 Okay. Well, it is 546. Welcome to a regularly scheduled meeting. We're starting at 545 today. May we have your roll call? Council Member Brooks is not here yet, so we'll start with Council Member Clark. Here. Council Member Peterson. Here. Vice Mayor Brown. Here. And Mayor Kaiser. Here. And we can go out to the comment. Seeing none, we will adjourn for closed session. We'll be back at 6. Good evening and welcome to this evening's regularly scheduled City Council meeting on November 21st, 2023, 6 p.m. start time. I just wanted to make a quick statement before starting the meeting. We as a council as a whole, we'd like to express condolences to the family of Deborah Brown. She's a member of our community who was killed this weekend in a tragic hit and run incident, sadly. I know many people are grieving as are we and I just want to say that we share in those emotions. And a really huge part of this is that if anybody anywhere has any information regarding this incident that happened on Saturday, please reach out to our police department. There is also a reward for information right now. So it could be any little clue that could help us. I know we all really want to get to the bottom of it. So I will call this meeting to order in honor of Deborah Brown this evening. May we have a roll call please? Council Member Brooks? Council Member Clark? Council Member Peterson? Vice Mayor Brown? Mayor. And Mayor Kaiser? Here. Would you all please join in the Pledge of Allegiance? All right. Thank you. Do we have additions or deletions? Staff has one proposed change for this evening. We would like to pull item 8D and we can take that at the end of the evening. Okay. Great. And then that'll take us to presentations. Tonight we have a emergency preparedness presentation by our police department and fire. Good evening. Good evening, Mayor, Council and the community. I'm here tonight as your police chief and also I have Assistant Chief Chad Aiken here to give us a little bit of overview of the preparedness as we approach the winter season and then some of the alert systems that we have in place so we can keep the public aware of what's going on and then informed in the event of an emergency. So the stuff that we're going to talk about tonight is just the levels of activations during the different emergencies. We're going to talk a little bit about the notification systems. There's a zone haven. That was something that was new last year that was a little bit confusing to the public is what that is. And then I'm going to give you a very brief update on what the weather expectations are this year and then open that up for winter preparedness and any questions that you have. So emergency response is obviously very, very important for a variety of reasons. We want to prepare for any potential disasters that are out there. We want to be able to respond to different emergencies whether it's a local emergency or a regional emergency. And then the other piece is that it assists with the recovery efforts when we do have an event. So the stuff that we're looking at is just any extreme weather event, tsunamis, earthquakes, fires, local disasters, law enforcement activities, and also fire activities. We operate under the SIMS, which is a standardized emergency management system. Next. And just so you it's kind of like a, it starts basically with the field and then it's like an accord and it can either expand or reduce as dependent on the emergency. So everything starts on the local level with the police and fire response. And then once it goes beyond that, then we kind of tap in the city resources. And so that would be something the next level is like local city government. Once it goes out the outside the capacity of our local government, then we tap in the county, which is OR3. So that's Santa Cruz County. And then once it goes beyond that, then we tap into our region two resources, which is the state resources. And if it goes all the way up like this last winter, we had to tap into our federal resources. So it can like I said, it can go all the way up to the federal government and then also can be just handled here at the local level. Next. So the types of alert systems that we have currently for Capitola, because you have your own police department, we have the ability to send our officers out. So depending on the nature of the incident, if something something small, maybe it's impacted just a couple houses or a small neighborhood, you'll have the police department to go out there and make those personal contacts. If it's isolated or something that's a planned event or planned evacuation. So we'll either do door to door. We always have our PA system on our vehicles. So we did that during the evacuations last year. The other pieces that we have Nixle alerts, and that's something that the public can sign up for. And it's an alert notification on your phone. That's sent by the PD. A lot of times you'll get those alerts if we have a special event that's happening, or if we have an accident that happens, we'll put the information out to the public and just say deter from this area or there's going to be police activity or, you know, circumsand has come in this week and we don't use it for something small like that. But if we had the Goniah festival, not the Goniah, the beach festival, something like that, that's what we use that for. And then we the next the next level up from that is we call it a reverse 911. And so what happens there is if we have an incident at a specific house or on the campus of the school, we can request a geographical bubble. And what happens is Netcom is our dispatch center will actually be able to contact all the residents and they to reverse 911. So we can have a pre programmed message that we send out to the public saying shelter in place, evacuate, something's happening. So once we put that out, we always will follow that up. If we if it undoes itself, we'll put the same notes out. Again, that's just the kind of the smaller, smaller scale stuff. Next, we obviously use social media for quite a bit of information sharing. So we use Facebook, Instagram, next door. That's that's handled here within the department, the police department and then the city, we work with the city and the police department, we send those messages out. The next level up from that is the emergency alert system. So that's the EAS system. And those are for amber alerts for missing