presentation um you know looking at all the permitted sections would be really helpful to know okay if you know we use some of our proceeds from the fire fund to invest in us treasuries for uh you know five years or 10 years what's the yield going to be as opposed to if we invest in medium term corporate notes um you know just just so we can think about okay how can we use this chunk of money in this principle if you will to help support ongoing city operations for the next 200 years no that's that's an excellent question and I just just to give you a bit of an overview on that if um if you don't mind um flipping down to the portfolio slides um the city has contemplating that um the city it's we don't it's not a sort of a one like are we getting invested in a five-year today or a 10-year today there's a strategy so what the city does um if you keep going please um to the end of the present one more oh sorry one more there you go um the city has looked at its cash needs um we have a strategy it's a zero to three year strategy I mean sorry it's a one to three year strategy and that means that the the this is a total return portfolio so it's managed to a benchmark which is that one to three year treasury index that generally has an average maturity of about 1.8 years and what that means is that you have zero to five years that you can you know you can get to 1.83 years in any combination of ways I can buy you know half one day securities and half five years five year securities and get to that like sort of middle of the road um what we do is we look at the value in the market based on maturity and based on um sector allocation that was your point like you know is it better to buy a treasury today is it better to buy a corporate am I being compensated for risk that's another aspect like it's not about the highest yield it's about why is that yield the highest or what is going on in the market and so we have a strategy that's based on this um you know it's safety it's based on what the city's risk tolerance are where they see needs where money is allocated um and part of this does include um you know their liquid the liquid funds you keep for operation so it's not all PFM managed um but that is all internally done um and we have you know we try and optimize where the portfolio yield is you know unfortunately we're in a zero rate yield environment so today your yields and your returns are going to be significantly lower than what you see in the equity market and I know that's what sort of everybody's really familiar with um right now um for instance the 10-year treasury is it near 1% right now which is crazy um it's crazy low it's again another one of those unprecedented times that keep becoming more precedented or more with more precedent that we see um so um that's just the reality of fixed income and where the city has to invest or California public entities and public entities across the country have to invest so sorry to interrupt I think also with the bond market typically when you hear people talk about the bond market they're not talking about this very short duration um space that California entities can invest in you know as Paulina mentioned um or maybe the city's portfolio to a one to three year strategy and then sort of the broader markets when people talk about the bond market or the fixed income market they're talking about four strategies which are much longer duration 10-30 year bonds so there's a difference there as well in terms of return expectations for this portfolio versus what you tend to hear um being talked about so to try to distill this down um are what you're saying based on your your graph is really you know if the city were to invest some money it's it's it's unlikely that we'll see yields above 2.5 percent and looking at your portfolio yield cost line on your chart and it looked like it was performing the best in November of 2019 um that's the kind of ROI we can expect within the boundaries of the law that we are required to operate within in this current investment environment yes there's nothing again if if interest rates so tomorrow we have the amazing economic report and everything's great and the Fed raises rates 300 basis points then that would reset the limits but in this current rate environment yes you won't see anything um you know that's much higher than that if you want to flip can we go one slide back please and just again uh a couple members just for your question and I think it's a it's a really good one um I'm sorry one more um to your question about you know where do you find value why aren't we we're being treasuries versus corporates if you look at the bottom pie chart this is really that that choice um and we are uh showing you know when we see a when we see value in the market that fits with the the city strategy and often offers the correct compensation for the amount of risk that's when we're buying um strategically um when we don't of course then we're going to to to put uh government securities in the portfolio um and you know we make those choices on on a daily basis um so again we are very very mindful of making sure that the city's funds are optimized um at all times uh what's the highest you've seen in your career in terms of an annual yield in terms of well for a portfolio like the cities um one to three I mean I don't money do you have a I mean I would think the highest I've ever seen and I've I've been in this business for about 15 years is I've been I've been here a little bit longer than Paulina and unfortunately um in my tenure I think over the last you know 17 18 years I mean that the best it's been has been you know five and a quarter um you know we've we've been in an interest rate cycle where you know interest rates have been falling to extremely low levels and the interest rate that we're talking about the benchmark that we use is a federal funds target rate because that really anchors the short end of the yield curve and you know that that fell to 1% after the great recession fell even further to that 0 to 25 basis point range um we we got some relief a couple years ago when the fed started raising those rates again and then we saw that rate decline um in 2019 and then drastically in 2020 as a result of the pandemic so now we're at a 0 to 25 basis point range literally 0.0 percent to 0.25 percent as the anchor point on the yield curve so you know what we're dealing with and what we expect to continue dealing with over the next few years is being look is being forced to look at investment choices where you have very low yields on the treasury curve trying to find some additional income with credit as Paulina mentioned we're really making strategic decisions are we being compensated enough for that credit um so we'll see the portfolio yield continue to decline unfortunately over the next a few months likely over the next fiscal year until we see that anchor rate start to rise again thank you so much any other questions from council i did have one for you and uh you know it's unfortunate to see some of the areas that we can go or can't go i did look back after having the conversation with with council member tidbits obviously we would never do this but investment in tesla a year ago would have returned 725 million dollars for the city so i understand having the safety as the principal conditioned here one thing that we have discussed and we discussed that our long-term finance committee probably about a year and a half ago was some of these emerging programs that we've seen pilot programs where a city can take their investments their cds that are liquid and partner with local credit unions and other banks and then the credit unions then can loan it out for purposes that the city dictates so for example housing production it's a huge goal for us it's a huge goal across california are you seeing other cities move in this direction of utilizing some of their cds or investment funds to invest in housing or other priorities that we know might not have the same kind of direct return for this the city in terms of a percentage though i'm sure you can negotiate that but more of the social capital or the social impact within the community absolutely that's a great question it's a really again it's not just the city so to dance that question it's not just you all who are contemplating um what we call esg which is environmental social government governance you may have heard it as sri which is social responsibly investing um forget what the other acronym is and monique will come out because monique has also has uh is very versed in this and just your specific questions so part of the thing because we do work with entities across the country and it's very much dictated by their state regulations number one so california government code and being um what will dictate for you all but again the code in other parts of the country is very similarly restrictive and i think that's part one um because public funds are very specifically regulated so for instance even if you wanted to go to a bank any bank and deposit them you have to have collateral agreements they have to be um super safeguarded um we actually with the city when we started that cd banking program um i think almost almost seven or eight years ago now um we had some of the union actually return their money because it was so arduous the reporting and the collateralization requirements on the banking side and so it again it's it there's a there's an administrative aspect that's a bit of a hurdle that isn't embedded in um public funds um the other question that you have there are we we do find um cities trying to find innovative solutions um one of the ones that we um specifically and and we have uh we're talking to the city about it we talk about it all the time as we always consider um the environmental social governments um for the city's funds and we know that's a topic that they care deeply about um there are ways to structure the portfolio to meet some of the guidelines um again this is a strategic discussion that we have um that we will be having on a quarterly base or that we do have and we'll continue to have on a quarterly basis with staff um as two specific programs outside of sort of a portfolio management like an esg mandate or an sri mandate on the on investment in the fixed income um i don't know the specific one outside of like a banking program where you're um investing in the in the local bank um i haven't heard of one there where they're partnering with the loan because that has been one of the hurdles is that um if cities or or any entities want to do sort of that kind of loan structure like you are not equipped to be a bank so you kind of have to get a bank to do the banking