 All right, Chair Pitts, looks like we've tested everyone's mic and we can see them, so you are good to go. Begin the meeting now. Yes, thank you. Great. Welcome everyone, board members and members of the public. Thank you for joining us today. My name is Logan Pitts, the Chair of the Board of Community Services and joining us today, we also have Vice Chair, Kerry Griffin, board members Carol Quant, Carolina Spence, Steve Spillman and Guido Boca Leone. Thank you everyone for joining us today. I don't think Madonna is with us unless I missed her. Looking like she's absent, okay. We also have our host today, that is Allison Rossin and Jackie Haman from the city. The host will coordinate comments from the public and assist during the meeting and take any notes for follow-up needs. Panelists and presenters, please silence your cell phones and keep microphones muted if not speaking. Members of the public joining this meeting will have webcams off and microphones muted. If you're phoning in to join the meeting and you choose to speak during public comment, for privacy concerns, we'll rename you to caller and only show the last four digits of your number. And the city of Santa Rosa is committed to providing a safe and inclusive environment free from disruption and will not tolerate hateful speech or actions. Everyone is expected to participate respectfully or if necessary, the meeting will end immediately. Let's be nice to each other. Hosts, will you please explain how public comments will be heard at today's meeting? Thank you, Chair Pitt. At each agenda item, the item will be presented. The chair will ask for board comments or questions and then at the appropriate time, open the floor for public comments. The host will lower all hands until the public comment item is open. Once the chair has called for public comment, the chair will ask the public to raise their hand if they wish to speak on the specific agenda item. Those joining by phone may dial star nine to raise your hand. The host will then call on those who have raised their hand. Public comment is limited to three minutes and a curfew timer will appear on the screen. Email public comments received by the deadline have been distributed to the board of community services members and uploaded to the agenda prior to the start of today's meeting. Emails received will not be read into the record. Thank you. With that, I call this March 23rd, 2022, meeting of the board of community services to order at 4.05 p.m. And pursuant to government code section 45953E and the recommendation of the health officer of the County of Sonoma, board of community services members will be participating in today's meeting via Zoom. Board members and staff are participating from our remote locations and we are practicing appropriate social distancing. Members of the public may view and listen to the meeting as noted on the city's website and on the agenda. Host, may we have a roll call, please. Please respond when I call your name, chair Pitt. Yes. Vice chair Griffin. Here. Board member Spillman. Yes. Board member Kwant. Here. Board member Cruz. Board member Spence. Here. Board member Bocchlioni. Here. Let the record reflect that six board members are present with the exception of board member Cruz. Thank you. I'd like now to go to agenda item three and open the floor for public comments on non-agenda items. This is the time when anyone may address the board on matters not listed on the agenda but are within the subject matter of our jurisdiction. Host, do we have any public comments? Yes. Thank you. Please call the first speaker. Speaker John W, you may speak now. Thank you. I didn't realize only the W was there. My name is John Walsh, WALSH. I reside at 2037 Orchard Street here in Santa Rosa. And I want to speak to a non, or making an non-agenda appearance on the matter of the refurbishing at Fremont Park. The survey, as I understand it, has recently been extended to gather public input as to what our citizens would like to see in the way of improvements to the park. I just wanted to point out that it's my opinion and that of a number of other folks that I've talked to on this matter is that it's deeply flawed. There was absolutely no mention of refurbishing the fountain, the yew trees, or any of the other specific elements that currently exist in the park. The park has a very old historical heritage to it. And it was just absolutely left out of the survey. And so what I would like to ask the board to do and the staff perhaps is to redirect the consultant or architect that has been retained for this matter to redraw, redraft the survey and include elements that are currently in the park refurbishing or repairing the fountain and so on. I don't know what happened, but that certainly just seems to me a gross oversight. And I'd ask the board to direct staff to redo that survey. So thank you in advance for your consideration of this matter. And I will sign off now. Thank you. Thank you for your comment. We have no further comments. Thank you, host. Our next item is item four, the approval of minutes. Are there any edits or corrections to the minutes from February 23rd? Carol, go ahead. There's one, these are the draft minutes. I don't know if we got finished ones, but we have at least on my copy two separate ending times, one at 533 and one at 610. I don't know if this is a boilerplate and one just didn't get deleted. I was also wondering if the minutes have gotten a little leaner in the last year, that they don't seem to have a lot of information. And I don't know if that's because all of the meetings are currently recorded, which is better documentation or if it's just a staff change. Thank you. And so thank you, Board Member Quant. We did have an update to the minutes. So we had, it was very light originally. We had an update to the minutes to include additional information and clarification. So they were a draft. I'm gonna check in with our host to see if we're able to get that posted. The host Ross and the safety are able to get the information reposted. Do we need to hold off on that approval then, Jen, until the next meeting? Let's see if we got, if we were able to get the update prior to this meeting. The update was re-sent out to the board members. I believe yesterday they got re-sent out. My apologies for downloading the wrong copy. It's okay. It happened. So the updated minutes are more like what you're used to seeing, lots of information in there and public comments as well. And so... For some reason, the link in that agenda sent out yesterday is not working for me right now. I feel like it was working like 10 minutes ago, but... We can hold off and adopt them at the next meeting. If that would be better. Okay. Everyone has a chance to read them and make sure it's, you know, there's nothing hyper-critical in there. We should just wait so that everyone has a chance. Yep. No rush to approve minutes. So we will make sure those are correct and work on that at the next meeting. Thank you, Carol, for flagging that. Any other edits or corrections to the February minutes? All right, seeing no other ones, we will table that for now and come back to that. Agenda item five, upcoming events and reports on accomplished events, Deputy Director Santos, please provide your report. Thank you, Chair Pitts. And if you've looked at your upcoming events and accomplishments, we have a lot of information on there. I just wanted to update the board on the upcoming event for South Davis Neighborhood Park. We're gonna start the process of engaging with the community about replacing the playgrounds there, but also asking the community at the same time. Is there anything else we should be looking at for future improvements there at that same time? So that's exciting. And since it's tomorrow, I wanted to make sure I made that announcement. But there's also lots of other exciting, really cool upcoming things since we are kind of slowly drifting out of the pandemic restrictions. You can see a lot of things going on with recreation and parks, there's just lots of things going on. And as far as accomplishments, just a reminder that the soccer season has started and we have a bunch of permits. We have 12 organizations and clubs signed up. 800 adult players, 2000 youth players. This is one of our most sought after spaces is soccer and baseball fields in the city by far, as far as members and only just barely probably beating out pickleball depending on who you ask and what day you ask. But those are some of the most popular sports fields we had. So I wanted to give that reminder to the board and definitely check out the accomplishments and upcoming events. There's a lot of information on it. That's the end of my report. Thank you, Jen. Any questions for Jen from the board? Terry. Thank you. Jen, I just wanted to say I so appreciate the hyperlinks in this document. It really, it's so helpful for me as a board member and I'm sure to members of the public that can access this information through our agendas to have direct links to the activities and all the different things going on. So I really appreciate that addition. That was it. Thank you. Appreciate it. Any other comments from the board? Okay. Thank you again, Jen. We'll move on to the next item, your director updates. All right. Thanks again, Chair Pence. I just have a few updates tonight. Just to take it a step back to February and a little reminder that we opened up Colvin Creek neighborhood park. If you haven't been there yet, feel free to stop by. It's brand new playground out there. It's really attracting a lot of attention and fun from the neighborhood. And an update that the bids for those management companies that are interested in managing the Benavali golf course are due tomorrow. And we had a good turnout at our mandatory bid walk of interested companies. So I'm very excited. I hope we get a lot of proposals to operate the golf course. The next step is that we'll go through the review committee for review, which includes a council member, staff members and a member of the golfing community. And they'll go through and review that, have interviews and then look for a recommendation to council in June for that. And then the Fremont master plan started a few months ago and we have extended the most latest recent survey till March 31st. And if needed, we can extend it again. It's one of many surveys to come to start that process with that community. We're anticipating that that process will probably take about a year or less, it takes a while to get all the comments, especially when you've got some really divergent views about what should be happening with the park. It takes some time to work with the community to see if we can find some common ground with that park. So that's been kicked off and we'll extend, we'll allow the extended to March 31st. And again, we'll extend it again if needed. And we anticipate many future surveys with this park. And also council recently approved the two fire damage, the two remaining parks fire recovery projects. It's the six fire damage parks, as well as the roadway recovery landscape project. So council approved the construction agreements this month and we are looking to go out to construction very soon with that. The public works engineering team will be managing the day-to-day process of the oversight of the construction for that. And those have been a long time coming. So I was really happy to see them get approved at council. We'll be improving most of the landscaping along Fountain Grove Parkway, as well as some of the roadway landscaping in the coffee park neighborhoods. And then the six fire damage parks are all, most of the parks up around Fountain Grove that were damaged, they had little bits of damage to each of them. So we combined them into one project for in-order expedited project. And so those should be coming up soon. One of the major pieces of replacement for the six fire damage parks is the playground replacement at Furbridge Park. So we're really looking forward to that process getting started. And we are still continuing with our budget process. It starts January-ish and it doesn't really end until council makes an approval. So staff are always busy working on the budget process. And I want to check one more thing. Just a reminder that Gabe Osborne is the public works director, acting director right now for three months. And then after that will be Joe Chavoni. Just a little reminder that I was hoping, he was hoping to attend tonight. So I'm hoping he can jump on at some point in the future and listen in. We're really excited to have Gabe on board, even if it's only for three months. So that is the end of my updates. Thank you, Jen. Any questions from the board? Carol. Jen, excuse me, if I missed this, I was trying to find myself in the agenda. The fire damage parks, are they being repaired with measure M money? Did you discuss that? No, I did not discuss that. So yeah, I can answer that though. Yes, some of the funds from measure M will be used to fund those. So it'll be used to fund the GAP fundings. We have FEMA funding slash Cal OES. We have some donations that are going towards some of the parks in Fountain Grove. And then whatever is remaining, the measure M funds will come and fill that gap. Council approved the first two years worth of funding, subtracting all the other expenses we had to be allocated towards that as we did. So we are in the process of doing that. The reason I ask is I for one, I'm always pleased when I'm driving down the freeway and I see your Caltrans dollars at work. I don't know if there's any thought of putting up your measure M dollars being applied to. Yes, on a county wide basis, we've had the discussion on whether or not to do that, but there is going, there are going to be, there's going to be a permanent sign at the park when it's done to say that your measure M funds were used at this park for the