 you to begin. All right. Thank you, Dina, for helping us get that settled into our Zoom host and to everybody waiting. Again, I just want to apologize and thank you for your patience while we got that figured out. I am Adrienne Mertens, the Chief Communications and Intergovernmental Relations Officer for the City of Santa Rosa. I want to thank you for taking time to join us this evening. Our interpreter services are being provided today in Spanish. And to start things off, I'm going to have our Zoom host, Trisha, explain how that will work. Live interpretation can be heard on the Spanish channel. You can join the Spanish channel by clicking on the interpretation icon in Zoom toolbar. It looks like a globe. Live interpretation will be heard on the Spanish channel at the time the public at the time for public. The interpreter on the panel will be prepared to assist anyone needing interpretation. Additional instruction will be given at that time. Adrienne, back to you for additional housekeeping for today's meeting. Thank you. So this is the information and community input meeting for the City of Santa Rosa's PG&E settlement funds. This meeting was set up and open to all members of our community. I do want to touch on a few logistical items and then I will introduce you to the rest of our participating staff. So as community members join this virtual meeting, you'll be participating as an attendee. Your microphone is muted and your camera is off. Only today's staff panelist will be viewed during the meeting. If you're calling in from a telephone for privacy concerns, our host Trisha is renaming your viewable phone number to citizen and only the last four digits of your phone number will show on the screen to identify you. We will start the meeting with a brief background presentation that will provide information on the settlement funds. And of course, this meeting is also most importantly a time for those of you who have joined us to ask your questions and to provide your input on how you believe the Santa Rosa City Council should prioritize the funds. And so after the presentation concludes, we'll open for questions and community input. And so for the community input process, I will ask that you raise your hand in Zoom. And at that time our Zoom host will move one by one down the list of attendees with their hands raised. Once you have asked your question or shared your input, the Zoom host will lower your hand. And if you are dialing in from a telephone, you'll want to dial star nine to indicate that you've raised your hand. So now to introduce our city staff participants our Assistant City Manager and Director of Transportation and Public Works is Jason Knutt. Our Interim Chief Financial Officer from our Finance Department, Allen Alton. Allen will also be giving the presentation an overview of the settlement funds tonight. We have our Director of Housing and Community Services, Dave Gwine. And then we have from the Fire Department Chief Tony Gossner, Fire Marshal Scott Moon, and Assistant Fire Marshal Paul Lowenthal. And we also have our interpreters, Paolo and Mario. Thank you so much for being here with us. And then our hosts who will be helping with the public input and questions, Elisa Rawson and Trisha Mason. They'll also be helping to take notes during the meeting to make sure that we document all of the input received tonight. And so in addition to this meeting, the city has held two other public input meetings, one with fire survivors of Coffee Park neighborhood area and the other yesterday evening with fire survivors of the Fountain Grove, Hidden Valley, Montecito and Oakmont neighborhood areas. A digital survey is also being circulated throughout the community to collect public input as well. That survey will remain open through this Sunday, October 25th. We did extend the date of that as well as rescheduled this meeting in the previous one last night due to the glass fire. And so there is still additional time to take that survey. I'll share the link to it at the end of this meeting. And we do encourage you and to take that survey and also share that with other members of the community. And so after we've completed the community input process, staff will be taking all of the input that's collected to date, both from the community meetings as well as from the survey and compiling that into a comprehensive report for our city council. They'll be considering that at some upcoming meetings that I will let Alan share that as we transition into his presentation. And so with that, I will turn it over to Alan to begin and we'll give Trisha a moment to transition to his slides. All right. Good evening everyone. I hope you all are well and thank you for joining us this evening to go through this community forum. Let's just dive into the presentation. The next slide please. So the city filed a claim to recoup losses from the, or damages as a result of the 2017 wildfire. We filed that claim with PG&E and this is to go for projects that were not covered by state or federal aid or insurance. We received a settlement of $95 million in July of 2020. Next slide please. So the city council upon receiving the money, the city council directed staff to get as much input as possible from the community, both from fire survivors in targeted areas that were directly impacted by the fire, but also from the community as a whole as the fire actually impacted the full community. This, unlike other settlements, the funds that we receive in this have no restrictions and can be spent on any project. Ultimately, the city council will decide where the funds will be spent. Next slide please. So a little context before we move forward. The city, after the fires in 2017, we started working with FEMA and Cal OES right after that, beginning with just entry-level meetings in the December, January timeframe and moving all up and we're still actually working with them. It took us probably about two years, maybe even a little bit more than that, to develop the projects to be able to recover from the disaster. This is a long process getting FEMA to understand the projects that we need to have done and to ensure that they fit within FEMA guidelines and to have them approved by FEMA. All in all, there were 29 projects that were approved by FEMA. All of the projects that would reimburse the city for what's called, well, our response to the disaster have been paid so far. So we've been made whole there. What we have remaining are these more recovery projects. So your large construction and other projects both for the water department, for parks and for public works. Unfortunately, there were some other projects that were denied and are such unfunded at this point. So next slide, please. So one of those projects is Fire Station 5. It was located at the top of Fountain Grove. It was completely destroyed by the fire. We are looking to not only rebuild it, but move it to a more fire defensible space. We are estimating that the cost to relocate and rebuild the fire station at $14.5 million, that is a net remaining cost. The city did receive some money from insurance. And so the remaining amount is what we need. It's about a $17 million project all told. Next slide, please. In addition to buildings being destroyed, we also had infrastructure that was damaged. Streets in particular here were damaged mostly during the fire debris removal mission. We estimate the cost to repair and redo these streets at about $24 million. Next slide. Also, in addition to street infrastructure, there were also sidewalk infrastructure that was damaged both by the fire, the intensity of the fire, but also from the debris removal mission. And we estimate the cost of repairing those sidewalks at about $4.1 