kids or civil alerts for missing elderly adults, emergency alerts. And those go out through we put the request in through their through the county and they send that out depending on how big the incident is. Moving to a new thing for Santa Cruz County is called cruise aware. Cruise aware is a part of the or three, which is our kind of our county resource. And that's something that the public can sign up for. And it's a it's really easy to sign up for, they can go on there, and they can kind of select out of the menu if you want information on fire, if you want wind, if it's tsunami, there's a whole variety of kind of lists. So you can go through there, you can sign up for whatever area that you want. And then you can kind of monitor what's going on there and they'll give you notifications. And then zone haven, which is kind of again, new in the last couple of years, go to the next slide. So again, this is what they use cruise aware for non emergency. It's kind of the same stuff that we use kind of our reverse 901 and our Nixle alerts, it's just on a bigger scale for the county. Next slide. So zone haven. So zone haven, the program itself, it's ran by the county, but we have access to the information that's being put out there. And so zone haven is really designed for an evacuation software. So it was it was it was picked up by the county in light of all the fires and stuff that was happening. And so next slide. And so what they've done is they've broken up our city into these kind of geographical zones. And so that was a little bit of a challenge last year when we were trying to do the notifications, because we were limited to the zone. So if you look at kind of each, each little section there has a zone. And so when we tried to, um, like the lower village, which actually includes deep hill, when we tried to put that message out, it got sent, you know, evacuation warrant and they're up on the top of the hill. So we kind of had to act on the fly and really get in there and try and get a little more granular on our on our announcements. So we have the lower village in that flooding area just sectioned off. So we can put those notices out. And again, this is something that the public can sign up for. And you can zoom out of it and kind of see what other emergencies are going on. And it'll tell you what the different status of those different areas are. So it's just good information, power outages, any stuff like that. But like I said, it's really designed as more of an evacuation software. So what we do is if we want to evacuate a certain zone, we pull all the data from that. And then we can actually go out and just as a unified grouping, go out, so start making those notifications. And then we're just depending on where the threat is, we just work one way or the other, just give people to those right areas. In the event that we do evacuations and we set up our Jade Street Park as evacuation point. Next. This is just a breakdown of the east side in that lower village area that we developed. Again, there's just those are the zones that are ever programmed in by the county. We have the ability to adjust them a little bit, but we try to keep up with the neighborhoods. Next. So that's it with Zonehaven. I'll give you a quick update on the weather. So every indication so far is that they're saying it's going to be an El Nino year. What that means is that quite honestly, we really don't know. So here's an example of all the different recommendations of the weather experts that saying everything's indicating that it's going to be a strong El Nino. Next slide. And this kind of breaks down what the difference is strong, moderate or weak. And as you can see, the green is the precipitation. And you can see even in the strong, strong El Ninos, there's been times we've had a lot of precipitation. There's times it's been dry. Same thing with the week. We've had early on, it was very dry. And then 2004, 2005 it was really wet. So the bottom line is we really just don't know. We can expect that we're going to have an El Ninos winter. We just need to be prepared for it. And we'll just kind of see what happens. So just as preparedness, we want to really take a look at our stormwater management, really take care of you and your neighbors, be thinking about you and your neighbors. The things that we're keeping an eye on, especially when it comes to the upcoming winter, the king tides, because we look at those king tides with if there's rain or swell, what Soquel Creek is doing. And we look at those comparisons and look if we're going to have any flooding. Just making sure that everyone's aware of the different roads and the mapping that we have out there. If you have a power backup, that's very, very important communications. Again, signing up for cruiserware, the battery backup. And I think the final one was or no radio. So just being in tune to what's going on with the radio. This is the sand bag location. So we do have sandbags here at the police department. Central Fire has them there on 17th Avenue. They don't have them on Soquel. So they do have the bags on 17th Avenue. The bags are here in the front of the police department, Sains in the back, encourage those, especially the little vineyards to make those preparations early, I think. And then that's it for me. Like I said, I'm open for any questions. It was kind of a big highlight of overview of what's going on with upcoming weather, what notifications we have. And like I said, I have assistant chief Aiken here as well, if you have any questions about anything else. Thank you for that. We have questions. Thank you. I appreciate it. And I want to shout out to the social media. I know that was something when you came on as chief that that was something you wanted to build on. And you guys definitely have. So I follow it and I try to share it. And I know the rest of us do too. So that's been super helpful. We have a really good team. Yeah, awesome. Thank you guys. Great. Thanks. Okay. Item four report on closed session. Good evening. We had a closed session on the autumn on the agenda and no reportable action was taken. Thank you. And then item five additional materials. Staff received one email communication related to item eight F and then staff provided an updated attachment for item 80. Great. Thank you. Take us down to item six. This is oral communications by members of the public. This allows for any comments