recovery. During construction, probably not, but after construction will be a permanent sign. Thank you. Any other questions from the board? Jen, I had one question. Are you able to provide an update on the plaque at Flat Rock Park? Sure, yes. I did have it on my list and provide about that. So thanks for the reminder. So in speaking with the city manager's office about Flat Rock, it's very similar to what I said last time, is that it really the concept of what to do with a plaque that may be somewhat, may be considered inappropriate is a discussion that's citywide. There's all kinds of discussions about signage and a variety of things throughout the city. So this project, while, you know, the discussion topic for us as originating parks, it will be traveling to the city manager's office and they will be deliberating on what our next steps should be. It will likely end up with our diversity equity and inclusion team for discovery. But as I have updates from the city manager's office on process, I'll be circling back to this board with those updates on whatever gets decided going forward. But meanwhile, it, you know, we're probably not gonna talk about it much more here. I'll go on to the city manager's office, but I will keep you all updated. Thank you for keeping us updated and for advancing that forward. Okay. We will now move on to our scheduled items unless there were any other questions. All right, scheduled items. So we have a new one. Agenda item seven is something that is new on our agenda. And we are gonna ask each board member every month to give a brief update and this is gonna be relevant to rec and parks. So we wanna keep this focused on something that is absolutely an intersection with rec and parks not tangential. Let's try to keep it positive. If you ever have a critique or complaint, Jen is always happy to take those directly. So let's try to keep this, keep it positive. And the other thing that I wanna do in this monthly agenda item is I'm gonna challenge all the board members to go to a new park every month and report back which park you went to. And if you didn't go to one, it's okay. You won't get your gold star, but I want everyone to discover new parks because we have a lot of them. So I'll kick it off this month. Normally I'd go last, but I'll just give an example this month of what I'm hoping to see from folks. So what I did this month related to rec and parks was went to another park a month cleanup at Rincon Valley Community Park. It was great to get out there and help. I've helped plant one tree. I can't take too much credit there. I think we had 26 trees planted there. I remember Carol, you asked at the end of the day. And I got to redo the baseball diamond there. So put some dirt down. I didn't think we'd be able to finish that, but many hands makes light work. So we got that done. So that's my example of my update for the month. And then the other thing I'll say my new parks that I went to, I went to two new parks this month. I went to Nagasawa Park, which I'd never really been to. That's a beautiful park. It's got a nice lake. Might take the kayak out there next time. And I also went to Harvest Park off of Santa Rosa Avenue and my dog very much enjoyed the dog park there. So those, that is my board member update. And I'm gonna call on folks. And if you don't have an update, that's okay. But I really again would encourage everyone to try to visit a new park at the least. So we'll go first to our vice chair. Terry, do you have an update this month? I do actually. I also attended the Arbor Day celebration at Rankin Valley Community Park, which was wonderful. I was so impressed with the turnout and with the park staff that attended. I ended up painting benches, which was great, a great workout. I think I ended up doing about half a dozen benches. An interesting thing that I encountered while there in standing in line and talking to a couple of young women that were behind me, they traveled all the way from the East Bay to participate in that event. They have no connection really to Santa Rosa other than they happened to see the event. I neglected to ask how, but it was a beautiful day and they love trees and they decided, let's drive up to Santa Rosa and participate in this event and have lunch. So that was really fun to get to meet those folks. And so in terms of new parks, I didn't attend a new park this month, but I did attend a new park a couple of months ago, Dutch floor in conjunction with our agenda item. And what a lovely, lovely neighborhood park. So I appreciate your suggestion that we get out and see more of these parks. It's really eye-opening. So thank you. Great, that was perfect, Terry. Good job. We will go to Carolina next. You have an update. Oh, we can't hear you Carolina. We'd love to though. Can I slip in the Merritt Awards? The Merritt Awards is kind of related. It's a kind of a sister of the park and rec. We are meeting. We're starting to meet on April the 4th. I will keep you all. That will be part of my report outs. I'll do parks, but I'm going to remind you all about the Merritt Awards and look around your neighborhood. And this is last year. So don't pay attention to the printing on it. Pay attention to people in your neighborhood or helping beautify the community because it's a wonderful award. And don't worry, I won't let you miss it. I'll remind you on a monthly basis about it. And I'm sorry I didn't buy. I love the idea of going to visit parks. And I have a couple of ones and I'm just going to go back and see because I love them so much. So thank you for it. That works too. If you just want to talk about your favorite park, that's great. And as long as you're on the Merritt Awards, you're free from all challenges. So thank you for your work on that. We'll go, yeah, we'll go next to Guido. Do you have an update Guido? Make sure you're unmuted there so we can hear you loud and clear. I know I don't exactly, but I'm concerned about a couple of items at the Southwest Community Park on Hearn Avenue, which is close to me. And I've had some people there. That place is packed all the time. And I've had some parents there that were a little bit concerned about more playground equipment for the little children. And that's the only thing that I wanted to bring up, but because there's plenty of thing for the adults there, but he said they just didn't have enough for little kids to be playing. That's great. Thank you for that update. That's a well-loved park indeed. Steve, do you have an update? Yeah, so I visited all of the parks last fall that are in district three, but it was on a weekend and I had an opportunity to just chat with people who weren't using the park, but I've started going back after work hours during the week to see if I can find different people who may not have the opportunity to go during the week or during the weekend. I also met with our new council member, McDonald, and we planted the seed of chatting in the future about potential goals that she might have for Rexon Park and for her district. And I'm also continuing to pursue two property owners who have voiced interest in donating land to the city for open space. And I will talk to, I talked briefly, exchange an email with Jen on that a couple of months ago, slow process, but who knows how it might turn out. We might be able to add something to the inventory of parks and open space at no cost. Wonderful. Thanks for the update, Steve. And Carol, we'd love to hear your update. So the new park I visited was the one in Rankin Valley for Arbor Day. I grew up in Rankin Valley. That park was probably an open field when I went to Rankin Valley Junior High School. So it was mind blowing to see how much the neighborhood has grown up. An unexpected shout out. I already told him this, but aside from the turnout because there were over 100 people there, I got to spend some time with Elio. Sorry, Elio, I'm gonna call you out. I know Elio from our time together at the rural cemetery. So I was going to say my goodbyes and he was engaged with a woman who had a specific concern. And Elio was so incredibly professional and personal and just a really good representative of the city of Santa Rosa and the parks department. I left the conversation with, wow, why is this woman saying this wasn't very well advertised when there were placards everywhere and it was in the guide, but she didn't know. And Elio just handled it with much more grace than I would have. So I called him up the next Monday morning and a lot of people don't like getting phone calls from Troquan on Monday morning. I think I surprised Elio when I just told him what a great job he did. So that was my new park. Today I drove by South Davis for the second time. What a challenging opportunity that parcel is. And I look forward to hearing from the community tomorrow night at the virtual setting. Rink and I got to meet Diana McDonald and took some pictures of her and interacted and that was a lot of fun for her and her husband. And other than that, I just spend an awful lot of time hanging out at the cemetery. Thank you. Yeah, it was great to see council member McDonald out at the park. And let's get all our council members to come to our cleanup days. So talk to your council member and don't ever stop bugging them about that. It's great to see, and yeah, the staff was great to see too. They all had smiling faces on a Saturday morning. So good work to all the staff at the park. It's just really cool to go there. It's already a nice park. And then as you're leaving, it just looks even better. You can see all the work that's been done. So thanks everyone. And that was perfect. We did great on our updates. So no griping this month, really. So thank you everyone for entertaining our new standing agenda item. Now we are gonna move on to item 8.1. This is our vice chair nomination and election. So let me explain the rules to folks and just kind of how this is gonna go. So we will open the floor for nominations for formal motions. But before we do that, let me just explain the rules and a little bit about our customs here. So anyone, here's the rules. Anyone can make a nomination and put a motion on a table. Then someone needs to second it. If there's only one nomination, we can basically do this by acclimation and not need to do a tally vote. The person who's nominated needs to accept. If they decline, then we move on to another nomination. If we have more than two nominations, if there were two nominations, we'd vote on the first and then on the second and whoever got the most votes would win. If we have three, it gets a little more complicated with a process of elimination. And we would basically vote for two at once. And then if no one receives any votes, they would not advance to the next round. And so before we go into any formal motions, this is, you know, we wanna make this feel like an open process. Let's get any volunteers. Does anyone desire to be vice chair? Let's start there. A strong burning desire to help to step up and be the vice chair of the Board of Community Services. Do I have any volunteers? All right, someone's gonna get forced into this. So no one's volunteering. Now that was supposed to be the friendly discussion. So now, oh, Steve, we were going to motions. We can do that. Let's go to motions. We didn't have any volunteers. So I will now accept motions from the board. Steve, were you about to do a motion? No, I would just really more inquiry of the job description. Maybe- Why don't we defer to deputy director Santos on that? And sorry, Steve, do you have a further question? I didn't mean to interrupt you. Jen, go ahead. Thank you for the question. Yeah, it's very simple. I say that. It's really following up if the chair is out to organize and run this meeting and being out in the community on behalf of the chair or the board, if the chair is not available, things like that. So there's nothing hyper specific, but this meeting for sure would be something we would look to the vice chair to run and work with staff to get going. That's, I think the biggest role and the rest of it would be just following in the footsteps of the chair. That's probably the biggest, depending on how long the chair is out. Okay, thank you. Thank you. Well, no one will volunteer. I will. Okay. Thank you, Steve. I appreciate that. Do we have any other volunteers? Just ask one more time. Going once, going twice. Okay, before you agree, Steve, let me just give you a little bit of transparency. You might be running next month's meeting. And I say that only because I will be overseas and in Scotland and it will be midnight, local time when the meeting begins. So I'm gonna do my best to chair that meeting, but there may be, it's also the day after I attend a wedding. So circumstances may be out of my control and I may not be able to chair that meeting. I'm going to do my best, but I just wanna let you know you could be thrown right into the deep end, first meeting. Is that okay? Midnight Pacific time? Midnight Edinburgh time. Okay. I have chaired numerous commissions and committees before. So I'm fairly comfortable with this and with staff and our regular board members, I'm sure that they will help if I stumble. Great, I appreciate the confidence to be determined if you'll have to do that. So we'll be in touch, don't worry. Okay, so since we have no other volunteers, I will simply ask for a vote of acclimation and what I'll do is I'll just ask everyone to unmute their microphone and just proceed. I think we will do a formal motion though, I'm sorry. Let's just do that officially. And I believe also that we do need to take public comment before we do the vote. Do I have that correct, Jen? Yes, yeah, we wanna make the motion. Okay, we'll do public comment and then we'll come back for a motion. Do we have any public comments on agenda item 8.1? Thank you, we have no hands raised at this time. Okay. I would like