Okay, it's 6 30, so let's call the meeting to order.

No more puppy photos.

No, sorry.

Okay.

Council member coming in.

President.

Councilmember Harrison.

Councilmember McLean.

Council Member Starr.

Okay, for public comment, public forum, public announcements.

We'll have a limit of two minutes.

Do you want to read the um directions for public comments?

Sure.

Before you start your public comment, please state your name for the record.

If you're participating online, please please use the right hand function.

If you're calling Ed, please dial star nine.

Other than that.

Okay.

Could you do me a favor?

Could you find out which items those are?

I can't read it.

Okay.

Yeah.

So at our last meeting, there was one person that just sort of took over the floor and just started talking and they hadn't filled out a card.

It wasn't their turn.

I really want to avoid that.

If people are going to just start trying to take over the meeting, I'm going to have to ask them to leave.

And if they continue with that, then we'll just ask somebody from the sheriff's office to stay for the whole meeting and escort them out.

Okay.

Is it an open?

Yeah, open comment and then B and A.

B and A B.

B and A two or three.

Okay.

An open comment for sure.

Okay.

Open comment, and then it looks like a movie and a you have a public comment.

Yeah.

And uh septic issue.

You had on it was on the agenda your last agenda.

Yeah.

And uh I listened here to that.

Uh I wanted to just indicate that I uh basically agreed with uh what the report had to say.

My only concern is that uh you know we'll be paying this this outfit 93,000 at least uh to do this, and they've been working on it for several months, and uh there has not yet been a meeting where members of the community can have any discussion.

Uh Kanye had indicated to me, she thought there had been two or three meetings, but I talked to people.

I found no one who is aware of any meeting that is has been held, and uh so therefore it's not concern about something that's in the report, it's just a concern about the process, and that I think that there needs to be some opportunity for the community members uh to uh have ask their questions, but especially to make their uh their feelings known.

Um that that was a big problem with the last and uh when we did a survey after that uh over 100 people responded, and they're overwhelmingly were concerned about the lack opportunity for for MPP and so on.

So I I would uh suggest that we do something where we can schedule uh at least an initial uh meeting where the public can interact with the people doing the study, and so that they have some sense of what the community is feeling.

Okay, thank you very much, Jim.

We will follow up on that.

There are now public comments online.

Okay, thank you very much.

Go up to Meg uh reports updates.

We have lots of people here.

Thank you for coming.

Okay, Mark Petrini, you're first sheriff's offices first.

Good evening, everybody.

Uh since our last meeting, we've had 33 calls for service.

Um 911 open lines and a few little disturbances related to one person who lives up on the hill of town that we've been trying to take care of.

Uh Ws have conducted 20 proactive stops.

That's down considerably from last month.

Uh had some things going on in other areas of this this beat, which as I've told you before, it's quite large.

So they haven't been here as much as I'd like.

Uh business check patrol checks are down to.

They've only logged 32 in the last month.

So we'll see if we can fix that for next month.

Um hopefully get a few more things going on out here to try to curb the little bit that happens.

Um so this will be my last meeting.

I'm retiring.

All right.

Wow.

I've brought along uh Sergeant Franco with me.

He is going to be my replacement.

He is uh from Sinnol, Sergeant Franco Franco, okay.

He's from Sinnol, so he knows the area.

Um he was a motor sergeant for us several years ago, and then he moved on to some other stuff, and he's currently a patrol sergeant at our main station, but he'll be over here in April full time.

Uh he's also on our tech team, it's got a lot of knowledge.

Uh he wants to introduce himself, say anything.

Uh so we were in the same academy, actually.

Uh we both did uh well 27th year.

Uh I'm not retiring.

Um, but I will say we can't we started at 21, so I'm a little bit younger.

Um, but I will say I asked for this position to take this spot.

I've worked everywhere within the sheriff's office.

I've had a uh a great time and career, but I specifically asked for this spot.

I grew up here, my family still lives here.

I went to this school, so that's why I asked us like, hey, I would like to take that last spot here uh and do my last several years at the Tri Valley South Station.

So that's why I picked it.

So Frankl's or there are a lot of Francos.

There are.

Um, my Franco is off 84.

Mine is off the 84 with the rodeo grounds and that section.