million. Next slide, please. And then we also have hazardous tree projects. Over the past couple of years since the fire, the city has removed hundreds of hazardous street trees and other right-of-way trees in the burn scar area. And there are hundreds remaining in the private property hazardous trees that were identified through an initial assessment by the city. So the fire department intends on focusing on these private property dead and drawing trees. They present a fall hazard to structures or initial structures or neighboring structures. They do infringe on defensible space around structures and contribute to fire fuel. The cost of that, we are estimating at about $5.1 million. Next slide, please. So in addition to those specific ones that were outlined, and also to be clear on these, these were all those individual projects were all denied by FEMA. We do have the fire station is on appeal, our second appeal with that. So these are some of the reasons why we brought those forward is that they realistically looked to be an unmet need that funding wouldn't be available for it in the from federal or state areas. We're doing our best to try to get funding for those. But just from a realistic standpoint, if other funding sources were there, we would bring those forward through that. And there are a number of other projects that have popped up during different community forums, goal setting through emails and letters to the council. And so we've kind of included a list of these types of projects here. They are also included on the digital survey that Adrian talked about. There are a number of fire related projects such as vegetation management and evacuation route constructions and improvements. There are home hardening incentives and assistance programs for defensible fire spaces, wildfire readiness, and things like that. But there are also community wide projects that have been brought forward, such as jumpstarting affordable housing opportunities through incentive funding, road repairs that weren't necessarily associated with fire recovery, homeless services, new community assets such as libraries and community centers, support for businesses and workforce recovery through loans and grant programs, strengthening the resiliency of the city's infrastructure through backup generators or micro grids and things like that, and to doing park improvements. Again, because of the nature of the funds that went in, we're able to look at a number of community wide projects. They are, and again, these have just come through different forums along the way. Ultimately, the city council is going to decide where they're going to prioritize the funding. But part of what this forum does and what the other ones in the survey does is it's providing the input to the council of what the community is looking for in a way to use this money. So with that onto the next slide, please. And there I kind of got ahead of myself there. But yes, we are looking for this, for your input. This is your opportunity to do that through this meeting. And again, like I said, we have a digital survey that has a number of projects that are on there that allows you to provide that input. At the end of this process, like Adrienne said, we're going to close down the survey at the end of Sunday, then we'll start tabulating all that data, bring together all of the input that's come from the forums that has come to us through emails and letters. And we will develop a report out to the council first going to the long term financial policy and audit subcommittee, which is a three member or three council member subcommittee that is televised. It's an open meeting. It's a Brown Act published meeting. That will happen on November 12. And then on November 17, we will be in front of the full council during the study session to again report out all of this, this information. So your input is very important in helping the council prioritize these projects of what would be best for the community. And so with that, I'm going to wrap up my comments. Thank you, Alan. So we will now open the meeting for questions and your input. And so again, just a reminder, if you wish to make a comment or ask a question via Zoom, please raise your hand using the raise your hand feature in Zoom. And if you're dialing in via telephone, please use star nine to indicate that you've raised your hand. And Trisha will give you a moment to transition the screen for taking questions and input from our attendees. And I'll let you explain a little bit more about how that will work tonight. Thank you, Adrian. A countdown timer will appear for the convenience of the speaker and viewers. The first speaker will be acknowledged and invited to speak. Please make sure to unmute yourself when you are invited to do so. Your microphone will be muted at the end of the countdown or at the conclusion of your comment. If you are participating in the meeting from the Spanish Channel and Zoom, we have an interpreter on standby on the English Channel to assist during your public comment. If you wish to ask a question or provide input, please be sure to pause throughout your comments to allow for interpretation. Those using interpreter support will be afforded additional time for your comments. For Spanish speakers at the time you hear your name called, turn off the Spanish Channel to make your public comment. This icon may now look like a circle with an ES in the middle and the word Spanish underneath. The first speaker will be Thea followed by Joanna. Please unmute your microphone and identify yourself for public record. Good evening. My name is Thea Hensel. I live on Yalupa Avenue and I am co-chair of the Southeast Greenway campaign. Thanks all for you for listening to the public input tonight. The Southeast Greenway campaign supports fire recovery, housing for all, and the creation of a public space that can offer respite for the pressures of life. We come here tonight to thoughtfully consider monies that come to Santa Rosa out of pain and suffering. Currently that includes a housing shortage and safe haven for all. The PG&E windfall is just that, a one-time occurrence to look at opportunities not usually available. Santa Rosa needs affordable housing. Caltrans, who we have been dealing with and owns the Greenway property, will only sell 47 Greenway acres of land if the city purchases the other 10 acres that are zoned for medium density housing. This seems like a win-win situation for the campaign committee and our supporters. The Greenway campaign and Sonoma Land Trust continue to raise money to purchase the park lands portion of this transaction. We ask the city to purchase the remaining land to add to its excess land and housing stock and allow the Greenway Project to move forward. Please consider this urgent and timely opportunity. Thank you very much. Thank you, Thea. The next speaker will be Joanna. Please unmute your microphone and identify yourself. Hi, hello. My name is Joanna Mique and I live off Old Redwood Highway and I'm calling because I would like the city to invest in fiber to and through the premises for several reasons. As a public utility, this will cultivate a vibrant city because everyone will have access to a high quality internet and businesses will thrive. It's safe, fast, reliable, private, sustainable, and there would be no digital divide. I've noticed that on the survey fiber and wireless have been clumped together and I think it's very important that the city invest in fiber instead of wireless. I'm also wondering where we can email comments so that the city can take in these comments when they're tabulating the public input as the website on Santa Rosa Fire Settlement does not have any information on this. Thank