to entertain a motion for vice chair. I will make a motion to nominate board member Stillman as vice chair. I'll second that. Great, we have a motion introduced by Terry and seconded by Carol, thank you for that. Yeah, we have no score. Do you accept this, Steve? Yes, I do. Okay, no going back. All right, I will ask everyone to unmute their microphone and if you agree with this, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Great, you have been elected by acclimation, Steve. Congratulations. Or condolences. Yeah, you'll do great, seriously. Thank you for stepping up. We appreciate your experience and dedication. All right, moving on, that was easy. Thank you for making that easy, everyone. Do we have any discussion, any further discussion on that from anyone, any comments? No, but I wanna thank Terry for her services vice chair. You've done a great job, Terry. So thank you and I know you will have the same level of commitment to the board because that's the type of public servant you are. So thank you. So we will now move on to 8.2, Kim and Elio, are you ready to present our volunteer program, park monitors and park permits? Yes, we're ready. There we go, there we go. Hey, Elio's got his uniform on looking sharp. Okay, kick it off. So I wasn't planning on saying this but what an opening, what a lovely opening remark you guys all gave us. I can't think of a better lead into our presentation today and I appreciate all your support in being in our programs. So thank you. So thank you for the opportunity to present our park permit program, our park monitor program and our volunteer program. Our focus today is gonna be on how recreation and the park department work together to provide these services to our community. For those of you who don't know me, my name is Kim Hatch and I'm the recreation coordinator that oversees these programs. The success of these programs are definitely a partnership by recreation and park and in the past, it's only been recreation that has presented these programs to you. So I'm really thrilled today that Elio and I have teamed up to present to you what we've accomplished this year and I think the park maintenance needs to be recognized for what they do and what services they provide to our community. So Elio a little later will introduce himself and because we're doing this together, I'm gonna just lay out the presentation so you guys can get a little oriented before we flip back and forth. So we're gonna talk about the park permits and the park monitors first and then we're gonna talk about the volunteer program and each section will hit four topics. I will talk about the service and why it's of value to our community. And then I will discuss how we work together to provide these services. I'll pass it over to Elio. Elio will talk about the challenges of 2021 and of course, 2021 there were challenges but despite those challenges, he'll talk about what we were able to accomplish. Then he's gonna talk about the future of these programs where we wanna see them grow, how we'd like to see them expand. So with that, and I should say if we can entertain you a little bit during this presentation, that will be an extra added bonus. So with that, I wanna start off our presentation, rec and park the yin to your yang. Next slide, please. So the number one question I get asked in park permits and we're starting off with park permits is why do I need a park permit? And it's a great question. It's a question I like to, I do like to answer. And my answer is almost always around the lines of have you ever had a neighbor who was awful? A neighbor who threw trash all over their yard? A neighbor who had parties all day and all night who blasted their music? A neighbor who drove their car up and over your sidewalk almost hitting your kids and parked their car right in the middle of their lawn. Well, all of our parks are located in neighborhoods. Even our community park has neighbors, residents that live by. And we wanna be good neighbors. Not all activities in a park require a park permit, but if the activity has a potential of damaging the park or the potential to disrupt the enjoyment of the park by other park visitors or the potential to impact the surrounding neighbor, then we do need and require a park permit. And a lot of people when they hear the word permit and I'm sure you guys felt the same way when you're like, oh, great, I get a presentation on permits. You think of the paperwork and the red tape and it's not a fun topic, but for us in recreation and parks, it's not about the paperwork. It is totally about the people and the service we provide to them. And I do have an example of this. On your screens, you can see two pictures of trash and this is trash that was cleaned up from the Southwest Community Park after an Unpermitted Basketball Tournament. It took two park staff two and a half hours to clean up that trash. And it also was impacting the neighbors. The neighbors were calling the police and the police had to come out repeatedly and the police came out and they broke up the event and then the event would just come back later that day, later that week, it happened repeatedly over and over again. So I don't know if you guys can see me, but park permits to the rescue. I'm doing my superwoman pose right now because park permits does what the police cannot do. And we headed out to that park. We sent our park monitor out there to make contact with that event organizer. And our approach is not to say necessarily no, because clearly this was an event that the community wanted. They had over a hundred people participating in this basketball tournament. The community was embracing it, but the issue was that it was impacting our park and was impacting the surrounding neighbors. So we sent our park coast out there, he went out there and he talked to them and he said, let us help you. We want you to be able to offer this service to the community, but let us help you through the park permit process. Come to us, we'll get you all set up. We won't have you impacting the neighborhood. We won't have you impacting the park. And then you, the police don't have to come out. And he left, right? And we just hope, we have to hope. And I have to say that he does this all the time and more people do reach out to us than they don't. I do believe that people do wanna follow the rules. They just need to know the rules and they don't really understand necessarily from another person's perspective. So that event host reached out to us and I think he reached out within two weeks. We worked on that with that group to get their park permit. We also had to give them information on how to get their sound permit with the police department and a fire permit for their propane tank use. We worked with them to come up with a trash management plan and a restroom plan. Their event is growing and they're holding another one soon. And so we are now requiring a parking plan because we don't wanna impact. There is a parking lot there, but it's not big enough. There is a lot of activity in that park and we don't wanna impact the surrounding neighbors. So I'm really happy to say that in 2021, that event organizer held eight basketball tournaments and we did not receive any complaints after they went through the park permit process. So that's really the success of park permits. That's really our purpose. We wanna help people out to hold these events that benefit the community, but we wanna do it in a way that is beneficial to all involved. So with that, if we can move on to the next slide, please. So meet our park permit team and it is a team. It's recreation and park. We have all the recreation staff in blue and then all the park staff in green. We are a team that works together to accomplish the park permits. This is clearly not everybody. And if you see a little plus sign with a number next to a face, that's because they represent that many more staff that do that position. I could not include everybody on this slide. So then there is also people that are circled in black and those are our permanent full-time staff. The people circled in orange are our part-time, either part-time permanent staff, but more likely there are part-time temp staff. I just wanted to point that out because we do rely a lot on our temp staff. They are critical to our operation. And if I do say myself, I started as a temp staff and we are fantastic. And hopefully they move up and they're promoted. But it is the nature of a temp position to be temporary. So they are only allowed to work part-time. They can't work over 1,000 hours a year. So that means under 20 hours a week typically and they don't receive benefits. So there is a high turnover rate in the temp staff. And that is a strain on the permanent staff because it is us having to hire and replace and train repeatedly. An example of this is our activity specialist that I have on our slide here. In the three years that I've done park permits, I've had three different activity specialists. And it's not because I'm a bad boss. At least I hope it's not because of that. One person could not afford to live here on the temp pay and they had to move to Arizona. And then our other staff member was promoted to another city department as a permanent staff. So that and that's just the nature. We want people to move on and become permanent staff whenever they can, but it is a strain and it is a burden on the permanent staff to constantly be training and rehiring and replacing. So real quick, I'm just gonna run through really briefly like how all of these jobs touch on a park permit because they all do. We have our front desk staff at Finley and they are first point of contact. They determine if it's a picnic reservation or a park permit. If it's a picnic reservation, they can take care of it and it skips through all of the other people. If it is a park permit though, it does require more work. And so then it goes to our activity specialist. Our activity specialist is the person who does all the correspondence and manages our park permit email and our park permit phone. She also books all of the permits into our system and manages the timelines to make sure that we're meeting the deadlines for each permit. Then there's the recreation coordinator, me, that cheerful person right there. And my job is to coordinate between the recreation and the parks department. I oversee the activity specialist and the park host. I have to approve all applications. I have to issue out the requirements for those permits to happen. And I also attend all the pre-event meetings for any large events. Then we have our recreation supervisor, Amy, who you guys met last month. She also oversees the sports permits. So her job is to kind of coordinate these permits internally to make sure that we're not overlapping on each other. It's very easy to like have too many permits going into one park at one time. So she kind of coordinates that and make sure we're not doing that. She also has to sign every single permit, every single sports permit, every single park permit, every picnic reservation. They all have to be signed by a supervisor. So then down below, you guys can see LAO's face. And like I said, he'll introduce himself in a second. He is one of two park crew supervisors. He is my contact that I coordinate anything that has to do with park permits. He also supervises all the park maintenance staff and make sure that if we have any special things that need to be done for a permit, he makes sure that they happen. Next to him, we have the park maintenance staff. They are the staff that are in our park every day. They're making sure it's clean, safe, and usable. We also have our weekend staff. This staff is actually kind of like both and fluid. A lot of our park maintenance staff does work a Saturday or a Sunday, but the weekend staff that I'm focusing on is our temp weekend staff. And they're required or their focus is on the weekends to go to the picnic sites to make sure that they're cleaned up and usable, that the trash is removed and the bathrooms are open and operational. And then lastly, we have the park host. Our park host focuses on the people. He's out there meeting the people in the park. He goes out to the event organizer. Is everything okay? Did you have any issues? Is the bathroom not working? How can I help you with someone in your spot? He also makes sure that they are doing what they said they were doing. Like if they are not having a jumpy and he goes out there and he sees that they're having a jumpy. And he's also our face. Like if someone doesn't clean up after seeing Dennis's face, then I'm shocked because Dennis is so pleasant and nice and wonderful that nobody wants to leave a mess for him. So he is our face to the public. And then another part of his job is he goes around to the events that are unpermitted because I would say most of the events and activities in our park are not permitted. He goes around and he gives them information on how to get a park permit. So that is the staff. As you can see, it's a lot of staff that is required to provide this service and that just like the title says, working together is our success. So with that, I would like to pass it on to my teammate, Elio. Elio, take it away and next slide, please. Thanks, Kim. Good afternoon, chair pits and board members. My name is Elio Toronto and I am one of the parks crew supervisors alongside Tim Finnegan who presented you guys last month. I definitely could not do this job without Tim. He's been a great role model for me in this position. I have been with parks only 10 months. So I'm trying to absorb as much information as possible. There's a lot to learn with park and rec and being separate and hopefully one day being together who knows. But I came over from facilities maintenance. So I have worked with the city for about five years. So I'm really excited to be in parks. I wanted to thank you for the opportunity to present today. And also thank Kim, my teammate for working with me. Kim has been instrumental in guiding me through the volunteer program. So I'm very grateful to Kim for that. Also grateful for the support that the board gives us. So with that, I'm going to talk about first the demand that was up in 2021 for park permits and some of the services that were kept the same. If not, they dropped a little bit. So with that being said, demand was up in 2021 in our parks. We had more people out and about, more large gatherings as people were eager to get out into some of our public shared spaces. Social services and local businesses also drove up the demand for park permits as well. And if you look on the slide here, you'll see that the demand was up obviously because of larger social gatherings and the social services like COVID relief stuff, as well as some of the local businesses that couldn't operate within the confines of their buildings that needed to take it outside. And one of the biggest things to note under the park permits area is that in 2019, which is a pre COVID year, we served 114,129 people. And if you look directly above that, you'll see that there was only about 708, excuse me, only 31,653 people served in 2021. So pre COVID obviously numbers were still not there. 