on consent items or anything that is not agendized on tonight's meeting. You will have a maximum of three minutes to speak. If there's anybody in house that wishes to speak. Good evening. Thank you for letting me be here. Dear council members, my name is Charlotte. In June of this year, you helped us at Gabriel Mobile Home Estate to reinstate the rent control at our mobile home park. The property is owned by the Vieira Enterprises. Thanks to the rent control, we are still paying $641.76 per month. Mrs. Judith Pappas bought her place June 6th, 18th, 23 and she lived in number 32. She moved into the park in July and has been paying $1,000 per month for state rents. Mrs. Pappas signed the contract. That's what both realtors told her, the buyer and the seller told her to sign. Mrs. Pappas is an older lady and the Vieira has took advantage of her. On Saturday, November 18th, I learned that one of the houses in this park is for sale. I checked the details and noticed the rent for this house is $1,000 per month. This is against the rent stabilization ordinance. The maximum rent the Vieira can raise is 15%. The Vieira may use the higher rent example as justification for higher rent for all residents in the park. Thank you very much. I want to bring this to your attention. My friend Maryam has something to say and then Mrs. Ling will tell more about house number six. Thank you. Hi. Charlotte is now, she's John, Hakin's widow and she's now the president of the HOA and I'm her vice president. And this something had come up in earlier meetings is what do we do if we know we don't have contact with every single homeowner in the park and how do we get the message to them that these ordinance are even in place. So when Charlotte saw the place was for sale, that's what she realized. And then also number 32. So one of our, we're all members now of GSMOL, which is the Golden State Mobile Home League. We just have representatives. And so our president of that who names Lori, she reminded us that on the fact sheet on the ordinance fact sheet, it says it is a resident that it says to contact the ordinance administrator if the landlord or park owners violating the ordinance and who administers the ordinance, the capital, the community development director. So Charlotte wrote a letter which we're going to edit and send from our HOA to this email address, but it was really important to her to also come here and read the letter to you. That's why it's great. Thank you. And this is Anne Lam and she lives in number six. I'm the realtor and I help her sell her mobile space. Hi everyone. My name is Anne Lam. I live in the park, my house on number six. So when the earlier in the year, I got the letters from the landlord to say they will increase my rent to 1,000 instead of 645. And then because they have a meeting in May, I have to travel all of this day. So I meet the landlord it's early than the May. So they give me a new contract and say I have to sign a new contract and I ask them, is the property have the rent control? They answer, they say because the property is a privacy, so they don't have the rent control. So I need to sign a new contract. If not, I need to move out. So that's why I have no choice to negotiate the lease. So I sign the contract since so I've been paying for 1,000 in June first until now. That's my story. Thank you. All right. Three minutes. Hi, my name is Megan Carroll. I'm the volunteer coordinator at the Santa Cruz County Animal Shelter. I have been at the shelter for two years. I'm here because you have a representative appointed to our Animal Services JPA board. Police Chief Dolly, which who I think is, hi. You may have recently read in local media that the shelter has been experiencing a lot of problems and issues. Our three main problems are understaffing lack of resources in a management vacuum that we've been dealing with. In the last year, we've had a 22 percent increase in animals. And it is the highest rate of animals in 10 years, according to our shelter manager Amber Rowland today on the radio. She said that. This affects our community because we at the shelter would like to give as much care and as we possibly can to all of the animals and the public who visit our shelter. In the future, these problems will compound and create larger issues that can affect public health, public safety, and also affect own family pets. We ask that you check in with your representative to our JPA Board Chief Dolly as to what is going on at the shelter, the different issues that we're facing, and how that may affect the public. Many people in our community are supportive of our shelter and love our local shelter. We bring this to your attention because we want to ensure that the Santa Cruz County Animal Shelter can continue to support our community and animals at a high level in the future. And that takes some of us calling up for our representatives to check in with the JPA and see what's going on. So I would really appreciate that. Thank you so much and thank you for your time tonight. Thank you. Good evening. My name is Sally and I am the Director of the Cabrera College Stroke and Disability Learning Center. I appreciate the opportunity to come and express my gratitude to the City of Capitola for the support of our Center through the Community Grant Program. Your funding is a significant piece in sustaining our services, especially in what is a rebuilding season for us, following the impacts of COVID, inflation, and funding cuts. Your support in keeping this effective safety net service going is greatly appreciated. For those not familiar with our program, we're an education center for adults managing a change in functioning due to a neurological event. About 50% of our students have had a stroke. Others are managing conditions such as MS, Parkinson's, the impact of cancer or cancer treatments, or they may have experienced a traumatic brain injury from accidents or other events. Our program is all about supporting adults to strengthen the abilities they have just to participate as fully as they are able in life despite their unexpected functional losses. Our classes support independence, mitigate against continuing decline and celebrate the wisdom and contribution of these adults to our community. We offer classes in mobility, communication, and counselling. The classes are led by licensed professionals such as physical therapists, a licensed speech and