So that's where I grew up.

Welcome.

So look forward to it.

Yeah, look forward to seeing all you guys and being at the meeting.

So anything guys need for me.

I mean, it's like it's like home to me.

So if you ask me for something, I'm gonna do my hardest to make sure that it's taken care of.

But there are limitations.

I understand that you guys understand it as well.

But and there's some big shoes to fill.

Oh, yeah, definitely.

Definitely.

Uh public retirement plans or no comment.

Uh yeah, Dad.

Got an eight-year-old, so good.

Great.

You have your job.

Any issues which you need to know about anything.

All right, thank you.

Thank you very much, and thank you for all the meetings you've been to and all the help you've given us.

You're welcome.

Appreciate it.

Yeah, yeah.

April 10th.

April 10th.

Okay.

Thanks.

I miss you very much.

Okay.

Sean Landers.

Um, it's getting hot.

So we're doing what we can.

Juan and I were out today on 84.

We wrote 30 tickets in a few hours just on 84.

So we're trying to get around the county.

Yesterday we were out on the far east end.

We've got three days a week that we work together.

So when we're on those three days, we're trying to hit areas and overlap.

Uh, we've recently received a complaint about the Paloma Way on ramp at Southbound 680 with cars not following the left turn right turns and going straight across.

We've pushed that on to our day shift guys to try to get the units that are down here to try to get some enforcement on that to try to help squish some of that where people are trying to just cheat, cut across and pass traffic.

Um, but we're trying to do what we can with the numbers that we have in our office.

Uh, we've also been asked to do more enforcement on the north end of 680.

So that doesn't help you guys down here, but our staffing levels are as limited as they can be, and we're doing what we can while we can.

So if you guys have any other comments or questions, we'll pass them along to the right people.

Otherwise, I feel like we're at least trying to make a difference.

So what were the uh most of the 84 pullovers for?

All speed.

All speed, okay.

Yeah, speed.

doesn't help you guys down here but our staffing levels are as limited as they can be and we're doing what we can while we can so if you guys have any other comments or questions we'll pass them along to the right people otherwise feel like we're at least trying to make a difference so what and what would the uh most of the 84 pullovers for all speed all speed okay yeah speed so it's a nice wide inner expressway now makes it easier for us this is good anybody else anything any other issues going through town the traffic lights everything seems like it's cooling and settling now with 84 open up on the 680 that merge seems like it's helped a lot so I mean there's the ones and twos it is what it is but I feel like it's helped a lot through this way so all right sounds good thank you fire protection uh no Bonnie sent me an email saying that she's unable to make the meeting tonight some kind of family issue um there were 27 calls for service since the last meeting 93% of the calls were EMS related which is just about all of them five were fire responses one was for a controlled bird and one for a rubbish fire so she's hoping to be here next week um yeah I I saw the call up for the rubbish fire and I thought how could we have a grass fire this time of year but could have could have been I'm not even sure that I don't even sure it's legal well okay Jeff Nichols here I think that's it for fire they're not he's not on the call okay um progress reports fire safety work group no update other than the PGE okay okay we'll talk about that under comments comments too awesome follow up on that thank you very much um Jim do you have anything on the tree advisory work group in the depot gardens Jim do you have any comments on the tree work group any information this will be quick uh we we are continuing on our our effort to improve sendbad creek going specifically through the park but all of Sandbad Creek and uh just a reminder in the last two years we've actually spent 10 000 on tree work in that stretch of Cendat Creek from the foothill road uh to uh the post office and so that you was a good uh been a major major effort and that the only way we're able to do that because we really have no funding uh is uh the cooperation of uh friends of the park and uh pl a pl a has picked up half of the cost of that and uh without that support we wouldn't have been able to uh do that work so we uh when you talk to some PLA people uh thank them for their their uh generosity uh the other big part of it came from uh the friends of the park and they get their money from PLA too so actually PLA is a critical player there and it was very helpful in terms of uh time and uh and effort and then when it comes to where we we actually need the dollars because it's stuff that we can't do ourselves uh they you know come through uh Saturday this this coming Saturday uh we are gonna uh have uh uh what we'll probably be a fairly small work day uh we we need to clear the area behind the post office uh where we planted our uh sycamore trees uh earlier uh the grass is is getting two to three feet high and uh we mowed it once but we're gonna have to uh weed whack it again and get it down to uh manageable size and at the same time we'll be checking the irrigation uh for those trees which uh we'll be needing in the near future uh like tomorrow uh so uh if anyone has a little uh extra time saturday morning and especially if you have a weed whacker uh if you could join us uh we we three or four people should be able to get that done in uh two hours so but that but that's sort of a timely thing that we we didn't need to get on top of