2020 was basically shut down, but 2021 we're trying to make a comeback. So the demand was there and we're hoping that it continues to rise. On the flip side to that, what I'd like to talk about is some of the budget cuts. And with that, there was a proposed cut of three vacant groundskeeper positions that we had that were not filled. And that affected the maintenance that we provided in our parks. And that was specific to the reopening of bathrooms. So basically what happened in 2020, our bathrooms were shut down. In 2021, we did not have three groundskeeper positions who are integral in providing a clean and safe environment for our bathrooms. So we did not have those three groundskeeper positions. We also did not have picnic site reservations during the week. So they were only on the weekend because we didn't have the staff to basically be in the parks every day due to rising demand in other parts of our parks and landscape areas. We also did close a parking lot at Doyle and that affected the park permits as well. People could still access Doyle Park. There is still a large open parking lot, but that did affect it as well. We weren't able to have that open all the time. And then of course the bathrooms. With that being said, fortunately bathrooms eventually were reopened to full capacity in late 2021. And that was with or in conjunction with the hiring of those three groundskeepers that were slated to be cut. So we did eventually get those three groundskeepers back. And I wanna thank the board for providing support and the hiring of these three positions. And that really helped us get back to opening and keeping our bathrooms safe. I will say that in park maintenance we currently have 20 full-time employees and five temp staff. And those temp staffs are only allowed to work a thousand hours per fiscal year max. I also would like to note that I really owe a great gratitude to our maintenance staff. Myself and Tim are the supervisors, but the maintenance staff are in the parks every day, seven days a week, and they try to keep the parks in as best shape as possible for the public to use. So we're very grateful to them. Next slide, please. Okay, so park permits played a huge role in the COVID recovery. As people were eager to gather in a safe place outside being cooped up for such a long time, although COVID was still around, they were able to gather in parks and parks provided that space for them to gather. There were testing facilities in parks and vaccination clinics and also food distribution areas that were held in various parks throughout the city that provided aid to those in need. So parks played a huge role in that. Essentially having the ability to provide an outdoor space to local businesses to help them through difficult times during COVID is just another reason why the park permit program is such a valuable resource for anybody in need. It's exciting to note that larger events are coming back, a few did in 2021, such as Marathon, and then the hardest festival at their park. Some other larger events, like the Father's Day car show, will return in 2022 at Juilliard Park. On the slide, you'll see a good example of a large event that was held at Howard's in the top right picture there. And that just shows the capacity that our parks have to hold these larger events. We just need the staff and the resources to support that event as well. Also, picnic reservations are now back all week, which started on March 5th. So it's no longer just weekends. And as you can see in the top left corner there, a picture of a park monitor who's posting a reservation sign at one of the picnic sites. We're also offering winter covered picnic sites, which are at Howard, Finley, Bayer Park, Southwest. And that bottom left corner there, that's a picture of Finley, which is a very popular site. It's incredibly busy on the weekends. There's barbecues there. So it's just these covered areas are a huge resource for park permits. And a lot of people love to gather these areas. And especially during the winter to offer those is wonderful. A big thing that park maintenance really appreciates is recreation has helped with the park monitor being available to open bathrooms for events. They post reservation signs and check for maintenance issues. So with staffing levels being somewhat tight on the maintenance side for daily duty, the park monitor system has really helped us out a lot in being able to be in the parks on weekends. And speaking of weekends, that's where the park monitor really helps us the most. Park maintenance has five workers on Monday, excuse me, a Saturday and five workers on Sunday. And they're specifically there to open bathrooms, clean the bathrooms, make sure that the bathrooms are safe and then pick up trash around the parks. And you can imagine Howard Park in spring or summer and how many people will be there in the park. So the maintenance really needs to focus on keeping the bathrooms going and whatnot. So that park monitor on the weekend has really been beneficial to park maintenance. And we really appreciate it. I'll pass it back to Kim now for the next few slides. Next slide, please. Okay, so transitioning out of park permits to our volunteer program. With park permits, like I said, most people think of the paperwork and forget about the people. With the volunteer program, most people think about the people and forget about the paperwork or the management that's required to operate that program. And of course, why wouldn't we think about the volunteers? They are fantastic. Our volunteers in our city are amazing and their creativity and their passion cannot be matched. And all the pictures you see on our slide right here are all programs that were created or maintained by volunteers. And I just want you to imagine for a second Howard Park without the Western town that was built by volunteers or the rural cemetery without lamp light or the dark side tour. Youth Park and not a lot of people know this about Youth Park, but there's a Frisbee golf course in the back of Youth Park. That's all volunteer created and maintained. We also at Youth Park have a train out there that's operated in the summer and that's all run by volunteers as well. There's the pump track at Northwest and the RC track at a place to play. These are just some of the areas that make our city like iconic and special and unique and they're all volunteer created. We have a new one that's coming and it's if you see the two kids on the screen that look like they just won a brand new car. They didn't win a brand new car, but they're super excited because they're on a story walk. So we have in the adopted green space program we have the Rinkin Valley Library doing an adopted green space at Rinkin Valley Park where they are putting up these temporary signs and basically what they do is they dissect a children's book and they blow up the pages and they put each page as one sign and they put it along the path and the kids walk, they get a read, then there's some kind of physical aspect where it says like quack like a duck. So then they have to quack like a duck to the next sign and then it also engages them to look around and see what's going on in their park. So it's like, do you see any other birds in your park? It's a fantastic thing. I'm super excited. It just went up two days ago. Check it out. It's there now. And so we're already talking like, this is only a temporary thing. It's not a permanent thing. It'll be there like for a month, but I'm already talking with them. We're thinking like it would be fantastic if we did a book about bikes at the Northwest Park by the pump track or a book about trains at youth park by the train track. So we're already thinking of new ways to spread this enjoyment to the community. So this program, like I said, is brought by the adopt a green space program, but typically it does have some recreation programming, but it typically is the maintenance of a park. So anyone can adopt a park or an area of a park or even a median to take care of. And so we do have a lot of people who do that. And this year we had a brand new group that at Dimeo Park that has adopted Dimeo Park and they're really doing a good job getting it cleaned up and working out there. So I'm only focusing on one small aspect of our volunteer program. Our volunteer program is very large, but I can't spend all day or all night talking to you guys. So I'm just shorting it down to that adopt a green space program. And I would say behind every successful volunteer is a very tired, hardworking city staff. And with that, I'd like to move on to the next slide, please. So when our volunteer program started, we were all, all the components needed for our volunteer program were under one department, the Rec and Park Department. In recent years, we've been split into three different divisions. So our components have been split into three different divisions. We have the communication division that is in charge of our recruitment and marketing and advertising for our volunteer events. But she also does our website maintenance. Then we have me in the middle with recreation. I do the screening and placing of volunteers. I orient, do the orientation and the onboarding. I do all the forms, all the procedures, all the guidelines. I do the, I do the planning for the appreciation events such as the merit award, which not doesn't just cover the Rec and Park volunteers, it covers volunteers throughout the whole city. I maintain the volunteer budget and do the, maintain the database of volunteers in volunteer hub. Then we have Elio on the park division side. He does the training of the park staff, our volunteer staff. He organizes the workday events and not just the park a month workday events. Those are only a few of the workday that he has to organize. There's a lot of workdays that are community organized like we have Bennett Valley vision. So he has to work with them on their workday. We also have the dog parks. They have groups out there that have a workday and he supplies them and sets them up. The D'Ameo group, he helps them out. That's just a few of them. He schedules those workdays with the volunteers. He provides supervision and by he like it's him and his staff that is providing it. And then he also evaluates the work that the volunteers are doing. So this works great, but unfortunately because we're three divisions, it does require that we all three have the same volunteer mission and any of our divisions, if they're given another priority that is not volunteers, that volunteer program stops. It can't move forward because we require all three of these divisions to be a part of and to have a component to our volunteer program. And this has happened with all three of the divisions at one time over the past few years where we couldn't move forward with the volunteer program because our priority was placed elsewhere. So we do know how to run a successful volunteer program, but we just all need to be focused on the same mission. And that was really evident by our Arbor Day event, which you guys, so many of you showed up for. That was all three of our divisions focused together to provide that service. And it was fantastic. Like you guys said, we had over a hundred volunteers. We planted, I think it was 23, maybe it was 26, I don't know, but we planted trees. We painted the picnic tables, the sports fields, soccer and baseball, they got addressed. We celebrated Luther Burbank's birthday. We had cupcakes and slushies. We gave away trees. We had vendors out there. We had a DJ. As one volunteer said, it was a joyous, joyous day. And I could not agree more. I really feel lucky to be a part of this and get paid to do it. It's a really, it's a great, great feeling to be out there. And it gives me encouragement for how wonderful our community is. And it really makes me happy. So that Arbor Day, that really highlighted what we can do when the three departments are united on one mission. It highlighted all of our skills and our talents. And I just, I think it was just a fantastic event. With that, I would like to turn it over to Elio. Next slide, please. Thanks, Kim. Just reiterating what Kim has said, how much we do appreciate our volunteers and especially in park maintenance with the shortages that we do have with resources. They provide so much health and it really benefits our department as a whole. And we're very fortunate to have the groups that are working out in the field behind the scenes that don't get a lot of the recognition that they do deserve. But we have so many groups out there that are in our parks daily