you for your time and again my suggestion is that the city invests in fiber through and to the premises. Thank you, Joanna. The next speaker is Eddie. Please unmute your microphone and identify yourself for public record. Yes, my name is Eddie Alvarez. I'm currently a candidate for City Council for District One and I would like to share my ideas with you all. We are in agreement that the firehouse should definitely be built. We believe in protecting each other and that is definitely a big factor when it comes to fire and a big thank you to our firefighters and for what they do. I know that they personally have lost our home due to the fires in the recent years so I commend you and applaud you for your bravery. With that said, the second thought that I have is that Rosalind specifically needs a library. Currently there are concerned citizens which are gathering resources to build this library and I think there is no better time than now if we can complement their efforts with the funds necessary to finally to finally obtain a library in Rosalind. Now, why Rosalind, why a library? When we think of the community that was tasked with the cleanup after these fires, a great majority were the laborers from my community district one. We were asked to go into these areas that were still smoking with the contaminants in the soils and we did that and I think it is just that there's compensation for the community when we think about our future, the children of these workers. Thank you for your time. Thank you, Eddie. The next speaker is Abigail. Please unmute your mic and state your name for public record. My name is Abigail Zover. I live in Santa Rosa. Thank you very much for having this forum and I appreciate the really well thought out presentation that was given. One comment is that the slides on the website don't have the long list. There's a few missing but one of the things I can't help but notice is that if you add up all of the existing expenses that were presented, that's around $48 million and leaving around $47 million left over so it doesn't sound like there's really enough money to go around for everything and all of these are very worthy goals. I want affordable housing. I want a library in Rosalind. I want fiber for all parts of Santa Rosa. I want those but if we do not address the fire risk that's looming over our heads, then all of those wonderful goals will get burned in the next fire and therefore vegetation management, control burns, some removal of vegetation, whatever it might be, there are many wonderful, very talented fire ecologists in the state of California that could give us very good advice on what we should do with Spring Lake, with Annandale, with the area of and beyond Rington Valley, with Montecito Heights, with the vegetation on the west side of town. All of these are looming over our heads like the sort of Damocles and they just have to take first priority. I think what we've seen year after year since the Tubbs fire is that every fall we are going to face life-threatening fires and if we don't take action to deal with that problem, everything that we take, everything we value is at risk, including all these wonderful things that people put forward. Thank you. Hey, before we go to the next question, could I just answer a couple questions or make comment on a couple things that came up the last couple speakers. There was a question about how to email comments to City Council because it wasn't on the website. So you can email directly to City Council any comments you want to. That's city council at srcity.org. That's that email address, but I do want to reiterate what we mentioned earlier that all of the input from these meetings that we are documenting as well as the responses to the survey where there are open-ended response fields as well and any emails that are coming into the City and to Council are all going to end up getting compiled together into the same report. So, depending, you know, it doesn't matter where you want to submit your comments to, but we will compile all of them into the same report that they receive for consideration. And then also on the last comment about the slides on the website not having that same list that was in Alan's presentation. So, when you actually go to take the survey, that full list is there and survey responders actually weigh in on each of those areas to indicate how strongly they feel that the funds should be prioritized for each of those areas. Thank you, Adrienne. The next speaker is Magdalena and then Janine. So, I'm going to ask you to unmute your mic and state your name for a public record. Hi, my name is Magdalena McQuilla and I'm giving a comment today because there's obviously so many things we could be doing with this money and I don't know how we make ourselves whole after 2017 and everything that happened or how we ever make the eastern part of our city fire safe. I don't know the answers to those questions, but to the extent that we are doing additional community projects that aren't related to fire safety, I must advocate for a library in Roseland, especially because Southwest Santa Rosa is already a very dense area and it's becoming even more dense as people are doing infill and affordable housing is being built and these circumstances have only been exacerbated by losing so much of our housing stock in the fire and all of the changes that have happened since. It's also, you know, you can never say it's completely fire safe, but it's one of the safer areas in our city and I personally anticipate that more and more people are going to be moving to Southwest Santa Rosa and we need more resources over there. We still don't have a library, it's been at least 15 years since community members have been actively asking for one and there's a project right in the center of our neighborhood that is being built that is supposed to have a library in it that also includes over 150 housing units. So it seems like it could also be a way to promote a little bit more of that project being built and having that housing security that we lost so tragically in 2017. So again, if if there was some way to direct all the money to just making our city completely safe, you know, those are decisions that you guys should probably make, but I don't know that that's the situation. So if we are using the funds for community purposes, I really think it's it's a great project to invest in that would benefit our recovery from this tragedy. Thank you. Thank you. The next speaker is Jeanine followed by Miranda. Jeanine, please unmute your mic and identify yourself for public record. Hello, I'm Jeanine. I am a 2017 fire survivor and was unable to attend the community meetings. So thank you for doing this again. I have a brief comment, but a couple of questions. I certainly feel that all of the funds that are coming to the community for the reason of fire safety should be used for that. And we should be looking at those projects first. So my questions are for the fire station. Does that dollar amount the cost that you showed on the slide include what you would do with the current location where the fire station was from what I'm understanding you're going to be moving the fire station. So does that include doing something with that land and then also do your dollar amounts in these slides include a timeline. So if we have extra funds, can we expedite having some of these projects completed by having more dollars to throw at it so that we can get out of the situation that we've been in for the past three years of having poor infrastructure and need for vegetation? Tony or Jason, do one of you want to speak to the fire station? Speak to the fire station. The property that the initial fire station