So uh if anyone has a little uh extra time Saturday morning, and especially if you have a weed whacker, uh if you could join us, uh we three or four people should be able to get that done in uh two hours.

So, but that but that's sort of a timely thing that we we didn't need to get on top of uh right away, and we'll do the uh tuning up of the irrigation at the same time.

Uh the other thing which I mentioned last time is that working with uh Jennifer uh from the resource conservation district.

Uh the ones who brought the group of about 40 students uh earlier and for a work day where they cleaned up the creek and planted a bunch of plants for us and so on, and we're we're looking that this is still in the planning stage, but we're they would like to come when the creek is running at the tell them last couple days that uh the creek's not running.

Uh if we get one good rain, it will be again, but it's not now because they wanted to do water sampling uh because they're looking at educating the the group of students.

So again, be the uh although I hope we can outnumber them this time.

Uh we we did give a very good show in community support for the last word take, but uh they'll probably bring about 40 people uh to do the you know the the real uh labor intensive part of it.

Uh and uh they will if if possible they will do water sampling, and we're in this case we're gonna have to bring the water to them, but we can get it out of the arroyo out of Calaveras Creek, and there's probably some uh pools up the end of Kilcare, so we can get five gallon bucket of each of those waters and go through go through and actually do the testing and be able to show the students uh you know what we're doing and why we're doing it, and uh actually be using the water from uh maybe find out some things that we don't know uh about the the creeks themselves.

Uh and but the main focus of that will be uh uh cleaning up the creek uh litter, but also if there's uh excessive accumulation of debris, uh we'll try to remove as much of it as we can, and we're having decided that there's a possibility we can make this a total community project and actually do all of Sinbad Creek in terms of litter pickup uh so that we could you know start out at various locations and uh encourage the people who live by the creek to uh do to join in and help up help clean up the creek in front of their uh houses and actually get a good cleaning of the whole creek, the whole uh distance.

So that may end up being a little complicated, but we're we're as of now we're still talking about trying to do that.

Uh and uh I think we'll do a better job this time of uh communicating with the community in terms of how they can be involved and uh the importance of uh paying attention to Sent Creek, which one water you will uh weights resources.

So unless there's questions, then we get thank you very much, Jim.

I do have a fire safety report.

Okay, go ahead.

We completed 10 days of tree work on Kill Care Road.

This is with funds from Cal Fire.

We removed 18 dead hazardous or structurally compromised trees.

Uh we trimmed and reduced the weight of 87 trees.

In total, we um we serviced 118 trees.

We removed nine full truckloads of uh green waste total of 144 cubic yards, and we removed them off site.

Actually, a lot of them is sitting on in my vineyard.

Turns out I think if you drive up Kill Care Road, you'll see a difference.

We raise the canopy.

If there's ever any emergency, fire crews can go up Kill Care safer.

We managed to treat about two miles of the almost four miles length of Kill Care Road.

As we had about 42,000 of Calfire money, excess money that they found for us.

So we are very grateful to retiring Ed Ore Calgary found the money for us.

So to complete the work, we would need about another 50,000.

So we'll be scratching around looking for anyone who adds money, and we complete complete the job.

Thank you very much, Mr.

Frank.

Thank you.

Downtown Revitalization Work Group.

Well, I'm glad you're all sitting.

By my watch, it's um uh it says March 18th, and that means it's not April 1st, because what I'm about to tell you, you're gonna think it's April Fool's Day.

The sign's gonna be here Monday, the prototype sign.

They're gonna deliver it, they're gonna drop it off.

And uh it's uh we got a lot of questions about it.

It's it's lighter in weight, so we're not gonna be able to leave it out 24-7.

So we're working through some logistics.