language pathologist, and social workers. However, they're conducted in an educational framework. These adults come as students rather than patients, and the collaboration with an understanding peer network creates significant opportunities for mutual support and learning. We also have a range of classes that focus on creative skills. Our students have created wonderful works of art in painting and ceramics, for example, which are shared across campus in the library and gallery and other public art spaces. We have a choir, a joy of music class, therapeutic horticulture class, and each class is a unique opportunity to continue to grow and knowledge a creative expression. In addition to the students who benefit directly from our classes, we collaborate with other cabrio departments to provide education and awareness for providing services to people with disabilities. For example, our nursing students complete a rotation through our department and in particular learn how to become a communication partner with people who have experienced a neurological impact on their speech and language. It builds their confidence and tools that they need to deliver quality nursing care. The stroke and disability learning centre supports independence in vulnerable adults in the midst of significant change. Thank you for supporting us as we strive to deliver quality education. Thank you so much. Any other members of the public wish to speak? Seeing none, we can take this to any staff comments or council? Thank you. I just wanted to request some follow-up on some of the items that came to us just now at public comment. So the first, if police chief Daly could do a follow-up at a future council meeting on the activities going on at the Animal Services JPA just so that we are kind of have some better insight on what's happening there, what our role is as your representative on our board, etc. That would be great. And then to follow up on the concerns brought to us from the residents at Cabrillo Mobile Home Estates based on what I remember from the ordinance, I'm pretty sure an increase to $1,000 of the mobile home space is still outside of what the ordinance allows even when a property is sold. That sounds right to me. I don't know. I don't know all of the facts of your situation, but I would suggest it sounds like certainly one of the speakers is on the right track in contacting development director Herlihi. She is the administrator for the ordinance, but I might suggest that the woman who spoke about your rent being increased to $1,000, I might suggest that perhaps you contact director Herlihi as well. And she can tell you if that increase is consistent with the ordinance. I know this is a tough week. A lot of people are out, but perhaps on Monday you and you as well, ma'am, I'm sorry, I don't recall your name, perhaps you could contact her. We can't go back and forth now, but if... Yeah, I think that worked. Yeah, that's great. I think that's just what I was hoping to hear is that we can ensure that staff is following up on this. Thank you. I'd like to discuss a few things. One of them being Alexander Peterson, council member, and myself have been working behind the scenes on a project of Hill Street in Bay. And I think it's a good time for us to discuss a little bit about it and maybe put it on our next council meeting so that we can bring staff back and revisit it. And in the meantime, we are going to have some outreach with the public. Next week, we have a meeting planned. Sorry, Joe, are you finished? Yeah, go ahead. Okay. Actually, next week's meeting is not going to be a public outreach meeting. It's a planning meeting. Yes, correct. Internally. And I would propose that we have a special meeting to address the safety issues on Bay next week and give the public a chance to talk about their concerns and a chance for staff and ourselves to explain what our process is and what we're planning to do and a timeline of the safety improvements for the Bay Avenue corridor. Yeah, I think that is a good idea. Although being the holidays might be hard for us to get a meeting between now and the 14th, but either way, have staff come back and bring it to us to maybe we can move forward a little quicker and just to let the public know that we are working behind the scenes on this. Yeah, and I'm looking at city manager. Generally, we need general consensus. And so I would be in more agreement with Councilmember Clark on bringing it to our December meeting. So it gives everyone time to prepare on our staff level. And so that council also is all available. So there's a planning meeting next week. There's an ad hoc committee meeting. Exactly. Then staff was planning on reaching out to adjacent property owners before Christmas somewhere in there or right after and then hopefully hosting a community meeting with the residents at 750 Bay, probably the first or second week. That's our tentative plan right now. We're happy to bring something back to council if you'd like a special meeting or we can do it December 14th. If it came to us on December 14th, we could get an update from what happened in the planning meeting. Correct. That'd be open to you either, but I really want to impress upon the public that we are working on this. It's very important to us. I would love to have the opportunity for concerned residents to interact with us before the December 14th. It seems like a long delay. I'm wondering if we couldn't open up the planning meeting at least to public input as well. That would be a different meeting. The ad hoc committee is intended to get feedback from the council and talk about our outreach plans and refine them. If the council would like us to hold a workshop, we can do that. It's a little odd to do it in this context, I think right now. Are you suggesting that the public be permitted to provide comment to the ad hoc committee? Or are you suggesting that the full council attend the ad hoc committee meeting and the public be allowed to provide comment then? The former. Okay. I don't know if that's what you understood. So it sounds like we're meeting in the last week of November. Maybe we can have that meeting the first week of December and then have our council meeting the following week. And then? We can do that. I guess I'm just not entirely following what it is we're trying to do. Is the idea to have a little bit of a public workshop on this in the interim? We are working