um i have not seen one deployed on a on a larger scale when you go i don't know if you've seen um something like i'll add to that i think um councilmember rogers you're specifically talking about um i think impact investing where you're looking to um deposit funds um to have a very specific impact whether that be a commitment from the bank to build housing in a certain area or to do something um directly for your community i have had uh some of my clients who are exploring ways to um have sustainable investing impact investing or esg techniques explore similar things um i think where the where we sort of get into some friction there is is getting the agreement sort of documented on how you monitor assess what the impact is so how do you sort of document that commitment from your business partner from your banking partner to build those houses to do whatever that impact that you require and then how are you sort of monitoring that over time and that has been some of these sort of the the strain sort of getting those documented but those conversations have been taking place and as paulina mentioned we have lots of conversations with our clients and with the state for some ways to look at sustainable investing approaches for the portfolio that we manage on the city's behalf and just as a follow-up and we've had one of the things we've done is in other places they have a very similar program of similar programs uh cd programs to the city and and one of the clients that i work with has requirements very similar to the ones that you would be asking for a like a loan program on their cd program so they have to monique's point um have very much um revised and sort of struggled with how to evaluate how to continue to um track and then again how do you translate a lot of banking terms um into real world you know you know x amount of loans is what in the real world and how does that really reflect on the city's mission and those are the those are the very technical and very um uh sort of uh you have to have a lot of thought that goes into thoughtful places in those programs nothing now you can't do that and not that you don't have the will but those are really the places where a lot of time and energy is spent yeah i really appreciate that and um when we when we looked at the analyses for what a city chartered bank would look like it was the capitalization requirements and some of that staffing that you talked about that was a significant barrier and it's i'm just struck that perhaps uh the efforts might be better spent doing some form of reforms over in sacramento on what types of investments or how to invest cities can can partner with their local jurisdictions uh the local institutions i should say uh so i appreciate that uh councilmember alvarez yes the first question that i had was actually housing but thank you for answering that question and thank you for asking that question here uh the second question that i had was uh to for monique uh you stated that you had seen a return of five percent what time period did you notice that was that the earlier uh two thousand five two thousand five two thousand six yeah right before right before the housing crash yeah okay perfect all right thank you it's when monique and i were still in the analyst pool on the bloomberg every day but you know another great point that was made was actually local uh investment which he just brought up here but nonetheless though i had measured there was a correlation between the housing and the housing crash with uh with a higher interest rate especially when it was interest only if i'm not mistaken yeah that yeah they were those were interesting times uh to be in finance i'll say that um i just just as you know i started my job at pfm uh three months before the crash happened so i learned a bunch of stuff and then the next uh after three months it was irrelevant all right council any other questions all right thank you both so much for the presentation uh alan really appreciate it uh and with that we will go on to public comment for agenda item seven our staff briefings uh madame clerk if you could pull up the timer and first i see uh micho followed by demetra hello can you hear me yep go ahead sir all right i'm micho i'm from uh so i just want to comment to uh what magali was talking about the snowma county lord council and the car car build that's going on and um so before before i comment to that i just wanted to say a little bit about myself so i'm from the center was an area born and raised i'm from the rosin an area i'm a part of the center sonoma county lord council and latin rollers car club and i just want to commend the city on the effort uh just locking arms with us to uh to do to do this um me as myself you know i just grew up grew up in this area grew up around low writing and uh even as a small child you know when i was in writing in a car seat my car seat was strapped into the back of a low rider and um i just really seen that the young people that got involved with low writing when i was younger how they really stayed out of trouble so the fact that you know the violence prevention partnership the police department and everybody's you know trying to just lock arms with us so we can make this project happen is amazing the the original idea behind it was really to uh just bridge the gap between the community the city and the police department and um you know we had the ideas of uh you know like during spirit week during schools the police officers taking the uh being able to take the cars to the schools getting the kids excited and just kind of showing the young people that law enforcement you know that they they too could be law enforcement and that you know we as the low rider community wanted to really just reach across the aisle and give this gift of low writing to the police department um so they can share in that culture with us and um really you know low writing is art and um you know uh there's been some some negative comment from um other community members saying that the city was appropriating our culture and uh I really just took offense to that because you know this is my culture and all the culture and uh all the people that are involved with the law and counsel's multiple car clubs and large car clubs in the area were collective and everybody's in support of this project and I just wanted to reaffirm that you know we are all excited we're pumped and uh we're really just can't wait to get this project um on the road and um you know the uh the young people and um yeah so I just wanted to take the time just to um commend the city commend the violence prevention partnership and commend the commend Navarro and the police department and uh yeah we're we're excited thank you all right thank you for your comments you have Dmitra followed by David thank you can you hear me yeah please go ahead thank you so to clarify the community concerns received regarding the ethnic studies with the COP program were actually a report of survey results and very strong comments from hundreds of individuals submitted to the city council and the community engagement staff so the report given made no mention of this and I feel that's a little disingenuous um now that we know the program isn't planned for implementation to schools let's address the larger issue I heard a stated aim to increase positive interactions between police and youth but without meaningful police reform this program is essentially a photo op that doesn't reflect reality and won't contribute to meaningful change for the community my questions when will cahoots be implemented when will the there be excuse me disciplinary action for the human rights abuses reported by protesters in Santa Rosa when will the city of Santa Rosa ban the use of tear gas projectiles and military weapons on residents when will the individuals who committed vehicular assault be held accountable the basic ideology behind this program appears to try to encourage early relationship building between black indigenous latinx students of color and law enforcement I don't doubt police can interact with students positively in a controlled environment however this does not protect them from harm later when they're racially profiled by law enforcement agencies who have not engaged in sufficient anti-bias training who have not screened their ranks for officers with memberships in or affiliations with white nationalist groups or ideologies and where human rights abuses are allowed with no consequence reports are being received right now of active law enforcement in support of the capital insurrection locally state and nationwide we need real reform please listen to the community healing the relationship between the community and law enforcement starts with meaningful police reform and accountability not performative band-aids Santa Rosa residents and community reports of racism and brutality in law enforcement have made this need clear please engage in meaningful police reform thank you and I yield my time thank you Demetra I appreciate your comments David followed by Raquel and just as a reminder for folks we don't engage in a back and forth during the public comment but I can't ask some of these questions once we are done with our public comment for some response yeah hi can you hear me yep go ahead great thank you my name is David Escobar and I'm resident here Sonoma County and I want to just I'm also part of the the latin rollers car club and I just wanted to echo the comments by Mico and I also want to thank the city for the the hard work that the city has been doing in trying to create different potential positive and I would say not potential but actually actual positive spaces for community engagement I also want to talk a little bit about the latin the latin rollers and the the lowrider council there's about six car clubs and the last single that my event that we took pre-covid that event yielded about over 400 families that attended the our event and so we have quite a constituency and I think that and know that there's a huge huge portion almost unanimously that the families and the car clubs are enthusiastic about the lowrider patrol car that is coming there you know our way hopefully we know that Oakland has one San Francisco I believe has one and also the city of Stockton Stockton has has one as well so we'll be part and joining a part of this collective I think that is very positive for the community and I think especially these times there's really a need for positive community engagement and with with community especially the lowrider community that has always been seen as gang affiliated and I think that some of this engagement with the city and the police and the council can actually