is on is the city property. There are no plans for it that I'm aware of. Maybe Jason has information on that. And the timeline, we're looking at three years to complete the project for the fire station at this point. Yeah, I concur with Tony. It is still about a three-year project. There are no plans for the for the original station location, except to keep it or to remove any additional facilities that were associated with the original station as we look to rebuild it in another location that's that's less fire prone. So I guess I would just add that I would appreciate a plan to maybe either look at that lot to either sell it for a home or perhaps look at it to remove the parking lot and ensure that there aren't people parked there that shouldn't be. But my other question on timeline was more generally for all of the slides that you showed, what is a timeline to complete those projects? So let me respond to the question about that property. It's actually the same piece of property that the tank is on. It is not segregated and not a separate component. So selling off is not necessarily one of the aspects the city is looking at at this point in time. When it comes to protection of the property itself at Newgate Court, we'll certainly be removing any attractive nuisance that exists on that property. We don't want to create something there that wasn't there previously. So those are things that we'll be working on. When it comes to the fire recovery projects, we're actively working on a majority of the projects from 2017. We expect to see most of those completed within the next 12 months. Things that were listed in Allen's presentation, those are all depended upon the funding availability. If funding is made available, we will be able to insert those into the capital improvement program for the upcoming year. With that said, some of those required design and design will generally take a period of time before we actually get into breaking ground. Hopefully that answers the additional question. Thank you. Thank you, Janine. Miranda is next to speak followed by Patricia. Miranda, please unmute your microphone and identify yourself for a public record. Hello, my name is Miranda. If you could speak up, you're very faint. My name is Miranda. I want to encourage you all to prioritize as your number one consideration, affordable housing. We have $47 million to work with and it's plenty to kickstart concrete efforts to prevent homelessness. It's time for community land trusts, rental assistance, rent control. Now more than ever, it's time to crack down on unscrupulous landlords who think that a microwave constitutes a kitchen. Thank you. Thank you, Miranda. Patricia, please unmute your microphone and say your name for public record. Patricia, you're still on mute. Patricia, unfortunately, I can't hear you. Oh, I hear something. Okay. Can you hear me? Yes, we can hear you. I don't know if you can hear me. Well, I can hear you guys. Okay. Good afternoon. My name is Patricia Moreno and I live in Santa Rosa. Good afternoon. My name is Patricia Moreno and I live in the city of Santa Rosa. I'm here currently to advocate for the members of our county that are most vulnerable. And this includes our brothers and sisters that are undocumented. My brothers and sisters that are undocumented have been historically and systematically segregated. And I'm here to say that with this money, you actually have the ability to help the most vulnerable people in our community. Investing or placing money for rent assistance. Which we can say with the pandemic, the amount that's going to have to be paid by these essential workers is going to be tremendous. But also, we can just attack the root of the problem and acquire land trust to start building homes. So this is the opportunity to really make things better before we have more people living in the streets. Thank you and have a good afternoon or evening. Thank you. The next speaker is Lauren followed by Rumka. Lauren, please unmute your microphone and identify yourself for public record. Hi, my name is Lauren Fury and I live on Summerfield Road. I'll be pausing for the interpreter. I would like to advocate for Santa Rosa to use $10 million of the PG&E settlement funds to match Sonoma County's investment in the renewal enterprise district affordable housing fund. The loss of housing is one of the most significant impacts from the 2017 fires. We were already in a housing crisis when the top fire happened and subsequent fires have only worse than the situation. We desperately need new housing and housing that's affordable to all of our residents. By committing a matching amount of $10 million to the red affordable housing fund, Santa Rosa will have access to a $20 million seed fund to help get affordable housing projects across the financing finish line. This fund can be set up as a loan program that is self-sustaining so that it supports long-term housing opportunities for Santa Rosa. Most state and federal sources of funding reward projects that have local government financial commitments in place. As a Bay Area County, we compete head-to-head with projects located in towns and cities that have access to much larger sources of affordable housing funding. By creating our own affordable housing seed fund, Santa Rosa developments will be more competitive for funding sources at the state and federal level which typically funds almost 70 to 90 percent of the typical affordable housing development cost. And finally, aside from affordable housing, I want to say that I concur with the other community members calling for vegetation management throughout wild urban interface areas of Santa Rosa. Without strong proactive fuel load management, prescriptive burning, and other measures, all of these investments in infrastructure, housing, libraries, and so on will be for naught. And that's all I have to say. Thank you. Thank you, Lauren. The next speaker is Ramka, followed by Robert. Ramka, please unmute your microphone and identify yourself for public record. Hi, my name is Ramka Singh and I live in Skyhawk. I used to live in Pountain Grove and I lost my house there and now the fire came to Skyhawk. I'm very grateful for the efforts of the firefighters and because of their efforts today, my house is standing. I want to advocate for fire prevention. I think the fires, whether you live in a high-risk fire area or a low-risk fire area, they affect our entire community. As evidenced by the unfortunate house destruction in Coffee Park in the 2017 fires, the fire can affect each and every part of Santa Rosa. And when the fires come, you know, there is loss of housing and everybody, the richest resident to the poorest resident is affected and the poorer residents are affected even more. And so I think, you know, for the entire community, our effort should be focused for fire prevention and firefighting. And that is my request. Thank you so much. Thank you. Robert, please unmute yourself and identify yourself for public record. Hello, I am Bob Geiser. I live on Fremont Drive in Santa Rosa and I am co-chair of the Southeast Greenway Campaign Committee. At this time, the City of Santa Rosa has the opportunity to not only address some of the current pressing fiscal needs, but to look forward and create long-term benefits for the whole community. Our group has worked with the city, the Sonoma Land Trust, and other partner agencies to acquire 57 acres of unused land so that together we can create a large community asset with multiple uses and long-term benefits. The land use plan for the Southeast Greenway that was adopted by the city last year shows 47 acres of public park. The 29 acres from Montgomery High School to Summerfield Road will become a