on this sooner before December 14th. Sure. I think my recommendation would be that we can hold our ad hoc committee meeting and get the feedback from the ad hoc committee and then maybe schedule something the following week so that we could do that and then make sure that we're on the same page when we're going to the community. Again, we could do the community, a community meeting the first week in December. That's a special. No, I don't think it would need to be a special city council meeting, just a meeting for the public to reach out to us that we can all come back together on the 14th for a council meeting. When you say reach out to us, do you mean the ad hoc committee or the full council? Because if it's the full council, it needs to be a council. The ad hoc committee. Unless, I mean, I would be happy for a special meeting too, but I'm sure those are all over the place. I guess I'm just concerned that if we have a special meeting, yes, we can receive information, but I have no information to give them on what our plans are or what we're doing in regards to the Bay Avenue. We haven't received staff information. And so I think that ultimately the ad hoc committee should get together. I know there's community members who've reached out to me who want to be on it. So I think this, that would be their opportunity next week to do that. And because that's when the ad hoc committee is. Well, that ad hoc committee next week is not open to the public, which is what I was saying. And then in December, when we receive that information, it is open to the public. And then we can hear from our community there. I think it's just important for us to have all the information we need. And that's only what two weeks, you know, till our December 14th meeting. I think that that's enough time. And can we maybe just recap what we had voted on the last time this was an item? So as a reminder, when we, when the council voted, I think when we presented some different options for Bay Hill Avenue intersection, the council formed an ad hoc committee to assist staff on doing a little bit of outreach and refining the design. The direction was to do that and then reach out to the adjacent land owners and the residents at 750 Bay and come back with some final plans. So that's the plan we're working on. I think the goal would be to get something back to the council, probably the second meeting in January, the first meeting in February. So those are the steps that are outlined. One option that maybe just makes this a little bit easier is we could just open up the ad hoc committee meeting to the public that we think have scheduled. I believe it's next week. Later in the afternoon, we can put out the notice if anyone's interested, they can attend. We can do it in the community room. Then we can answer questions if people do want to attend. That might solve your interest, Alexander. And I would prefer that just to give an opportunity for their concerns. Knowing that we may not have complete answers at this time, but that we're working towards that. And then we'll probably need to have an additional private meeting. I would rather have the open community meeting sooner and then schedule the additional private meeting the week later personally. Okay. I'm good with that. Any other council comments? I was trying to think of what it was. I received an email from staff about participation in a clean energy program in partnership with the county. Am I saying that correctly? I was just wondering if you could give us information on that. We were supposed to sign up, clean energy. I'll look for it. You guys are all looking at me. Is this signed up? Is it the Resilient Capitola program? Oh, it was on social media. So there's a Resilient Capitola. It's on social media now live. You can sign up your home, your condo, your rental, and it gives you back information on tips and tricks on how to lessen your bill and your energy. And then if you sign up, you can come into City Hall and get a package of goodies, like a reusable plastic, non-plastic, whatever it was, wax papers and such. So anyways, check out our social media, sign up today. We're closed on the Thanksgiving but come by next week and pick up your stuff. Thank you. Just a few announcements from me this Thursday's Thanksgiving, happy Thanksgiving, which means on Saturday the guy in the big red suit surfs into town, right out in Capitola. And then he will be here for hours speaking to all of the young kids. So please come down. That happens at noon. Yes, okay. Yeah, so come on down, check out Surf and Santa. And then the next weekend, December 2nd and 3rd is the annual cookie walk. So a lot of the businesses in the village will be handing out cookies for those that would like to participate. And I was lucky enough this past week to do a ride along with Officer Camacho with our Capitola PD. So I just want to do a huge shout out, huge thank you for being gracious and welcoming me, the whole PD and Officer Camacho as well. Thank you so much. And we'll come down to consent. These items are enacted by in one motion in the form listed below minus 8D. So that would be ABC and then EFGHNI unless somebody needs to pull something else. We'll move approval of consent. I'll second it. Great. We have a motion and a second. We have a roll call. Council Member Brooks. Hi. Council Member Clark. Hi. Council Member Peterson. Hi. Vice Mayor Brown. Hi. And Mayor Keiser. Hi. This is unanimously. Thank you. So in general, government this evening, Item 9A, the voting voter polling contract, the recommended action is to authorize the city manager to execute a professional service agreement with EMC research in the amount not to exceed $25,000 to conduct polling on potential revenue measures to be placed on the 2024 general election ballot. And here is Chloe. Thank you, Mayor Keiser and Council. As you said, we're going to be speaking about a polling contract, the little background for you. In 2021, Council did direct staff to research possible tax measures, viability in conjunction with the 2024 general election rather than placing anything on the 2022 ballot. And more recently, you did allocate funding through the 2023-24 budget goals towards to fund a survey of capitol voters regarding tax measures. So this past fall, I guess we're currently in fall, the Finance Advisory Committee made a formal recommendation to Council to, if they, if you are to agree on the