and they really, really, really help us a lot. So we're grateful to them. Unfortunately, volunteers are not free. Like all staff, they do require some degree of management and planning, which does translate to labor and time for both recreation and park staff. However, volunteers are a very valuable resources, but they are not exactly the solution to staffing problems in maintenance. We need to recruit, we need to retain the volunteers, we need to plan, schedule and train the volunteers, which does take time. And of course, the biggest one is, is that we need to show our appreciation and our gratitude to all these volunteers who are giving up their time to give back to the community. Despite some of these challenges that we do face, volunteers along with staff, were able to accomplish 33 workdays, 18 proposals and 20 adopt space agreements, which is incredible, which all equates to 2,956 hours, which is incredible if you think about 33 workdays throughout the year and the amount of people that are at these smaller events that not all of us know about, it's just incredible to me, the amount of work that they're able to get done on a Saturday morning from 9 a.m. to 12 a.m. So it's really great. Once a volunteer or a group establishes a proposal with Kim, our maintenance team will begin to organize the meetings and training and workdays that will take place moving forward. So we must go over safety regulations and give any advanced training on any specified equipment that will be used while volunteering, mainly power equipment. We try to have our volunteers do as much as possible. We just have to make sure that they're safe when they're working in our parks. And if there's an adoptive space agreement with an individual who wants to use power equipment, we do have to go over training. And Tim and myself are in the field a lot and it takes some time to meet with these individuals and go over some of the safety aspects of running that equipment. And the biggest thing is we also need to highlight our volunteer groups by having these appreciation barbecues or events to give thanks and show our appreciation for the time that they do spend in our parks and getting back to their community. We value the volunteers and we definitely could not maintain some of our designated areas without the support and hard work that they put in because we do have a lot of areas to cover in maintenance. So we really, really appreciate that. Next slide, please. So on to the future, we're very, very excited. Let's get cooking. Park of Month is back, like Kim has noted a few times. Arbor Day was a great, great day and it was something that I was very proud to be a part of. I'd never been a part of something like that and I was astonished to see how many people were out there. We also had a volunteer Park of Month Day at Franklin Park, which was on the previous month, which was very exciting. So Park of Month coming back is great for recreation, great for parks and we're very excited to see where it can go this year. One thing that we have discussed and we'd like to move forward on is a volunteer trailer. And essentially what that does for our maintenance staff who has daily responsibilities is if we had a volunteer trailer, they would be able to have all of the resources that they need in one trailer. And that includes supplies, personal protective equipment and materials that we would essentially hook up to on a Saturday morning, drive out to the park and we would park that trailer and we'd be able to have everything in one spot. Currently on Thursday or Friday, leading up to a Park of Month Day, our maintenance staff has pulled out of their parks and we have a shed out back on our levee that we go and we start pulling different tools out and we load them up in multiple different trailers. So it does take some time. So we hope that eventually it can become more fluid with that volunteer trailer. We could also put signage on that trailer to promote where we got the money from. Parks make life better to be on the side of it. It could be a great advertisement for parks and rec and the programs that we provide. Also the merit awards are going to kick off on April 10th, which Kim talked about a little bit. And then we're also looking for some new ideas. Myself and Tim Finnegan, we have a supervisor and our superintendent James Castro are working on a weekly basis to try to come up with new and fun ideas and different ideas that will help maintenance and help recreation with this volunteer program. One thing that we did come up with with Kim is this adopt the sports field program. We have so many different sports teams out there in our parks that are willing to help us. So we're hoping that by putting this out there, they might be able to adopt a specific soccer field and they can help us maintain that soccer field. They'll be really beneficial to maintenance and it would take a heavy load off of our shoulders. A few of the pictures on the slide you'll see on the bottom left is the Franklin Park. Park them up. You have some appreciation awards there in the middle. And then an example of a potential trailer on the bottom right-hand corner. And then those are some Arbor Day event pictures on the right-side top and in the right-side middle. Next slide, please. So I just wanted to say thank you very much on behalf of Kim and myself. We appreciate the time that you guys took today to listen to our presentation. On the screen here, you have some contact information via email to contact the different resources and recreation as well as the parks maintenance email on the bottom there, which we have put out there to the public that they can reach us for any concerns in our parks that will essentially come into our system and we'll be able to create a work order for that to get it addressed. So thank you very much again. We appreciate your time. Any questions? Thank you, Elio and Kim. So right now from the board, just a reminder, we're gonna go to public comment and then we'll do our personal comments and opinions. But before we get to that, are there any clarifying questions from the board? Any technical questions? I had a few. Oh, go ahead, Teri. Thanks, just a couple real quick. When somebody applies for a picnic permit or park permit and there are multiple permits needed, is that something they get as a packet and they have one point of contact or is it split up among the departments and they have to work directly with fire and police and parks? So a little bit of both with the police department, we've worked out a routine where we're the middleman, so they don't have to reach out directly to the police department. They give us their police permit amplified sound and then we send it off to the police department and then send them the certificate. With the fire department, we have all of their information so we can give them, when they come in, we can give them the application that they need and all the information and then they do go and take care of it with the fire department. And are there costs associated with each of those permits or is it one cost for the whole package? So the amplified sound is not a cost but the fire permit is an additional cost. And then just to get some clarity about the park monitors versus the park host, are the park monitors temporary staff? It sounds like there's multiple people that function in that role versus the one park host. Do I have that right? Yeah, so right now we only really have a park host but we will be getting some more park monitors. The park monitor role is a lesser role. The park host really, if there's any conflicts that are going on in the park, that is gonna be the park host is gonna have to resolve it. So they're at the bigger events and if there's any issue that a park monitor can't handle then the park host will go out. The park monitor has more of an overview of looking around the park and talking to people and letting them know when they need a park permit but they do not deal with any challenges. Great, those are my questions. Thank you. Thanks, Terry. Any other questions from the board? Carol, go ahead. Thank you. What percentage of the events that should be permitted at our parks actually are permitted? What are the ramifications of the unpermitted activities? Do they get shut down, is it? And several years ago, we talked about the inherent danger of bouncy houses, specifically at Finley. And at that point, I think it was decided that the owner of the bouncy house companies having a permit in hand before they were allowed to gender, remember this? Did that go into existence or is that still a work in progress? Well, I'll defer back to our volunteer staff because they've really taken on the lead with this and with the pandemic, there's been lots of stops and starts. So I'll defer back to them and chime in about the historical if I need to. Actually, those are really good questions. When I train our park monitor and park host staff, I train them that they are the bartenders of the park, not the bouncers. The bouncers are our police department. They are the ones that have to enforce the rules. We only educate the public on what the rules are. So we don't have the authority to tell someone to take down their jump house. We can inform them that they do need a park permit. And so we approach it with the information side. We're really trying to educate the public. It is a new policy. And so a lot of the public doesn't know about it. And before any enforcement can happen, they need to be educated. So we're really educating right now. I would say percentage-wise, I don't know, at least 50% are not not going through the park permit process. But every time Dennis goes out there, every time he talks to someone, we get more people and that is also partly where our demand is going up. Because people are hearing about what they're supposed to do and they do wanna do the right thing. So they are coming to us. I think I, did I answer all your questions? Thank you, Kim. Great. Any other questions from board members? Okay. I had a few questions. Thank you for that presentation. My first question, can adults use the bounce house? That's sarcasm, but maybe someday. So on the permitting, Kim, is there any sort of online portal? It seems like people have to go to Finlay or did I hear that incorrectly? So we do a lot of permits, not necessarily online, but there is an application on our website and they can submit it via email to us. So they don't have to come in. We can do it all virtually. Okay. Is that also, is that form in Spanish or do you have staff who are bilingual that can help folks? So yeah, that is always a big challenge. We really do need to have bilingual staff at our front desk and that is a skill that we're always recruiting for. We do have it in both Spanish and English because it's needed in both languages. Yeah, I had imagined translating technical stuff would require a good amount of experience. So that might even be harder to find those folks. Thank you for making that a focus. And then also, this is a question. Can we be invited to the appreciation days when those happen? So I guess that's more of a comment. Please invite us. We'd love to know about that too. And then on the volunteer outreach, can you explain how that happens? Is it just like a sign posted or do you interface with like the team coach or how does that work that people know they can volunteer? And maybe, and I'm thinking more in those formal like adopt the sports field ways or even just like the average person, how do they actually find out about that? So a lot of it is through our website. We do post signs in our park ahead of time for the Park of Month event to give people a little bit of heads up. Marketing also does like some announcements. We also go through Sonoma County Volunteer Center. So they know about us and they refer people to us as well. We also, and Elio, I know he did this for this last Park of Month event with Arbor Day. He reached out to some of the sports groups that he's worked with and asked them to come and participate with our event. And I think that's something we definitely want to expand on. Like I'd like to reach out to all the surrounding schools near the park that we're gonna be out and let them know about it. So that is something that we want to work on getting better at. Great. Elio, do you have anything to add on that? I actually would like to add that. I know that the internet these days is a fantastic way to notify people, but I will say that within the community, the closed community and proximity to the parks that we are working in on those days, a lot of the people sometimes don't find out. And this time around, our superintendent, James Caschaud, did actually bring out some signs, some A-frame signs, the week before the event with the date specified on it. So there was a little more outreach specific to the neighborhoods around the parks. Great. Thank you. Yeah, when I was doing Rinking Valley, I had a little league player helping us with the baseball diamond. So that was great that he came out, him and dad. Great. Okay, so we are now gonna go to public comments. And then after that, any board comments? Do we have any public commenters post? No, we do not have any hands raised at this time. Okay. Let's go back to any comments or opinions folks wanna offer for that presentation from the board. Terry, go ahead, please. Thank you. First, I wanna just tell you that visually, this presentation is gorgeous. I really appreciated the format and the way you constructed the presentation. So kudos on that. It's really, really nicely done. I was curious and I apologize that I didn't ask this question earlier. There were several folks from Target stores at the Arbor Day event. And I was curious whether the city had an established relationship with local businesses to provide volunteers for certain events or whether they just came of their own