take away a lot of the stigma that has been promulgated throughout decades of lowriding I do also believe that and I'm not going to comment on the on the other projects I'm here specifically talking about the the lowrider vehicle but I do believe in and police reform and I do believe in and not you know taking the lowrider car as a as a photography opportunity for the city I think it's a mutual situation here where the council and its membership is actually doing a meaningful project for the community and so I just want to thank you for your your your courageous effort in helping us engage in these positive interactions with the lowrider thanks thank you David next up will be Raquel followed by Kimmy hi can you hear me yeah I could go ahead well thank you um hi everyone my name is Raquel and I am a resident of Sonoma County and I wanted to join this public comment to address the ethnic studies with a cop program I will name first that I'm really trying to hold back a lot of my sentiments because I I really hope that I can be clear with what I'm going to say um also I really hope that y'all were taking notes while Demetra was talking because I I really think she made a lot of really good points um I don't believe that police equal safety for our communities and that means our youth um I I know that a letter was submitted to you all um and to the folks at the community engagement office about this program um that expressed a lot of deep concerns over the program itself and yes you know police can get out of uniform um whatever but ultimately what is still happening is police being in a space with young people um which is not does not guarantee their safety so another thing that I wanted to bring up too I really wanted to invite y'all to um the California Department of Education's Facebook page in June of 2020 they actually had a um live stream where they were talking about safe schools hearing and the impact of police in schools and it's really astounding to me to watch that and then realize where I am and where things are in Sonoma County because it seems like polar opposites um I don't believe that police should be in schools again they do not protect people of color they do not protect black folks they do not protect indigenous folks and they do not protect people of color um so lastly I just want to say that um I really hope that the folks you know who are part of putting this program together can understand that yes even if the program is not going to continue there's more to the story the harm was already done this needs to be addressed because it was it was a mistake um and there needs to be accountability for this so um I really you know hope that this program is not replicated in any way shape or form because it's not what the community wants um and we see that through the survey that was also submitted to you all where people were able to comment their thoughts on this program so that's all I don't want to say for tonight I yield my time all right thank you Raquel next up is Kimmy followed by lib hi can you hear me yeah go ahead Kimmy hi my name is Kimmy Barabosa um I am concerned at the lack of transparency and communication around the ethnic studies with the COP program you presented very selective survey results and a very selective description um however students in Sonoma city have actually been surveyed and expressed they don't feel safe the presence of law enforcement in their schools a second survey received by community members specifically regarding the ethnic study program pilot program here in Santa Rosa re-healed similar results and not to mention a petition that went out last week has already gained almost 300 signatures to prevent this program from continuing I know you did mention that this is a pilot program that will not continue but you also did mention there's an advisory board to create further engagement opportunities with officers and youth if the perception of law enforcement is that you if the goal of this is that you're trying to change the perception of law enforcement then please consider addressing the reasons why there is a negative public opinion and why that exists in the first place instead of creating programs that act as band-aids to the root of the problem it is the traumatic actions of the police in this area that has created this negative public perception to begin with not a lack of interaction between law enforcement and youth to push these performative programs instead of real change or reform to law enforcement is a disservice to our communities especially our communities of color and our overpoliced communities cops playing soccer with youth or cops hanging out pencils to students does not change the fact that children have been murdered by law enforcement in this community I'm speaking about Jeremiah Chas and Andy Lopez or that our families have been impacted by incarceration so I hope that the advisory committee does not move forward to have any more of these engagement opportunities with law enforcement and youth because it is not first of all trauma informed but also it does not address the root problem at what is causing this distress the law enforcement in the community what is causing this negative perception and what is causing this trauma to begin with thank you and I yield my time thank you so much Kimmy thank you for your comments next up is libs followed by chris hello can you hear me yep go ahead cool um so Kimmy just gave y'all a master class of what you should be doing right now and I really hope that y'all were taking notes because everything in there was really important speaking to the root of these causes in what way do we think that law enforcement which is a derivative well sorry not a derivative it is a symptom of white supremacist values why do we think that we can reform this and make it better why do we think that a cancer can be turned into something that's benign like it's it's not going to happen abolish the police I yield my time okay thank you for your comments chris followed by Michael yep go ahead yeah I was calling in also about the ethnic studies with the cop um I agree with Kimmy I don't think that there was enough um interviewing of students across the county rather than just interviewing the students in that class or the little short program that you guys ran like why weren't you guys interviewing students across the county to see if this is even something that they feel comfortable with um and I noticed people keep calling in about the low riders um so I have a question that I would hope you guys can answer this later um how much did that low rider patrol car cost and why weren't those funds used to address the systemic and implicit biases that too often impact relations between law enforcement and communities it's it's concerning to me that the city would rather spend money on a vehicle than further training their officers that have shown throughout this last year that they needed some help um and like Kimmy said this course was not trauma informed or trauma sensitive personally I know that my children would have been really upset to be in a course like that they witnessed and heard my personal experiences while protesting um throughout the summer last year and had to be told that their mom wasn't coming home because she was arrested for protesting um and their black and their experiences with police officers have not been positive um so just with that knowledge I don't think that like yeah this is not trauma informed at all at a minimum you guys should be doing that for children I yield my time okay thank you Chris Michael followed by Kelsey hey can you hear me yep go ahead Michael hey so I was part of a group that uh emailed members of city council earlier this week as well as the um the uh the empowerment commission the information regarding our open letter about ethnic studies with the COP as well as some survey results that were done by the organization Savior Six and we didn't get a response unfortunately um so you know this is a where we'd like to hear from you individually as council members on how you feel about this program um but at you know at this point what I was disheartened to hear tonight was that it seems like the less first of all let me just say that the communication about whether this program is going to continue and in other forms is really inconsistent we've heard that it's not going to be continued anymore but tonight we heard that it you know the results of the survey information gathered from the program are going to be carried out into possible future programs and the only lesson learned was maybe we shouldn't you know name it ethnic studies with the COP um and that concerns me for a lot of reasons um you know our concerns were the fact that law enforcement were involved with students which um we know students of color were are over policed in this country and this program was working with students from Bellevue elementary school which I understand is um is a high minority enrollment um so you know our concern is that is that this those concerns aren't being taken seriously but I'm concerned that you know these kind of program might continue under names that don't reveal that law enforcement is going to be involved and the community really needs to know that you know our priorities here are we need to we need to be really clear about what law enforcement is involved in and what they're not involved in and as you know was stated by many speakers before really healing with the community here is going to require law enforcement to take accountability for the actions that have made them unpopular um I don't feel like this kind of program which you know makes the county look like it's trying to reach out to youth of color it's not addressing the underlying concerns that we have about the way that you know Black Lives Matter protesters are treated the killings by of um of you know youth of color and police brutality in general um I don't believe that you know our our you know our community is is you know completely special it may have you know slightly different historical roots and I don't want to I don't want to yeah let me just say that as as finished um please consider ethnic studies with a cop and don't you know please don't please reach out before considering carrying this program forward thank you all right thank you Michael Kelsey followed by Amanda hi there okay um yeah my name is Kelsey I was born and raised here in Santa Rosa as well and yeah I want to speak to the issue of ethnic studies with a cop as well um I hope you're getting this sense uh from these comments how shocked we were um many folks I talked to and myself included um when we heard about this program it absolutely