polling to pull around two things, the extension of Measure F and a possibility for a general obligation bond. So a little bit more on those two types of possible revenue measures. Extending Measure F you may be more familiar with because this is a current quarter cent sales tax. It was originally passed in 2004. It's been extended twice, with generally very high approval in 2008 with 66 percent approval and more recently in 2016 with 81 percent voter approval. It currently will expire in 2027 and it does bring in around a million dollars in revenue each year, which can and could help with ongoing operational expenditures for the city. So keep in mind, these two different measures would really meet different needs for the city. A general obligation bond, you'll hear likely the city manager and our finance director say a GO bond, but it's a general obligation bond is what that means. It is something that would put in a property tax, an example. I'm not suggesting this would be the details, but an example is $50 for every $100,000 of assessed value on property within the city. These are different in the sense that the revenue would be used for something very specific, projects that often serve the community, and the use of the revenue would be identified in the ballot language. So for example, this could help with long-term facility needs, infrastructure needs. You'll see this on ballots often, a GO bond towards building a new police department, for example, or maintaining green space for the community. So moving on, thank you. Why should we poll? So this is a really good way to determine I don't want to say if, I want to say how likely capital of voters are to approve the types of measures the polling identifies. This can help determine our community's priorities. Like I mentioned, the language on the ballot includes what the revenue would be for. So if they really want to preserve green space or they really want to rebuild the community center, we would like to know that before we write the ballot language. Also can dive into getting information on what tax amount would voters respond to, how long would they want the tax to be in place, etc. So staff did review three proposals from firms that do this sort of research and recommend EMC research. We've gotten really positive feedback on them from neighboring jurisdictions. They would use phone, email, and online surveying. So this is a really more modern approach to survey our likely capital of voters with the hope of collecting at least 200 responses. We remember that we are a small community with just under 7,000 registered voters. So that's why that number might seem small, but it's mighty. And we would expect results to be available to be presented to you in the springtime with plenty of time for council to deliberate, listen to those results and determine how to move forward, keeping in mind that the deadline for the ballot is August 9th of 2024. So a recommendation this evening is to authorize the city manager to execute an agreement with EMC research for $22,000 to conduct capital appalling and include questions around these two types of measures in particular general obligation font and the extension of measure F. I'm available for any questions and I believe a representative from EMC research is also on the line if you have questions. Thank you. Great. Do you have any questions? I have a good question. Are we doing one or the other or is this for both the bond and the measure? So the polling would be about both and often how would those two connect? And I have two questions, Chloe. You mentioned that measure F expires in 2027. So why would we be pulling for something for 2024? Would it go essentially into effect the next selection cycle? Can you just explain that for absolutely? So I believe and our city manager can jump in if I'm wrong, that we would want to have that approval ahead of time. So it would just, it would no longer expire in 2027. It would continue through however long we would put on the ballot. And I think that would be something addressed in the polling as well. How much longer would people want forever? Could we extend it in perpetuity, for example? Okay. Thank you. And then my second question is regarding outreach. Can we request that it get, we set out via text as well, not just phone? That's a great question. And I don't know. So I can ask. Certainly I don't know if Jessica is on the lines. She may have an answer right now for you. Yes. Good evening. Thanks for letting me jump in. Indeed, our methodology would utilize text messaging along with email invitations to complete a survey online along with telephone calls to both landlines and cell phones. Thank you, Jessica. Thank you so much, Jessica, for being here. No problem. I think you mentioned this, Chloe. So forgive me if I missed it. So this is polling voters specifically and not just residents, correct? They're going to confirm that these people are registered to vote and will be voting. Yes. Okay, cool. Thank you. Did we put this out to bid? And this was the best option. Yeah. This was also the most affordable option. Yeah. As I just wanted to throw it out there. If it's asking the first people to respond to surveys, could we not just offer people $50 to fill out the survey? Because right now we're paying $100 per survey. So the goal behind these surveys is to get a statistically accurate representation of whether or not a measure is going to pass or not. And obviously, if you entice people to pay, you pay people, you're going to get a different sort of group of people responding that isn't necessarily statistically relevant. In fact, the polls aren't just focused on registered voters, it's actually likely voters. So they can look at the roles and see who actually has voted and passed elections. And then they try to balance it out. You try to make sure that your poll has the right mix of left and right, different age demographics to try to match what the likely voter profile will be in the election. So there's a fair amount that goes into it, and you don't just want to put out a survey monkey because it'll give you different results. I just wanted to ask, I don't know if either you or Jessica, but just wondering about availability of bilingual options, if this would be offered in Spanish for those voters that may be their first language. I can start and then Jessica can jump in if she feels comfortable. That is an