volition. I actually spoke with one of the individuals from Target and I happened to know them from high school in the past and I did ask them because there was a fairly large group and they just notified me that they searched online for an event on that weekend. They had multiple employees at different events over that weekend. And that group just happened to find Wiccan Valley and showed up. Great. So maybe the marketing team could do some additional outreach with local businesses in that same manner. Encourage them to send employees to our park events. So I really appreciate all the work on the volunteer program. And I look forward to seeing it continue and grow. One other quick question with regard to the trailer. Is that potentially going to be an ask in this year's budget or will you be seeking other sources of funding for that? I may not be able to answer that perfectly. Maybe I can defer to Jen or my superintendent to use Castro on that question. I can help you. We are looking at funding that through our Measure M program. So it will be part of the budgetary process going forward to council, but it's really exciting way too and a great way to spend our money to get that trailer wrapped with volunteer information on it. It's gonna be really cool and long time coming and a great idea from the team. Great. Thank you so much. That's all I have. Thanks. Thank you, Terry. Carol. I have several. I'm gonna go back. The book thing, you guys probably aren't old enough to remember Burma Shave. Burma Shave, when you were driving across the country, there was one page like every 20 seconds. So this is like a park version of Burma Shave. Number one, I don't know who's coming up with the money for it if it's a library thing or if it's a park thing, but this is really cool. When one book is done at one park, why doesn't that book move to a different park and you could have five books that made their way through all the parks and all the kids in all the parks could see them rather than having just a one go. This clicks so many boxes all at the same time. It's very exciting. So I can answer that. So the library is funding it all and they are doing it through their funding that they also received. I don't know what measure it was, but they actually have to share these signs with other libraries. So they only have one set of signs. So that's why we can only do one at a time. The next thing I was wondering was what kind of ideas you guys have kicked around to make the transition of staff, the activity specialist specifically, knowing, I assume it's budgetary string more than anything else that prevents the staff from either having a full-time position or staying long-term. Knowing that ahead of time, has staff wrapped its head around like training manuals. How do you cope with something that you know is going to be repeating detriment over and over? You guys have so many repeating detriments that we don't seem to be, as a city, able to fund your way out of. So what do you do? I was gonna say LAO and I can both answer that. LAO, I'll let you go. So being newer to parks in this position, I think our current goal is to hire more temp staff. And I understand that there is, you know, sometimes a lot of turnover with temp staff, but hopefully we can develop some kind of program where when we do bring in temp staff, we know exactly what their duties are gonna be. And maybe some kind of manual or some kind of temporary staff manual that we can provide to incoming employees that would benefit them instead of just coming in and not really sure what they're doing, but if we could establish their schedule, establish their duties, and if they happen to move on to a different position or different job, the next person in at least has an idea of what they're coming in with. The next question I had was, when things like the train or the RC park happen, that specific groups who are looking for something that really serves their special need and that is really cool. I'm wondering how we get neighborhoods to say, we love our park and we wanna be a special interest group known as the neighborhood, how do we encourage neighborhoods to adopt their parks? Is that something that staff has kicked around? And I'll piggyback, my last question is what can we as a board do to help you? So I was actually hoping someone would ask what you guys can do to help because that's a great question. I think there's three levels of how you guys can help us. And the one level is, just be sure to tell our story, tell our story to city council, tell them the value of our program that we're part of the recovery, COVID recovery. Let them know that we are struggling to offer these services but they're really valuable to our community. So just the more you can share our story that is really great. I also have to say it is super motivating for me personally to see you guys at our voluntary event. So that is very helpful for me and like my spirit. So please continue to join us at those events. And then maybe if working in a park is not your thing, I get it, but we also have, like you can volunteer for our craft fair or our fairy tale ball. Come out, there's nothing more satisfying than to see these families at our fairy tale ball having a blast. A child's first step into community is their family and friends. And so these programs that we offer through recreation are their first step into the community. And they're really wonderful to see. So please join us at any of those. And then the last thing that would be helpful for us is we're having to make some hard decisions on what we can do and what we can't do. And if you guys can put input into where our priority is because like we talked about, we are multiple departments and we need to have a focus, a mission and have that narrowly defined. And so those are like the three levels that would be really helpful. But of course, recruiting, talking to people, telling them about our volunteer program. If you have anyone who complains to you, direct them to the volunteer program and let them get involved. We would love to work with them. Thank you, Kim. Any other questions from the board? All right, I had a few. At first just Kim, I'd say that's a really great point, your last point. You should always kind of direct people's energy in a positive direction. And so I think I will take that to heart myself. And that was great. Thank you for that. So let me all ask a kind of a big question first, maybe to Jen. So in a hypothetical world where you have an unlimited budget, which I know is a fantasy, but is that volunteer, so all those ingredients to get the volunteer program, is that enough for a part-time or full-time employee? Enough work, I guess. Yes, and then some, I'm sure we can have a whole section just devoted to this. It's such an important program, but it's one that when we have economic strife in our department, we often have to, as Kim said, make tough decisions about priorities. We would love to expand it, of course. It's really a service to the community and to us to get folks in, like the RC Trapper, just talking with those folks this week about how energized they are again to get it going a little bit better than they have been. And it's really encouraging for us because it's all of our parks, it's our community parks. So when they get involved, it just makes our parks so much better. So absolutely we could, the sky's the limit, have a whole section just devoted of staff just to this process. I'm sure Kim and Elliot would agree. Okay, so in a non-fantasy world, back to the real world, how possible is that within the current budget to carve out at least a part-time position to take on that role? Well, right now, the overarching budgetary instructions have been to keep a flat budget. So that makes it really difficult when we, if we're gonna add somebody to the volunteer program, we are subtracting it somewhere else. So we're following those directions. It makes it really tough to try to reorganize, but we do at the executive level look at ways we can find ways to stretch people or move people around to be better effective at providing services to the community. So it's very difficult. I think Kim and Elliot's team have done an amazing job. We all share a lot of responsibility with this program, even outside the dedicated folks that they have, that they mentioned earlier, there's a lot of us that get involved. Kind of third party. So we really try to share the responsibility in ways that we can, all of us play small roles in some way. That's how we're managing it right now from a budgetary standpoint. But we really look to the ability to ask for additional needs. That's what we would need in order to fill that position. Okay. You do a great job working with what you got. Carol, did you have a question on that? We can't hear you. I'm gonna call out Kim Hatch. Kim Hatch, didn't she used to be the volunteer coordinator? So the position I took over used to be the volunteer coordinator. I am now the volunteer coordinator and I do park permits. I also do tennis and pickleball. I also in the backup for our data specialist. And I plan events like the leprechaun hunt and the fairy tale ball. And the merit award and the craft fair. I help with all of those. So my position is much bigger than just the volunteer program, but I could spend my whole time on the volunteer program easily. And probably your whole time on pickleball as well. Yeah, that's a lot Kim. That's impressive. Thank you. Thanks for that question, Carol. So just some other thoughts I wanted to share. I think that I appreciate you explaining that taking on volunteers is maybe cost neutral is a way to put it. Or some other technical term or the amount of time you put in might be more than what we get back. But that could be true. And but I still think it's a great public service. So and I know that you agree with that. I know that's been the spirit of your presentation. Kind of like training an intern often that that is almost more trouble than it's worth. But it's a great gift to that person to give them that experience that a share your experience with them. So I appreciate that spirit. Let's keep that alive. That it's that it's a public service for all the residents of the city. And hopefully we can get something out of it too. I think one suggestion I wanted to share is I think you could find a lot of corporations and businesses who want to send a team. I'm thinking of like Keysight or Sonic or some of our bigger employers in town who do probably do that like once a year do a sort of staff clean up, staff volunteer thing. Let's get them out there. I think also, and maybe you've done all this. So if you've done it all, good job but maybe reach out to some like service clubs like Rotary, maybe some youth organizations and thinking of like political clubs too. People like that always are looking to give back and looking for things to do usually with their members in my experience. So if you need any help on that too that's where you can also come to us and we can use our community contacts to help you get connected with those folks. We're always glad to help you do that. Those, I think those were all my thoughts. And then the other thing on outreach I wanted to say, yeah, if possible let's try to do more of that signage. I think that was a great thing that James did the week ahead and maybe that's why we got a big turnout. So maybe try experimenting with that. I know that's an extra job to do but that turnout was impressive. So I also sort of want, was that kind of the high watermark, Kim that you've seen like the Rink and Valley turnout? So our MLK event at MLK Park and our Arbor Day events always have a large turnout. They're our most popular because people know those volunteer days and so they're looking for volunteer opportunities. Yeah, well that's a great point. And that's those are days people basically think of all year long that they're gonna go volunteer. So yeah, and I'm glad to come out. I like yard work, so I'm weird like that. Okay, I think that do we have any other comments from the board? No, well, thank you again, Ellie on Kim. That was great. And also I agree with Terry. I liked the presentation. I liked the little headshot. It's great to get a little picture of someone and put a face to the name. So again, good job on that and keep up the good work. Thank you. Thank you. All right, thank you again for that. So we are gonna move on to our next agenda item, which is 8.3. That is the parks capital improvement projects budget update. And we will be hearing from research and program coordinator, Terry Bladow. Let me, Terry, please correct me if I didn't say your name right, Bladow. But we can't hear you, Terry. There we go. How do we say? Bladow, Bladow. Okay. Thank you. Terry, please, Terry Bladow, please kick it off with that update. Okay. Hopefully they can bring my presentation up. There we go. Hello, board. Thank you for having me. My name is Terry Bladow. I've been a research and parks program coordinator for parks for six and a half years now. Sorry, this is the first time you're seeing me. I'm usually buried. I'm here tonight to present the capital improvements update. Next slide, please. In 2021, we did various different parks projects. A new playground was put up for ages five through 12 was installed this winter at College and Creek Neighborhood Park. And this park was built using what's called a cooperative purchase agreement. So for approximately $290,000, we put in a new parks playground. This saved us quite a bit of money and we hope to be able to do that again, going forward. As part of the new playground process, we got public input and began that back in November of 2020. We sent out postcards for that and then we had our first public meeting in December of that same year. This park was officially opened by the mayor February 23rd of 2022. This does take a while. Next slide, please. And