city park and the 18 acres east of Summerfield will become an extension of Spring Lake Park. Today, we are asking for $12 million of funding for the city to buy the other 9.7 acres of the Greenway property. This is the three sites near Farmers Lane and Yulupa Avenue that are planned for up to 244 housing units in medium and medium high density. City acquisition of this land from Caltrans will allow the acquisition of the park land to proceed, will provide much needed new housing to the community, will give the city more direct control of the development of these sites and will increase the coordination in the design of the public parks and private development in the Greenway. The amount of our request is based on a preliminary estimate of, by city staff, of 12 to 14 million for the sales price of the developable parcels. After the final appraisals and negotiations take place, that price tag may be reduced. If so, we requested any unused balance of the requested $12 million be placed in a Southeast Greenway account and set aside for park development. This will allow seed money to acquire matching grant funds and provide a fundraising platform. Thank you for your consideration. Thank you, Robert. Jennifer will be the next speaker followed by Sarah. Jennifer, please unmute your mic and identify yourself for public record. Hi, my name is Jennifer La Porta. I live at Rose Land area. Can you hear me? Yes, I can hear you. Okay, so in terms of your survey, it was very confusing because you lumped wireless in with fiber to the premises. So I want to know if you're going to decipher which of those two people want if they check that box. And I'm also wondering if you'll tell the public how many emails were received for each individual topic. And my vote is for fiber to the premises and through the premises. Fiber is the wired alternative to being sprayed with wireless radiation 24 seven from the cell phone towers all over town. Fiber is safer, faster, more reliable, more cyber secure, more private and uses less energy than cell phone towers. Many cities have installed fiber to the premises such as Chattanooga, Tennessee. And guess what? They reaped a 1000% return on their investment. Fiber can be regulated by cities at regular and low income rates, as opposed to what we have now, which is ever increasing rates from big telecommunications, big telecom. And thus we could eliminate the digital divide if we had the city regulating fiber at regular and low income rates. Businesses left Knoxville, Tennessee for Chattanooga when fiber was installed in Chattanooga. How home prices rose in Chattanooga? Why would Santa Rosa give big telecom lucrative long term contracts when the city could regulate fiber? I want to thank council members Fleming Rogers and Tibbets for voicing support for this in the goal setting meeting on August 3rd and 4th. There were a total of 78 comments asking for a protective telecommunication ordinance and fiber to the premises. These 78 comments were out of a total of 99 comments for all the issues on that night. That sounds to me like an overwhelming majority of comments for people who want to see fiber installed, fiber optic. So I also want to say that Santa Rosa needs a telecommunications ordinance that protects residents, schools and daycares from wireless transmission facilities. And I understand that ordinance is on the way, but this is the big picture. You need to install fiber. Every time you dig a conduit, let's do a dig once policy where you install the fiber while those roadways, those areas are open for other construction purposes. And I believe my time is up. Thank you very much. Thank you, Jennifer. I'll take it just a quick quick sec to address a couple of the questions that were in there. So on the survey, those are very broad themes. They're not the plan for what would be implemented. It's really to get a sense on the areas in which our community would like to see the settlement funds be invested. There will have to be much further discussions and planning around each of those areas. And then for the compilation of emails with the survey data, I don't know that we've completely figured out how we'll do that yet. We do have a few thousand survey responses already, and there's open ended responses on that as well, but we'll make sure that it is complete and that it does, you know, accurately reflect the views those that took the time to respond. And that report will be made available on that same website where you can access the survey, which I'll cover at the end of this meeting too, so that the public can view it as well. And that'll be posted by November 12th. Thank you, Adrienne. So the next speaker will be Sarah followed by Joanna. Sarah, please unmute your microphone and identify yourself for a public record. Yes, hello. My name is Sarah Kasmith. I use they them pronouns, and I am the interim board president of the North Bay Organizing Project. That's the same organization that our friend Patricia identified herself as part of earlier that didn't actually come through on the English. So I just wanted to add that in. I would like very much to talk about housing, but I have to pause here and address just something that I noticed this evening that bothers me just a heck of a lot. After spending about 20 minutes figuring out the interpretation for tonight, residents on this meeting relying on that interpretation had nothing. The speaker carried on and, you know, occasionally we could hear something happening, but it didn't happen until well into the meeting into the presentation. This really demonstrates to our Spanish speaking community just how little Santa Rosa cares about them. And that it's just a huge insult to our neighbors. And I'm embarrassed to have witnessed something like that tonight. And as in a city that's about 20, 20.6 Latinx. And y'all said that the community's input is important. And I want to know whose input is important. The Board of Supervisors ran a survey as well. They only received 29 Spanish responses out of the 1600. And those responses show vastly different priorities than us English speakers. The top priorities among English speakers for that survey in order were vegetation management, alert and warning systems, road repair, affordable housing and community preparedness. The top priorities for Spanish speakers were financial assistance, so rent control, not rental assistance, things like that, affordable housing, broadband internet, community preparedness, and alert and warning systems. So we are, if you will, speaking different languages. And in a county stuck in the lowest tier in COVID recovery, you know, in large part because of our racial disparities, this is a major issue. And we are also speaking different languages when we talk about things like affordable housing. Those two words together don't always mean the same thing. We do not support the red fund transit oriented housing tends to be a major factor in gentrification. We call for community land trust in particular. I want to advocate most specifically for common space community land trust. We are, you know, working with them to actively serve marginalized communities and any amount of seed money that goes toward that organization is funding well spent that will help build the infrastructure of that organization and allow it to provide housing for generations. Thank you. Thank you, Sarah. I'll just make a comment real quick. We do apologize for the technical difficulties that we did experience at the beginning with the interpreter app. That was obviously unexpected. And if there is anything that I need to follow up on with those that missed the first part of the meeting, following this meeting in the next few days, I'm happy to