feels tone deaf um there's so much movement towards accountability potentially like real sweeping changes um and having communities who have been trying to tell us what they need to be different about the way that that policing is done and the how unsafe um they are how over police certain communities are how it doesn't keep them safe um in any way uh they've been trying to tell us for years what they need and maybe there's some traction now to start listening to that and making real change so again what others have said about this feeling very performative like a puff piece like a PR campaign uh I think ethnic studies or or whatever you would want to call it is is very important to tie it to this particular issue feels very strange um there's a movement to take cops out of school completely there was a whole debate about it about it not being about the personalities of the SROs or whether someone had had a good experience with them it was about listening to even if it's a small number or percent of people who feel unsafe or have been harmed that we pay attention and make our policy based on what they're saying so you cannot say that that a program is for a community if that people from that community are telling you they don't want this they want something else um and I definitely agree that we want to understand where the listening came from in the listening circles and and and what needs to be done to make what we we want more clear around real reform and investing in communities so basically we don't want cops to seem safe we want them to be safe we want people to be safe from them um so we need to work on that thank you all right thank you Kelsey next up is Amanda followed by Bailey Amanda go ahead and mute your mic and mute your microphone looks like we're having a little trouble with Amanda's let's go on to Bailey and then we'll try to come back to you in a minute Amanda hello can you hear me yep go ahead awesome um yeah I would just like to pretty much echo everyone's statements from Kimmy and Libby and forward um pretty much uh yeah I think that's all I have to say um yeah I yield my time all right thank you Bailey and it looks like we lost Amanda from the the meeting so I'm going to give it a second here to see if Amanda comes back or if anybody else raises their hand and then I'll bring it back to council to be go ahead I can hear you you're a little breaking up a little bit but let's go ahead okay um this is to be with love and light and um you know I am I'm in the doctor's office but here we go you know the first thing is we we pass measure p and we don't need a program where it doesn't have public comment or public opinion things need to be transparent with our county it needs to be transparent with the people's voice and unfortunately this is not this is going against what we as a community have been fighting for transparency amongst law enforcement transparency within the people and again these closed door meetings don't work for the people cherry picking people to have opinions about programs that affect our children and especially being a single mother in this county I do not want my son to be in a program in the future that doesn't doesn't communicate to parents what it actually is it is a false narrative that we don't want to live by as BIPOC and it's endangering our safety and we already have seen that with law enforcement why don't we build a a conversation with the parents instead of forcing children on the west side to be okay with law enforcement this is not okay this has not been a conversation with the community and we need to end it now um there is just no way around that it is disgusting behavior that we have to go back to being transparent and that's what we're asking for communication law enforcement should not be in schools period it is an intimidation factor and here's the thing ethnic studies should be taught to law enforcement period they need to understand how it is for us as BIPOC and we need to abolish the system and rebuild it because it's just not working I yield my time thank you to be next we have Amanda followed by Lee great can you hear me now chris yeah there we go thank you I had to change devices well good evening everyone it's really great to be here with you and thank you for taking the time to listen to the community and hear our thoughts and concerns and welcome to our new city council members eddie it's really great to see you I know you're from way back and I'm happy to I'm happy that you're there um so um I'm a Chicana I've been living in Santa Rosa my whole life I'm currently a resident of Santa Rosa um and I've been doing ethnic studies work in Santa Rosa for over eight years with our community it's something that's really um been wanted by the young people and thankfully um Santa Rosa city school district one of the districts of the many districts in Santa Rosa has taken it upon themselves to do the work of um including the community and the decision to implement their programming so I'm a part of their committee as a volunteer community member and to see the amount of work and effort that's gone into ethnic studies in Santa Rosa in this district has been really remarkable and so it's very disheartening to hear that there was going to be an ethnic studies with the cop program implemented not in schools but with students I think with the amazing response that we've received from our young people around um their distress discomfort and and honestly the understanding that there can be violence um that there can be put into very violent situations with police officers um and asking to have them not be in the school should have been an indicator to the city to not um have police officers around young people unless completely necessary I agree with a lot of the community members that spoke before me and saying that I think that it's very dangerous to have police around young people when there isn't um well I guess I'll just say that period I think that there needs to be more education with our police officers and there has to be um more accountability taken especially with this program I know I feel like it's getting a little swept under the rug but the magnitude of how these young people who went through this program they were third through sixth graders they were third through sixth graders who went through this program and it's very confusing for young people in Roseland to have these wonderful experiences with police officers but guess what when they turn 13 they are going to be targeted and no matter how nice the officer is no matter if you make a low rider cop car that is the reality and I think that it puts our community in danger and I think that you all should really really reconsider this program and make a public apology and think about community programs that are not about making the police look pretty but actually holding them accountable and holding yourselves accountable to making sure that our community is safe thank you so much thank you Amanda next up next up we have Lee hi can you hear me yep go ahead Lee okay okay thank you so much um welcome to the new city council members I'm I'm hopeful and thank you for having this public meeting um I I'm gonna echo lots of people um I'm uh I'm a former educator in Santa Rosa I also am a person who I'm disabled from mental health issues and a former educator so when I was a teacher I had the beautiful experience of being with teenagers who were willing to disclose their true feelings about law enforcement and I really really have strong feelings about the mental health of these children and the cognitive dissonance that happens as they are presented with with with training from somebody who is who is who is who is the subject okay let's just okay I need to take a breath basically let's handle the human rights violations report before we have in this county before we have any um presentation by law enforcement on racial anything any racial studies so um I'm sorry I had a note and I and I lost it so I'm I'm kind of stuttering here but I still have some time but my main concern is the mental health of the children who have to be subject subjected to people that they already fear teaching them something that they probably are not equipped to teach in all likelihood and also I really like what the previous speaker said about a public apology this is something that again back to the human rights violations let's take care of that and then apologize for not putting those two things together as problematic and then one more last quick piece there's something um you know democracy is fantastic and I love it but there's also something called consensus and the when when one person is so upset with something that they block an action which is basically what you have your community doing by calling right now we're blocking this action we're saying this is unacceptable to us those are the voices that are super important to listen to so I really I really I'm really hopeful that this city council will be willing to listen to to the people who are actually willing to call because there's so many of us who don't call but feel the same way so I I'm I'm end of time so thank you again and have a great night thank you so much for your comments Lee so sing no other hands I'm going to bring it back to the city council Mr. City Manager I heard a couple of questions in there that hopefully you can fill us in on first was specifically around the cost for the car and for the lowrider program I I meant I have to get back to you the chief's not here tonight so I'm gonna need to to to but I will get back to council with the costs associated with the program mayor we do have a voicemail public comment that was submitted oh I apologize go ahead Stephanie item 7.4 the way you do it from Roseland regarding water and the recycled water supply it's very important that we realize how we're going to have a year with less water than would typically be considered average with that in mind we may be entering drought season again it would be really nice if the city would work with the county through the Sonoma County water agency to start putting in stormwater retention basins and working along the riparian corridor such as Roseland Creek to do things that would help for aquifer recharge it's been talked about for 25 years yet no one gets up off of the talk and walks the walk hopefully you folks could begin this now it's the time because a lot folks not going to want to use recycled water for drinking water they're hoping that we can have aquifer recharge and not have the wells run dry for folks that are still on well water in the southwest area and western area of Santa Rosa thank you it's good new year to you 7.5 city investments