option and there's an additional charge. And while we didn't include that was because based on the amount of responders and based on prior elections, only 1% of our voters requested Spanish language balance. So we can absolutely add that option at that council's discretion, just keeping in mind that likely would be one to maybe three Spanish language responders, which wouldn't necessarily statistically change the results of the survey. But of course it's up to council's determination. Okay, thank you. All right, I guess then what would be the additional cost? Oh, I'm so sorry. It's $2,000. Any other questions? We can go out to public comment on this item. For anybody in-house, not seeing anybody. We can take it back to council for deliberation. Sorry, I'll just, I just want to make the point that generally we, well, I guess that would be a question. This requires a two-thirds vote, correct? If we're on the ballot, what kind of vote would it So a measure of extension would be 50% plus one and the GO bond would be 66. And the reason I bring that up is when we want more voters to come out to vote, we need to let them know about an upcoming election. And when I think about our bilingual speakers or Spanish speakers in the community, this might be a way to engage them, let them know. So even if we get one to three folks participating in the survey, it definitely triggers them to be interested in an upcoming election. So I would be interested in adding that in just because it might actually help us later down the road with getting more people involved in voting. So I would be happy to make a motion to approve the item as recommended with the addition of the $2,000 for bilingual surveys. Can I ask a question there? When is the time for that? Is it time now to ask a question? Okay. Yeah, I just wanted to ask, I mean if essentially additional $2,000 is going towards marketing for the potential ballot measures, are we allowed to spend money on marketing? So like I know I don't count, I'm not going to count this as but like a roundabout way. That's what we're talking about, right? So I'll give a sort of a city manager answer and then I think you might want to hear from the city attorney, but in general what we've done in the past is once an item is on the ballot, you're not campaign board as a city, but we can put out informational brochures. So we've done that in the past where we have a ballot initiative out there. We may just send something to residents saying here's what money would be used for and here's how much it would raise so kind of informational, but the city can't campaign for it. And so you said once it's on the ballot, what about before it's on the ballot? Are we allowed to sort of have a plan that we're going to put it on the ballot? No, we're not. You can't use public funds to campaign for a measure. Period, okay. Okay, so yeah, I guess this would fall into public information rather than campaign. Yeah, the surveying certainly would and then we've done, you know, we sort of have done like special editions of the newsletters and you know, we'll always run it through legal to make sure that we're not delving into a campaign that is really explaining what funds would be. It's not uncommon if a city has a tax measure on the ballot or certainly a bond measure. It's not uncommon for a city to publish an information sheet that shows how the money would be used if the tax passes or if the bond passes. So just that is different than for instance, council members going to a store asking people to vote for council members in saying on the dais, we endorse this measure. That's different. What about off the dais? Sure, you could not on behalf of the council. Right, exactly, not on behalf of the council. Sure. All right, thank you. I'll second. First in a second, may I have a roll call, please? Council Member Brooks. Hi, Council Member Clark. Council Member Peterson. Hi. Vice Mayor Brown. Hi. And Mayor Keiser. Hi. Thank you, passes unanimously. That'll take us to item eight, the nine B. This is our 2024 City Council meeting schedule. The recommended action is to adopt the resolution establishing the regular meeting schedule for 2024. Good evening, Mayor and Council Members. This is the item that determines our Thursday nights for the next year. So just to give some brief background, as a reminder, regular meetings are typically held on the second and fourth Thursdays of each month, but there are a couple of exceptions, notably July, August, November and December. So last year, at the last meeting of 2022, the City Council approved a change to the 6 p.m. start time, which I think has been a successful change, and that is proposed to continue in 2024. The two options before you this evening both continue the same summer schedule that we followed this year, so one meeting in July and one in August on the fourth Thursday. But as a reminder, we are entering an election year, so that does kind of have an effect on this schedule for November and December. So option A is pretty much the exact same as what we did this year. The second November meeting is held on Tuesday of Thanksgiving week. So the pros of this schedule is that it maintains the status quo. The con is that there is a meeting during holiday like we have today. The next option we have before you this evening is the same summer schedule. The only thing that's revised is that the November meetings would be back to back, but it would stay on Thursday. The pro here is obviously we would not have to meet during a holiday week. The con is that there would be a short turnaround time for the November 21st agenda, which would really limit the amount of late additions. Like for example, if something was added during the previous week's council meeting, staff would only have one day to turn it around and would probably have to publish the agenda with like a placeholder staff report rather than presenting a full staff report. So not impossible, but something to keep in mind. It is an election year. So I think staff would try to forecast the agenda in accordance with the election schedule. I don't think we would have results by that second November meeting, but that's something that would be coming up with that. The recommended action is to adopt a resolution establishing the 2024 regular meeting schedule, selecting either option A or option B. I'm available for any questions. Thank you. We have questions. The