Connie's gonna work on getting an email address set up.

Um, we want comments, we want concerns, we want any ideas.

This is just a prototype sign.

Be sure to get the word out, it's just prototype.

We used a we used a work group, use a lot of input for we artists, local artists, everything.

If we like it, great.

If we want changes, great.

It's just a prototype.

Um, and uh what we planned it is is figure out some viewing periods of it, leave it outside, leave it on the curb, leave it where it goes, and then we'll bring it back in at night, and then this time next month, we'll have it here for the meeting.

Um, and then you know, the everybody can can see it, and we're gonna set up a couple different ways you can comment.

We're discussing a way of where you can drop off you know, something a handwritten note.

Um, like I said, Connie's working on getting an email address set up for Sunnol.net where you could send an email um common commentary on the sign.

So super exciting.

Again, I maybe knock you guys over with the excitement, but uh the sign we'll we'll be here Monday.

So where's it gonna be put during the day?

Where am I looking for it?

Well, the the sign was the sign was designed to be um right across the street where that kind of trellis is that you walk into the parking lot across from the old Boscos.

Yeah, that it's good.

That's it's for that area.

Okay, so um, and and we've got um the the prototype sign that was gonna have you know little brown church, but uh 84 statue of Bosco, typically the things that people look for when they come to Sunol.

There'll be five things on it, historical landmarks on this particular sign, and then if we like it, um we'll order the next three uh and on to the next.

So yeah, really good news.

Okay, council staff comments.

Probably a couple of these.

Um Sean, did you want to talk about the bulky waste day?

No, okay.

No, I saw my little thing.

Okay.

So people should have gotten this in the mail.

If it went to landowners, right, property owners.

So if a tenant hasn't, if your neighbors attended and they say they didn't get it, that is why.

Um, and there's a coupon in it to bring in.

If you have multiple loads, I know people get there early and late both.

Can they still use the same coupon?

Or do they have one chip easy going at the gate and serve as the gatekeeper?

And if people have multiple loads, that's great.

But I'm not flexible with the time when it ends, it ends.

I can't, because then I have to pay the workers in there overtime, so it just costs exponentially to do that.

So you can make as many dumps as you want, just do before the end time.

Which I think is 11 or something.

I think it's one.

Okay.

Yeah, extended an hour.

12 noon, 8 a.m.

to 12 noon.

Okay.

One question.

Uh I didn't see any of the material uh in concrete.

Uh use con pieces of broken concrete of something that they'll take.

No, okay.

Okay.

Um, we have uh scheduled a PGE open house for May 13th.

We'll be in this room.

PGE refers to that as a an answer session, but it'll be like an open house.

They're planning on having uh posters and billboards, and so I would recommend that probably everybody on lives on Kill Care Road would be very interested in participating in that.

They're gonna talk about how they're undergrounding two miles of electrical distribution lines from about 1.55, 1.6 mile marker, and then they're also gonna be replacing the polls and hardening the polls for a mile the last down the downtown section of the last mile and a half, and so they're gonna be here to talk about it.

The project will begin in 27.

Um, which means we're gonna have the school torn up, and we're gonna have the Arroyo de Laguna Bridge torn up, and we're gonna have Kill Care Road turnout torn up.

So yeah.

Um I would recommend everybody come and get that information and come participate in that open house.

Um, it'll be in the evening.

Um got a letter from planning uh public works agency, uh, Department of Transportation, Amber Lowe.

Remember, she came here in June and then in October, and we asked her about the speed limit of two sections of road that aren't posted.

Um, she said that she would have to do a study to determine what the speed limit would be.

And um, they did do that.

I was really pleased to see that they had done that.

Um, that section on Foothill Road between downtown and the park is 25 miles per hour, and the section between Koopman and Paloma is 35 miles an hour.

Those are the two sections we had asked about.

Do you know if that got approved?

Sure.

I don't know if it got approved.

That was on the agenda for yesterday's Board of Supervisors meeting.

Yeah, it should have gotten approved.

I think it was on the consent calendar.

Yeah, I didn't stick around for the consent.

So then she will be able, or the public works will be able to post those sections of the road, which is good news.

Okay.

Any other announcements?

Any other comments running?

Sean, did you have any other comments or announcements?