Duane Dewitt from Roseland the city has a lot of money tied up in investments and yet it always pleads poverty to the neighborhoods that are in need hopefully you'll find a way to invest the monies that come into the city especially big monies like the PG&E settlement and put them into accounts that do capitalization and allow for the interest to come off and be spent for the things that are needed in the city right now such as road repairs be to Barham Avenue over in Roseland the perfect example one other innovative approach would be a few folks would begin to charge for the water that you send up to the geysers that's an investment that water coming from the city the taxpayers paid lots of money to build that infrastructure to send that water up to that private business to make profit we should be getting a piece of that profit thank you good new year to you that concludes with message public comments for item seven staff readings excellent thank you so mr. city manager i heard that you will get back to council and the community about the cost and some specifics on that program yep i i also heard questions around the timeline for when the community should see the cahoots program as well as the discussion on the human rights report and the specific incident reports from a protest last year so i will defer to the city attorney on the the the human rights report i will be able to answer that an update is coming on a believe on and i will confirm this state on january 27th involving the cahoots the in quotes cahoots model i just want to make sure it's clear that that's a branded model of engagement that's taking place in organ the city is exploring a similar model i'm not sure that that's going to be the title of the model but that that that that type of engagement activity will be part of the convert an update of that will be delivered on uh that i believe it's the january 27th but i'll make sure council has that date and time and again the community empowerment plan is coming back for review with council on i believe um let me confirm that date february 23rd um and so turn it over to the city attorney regarding um the other question uh thank you yes the um we are expecting that the human rights this will be one item a combined item in front of the council it will include review of the human rights commission report the after-action report relative to the protests uh last early last summer and then as well as the audit report on the specific instances of use of force we are expecting that to be held in march we do not at this time have a specific date but we are expecting that it will come to council in march all right thank you madam city attorney and uh perhaps tomorrow when we do our agenda setting we can see if we can lock down a date so that we can start to message that out to the community as i know that there's going to be a lot of interest uh on that topic uh council are there any additional comments or questions okay saying none we will move on to item number eight the city manager and city attorney's reports mr alvarez i believe that mr oh i i apologize go ahead council member i appreciate that mayor uh we also forgot to include the tear gas use uh and as well as uh i believe uh maybe sympathetic police officers that now to the national events that just occurred in dc i would like to also see that being included in any conversation that may be had as it was brought up by our constituents in regards to the the overall issue i believe that transparency sometimes brings forth a bit of uncomfortableness and that's perfectly fine one of the issues that was brought up is the the the vehicle and and i want to my hat to to uh councilman the swaltham this is something that was brought forth by the community and i would hope that my brothers and sisters out in the community understand that this is something that we asked for roslyn asked for and it's it's something that that empowers us to be able to say look we are here and we want to contribute to our community and i'm thankful to say that that the city listened sadly when it comes to the ethnic studies it might have been the lack of communication between our community and the city who might have had the best of intentions but maybe failed to include all of our community in that conversation what i would like to say to my community members is that we must try we must try even at the consequence of failure but hopefully through failure we understand that there might be a better way to conduct and provide something for the future it's it is trial and error this is something in the end that that i'm experiencing in the city of san rosa which is the the ability to be heard the ability to be listened to and and and move our ideas forward and in the future you do have a council member who can advocate on your behalf to make sure that your concerns are being heard i'm here please use me with that said uh let's work together i mean we have we have david we have uh michael uh gordo one part of all the council those are great leaders in our community those are definitely individuals that that have stepped forward and i think they should be applauded and and and supported in in their in their in their in their plight to be represented and have representation at the table uh hopefully this is this vehicle is something that can drive that forward told me i heard that you're in the hospital uh please recuperate soon and hope you see talk to you guys soon thank you by the vice mayor so thank i would like to thank everyone for their comments and just to say uh that i i do hear you i do hear the concerns what i one of the the things i hear uh most and there are a lot of concerns is that we are trying to restructure and rebuild a house without looking at the foundation and there are so many things that we need to work on before we get to programs and things like this to rebuild um our relationship with pd and law enforcement and so um that was my takeaway from it that we have a lot of things that we need to definitely work on and proceed with before we start integrating programs with our children who are getting uh mixed messages and you are definitely heard um i think the the mayor hears you and i'm actually confident and excited to see where the new council will take things and uh we we hear you guys loud and clear and thank you so much for for calling in and expressing your concerns all right thank you vice mayor uh we'll go on to city manager and city attorney reports city manager doesn't have anything a report but i do believe the city attorney does and may involve um uh assistant city manager jason uh yes uh good evening uh council members uh i do have two items that i want to report out on uh one that will be requesting the second will be requesting some actions by the council uh but first i wanted to loop back um last week a question was raised as to uh the steps that would be required to realign the seven uh districts of the community advisory board cab uh such that those seven districts would mirror the seven districts of the council so i did confirm that the council itself has the authority to make that realignment should it so desire um i looked back at the city charter section 10 does establish uh the the cab different terminology but establishes the cab outlines the cab's responsibilities but then simply requires that there be between seven and fourteen districts uh and the charter does not define uh define those districts or set any boundaries the charter does require that any representatives from those districts reside in those districts for the duration uh that they are on the board so instead the charter expressly delegates to the city council the authority to draw the district boundaries and it expressly allows that mapping to be done uh by resolution so alignment uh realignment of the cab districts is uh within your authority and in your hands the second item uh is a request from staff that a an additional closed session item be added to tonight's agenda it is the director of transportation and public works uh and our real estate manager have requested that the council make the findings that are necessary under the brown act to add a closed session item uh staff the the the item concerns a particular real estate uh that the uh the director and the real estate manager i'm sorry the assistant city manager um jason nut and our real estate manager uh jill scott um they were recently made aware of a property located at 2437 limitus avenue assessors parcel 180-050-009 that that property has recently been listed uh just listed per sale the property in its current state is a key barrier uh to the future future evacuation route improvements for the fountain grove and hidden valley neighborhoods so based on uh discussions between the assistant city manager and the real estate manager they have concluded that the housing market is currently very strong and that the property may not be available at the council's next regular meeting on january 26th so they are requesting that the council make the findings required under the brown act uh uh to be able to hear it hear that tonight the finding that is required um is uh that quote there is a need to take immediate action and that the need for action came to the attention of the local agency subsequent to the agenda uh being posted uh and it requires a two-thirds vote of the council members uh that are present if you make that finding uh then we will place it on the agenda um and uh it would be heard under uh item 18 on our current agenda so um to uh clarify the item uh that is being requested to place on the agenda is a conference with real property negotiators it would be held in closed session under government code section 54956.8 the property again is is 2437 let me just avenue san rosa apn 180-050-009 the agency negotiators negotiator is would be jill scott our real property negotiator and the negotiating parties are falahi pandora represented by century 21 and what would be under negotiation is price in terms of payment so we would ask that the council consider staff's request to place uh to take this item up even though it is off agenda in because in in in in compliance with the brown act um so those are the two items and again if the council votes uh to place this on our agenda tonight even though it was not on our published agenda uh as a friday then we will uh take that up as item 18 and we would hear public comment on the substance of that item at that time um clearly before the council could take action on whether to consider the item you'll need to take public uh comment on that as well happy to answer any questions so rather convoluted all right thank you madam city attorney uh i will start with the