do that. And I will provide my contact information at the end of this meeting. So that that can happen. Thank you, Adrian. The next speaker is Joanna, followed by Kimberly. Joanna, please unmute your mic and identify yourself for the public record. Hello, my name is Joanna Mekay. And I just want to say thank you guys for taking the time to answer our questions throughout this process and being interactive because I know a lot of us have had a lot of question marks and it just makes it so much easier when we can speak to you guys in this manner. I just want to reiterate what another community member had mentioned that I think it's really important that when you guys do come up with the tally of who emailed or how many emails you guys got about each thing that you guys make that very transparent to the public, just because you know, we are residents of Santa Rosa and we do want to know what the public was saying. In addition, as I've mentioned before, I am in support of Fiber to the premises and not for wireless. And I think the city council should be aware that it was wireless transmission facilities that helped cause the Malibu Canyon fires a few years ago. And you know, Santa Rosa has had four years of devastating fires. And I think that this investment into broadband or into, excuse me, into fiber optics is also trying to help with fire damage in the future while minimizing the digital divide. And again, thank you guys for taking the time to answer all of our questions. Thank you. Kimberly is next is next to speak and then followed by Roman. Kimberly, please unmute your mic and identify yourself for public record. Hi, my name is Kimberly Stevenson, and I live on that someplace. I support the city utilizing $47.7 million to complete the remaining from the 2017 wildfires. Additionally, the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors has voted to approve $10 million of affordable housing funding for the renewal enterprise district. I encourage the city of Santa Rosa to match these funds to address the city's urgent need for affordable housing. This combined $20 million will seed the renewal enterprise district housing fund and allow for a revolving loan fund that works to bridge the financing gaps for housing construction. I would also be very interested in seeing what the city staff would propose with regard to the remaining funds and how they would be utilized best to meet the various competing community priorities that would show us how we could best leverage dollars to accomplish the most goals. Thank you. Thank you, Kimberly. Roman followed by Colin is next to speak. Roman, please unmute your microphone and identify yourself for public record. Hi, my name is Roman. I am a fire survivor. I lost everything in the 2017 fire. So this pain is not lost on me. But we've adapted. This was three years ago. All of us who suffered have adapted and we're going through another multitude of crises. We have a housing crisis and employment crisis and economic crisis, eviction crisis. We have a suicide crisis. Our mental health facilities are completely full to the point people are being released after suicide attempts. I don't want to be insensitive, but these projects around trees on private property, if you own acreage, take care of it. There are so many resources circulating around land stewardship, broadband. This is kind of a hot topic, but we can barely afford shelter. Road repairs not associated with fire recovery. I don't even know why that's there. In regards to the housing crisis, between 2015 and 2019, there were 150 building permit issuances that went towards housing, those with an income ranging from extremely low to very low to low. In that same timeframe, 1500 building permits were issued for above moderate income. This place is like a Marin wannabe, except the problem is we need the lower class to function as a county relying on tourism, wine, and ag. So they need us. So we have this deficit of 3,000 issuances of permits under state RHNA standards. So I just don't understand what that is. I'm also kind of weirded out by the makeup of this committee. We have an assistant city manager, housing community services head, and three fire department heads. And these are one-time funds that are up in the air around finance. It seems like an odd makeup for a listening session, because these issues are ranging from broadband to potholes. It's all over the place. So I think, I mean, I'm not talking shit about any of you, but it's just weird. So I want to echo Patricia's comments. Eddie Alvarez. I love you, Eddie. Give them a library. Jesus, how is that even a thing? This is the same district devastated by COVID. It's like people don't care about them. So to rein this in, we need affordable housing. We need rent assistance toward our lower class, especially the undocumented, who literally are at this county's backbone, living in close quarters, because they simply can't afford this area. But we rely on them so heavily for our wine tourism industry. I appreciate everything the fire department does. All three of you here. I love you. You're heroes. Anyways, thank you. So just a quick comment. Apologies if that wasn't explained better at the beginning. Our panelists are here in the event. We do get questions. It is difficult to always guess all of the types of questions we might get on these meetings, but given the range of themes that were in that slide and that have come up in previous meetings, this is who we came up with for our panel. Our assistant city manager that's on is also our director of public works and has largely been responsible for the infrastructure side of our recovery and managing that. And we also have our housing representative on as well as our fire department as noted. Thank you. Thank you. The next speaker will be Colin followed by Erica. Colin, please unmute yourself and identify yourself for public record. Hi, can you hear me? Yes, I can hear you. My name is Colin Metcalf. I've been a lifetime resident of Santa County and Santa Rosa. I want to echo points made by Eddie Alvarez and Patricia and Roman and Miranda. Not in any particular order. I agree with Roman that we should be focusing primarily on working class folks with Patricia that we should be focusing on undocumented are undocumented neighbors and community members. These fires have driven dozens, if not hundreds or thousands of people out of their homes and residences, people who have been driven out onto the street and who will then be summarily be abused by Santa Rosa Police Department and the Sonoma County Sheriff's Department. I have been present at a number of encampment clearings and I cannot tell you the number of people who talked to me about how they used to have a fine living arrangement and they were doing okay. And then they were driven out by the fires in 2017 or they were driven out by fires and any other time. And the fact that we have allowed our community members, our neighbors, our family, our friends to languish on the streets, while we're talking about four million dollars to repair sidewalks, five million dollars to remove trees on private property, we should not be using publicly gifted funds. Money that we got from a settlement from PG&E to work in our communities to make sure that the damage from these fires is not widespread. I don't see why we're going on to private properties and removing these trees. That's five million dollars right there that could be used for plenty of other things. I did not know about this library idea in Roseland. I think it's a great idea. I want to back up Eddie Alvarez and that and other community members who have discussed the library. I think it's great. Give them a library, you know, they deserve