also of 2022 park projects, in August, we started the process of turning the Creekside open space park into the Mary Traversal open space park. It actually started in December of 2020 when we presented this to the DOCS and the board at that time asked us to return for further study. So and finally, after further study in August of 2021, we presented it to city council and finally completing this renaming project process. This process was not really budgeted so funding wasn't allocated for this. This project was primarily staff time that took to do this project. Next slide, please. In 2021, we had city council approved a grant. We applied for a grant application for South Davis Park and we received it. This is kind of an on-growth, this is still an ongoing project. Funding for this project came from two proposition 68 grants that the city was awarded. Both of those grants were awarded based on the census district that the park sits in. We have a rough cost for this new playground for about $490,000 to do both the design and install a new playground. As part of that process, our first community meeting will be held tomorrow and we encourage everybody to participate. We anticipate the construction for this project to begin in the summer of 2023 and expect it to be open to the public in the winter of 23-24. Next slide, please. Here is our draft concept plan for the family aquatics playground which is going to replace the existing waiting pool. The purpose of this project in addition to updating the features was to bring the existing pool deck up to new ADA standards. To work on this project, we'll begin in early 2021 or work again as part of the design. We estimated that the total cost of the project will be approximately $3.2 million. We anticipate construction for this project to begin in August of 2022 which will completely close the pool to the public as we can't have both things going on at the same time. We expect the project to be completed and reopened to the public with a new feature in May of 2023 barring any unforeseen conditions and the high construction goes. Next slide, please. Dutch floor master plan was approved by council in January of 2022. The approximate cost for the project to do the construction is $2.5 million. We expect construction to begin in June of 2023 and the final part open to the public again in November of 2023. Next slide, please. Several projects. Community, we received a grant from Agriculture and Open Space for a place to play community park that is currently in the process. The staff is looking forward to working with the Agriculture and Open Space District on this project. The community gardens that were designed under Kiwana Springs Community Park is part of the 2017 master plan. We anticipate construction beginning in spring of 2023. Fremont neighborhood park is the first stage of the master plan. This process really takes a year or more and the public survey has been extended to March 31st and we'll extend it further if it is necessary. And I really have no other information on that project. I care about the budget. Next slide, please. This is a map of the general from the 2008 general plan. For some of you, it's probably the first time you've ever seen it and it kind of requires a little bit of explanation. So the green shadowed areas are existing parks in both city and county and state as you can help by the large area that is marked as Annabelle. The little red trees and it's really hard at this point to differentiate between the large trees and the small trees. But the smaller trees are neighborhood proposed neighborhood parks and the larger trees are proposed community parks. As you can see, there's a couple of proposed community parks on there. There's three remaining. One of them we already own the landforms. So this document does need to be updated to show that we already have the land for some of these proposed parks and that they have not yet started the master planning stage. Next slide, please. This is our park development impact fee zone map. This map shows how park funds are allocated. Each zone comes, each zone's funds come from the building permits for all of the new developments that happen in that year. These funds are used for new park land and to make significant improvements to existing parks. These funds are collected by the finance department and then they're distributed to each zone. So if not enough building is done in one zone over another one, the funding amounts are substantially different. And this year's an obvious, it's very obvious this year. Next slide, please. So this is the proposed and existing budget for the park development impact fees for the Northwest Quadrant. So at this time we have these four projects placed as available as ready to build, funds available ready to build. So there are all of them, all of these four projects are in some assemblance of the process. They're either under the master planning stage or they've had the master planning stage is completed and they're under the design stage or some are even ready for construction. At this point we have in the existing funds for zone one, $5.9 million in the allocated funds for next year, which is the funds that came from this last year's construction or development built new homes in those areas. We have only received $1.2 million in this zone. So we are allocating, we're requesting to allocate that funding towards the Finlay Aquatic Center project so that we can build that in this year. So the total existing and available funds that are allocated for zone one is this $7.2 million amount. Next slide, please. And in zone two, the Southwest Quadrant Park Development Fund, we have five major projects going on at this time. We have small projects going on at Bear Park where in a holding pattern for Rosewood Creek, South Davis is slated to happen next year. We're putting money together for a potential project at Southwest Community Park. And we are holding funds for play equipment in the Southwest generally. Those funds add up to approximately $3.5 million. In zone two, we've received for the 2023 budget year, $1.8 million from development impact fees, which we would like to allot to South Davis Neighborhood Park and to the Southwest Play Zone Equipment Fund. The total amount of funds available for this zone, taking the existing and the proposed, we come up with $5.3 million revenue. Next slide, please. In zone three, we only have slated for two projects in this zone. One is the potential for doing three-bond park at a later date and the Luther Burbank Home and Gardens Project, which we anticipate happening here in the next year. We only have available for this zone, $1.5 million. And our allotment that came in was rather small from this area, not enough building going on. So we only have an allocation of under a million dollars. Our grand total for both the allocation and the development fees for the years, about $2.4 million. Next slide, please. In zone four, we have six major projects going on that we're trying to get funding for. We're trying to finish up Colgan Creek Park. I think that bill just hasn't come because this is information from February. We have Galvin Community Park that we have some work to slate out there. Kiwanis at 2K, Peter Springs, Southeast Play Equipment, and Kiwanis Springs Community Park, which I believe is the garden. So we have $3.7 million existing in that zone. And our allocation that we've got from new PDI fund is $469,000, which we'd like to allot to Southwest Play Equipment. Next slide, please. In addition to funding from PDIs, we have some non-developmental resources. So we have some funds that came from the trust fund for Railroad Square that we're holding for a major improvement at that location. Trust funds are just one-time fees that once they're spent, they're gone. In the Southeast Quadrant we're getting, we have some funds for Howard Park to improve the ADA access to both the floating dock and the fishing pier. The ADA funds aren't allotted by the city council as a annual allotment and we are not, we don't get to pick which project they do. They decide which project they do. These are the projects that we have thrown into their list. So we're not sure when they're going to happen. In our Northwest Quadrant, we also have an ADA project for the Lincoln Valley Community Dog Park, which gets us the pathway to the small dog park. And that'll complete that project and that accesses, that'll give us access to both dog parks in that location. Other funding for the Northwest Quadrant is the Luther Burbank Home and Gardens. The general fund is giving us 995,000 for the project to replace the roof and that should happen this year. And then city-wide we have two projects, the Fire Damaged Roadway Landscaping Design and Construction and we have the Six Fire Damaged Park Project. Both of those are covered by FEMA dollars, Caliouyes dollars, Santa Rosa Parks Foundation donation and Measure M. The amount there is the whole part, the whole dollar value of the project, not the amount that we've allotted from anything specific. Next slide, please. Let's start. So as a summary, and I probably went way too fast, I'm gonna study. The park development impact fees in zone one, we have an existing amount of 5.9 million. We'd like to, this year's allotted funding is 1.2 and we'd like to allot that to the Finlay Aquatic Spraygrounds. So we can complete that project. Our zone two funding, we would like to allocate 848,000 to South Davis. And the million dollars to the Southwest Play Zone Equipment and add that to our existing budget amount for, to have a total of 5.3 million dollars. In zone three, we'd like to allocate the park development impact fees to the Fremont Park Project, which is set at a later date. And in zone four, we would like to take the $469,000 allocated to the Southwest Park Playground Equipment Project. So our total budget for just the Park Development Impact Fee Accounts is 19,235,000. That's a lot of numbers to grind. Next slide, any questions? Thank you, Terry. Do we have any questions from the board before we go to public comment and board comments? Okay, I had a few questions, Terry. For the Railroad Square one, is that, and I'm not trying to just correct you here, was that Depot Park that you're referring to is getting improvements? Or was that like the neighborhood itself? I wasn't clear on that. That's the Railroad Square Improvement District. So that's not park specific. That's a trust fund that the merchants hold for that area. So it's not really allotted to the park itself. Great. Thank you. And there weren't any non-development fees allocated for the Southwest Quadrant. Are there other funding sources? Or maybe I missed that slide. Any development impact fees? The non-development fee source didn't have any listed for Southwest. That's correct. There aren't any at this time for Southwest. That would be anything that comes from the general fund or any sort of trust fund or any ADA funding. Okay. So for example, Rosalind Creek, is that have other funding sources outside of the general fund or outside of these listed? Right now it's only funding sources, the TDI fund. Okay. I guess it seemed unusual that that quadrant wouldn't be on there, but I'm assuming I'm trusting that we're finding other fund sources. And that's why we're not using those funds. Correct. We have other funding sources. That was just a list to give you information as to what other sources we have in addition to the park development impact fee. Yeah, that's great. Thank you for that. And then just another question. I, there's a general plan update is happening right now. And I just, I looked through it and there isn't really a mention of any parks in there at all other than very generic at the beginning. And I'm not saying we need a bunch of new parks, but is that part of the general plan? Oh, for that question again. Yeah, it's because I can jump in there. If you go ahead. Right now we have in the current general plans some information about parks, but it's relatively dated like a lot of the information on the general plan. So with the update, we are looking at working with planning and economic development to look at different designations that are more suitable for the types of parks we now have in the city versus what we had back in the day. We have courthouse square, which is kind of floating. Is it a park Plaza? You know, what is it? So we just want to get some distinction there as part of that process. And we've had early initial conversations with planning and economic development, but we want the public process to happen. And then we're going to circle back to see what comes out of that as well and work on a more hefty update. What's the public process? As well as we have a good feedback from the public process regarding parks. It should be full of parks at that time. Okay, great. I'll have a comment. I'll save my comment, but thank you for that explanation. Do we have any other questions from the board? Carol, go ahead. First, a couple of comments in going by South Davis. I looked at the play structure and it's like, you know, this play structure doesn't look bad compared to some of the others. I now learned that that revenue source is coming from a different pocket. Is that correct? And I'm hoping at the meeting tomorrow night, staff will somehow address that. I fear that other neighborhoods are going to say, what about us? Our stuff has fallen apart and theirs looks like it could actually go someplace else. But I understand that now. And I think that's valuable educational information to potentially share with taxpayers. A question, one more statement. I'm just gonna come right out and say, these budget slides just confused the hell out of me. And I try to go along. I'm hoping we could have a little primer where one easy slide is broken down a little bit further. I don't know if anybody else was