easier one which is the the cab districts and without objection from the council i will assign that as a conversation topic during our goal setting which is upcoming for us to determine what to do with that item with the second item i will entertain a motion from the council on staff's request to add item 18 to our agenda to discuss this potential property and i do want to remind you that you'll want to take public comment i will yes if there are any questions from from the council mr may i be more than happy to make that motion to add item 18 closed session item regarding a real estate issue at 24 37 limitus i'll second that okay with that we'll go to public comment is there any public comment on this item right so you know hands i'll bring it back for a vote adam clark if you want to call the roll and i would ask that you clarify that you are making the finding that there is a need to take immediate action and that the need for action came to the attention of the local agency subsequent to the agenda being posted again it came to the attention of our assistant city manager and the real estate manager just this weekend i think i heard that in tom's original motion okay great thank you okay council member tidbits hi council member schwedhelm hi council member council member soror's absent council member fleming hi council member alvarez vice mayor rogers hi mayor rogers hi that motion passes with six eyes okay thank you we will take that item up as item 18 and we'll do public comment at the beginning of it before we go back into our deliberations with that do we have any statements of abstentia from council members seeing none we will go on to our council member reports and just for the public we'll take a five minute break at the end of the council member reports but then we'll come back and finish the remainder of our meeting after that council who wants to start council member tidbits thank you mayor shon i was hoping that we could have an update on some of the homeless encampment issues that are going on around town and when the community can expect some action relating to those i'm not prepared to give that update personally tonight but i will make sure that staff gets an update out tomorrow thank you well can we actually shon would it be possible to do it publicly so that the community is aware and it's not just us getting emails um we'll provide an update and we'll we'll get something in the upcoming issue of city connections as well okay thank you council member uh madame vice mayor you're muted sorry i thought i pressed it i'm happy to make two appointments tonight first i would like to appoint an bomb gardener to the art and public places committee and margaret finn to the bicycle and pedestrian advisory board i would also like to encourage those that may be interested to send an applications or call and ask questions the goal of the council is to continue to diversify appointees so it's imperative that community members from all districts and backgrounds and in applications thank you okay council member fleming sounds like your puppy agrees um is that in the background um so i wanted to um take this opportunity to you know strongly condemn that the um the white supremacist riots that occurred last week in our nation's capital and also suggest that um that we as a nation take this very seriously and that people hopefully stay safe going forward um but that to my mind this this is an example of of terrorism i know that that i'm afraid that uh just on my block um a friend a jewish friend had his car vandalized today um he had jewish bumper stickers on it it was very clearly a directed um response to that and i i sent him to the police department but this kind of thing you know is really scary and dangerous and i i just want to express my condemnation of it and and those who participate in it so thank you council member alvarez uh yes i would like to announce that i'm putting mark walsh to the board of public utilities and uh secondly uh council member fleming very true and i concur fully uh it is trying times that we're seeing in our nation and we must be more unified than ever and uh it's what's ultimately going to get us through is the compassion and the understanding for one another and and and thank you for bringing that up thank you council member and i do also want to echo and thank both council members for their comments uh i think as many of you know i had the pleasure of serving in sacramento's capital for a number of years and i know that i'm not the only person here on this council that was uh shocked uh to see some of those things that happened uh last wednesday in dc uh without objection from the council uh in understanding that because we have not had much time to agendize uh a full discussion on this uh i will be sending a letter tomorrow uh to our congressional partners congressman huffman and congressman thompson in support of their efforts uh to call for the resignation of the president seek the 25th amendment being invoked or seeking impeachment of him uh to end his term sooner rather than later in the best interest of our community and in the safety of our community i'll be circulating this letter to council members tonight and any council member who would like to sign on to the letter with me uh can do so and we'll be delivering that to our partners uh tomorrow again not something that that we take lightly but i think what we saw on wednesday shows that our community will be better off by standing together uh to say that that was unacceptable that we do not condone white supremacy that there will be a peaceful transition of power within our community uh and that san rosa is going to stand for those principles upon which our our democracy was founded and with that uh we will take a five minute break and then we'll be coming back here at the council meeting still looking for a fourth council member to turn off their camera and then we'll get started again there we go council member madam city clerk if you please call the roll yes council member tidbits here council member schwethelm here council member fleming here council member alvarez president vice mayor rogers president mayor rogers here at the record show that all council members are present with the exception of council member soyer great thank you so much so council we will continue on uh in our uh item 10 item 10.2 which is the appointment uh the instruction from the council to the mayor on how to vote on matters before the mayors and council members association city selection committee for a number of different positions um madam city clerk is there a presentation or did you want to explain what this process looks like well the um city has received and the council members should members should have received the uh letters of interest that were submitted by uh the various city council members in the different cities on um which um board they would like to either be appointed to or reappointed to continue to serve and so I can read who has submitted those letters of interest in which board they are interested in being appointed to if you want me to yeah let's read through item 10.2.1 uh then I will take public comment on the item and then bring it back to the council for us to walk through them and give direction and then we'll come back and we'll do 10.2.2 uh again with public comment and then coming back to council for a direction okay so 10.2.1 we have the city selection chair to fill the expiring term of mayor dominick um football east term it's a one-year term and um number two the city selection vice chair to fill the expiring term of mayor augustine walter from cloverdale and that's a one-year term um I don't think any um there have not been letters of interest received for that but item three the bay area air quality management district there's one position to fill the expired term of chorisa barrett and of petaluma it's a two-year term and a letter of interest was received from chorisa barrett and petaluma item four is a golden gate bridge highway and transportation district appointment is made by the board of supervisors one position to fill the expired term of jenna belforte of roner park it's a two-year term and letters of interest were received from juror judice of roner park and dominick fo poli of winzer number five is local agency formation commission one position to fill the expired term of chorisa barrett of petaluma it's a two-year term and a letter of interest was received from mark landman of katari number six is the metropolitan transportation commission one position to fill the vacated term of jake mckinsey of roner park the vacated term expires in february 2023 and the city selection committee submits three names and the appointment is made by the board of supervisors letters of interest received were from nisa hinton of sabastopol mike healy of petaluma brian barnacle of petaluma and victoria flaming of sanarosa number seven is the remote access network aran board one position it's an unspecified term but must be filled by a mayor there were no letters of interest received and then number eight sonoma county oversight board one position an alternate to fill a vacated term of david cook of sonoma it's an unspecified term and no letters of interest were received and it is also recommended that if late nominations are received or the city selection committee or mayors and council members association board recommends alternates that the city council can authorize the mayor or his or her designee the authority to vote on these late nominations or recommendations at the city selection committee meeting or the mayors and council members association meeting i appreciate that stephanie so what i'll do first and foremost is that ladder step i will see if there is a motion from from the council on how you would like me to proceed during these conversations in the event that a late nomination comes up or that we have to fill a seat and that the council has not yet given me direction on so i guess what i'm seeking is authorization from the council to vote in the best interest of santa rosa without having to uh abstain from a vote because we have not received direction council members what helm that's just what i was going to say i've total trust and confidence you do your homework you're going to make the decision that's in the best interest of the city of santa rosa so i would um very supportive of you making that decision should they be uh put before you prior to going to the entire block body okay uh and actually i i apologize i do have to do public comment i forgot first before we do the motion so hold on to that for a second council member uh i'll see if there is any public comment any hands raised uh