it. We also need to be focusing on the working class. Without the working class, Sonoma County would be nothing. Tourism, the wine industry, all of these things are propped up by hardworking individuals who often barely have enough to pay rent in this county, much less eat and survive and have a decent standard of living. We need to support them. We need to give people rental assistance. We need to work on affordable housing structures. If there is something that we could do maybe in conjunction with projects, room key and home key, maybe picking up abandoned structures and moving people into them and just saying, like, this is owned by the city. We'll figure it out. We're going to give you somewhere to live in the meantime to get you back on your feet, because right now your house looks, you're out on the street, maybe, and we need to support folks who are doing stuff, members of our community. I'd also like to recognize this is unrelated to the fire relief. Today is the 7th anniversary of Andy Welthaz's killing by the Sonoma County Sheriff's Department, Deputy Eric Galhouse, and I just want to recognize his life and suggest that others do as well. Thank you. Thank you. We do need to take a quick recess to allow our interpreters to switch roles. So we're going to pause for a few minutes, and hopefully we can complete this smoothly. So we will be on pause for just a few minutes. Interpreter Pablo, can you please turn your camera on and give me a thumbs up if you can hear me? Perfect. Thank you. Interpreter Mario, can you please test your mic and confirm you can hear me and I can hear you? Perfect. Thank you. Adrienne, we have switched interpreter roles, so if you want to have everyone rejoin, we can restart the meeting. Great. Sounds good. Thank you. Let's go ahead and continue. Thank you. Thank you. So we have Erica as the next speaker followed by Helena. Erica, if you can please unmute your microphone and identify yourself for public record. My name is Erica. I live in the city of Santa Rosa. I am not a part of any big group or coalition advocating for fire funds to be spent. Me and my family lost our house in the Tubbs Fire along with all of our belongings. Our neighborhood and surrounding neighborhoods have yet to be given replacement street signs after three years. Street lights, landscaping, our parks are still burnt up from the fires and I would really strongly urge the city of Santa Rosa to consider only using the funds received because of the Tubbs Fire to repair these infrastructures, street lights, landscaping parks that have been destroyed due to the Tubbs Fire. Also, the money should be spent on fire mitigation. If we spend this money to build low income housing with no fire mitigation, like the previous speaker said, everything is just going to burn down. The city should take these funds and put the money to repair what was destroyed in the Tubbs Fire. First, if there's any money is left over, then they should be spent on affordable housing, libraries, new parks. But before the city even considers building all this additional infrastructure, buildings, parks, I think the focus should be on repairing what was damaged first. And I'm just curious as to why new parks are wanting to be built with this money, but the existing parks are still burnt and destroyed? I guess that would be a question that in my mind doesn't make sense and things like the potholes in the roads are directly related to the fires due to the fact that big trucks have been coming into the neighborhoods on roads, bringing in trusses and cement trucks which have damaged the roads to repair the neighborhoods which is directly related to the 2017 Tubbs Fire. Thank you for listening to my comments. Thank you. The next speaker is Helena followed by Noah. Helena, please unmute your microphone and identify yourself for public record. Hello, my name is Helena Whistler and I'm a member of the Sonoma County Public Library Foundation Board. The Foundation Board has been raising money for the library system for over 30 years. We support the newest branch of the library in Roseland. We advocate for a permanent branch there and we encourage you to invest in this endeavor with funding from the PGNES settlement. The reason our volunteer board fund raises for the library system is because the library is a priceless resource to the growing population of Santa Rosa and Sonoma County. It has proven to be a critical part of our community. For example, thousands of children, teens, and adults participate in the library summer reading program across all branches every year. Every age group saw a double digit increase in participation from the previous year, showing that the library is becoming more crucial, not less. Author Frank Chimero says, I once heard the library is one of the few remaining places that cares more about you than your wallet. It means that a person can be a person there, not a customer, not a user, not an economic agent, not a pair of eyes to monetize, but a citizen and community member, a reader and a thinker, a mind and a soul. As we consider that many spaces open to the public require some form of buy-in, such as purchasing food, our free spaces like libraries and parks become that much more important, especially for children and teens in low-income areas. If you read the first, the recent first five report on school readiness, you saw that the research clearly found a correlation in Sonoma County with visiting the library once a week and school readiness in children. Currently, over 500 children are registered Roseland Library users, and the site of the new temporary library is a half a mile away from Cook Middle School. Without the Roseland Library, those children would be without a community library. Libraries are critical to their early and ongoing education. Computer centers, library materials, and reference librarians are also a priceless asset to a community's adults. The library offers countless resources for entertainment, workforce development, and education. A permanent library opens the doors of opportunity and helps to build a vibrant community. As the City of Santa Rosa considers investing in the people and community of Roseland by using at least $1 million of the PGD settlement funds for the permanent Roseland Library, the Sonoma County Public Library Foundation continues to support that plan. Thank you very much. Thank you. Next we have Noah and followed by John. Noah, please unmute your microphone and identify yourself for public record. Can you hear me? I can hear you. Do I need to speak up? You sound good. Thank you. My name is Noah. I want to name the issues in this process that need to be addressed first and foremost. This meeting was delayed and should be extended to allow Spanish-speaking participants more time as compensation for lack of interpretation. And I'll be pausing to allow interpreter times. The City could and should have addressed this ahead of time. The City and County's method of gathering input has been discriminatory from the initial survey sent out that had an overwhelmingly only English language response. The initial county survey and its priorities only had 29 Spanish responses, 1.8 percent of the total response, which is a reflection of how the county had mismanaged getting the word out to our Spanish speaking residents. And I want to name that there was little to no option for Indigenous language speakers. The overwhelmingly White County survey response has skewed these priorities. The Spanish language response is named financial assistance, i.e. rental assistance, and affordable housing as the top two priorities that these funds should be used for. The fires destroyed 5% of the City's housing stock, especially impacting