staff have a reference. Is there any consensus on that? So this was brought forward because some staff members, a lot of staff members are, you know, taking time off during the week of Thanksgiving. It's normal with a holiday to want to spend time with your family and loved ones. So staff did request this change and we thought we'd float it. We understand some of the council members might have plans Thanksgiving week too. So it might benefit you to not have a meeting that week, but we are open to your request or your preference. So staff generally favors option B. Yeah, I would say that's a fair assessment. I think some staff members do try to take some time off this week. You know, I'm a curmudgeon. I usually don't. And, you know, I always think about it operationally just in terms of being able to produce good packets. It's hard to do it in back to back weeks, but I think that's definitely true than a fair number of staff members or community development director knows right now who's on the East Coast. They do try to take time off this week. So I think it's either way. I think it's really kind of council choice and what you prefer. I would say it's not impossible. We do have during budget season, we have meetings back to back and we're able to produce packets. It would just be a really tight turnaround time and we might have to publish a placeholder or something was added last minute, but it's not an impossible task. Great. Any other questions? Any public comment? Being none. Any staff members? Not just kidding. Anyways, coming back to council deliberation. I would be open to you either. I'll make a motion and move forward with option. What is it? Let me see. Hold on. I'm looking at the dates, so I'm trying to make sure I'm saying the right one. Option B with the back to back meetings that allows the entire week of Thanksgiving to not have a council meeting. And I think that that would allow more flexibility for staff and council. And if it turns out that there's an urgent issue and we'll address it then and hopefully there won't be. Second. First. Sorry. I just have it. You have a person that's second. We have a roll call. It's almost a holiday. I get it. Council Member Brooks. Council Member Clark. Council Member Peterson. Aye. Vice Mayor Brown. Aye. And Mayor Keiser. Aye. Passes unanimously. Thank you. We'll see how that goes. So then we'll go back. We'll jump back up to Consent Item 8D. So still on the topic of holidays. Welcome back. So this was an error. Uninfertenly, when preparing this resolution, I prepared the resolution with the list of holiday and city hall closure dates without realizing that July 5th, so July 4th for 2024 falls on a Thursday this year. And when preparing the resolution, I included that Friday. It was an inadvertent, but I think I was manifesting subconsciously. And so unfortunately, when something like this happens, July 5th is not included on the city's like MOUs for employees as a designated city holiday. However, the city council could designate it as a city hall closure. So the distinction here is that it's not a paid holiday for employees, but employees can use PTO and city hall would remain closed. So no one is required to be staffing city hall. This year, I don't remember exactly what day the 4th fell. I think it was a Wednesday this year and there was very little traffic or maybe it was a Tuesday. There's like very little traffic on that Monday before the holiday. And there were a lot of staff members who took time off to have enjoy the holiday with family members. And so staff did not see any increased traffic at city hall. If the council were to designate this a closure, it would just mean that city hall would be closed on that Friday following the 4th of July. So with that, the recommended action is to either adopt the resolution with the proposed change that July 5th would be a holiday closure or staff can amend the resolution and remove it and city hall would remain open on that Friday. I'm available for any questions. So you said that it wouldn't staff could use PTO and city hall would be closed. But if any staff decides they don't want to use PTO, would they still come into work and just city hall would be closed or would it be a mandatory vacation day essentially? So city hall would be open to staff members. Okay. So they could still come in and do work if they wanted to. If they didn't, they can take the day off but regardless, city hall is closed to the public. Yeah. When we have these funny days where we have like a big holiday on a Thursday, often what happens is Fridays are like first off, we end up trying to work through with our department that team like who's going to cover it. You know, someone has to be there to answer phones. Someone has to be there to open the door. Someone has to be able to answer a planning question, a building question, a finance question. So it's always a little bit of a balancing act to make sure we have like a skeleton crew that can cover it. And often those days are incredibly quiet if the phone doesn't ring and nobody shows up. So we were just thinking, well, you know, it is during our summer break and this would give us the ability to just say, we don't need to worry about overall coverage at city hall because city hall will be closed. And if people want to be off, if everyone wants to be off, that's fine. And if people do want to work, they can do that as well. So council's open to it. Well, we haven't tried it before, but we definitely I've definitely seen those days over the years, like when January 2nd, for example, or sorry, January 1st is on a Tuesday or something or a Thursday. And next day is super quiet. Any other questions on that? I'm just so city hall will technically be closed to the public, but open for staff. Correct. Yeah, so we're just not worried about basically having every department represented to be able to answer any question that would walk in the door. We'll comment. Seeing none. Take it back. Prove the staff recommendation. I'll second it. Great. First in a second, maybe have a roll call, please. Council Member Brooks. Council Member Clark. Council Member Peterson. Vice Mayor Brown. Aye. And Mayor Kaiser. Aye. Passes unanimously. And that then takes us down to item 10, which is adjournment. Again, I just want to wish everybody a happy Thanksgiving. Be safe. Spend time with your loved ones. And thanks for being here. All right. Good night.