from attendees seeing none were there any voicemail comments no sir okay great uh i'll bring it on back then uh so council member uh should what helm with your motion is there a second i second second by councilwoman fleming i madame clerk could you please call the roll councilmember tidbits hi councilmember schwethelm hi councilmember fleming hi councilmember alvarez hi vice mayor rogers hi mayor rogers hi that motion passes with six eyes with councilmember soyer absent and uh that will bring us to uh item number three on this section the bay area quality management district there is one letter of interest can i entertain a motion from the council i um i nominate um the interested party mayor barrett of pedaluma uh to receive the support of santa rosa second okay motion in a second madame clerk call the roll councilmember tidbits hi councilmember schwethelm hi councilmember fleming i councilmember alvarez hi vice mayor rogers hi mayor rogers hi that motion passes with six eyes thank you so mayor barrett will get the support from the city of santa rosa moving on to item four the golden gate bridge highway and transportation district two letters of interest received uh from the mayor of runner park and the mayor of winzer i will entertain a motion from the council i would make a motion nominating the mayor from winzer dominick fa poli to fill that long gate bridge position i second that okay are there any additional nominations on this item yeah i'll move to uh support to r and god's from runner park are there any there's a second on the item okay so we will take the madame city attorney do we take the nomination for the mayor from runner park first or do we do the original from winzer no you'll take the uh you'll take the first motion first okay so we will uh call the roll on the motion to support uh dominick fa poli from winzer for this seat councilmember tidbits may councilmember i'm sorry can i get a point of clarification uh Stephanie i'm sorry to interrupt um i seconded gerard are we doing two positions for golden gate we're taking the first nomination that um councilmember schwedhelm made okay so in that case yeah there's only one position up thanks for the clarification and yes councilmember schwedhelm hi councilmember fleming no councilmember alvarez hi vice mayor rogers nay mayor rogers day okay that motion fails with four nays okay so we'll entertain the second motion just to support the mayor from runner park go ahead call the roll okay and just so that i have that that motion was made by vice mayor fleming i mean sorry by councilmember fleming and seconded by councilmember tidbits correct okay thank you councilmember tidbits councilmember schwedhelm hi councilmember fleming hi councilmember alvarez okay vice mayor rogers hi mayor rogers hi that motion passes with six eyes okay the mayor from runner park will have santa rosa's support going on to lafko one letter received by councilman mark landman from katati one position is up does anybody have a nomination i'll nominate uh the mayor of katati markland into the position is there a second i'll second it all right let's go ahead call the roll councilmember tidbits uh councilmember schwedhelm hi councilmember fleming hi councilmember alvarez hi vice mayor rogers vice mayor rogers hi mayor rogers hi that motion passes with six eyes okay great moving on to item number six metropolitan transportation commission as was mentioned uh we as council members send three names to the board of supervisors and then the board of supervisors selects amongst those three so i'll open it up and see if there is a motion to be made councilmember tidbits uh i move that we send the following names fleming barnacle and hinting is there a second for that motion all second okay are there any other nominations okay madame city clerk please call the roll councilmember tidbits hi councilmember schwedhelm hi councilmember fleming hi councilmember alvarez hi vice mayor rogers hi mayor rogers hi that motion passes with six eyes great so that finishes off item 10.2.1 uh let's go to item 10.2.2 if you want to read through the the positions and the nominations then i will take public comment okay i'm number one the association of bay area government's executive board there are two positions to fill to fill vacated terms of jake mckinsey of ronard park and michael carnaucci of sabastopol the terms would expire in june of 2021 letters of interest received were from susan adams of ronard park denis po pooskay of petaluma and ariel pally of hildsburg number two is the north bay division of the league of california cities one position for an alternate to be filled by the expired term of john soyer expired in february 2021 term expires two years from the appointment and one letter of interest received from john soyer of san erosa number three is the sinoma county agricultural preservation and open space district citizens advisory committee there are three positions to fill the vacated terms of john del oso of catati the gold of hildsburg and the expired term of nisa hinton of sabastopol terms expire two years from appointment and letters of interest were received from nisa hinton of sabastopol brian barnacle of petaluma ariel cali of hildsburg and skyler palacios of hildsburg number four is sinoma marine area rail transit commission one position to fill a vacated term of joe naiocas of hildsburg one letter of interest received was from melanie bagby of cloverdale and then number five is the smart non-scta member one position to be filled to fill the expired term of debra fudge from winzer it's a four-year fixed term and the letter was received from debra fudge okay thank you we'll go to public comment on this item is there any live public comment on item 10.2.2 seeing none i will bring it back to the council are were there any voicemail comments there were none okay uh council we have first uh for abag we have two positions and three letters received i'll entertain a nomination councilwoman fleming yep um i'll move uh jenice posake and ariel kelly okay are there any additional nominations councilmember tidbits thank you i'll nominate susan adams and ariel kelly i'll second that okay are there any additional nominations but madame city attorney should we take the two motions as they came or should we split it into each individual since there are two seats and and three three opportunities or excuse me three individuals and two opportunities i would take the the two motions in order that they were made okay so first the council will vote to support councilmember posake and in council councilmember kelly uh for the two positions is there any discussion on the item from council okay let's call the roll councilmember tidbits i'm sorry is that a no correct thank you councilmember schwedhelm no councilmember fleming aye councilmember alvarez aye vice mayor rogers aye mayor rogers no okay that that motion fails with the tie vote okay uh so the second motion was for susan adams and ariel kelly let's call the roll um can you that was moved by it was uh tidbits and schwedhelm tidbits and schwedhelm thank you councilmember tidbits yeah councilmember schwedhelm aye councilmember fleming no councilmember alvarez aye vice mayor rogers oh next mayor rogers aye that motion passes with four eyes council member alvarez i'm sorry councilmember fleming and vice mayor rogers voting no okay moving on to item number two there's one seat up for a north bay division of the league of california cities uh we've received one letter and that's from councilmember soyer um i think he's new in san aroza uh i'll entertain a motion from the council i'll make a motion i heard the motion from the vice mayor and second from councilmember alvarez are there any other motions to be made right let's call the roll right i think we should have some some debate on the matter first no i mean if he's not here to defend himself that both feels like it would be wrong and also appropriate councilmember tidbits yes councilmember schwedhelm aye councilmember fleming aye councilmember alvarez aye vice mayor rogers yes mayor rogers aye that motion passes with six eyes okay moving on to number three uh we have three positions we have four candidates up and i will entertain a motion from the council i'll make the motion i'll make the motion that we support in uh kelly i'll ask you second i have a second from tidbits uh are there any other motions out there okay let's go ahead call the roll councilmember tidbits yes councilmember schwedhelm aye councilmember fleming aye councilmember alvarez aye vice mayor rogers aye mayor rogers aye that motion passes with six eyes okay number four uh for the smart board two-year term there's one letter of interest from councilwoman bagby go ahead councilmember tidbits uh moving we recommend uh nominate melody second okay motion by tidbits second by fleming any other nominations all right let's call the roll councilmember tidbits aye councilmember schwedhelm aye councilmember fleming aye councilmember alvarez aye vice mayor rogers aye mayor rogers aye that motion passes with six eyes and mercifully we come to our last one which is the uh non scta member for smart with one letter of interest from deborah fudge we'll make a motion we recommend deborah fudge for the smart non scta member second so moved by schwedhelm second from the vice mayor are there any other nominations cool let's do the roll councilmember tidbits councilmember schwedhelm aye councilmember fleming aye councilmember alvarez aye vice mayor rogers aye mayor rogers aye that motion passes with six eyes thank you council i have my direction for the selection committee meeting with that we have no approval of minutes mr city manager item 12 the consent calendar yes um item 12.1 resolution authorization to amend general services agreement f 001321 league sports officials item 12.2 resolution relinquishments of portions of third street and college avenue to caltrans revised documents item 12.3 resolution bid award purchase order for seven twos twenty twenty one ford f 350 class three extended cab chat cabs and chassis with nine fit foot utility body tool drawers and material racks item 12.4 resolution correction for of clerical area and administrative agreement approved by res 2020-161 for collection of assessment of sonoma county tourism business improvement area councilor there any questions on the consent calendar i'm not seeing any so i will go to public comment is there anyone who'd like to make live public comment on tonight's consent calendar i see one hand uh oh i think it disappeared i'll give one more second for them to come up let's go ahead and see if there are any voicemail comments and then i'll come back to live if the gentleman