challenged by it, it's like, I feel like I missed an econ 1A because this is just totally over my head. I don't know what's real money, what's looked for money, but that's something perhaps that could be addressed. And last but not least, if there could be a review of impact fees on single family houses versus apartment buildings versus low income slash subsidized housing, which I know the city is making a huge effort at addressing is an impact fee applied to each one of those separate dwellings. And if so, how does that slide around? Thank you. So Carol, to answer your one question that I heard in there about the South Davis Park, yes, the funds were specifically for just a couple of census districts. And we had to find the census districts that had a park in them that said that we could use those funds. And we only had, I believe two choices. And the other one was not available at this time. I believe the other choice was Bear Park. And that made no sense to do new playground equipment in a brand new park. So that's why this project was done in that park. Terry, can you also, is it possible to break down the impact fees by housing type? I believe we could probably get that data from finance. I do not have it. Okay. All right, it's gonna take a while though, if the board could have patients where we gather that it's not something we collect or are privy to it's all coming from finance and finance is very busy right now with the budget. So I'm sure we can get that for you sooner than later. I'll withdraw that request. I don't think that's worth spending quality time on. But maybe some generalities is an apartment building. Which one shall we use? Let's use the one that's going in at the old Prickett's nursery site. Will the per unit impact fee on let's say it's a hundred units be half of a hundred unit subdivision? Will it would it be a 10th? Do you guys have any feel for that? I would say that it's really dependent on the cost of the construction. So it's a percentage of the cost of the construction for all fees in the city. So it really depends on how many units are being constructed and what is the price range of those units are they market later or what? But it's right now somewhat dependent on that process. But we can get back to you with some of the details from the code. Please don't spend heroic effort for me on this. Okay, thank you, Carol. Steve, do you have any questions? Let's have a question regarding the non-development fee sources specifically the 6.8 million that was allocated to city-wide that was funded by FEMA and Measure M. Do we have a general feeling about where those funds are being spent? Which part of the city? Yes, we know exactly where those are going. That construction project will rebuild the landscaping features in several of our communities that were burned specifically up in Fountain Grove and in Coffee Park neighborhood. So that's the grand total cost of the project. We're not going to fund all that. Most of that will come from FEMA. We'll probably end up with a 6% of that cost as the city's piece. Were there any funds allocated to Sonoma Highway? In the Southeast history? Not from this fire. There might be some from the glass fire, but because that highway is Caltrans property, it would not come to us. There's a city-owned property along the west side of Sonoma Highway near Oakmont. That was burned. And speaking about the right of way? Yes. Right at the intersection? It goes all the way up to the Onoka property. I'm not familiar with that, I'd have to look into it. That's most likely Board Member Spillman right away, and the right away is the responsibility of adjacent homeowners. There's only a tiny portion of near the entry of Oakmont that is the city's responsibility for maintenance. So, I'm guessing it's probably dangerous, but guessing that's mostly the responsibility of the adjacent property owner. So in 2008, the city dedicated all right away responsibility for maintenance back to the adjacent property owners. So we'd have to look at it and we can, but if I recall incorrectly, I think that's the area that is belonging to those adjacent property owners. Thank you. And just to clarify on that, so these are the FEMA reimbursements or grants, I'm not sure exactly how to arrive. Those are for the 2017 Tubbs Fire, right, Terry? That's correct. Yeah, so we're not yet to the point of fixing other stuff if it needs to be fixed, but it takes a while to get a check from FEMA if I remember correctly. It does several years. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Terry, go ahead. I just had a quick question with regard to the Cala report and how that might impact the PDI allocations for 22-23, will there be any relationship between that report and these projects that are listed? Would you like me to jump in, Terry? Yes. The calendar report is not likely to change any of the current allocations significantly. So these are allocations we were really hoping to see at a larger dollar amount to support the things we're doing now. So the calendar's condition assessment that'll come out soon is likely, most likely to affect the 2024 budget as well as we'll start off using straight measure and funds to get things rolling. Great. Thank you. Terry, one last question for me and then I'll go to you, Carol. Why did the Mary Traverso open space? Why was that a capital project? Is that a sign replacement? We did not do any cap, we didn't do any capital work there. We just included it for your information that it was a completed project. Great. Carol, go ahead. Yeah, I'm gonna loop back around to ECON 1A that I didn't attend, obviously. I'm looking at the budget summary. Maybe we could go back to that at slide 15 of 16. Great. Does all of this money currently exist? Yeah. And it is earmarked, it is locked down for these projects. Yes. Great. Thank you. That would be as soon as the city council approves it. Correct, Terry? Correct. Great. So anything without their approval? Yep. Thank you for that. Thanks for that question, Carol. Any other questions from the board? Okay. Host, do we have any public comments on agenda item 8.3? No, we don't have any hands raised. Okay. Now we'll go to any comments or opinions folks have on that presentation from the board. I'll just share my one that I hinted at. Let's definitely get into the general plan update. I think that it's very housing focused, which is great. We need to focus on that in the city, but let's... Yeah, so you said you're doing that, Jen. Just maybe loop us back in in the future in some point as to how we're interacting with that. That'd be great. Absolutely, yeah. It needs a hefty update for the park section. Okay. Yeah, that's in my mayor's lunch too a little bit. So, all right. Thank you everyone. Thank you, Perry, very much for running through the numbers. Appreciate your expertise on that. Thank you. Yeah. Okay. We are now on to committee reports. And I guess that's me just heading right into the mayor's lunch. So the mayor's lunch had a few updates that relate to us. So I just want to talk about the general plan update because it is a big deal. And it will involve parks in the future, as we just heard. I went out to a meeting last night of that. They did it at the central library. And there was a pretty good turnout of about 30 members of the public. And there's a workbook you can get. It was at the park a month cleanup. So I appreciated seeing the planning staff out there. And that's a big job of the planning commission right now when they eventually get that approved. So go check that out. There was a website that everyone can go to. It's really easy. It's just called Santa Rosa Forward.com. And then you can check out the general plan update there. Another update, we talked about this last month but the Board of Public Utilities is still looking at drought issues and how that will affect a lot of different city services and functions. Obviously we're still not getting enough rain. So we're not, I don't believe we're at the point yet where they have even gotten to stage four. Maybe we're at that but stage five is the bad one. That's when there's a housing moratorium and a lot of other unforeseen consequences approved about 30 years ago. So it's likely the city council very likely will try to modernize that a little bit and make it more applicable to the current state of the city. The other one is charter review. So that's also a committee I'm on and we're chugging along on that. We're kind of in the technical part of it which we needed a good name or calling it the modernization and cleanup. So this is a lot of various things like changing the word citizen to resident. I think there might even still be some gendered terms in the city charter. So there's that sort of stuff and then there's some bigger picture stuff. We're looking at a two year budget cycle related to what we've been talking about. So that's possible in our future. We may just give the council the option of doing that and then they could basically change it mid in the middle of that two years but a lot of city governments use that. Apparently our city manager kind of came from a city that used that. So that'll be explored. It definitely helps on the staff time end and there's still a lot of public engagement involved. So yeah, go check that out. The city council gave us 12 items. So we've been whittling that list down. The other big update I'll save for Carol and that is our waterways update. Let's see, I think that was everything for me. Let me just check my notes real quick. Sorry folks. Yeah, that's everything for me. So Carol, would you like to provide the waterways committee report please? So I didn't really have any rabbits at my hat. I can tell you Prince Memorial Greenway we're still discussing the fencing around the Hyatt and I don't know if it's coming back to us or not but it's definitely bringing a, it's highlighting the importance of Prince Memorial Greenway. Terry Bladow showed up and gave a very interesting, in how convoluted the sections of the land at Prince Memorial is private. Jen, I know you're not in your head, private, county, city, street maintenance, park maintenance, everybody wants it to be the feather in our community cap that it can be. And this project that the Hyatt is proposing, I really don't think they expected it was going to be quite as, not that it's controversial, but it's opened a lot of can of worms that are really worth addressing. So I guess I'm real grateful for them for that but it is ongoing work in progress that is incorporating a lot of different elements within the county and there's no meeting tomorrow. So that's it. Yeah, and just from the mayor's side he met with the Hyatt folks and did not like their idea to put up the big old fence. I actually didn't know there wasn't even a public plaza there until Steve told us that in the meeting and I've used that pathway a million times and I had no idea that there's some sort of city owned courtyard or something behind the Hyatt that's right adjacent to the bridge to the park that's across the creek. So I'm going to go check that out. Maybe that'll be my next new park. Right now there's really no public use of that at least in any sort of formal sense. So yeah, I think that was it from the mayor's lunch. Thank you Carol for covering that. It's definitely an important part of the city's parks portfolio. Okay, moving on. Deputy Director Santos, do we have any written or electronic communications for item 10? Then this month. Great, that's easy. On to item 11. Any future agenda items? Would any board members like to suggest a future agenda item for us to look at? Okay, I had a few. Oh, I already did the parks and the journal plan update. Cross that off. Can we possibly, Jen, get some sort of update as BPU moves through that drought process on how that would affect city parks and rec sites? I've had people ask me that and I don't have a great answer for them. Is that a possible agenda item for the future? Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, we will keep you updated. We're in constant contact with the water department for what is kind of scenarios and we're doing the same thing. So we don't have an exact answer right this moment but we're formulating options for ourselves. Like what would that mean for us? Right now we're okay cutting back. You may have noticed some dry spots out there as the maintenance team was talking about earlier this year but any further restrictions could change things for us. So we'll definitely keep this board updated. Thank you. And then the other one that I'm hoping we can eventually get and maybe it's already on the schedule is a presentation from the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Officer, Sikoro Shields. You referenced that in some things we've done and I think Sikoro's planning to do that for every board and commission but maybe if you could just ask for us to get on that schedule in the next few months I think it'd be helpful for everyone. Absolutely, yes I did mention this to the Assistant City Manager and they were being discussed but I believe that was what I remember hearing that they were planning to get out and about to boards and commissions when they were at that stage and so I would love for them to be here to have that conversation with y'all. Great, sounds like it's in the works. Any other, that's it for me, any other future agenda items from any other board members? All right, seeing none, that is on to adjournment. So with that, we will be adjourning the meeting. The next regularly scheduled meeting of the board will be Wednesday, April 27th at 4 p.m. Like I said, I'm planning to be there but I don't know if that'll be possible internationally so Steve will be in touch, don't worry. And thank you again everyone for your time today. With that, I will adjourn this meeting of the Board of Community Services at 6.22 p.m. Thank you everyone.