Black, Indigenous, people of color, and tenants in this county who have since been scattered with few affordable options. In the wake of that destruction, developers now get to hand-pick lots in low-income areas for expensive new housing that will line their own pockets at the expense of a community under crisis-driven displacement. Projects like the Red Lightning District claim a progressive philosophy but in practice prioritize developers and speculators, which are historically racist and predatory. Tenants continue to be charged exorbitant rent with a threat of an eviction wave breathing down their necks. And those who are already unsheltered are maligned by city government and the press Democrat just today are continuously brutalized by an overflowing with cash police force. All of these are manifestations of disaster capitalism, where corporate interests and militarized law enforcement use climate disasters to secure their own power at the expense of the people of color. We need rental assistance. We need a librarian Roseland. We need a community-controlled affordable housing priority that prioritizes Black, Indigenous, people of color, such as the Common Space Community Land Trust. These land trusts permanently secure equitable and affordable shelter away from the speculative market, a market born from racist origins, and ensure that the land remains affordable in perpetuity. I recognize and uplift Tierra y Libertad land and freedom for Santa Rosa's working class and marginalized residents. Thank you. John is the next speaker. John, please unmute your microphone and identify yourself for public record. Hi, good evening. My name is John McCall and I work for the Sonoma Land Trust. I want to thank you for the opportunity to speak tonight. Associating myself with comments from a couple of the previous speakers from the Southeast Greenway Campaign, we wrote a letter to the city on October 2 detailing how $12 million of these settlement funds could go to support the Southeast Greenway Project. This money, there's so much tonight that is about the need to repair and recover and we also need to look forward. So many needs of the city in the future are related to housing, are related to open space and resources for all of our communities. So I appreciate all the other speakers bringing forward issues that I'm learning about as well. The Greenway, the first speaker, the Hensel, talked a lot about the benefits, but I just want to quickly hit on them. The housing component is 244 units on your farmer's lane, three parts of the Greenway are related to housing and then right through the center and heart of our city is the Greenway, the park and open space area. We as the land trust working with a lot of partners have raised over $2 million to help purchase and protect the open space and these settlement funds would give the city the resources we need to focus on the whole property including the development, the housing pieces, the mixed use pieces. So we appreciate all the challenges and needs the city's facing. We hope you come out with a balanced proposal in the end for this funding that includes money for the Greenway. Thank you for your time. Thank you. At this time, I do not see any other hands raised. I just wanted to take a moment to touch on a couple of the comments that were made earlier on. As Adrienne had mentioned, we did receive a number of questions in the last couple of community meetings that were very specific to vegetation management, dead and dying trees and other effects from the fire. The fire department is actively looking into the volume of dead and collapsing and deteriorating trees in the footprint of the tubs fire and nuns fire. When the dollar amount was figured it was looked at at the volume of trees that presented different types of risks. Right now the fire department is focusing on adjusting our weed abatement ordinance, which is currently a seasonal program that allows us to go in and ensure that seasonal grasses within our wildland, primarily in our wildland urban interface, the hillside communities are abated and it gives us a process to enforce that to make sure that that area is as fire safe as we can make it with that particular program. Our goal is to include trees into that ordinance, which will allow us to require property owners to take action on specific trees that pose a threat to public safety from a fall hazard onto streets or onto a neighbor's neighboring property or other structure within the footprint. The method at which we would be able to force that removal is where something like some of the dollar amounts from this settlement could be used potentially to help with that program. These are all the different types of concepts that we're looking at. Vegetation management was another hot topic. The fire department and the city of Santa Rosa have actively pursued a number of grants to kickstart a program to help make our community safer from the threat of wildfires as we move into the future. The plan that we have developed is called a community wildfire protection plan. That plan was funded by the only successful grant that we've had since 2017. In order to actually effectively help prevent the threat of wildfires here locally, it will take money. Even as we're having these community meetings and have been unsuccessful in past grant applications, we do and have already submitted additional grant applications as we move into the future. So we have had a lot of questions about how that will work. We are hopeful that we will be able to kickstart something in your future that will help obviously lay out the foundation for helping protect a lot of the assets and values that we have within our community from the threat of wildfires as we move forward. Thank you, Paul. Okay. So without any more questions or excuse me, any more hands raised, we have reached the end of the meeting. I do want to thank you all for participating this evening. And if you do not provide any input tonight, you can still do so by taking the online survey by no later than October 25th. And we've got the link to that survey now on the screen. It's srcity.org forward slash 2017 fire settlement. And on that site, we'll also be posting updates and the final community input report. As I mentioned earlier, that report will be posted by November 12th. And the recording in this meeting will also be posted on the site in the next 24 hours. You know, next steps, once the survey closes after Sunday, we will be compiling all this input together to get that report ready. And then that report will be delivered to our city council for consideration at those two upcoming meetings that Alan mentioned earlier, the long-term financial policy and audit council subcommittee meeting on November 12th, and at the regular council meeting on November 17th. And we'll have details and links to how to participate in both of those public meetings posted to that 2017 fire settlement web page once we get a little closer to those meeting dates. And so with that, I will, oh, I'm sorry, I also wanted to provide my contact information. I was trying to have our Zoom hosts make a quick slide to put that up on the screen. I don't know if they were able to. Yes, we have. Give us just a moment to put that up. Okay, thank you. So again, if anybody had any difficulties with hearing the first part of the presentation tonight and wants the city to follow up with them, we are happy to do that. Again, we apologize. That was unexpected, but there is my phone number in my email address and we can figure out how to meet your needs. With that, look, we could just leave that screen up there for a few minutes, but we are concluding for the evening. Thank you, everyone. Thanks, Adrienne.