puts his hands back up every no voicemail okay voice message public comments received on consent right and i don't see the hand coming back up uh so i take that that we might see that in public comment for non-agenda items but for now i will bring this back to the council uh madame vice mayor do you want to make the motion i move items 12.1 through 12.4 and wait for the reading of the text motion by the vice mayor second by councilmember tidbits let's go ahead and vote councilmember tidbits all right councilmember schwenhelm hi councilmember fleming hi councilmember alvarez hi vice mayor rogers hi mayor rogers hi that motion passes with six eyes okay we'll move on to public comment for non-agenda items again for the public if you're interested in speaking go ahead and hit the raise hand feature on zoom uh i see one hand so far let's go to michael and then he'll be followed by nancy michael go ahead and unmute can you hear me yes indeed you got me yep there you go you'll have three minutes go ahead thank you very much mayor rogers councilmembers city manager mcglenn first i'd like to support your letter regarding the actions in washington the hearings are continuing at this hour please provide a way for us citizens to join you in your letter so tonight i'm here i want to bring to your attention an important matter regarding emergency planning we remember this council and our board of supervisors saying in late 2017 that never again will we be so unprepared for an emergency communication preparations are part of emergency planning there really two parts to to communications from the city to the citizens and then from the citizens back to the city when power goes out when cell phones fail when landline dial tones go silent the city was prepared it had a program where the citizens could go to fire stations we authorized screened representatives with direct radio links to the city emergency operations center citizen messages could get through requests for medical rescue and fire assistance could get through in december the city suddenly disbanded that citizen of city communications link there's certainly no problem dropping this program in favor of a new better program but the city has abandoned this link without any replacement program or even without any thought out plan from tonight's meeting we know that the water department cannot implement emergency communication plans without the council's authorization yet this this significant emergency communications program can get eliminated without any public process you have a copy of a white paper based on my discussions with the fire department representative he has had the opportunity to review it he found no corrections no additions no amplifications which should be included today what are citizens to do line up that the homes of our city council members rig radios to directly use the red com communications frequency drive to the city manager's office as elected as our elected representatives i ask you not to leave us high and dry in a communications emergency for the time being i think you'll agree the city's emergency preparedness is now in a weaker state than it was before the tubs fire of 2017 uh mike fauner port in west santa rosa thank you mike next we'll go to nancy hi can you hear me there you go okay thank you thank you for the opportunity to address the city council meeting tonight my name is nancy alcott and i'm the owner and executive director of lattice educational services a non-public school in santa rosa serving children with disabilities and providing child care for two to sixth grade year old children i'm speaking tonight on behalf of our children and families and employees and asking for your help and a growing safety concern regarding the homeless encampment surrounding our school campus on industrial drive and center drive in november i was told that the encampment would be removed by mid january but it continues to grow and now we're told that there's nothing they can do at this point due to the pandemic daily we gather multiple needles on our playground and our walkways to the campus and to our classrooms we have people defecating and urinating on campus and our staff have to pick up human feces before children arrive we have people high on some substances yelling screaming profanity and fighting outside our campus where our children are playing we have found bullets on our playground one of the trailers on industrial drive is a drug dealer in a prostitute operation and has frequent visitors inside and outside the trailer i have personally been verbally threatened to be punched in the face and have had someone pounding on the front door to my office when working in the morning parents are concerned and are considering removing their children from our school we now keep the classroom building locked down all day long this is an extremely unsafe situation our staff despite our staff completing daily scans and checks on our campus for needles and feces we're afraid that one of our children will find a needle a needle that we missed and pick it up and get hurt i'm also afraid for our employees our children or family members who may get hurt by someone who is high on drugs and hallucinating i am requesting that the council members drive by the area if they haven't been there yet and see what we are dealing with on a daily basis i encourage you to have the homeless services take action immediately well i know that they're struggling with dealing with this pandemic so are we with trying to keep a business running and keeping our children safe we can't afford to lose any of our enrollment or to not be able to provide a safe environment for our children thank you very much for your time and considering taking action thank you nancy seeing no other public comments do we have any voicemail recordings for public comment there were no voicemail for public comments received mayor oh i'm sorry there was one my apologies okay it's all good item 13 public comment non-agenda items going to it from roseland there are some residents of hughes avenue who would like to thank you for the improvement of the roadway the full completion of hughes avenue which did not occur until after someone apparently from you folks put the word in to get it done they're happy about that just down the street macmillan avenue has now become beat up and burbank it's got problems over on barham that's the worst beat up barham avenue is a road kill for cars it's breaking people's front ends with all those potholes and the unfortunate thing is the man who was developing a project right there on the corner got approvals because he was putting in affordable housing units then from discussions that have been had it's been said that the city took away two of those affordable units and forced him to cut into his property to widen that avenue in front on the western side of the property at the corner of barham and dotton a big cut off of his property supposedly so bikes could go along there and the thing is very few people ride bikes on that avenue because it is such a dangerous road with so many cars parked on the sides and fast traffic i don't believe any of you have ever ridden a bicycle along that road you should try it would have been better to keep the affordable housing units that's what you claim you always want but it never seems to happen really unless somebody's making big bucks off the project the dilemma that we face is most folks are not in a switch over to riding bicycles maybe some of you folks but the general family people in roseland especially they're upgrading to suv because they're carrying their kids and not many people around bikes except all those bombs and hobos over there that have come over to rip off the neighborhoods that's really problematic all those bike thieves all the stuff that's going on that's crazy perhaps you could save us from them by building more affordable housing unless of these bike lanes and i'm a bicyclist i'm a guy that rides my bike almost all the days that are dry so i walk my talk and i think that it's really important that you folks really help us to repair the roads with the money that the county gave you fix barham avenue per bank avenue macman avenue south avenue there's one that's beat up too good new year to you concludes the voice message public comments thank you mayor okay so we will keep moving through we have no report items no public hearings no written communication the only thing left on our agenda is the newly added closed session for item 18 uh mr city manager from a practical uh application do council members join the previous closed session zoom from earlier today or do they have i will turn it over to i will turn it over to stuffy williams to explain the next steps i have emailed the council the credentials for the new closed session you should have with the link so you should have that in your email right now okay great then council i will release sorry go ahead and sue and i wanted to clarify also that we will keep this zoom meeting open so that after we're done a closed session we can step back out into this open session to report out on the closed session and do we take public comment for the closed session in this window yes okay then i will go ahead and open up public comment for our newly added item 18 which is the negotiation with our team on property as was added earlier tonight i'm not seeing any hands so i will recess us into a closed session uh council i'll see you in there in a couple of minutes all right council i'm just looking for one more person uh then we'll have a quorum can reconvene and give a report out and chris our colleagues know they've got to come back at least one of them yeah i i just messaged one to make sure that they know first one who comes back gets a prize we have the uh the vice mayor is trying to join all right looks like we have a quorum uh madame sydney clerk can you call the roll council member tidbits council member schwedhelm here council member fleming here council member alvarez council member sorry vice mayor rogers is it mayor rogers here let the records show that all council members are present with the exception of council member tidbits council member soyer and council member alvarez great madame city attorney do you want to give a brief report out on closed session uh yes council met in closed session on item 18 now which was a newly added added item um conference with real property negotiators regarding property located 2437 lamitas avenue san rosa and the council gave direction to its real estate negotiator thank you okay thank you uh council that's the last thing on our agenda so with that we are officially adjourned adjourned bye everybody thank you all right