Okay.

Alameda Creek watershed center.

We have Tim Ramirez and JP here from SFPUC.

Um, we invited Tim to be our guest here at this meeting because many people have asked about the status of the watershed center.

And thank you for inviting.

Appreciate it.

Um before I start talking about the watershed center.

Can I talk about some of the quick updates just because they're timely?

Um here, keep my head out of the sun.

Uh folks that don't know me, I'm Tim Ramirez.

I'm uh one of the division managers at the PEC for San Francisco in the water enterprise.

A lot of my staff are across the street here in the Signal Yard.

Um, and we've been on point for the watershed center um from the get-go.

I'll get to that in just one second.

But uh I thought about this with our um first responders here.

Every spring we have a liaison meeting for all the first responders in the area.

Um, and we invite the folks here as well, budget officials, fire state council, uh, the sheriff's also be there, CHP will be there, um, other first responders, CalPIR, um, and the date we're holding right now is June 4th.

It's a Thursday.

So we've not sent invitations out yet, but look for those soon.

Um that's the day, Thursday, June 4th.

Um, and probably that'll happen.

The invitations uh sometime this month, make sure it's on your calendar.

Um, we also did something Monday that we haven't done in a very long time, um, which is good news.

Uh a lot of folks know we have grazing tenants in the watershed, those tenants are working under leases that they uh initially signed in the 1990s, very long time ago, and so because there's lots of things that have changed since then, we put those uh the bulk of them back out for competitive bid on Monday.

So it just launched on our public website.

Um, and folks know Clayton Copeman, he's our rangeland manager, he's on point for all that.

If you have questions, please talk to him.

Um, there's a mandatory meeting for anybody who wants to respond to the RFP a week from Friday, and it's here um in SNOL, the R.

And then the applications that people want to compete are due in April.

And there's lots of information about that, lots of maps.

Um, we have a new range land management plan that Clayton worked on, um, and all that's supporting this effort.

Um, and I want to make sure people knew about that as well.

Um, one of the things that allows us to sign the new leases is that we're updating also for the first time our watershed management plan, which was adopted by our commission after our city planning folks did the environmental analysis in 2001.

So 25 years ago.

So a lot of things need to be updated.

The rain's land program is one of those.

That environmental document is going to be updated this spring.

We're hoping it's done in May, and we'll take it to our commission in June for them to adopt those findings so we can move forward with things like the Rangeland program and the new leases.

So all that's really good news for us.

It's taken a long time to get to that point.

A lot of our staff work really hard on this.

Miranda Moffin, who's over here in the yard as well in our group, Clayton, a bunch of people from Mill Estate.

So if you have questions, please feel free to talk to Clayton.

If you call me, I'm going to do Clayton's phone number.

He's really the expert and the personal point for all that.

One more thing that's connected to the update of the watershed plan is we're also going to provide public access to Calabresh Reservoir for shoreline fishing.

I don't know if folks have heard about this before.

Turns out we have a legal mandate to provide public access for fishing at that location.

And so we need to do something to make sure people can exercise that right.

And so we're going to make a couple of small changes at what we call the boat ramp location just off Calaverish Road for people to be able to do that.

It's going to be by reservation.

All those details have to be worked out still, but we're hoping to construct the site itself, which is basically a bathroom and some road improvements in the summer.

And then stay tuned for more details about all that.

It's not going to be open all the time.

It'll be restricted by reservation.

It's a very small footprint, but we will have public access at that location later this year, most likely, so they can finish the project.

So those are all things that are good news that are happening.

And I just want to make sure people had a chance to hear about that.

We're happy to come back, Connie, when we have more information about that if you'd like to talk more about any of those things extensively.

And again, the grazing RFP, that's happening right now.

So that one can't wait for the next meeting.

If you want to ask a question, please reach out and let us know right away.

So there was an article in the paper a couple weeks ago.

I think a lot of folks saw that.

I wanted to be here to make sure that all of you had a chance to ask questions if you have questions.

There's always a lot of interest in our construction projects in the valley, as all of you know.

This one in particular, because we tried really hard from the very beginning to make sure that the folks in Synol were involved at the beginning during the planning process.

A lot of people at the organization where I work, including myself, were also there at the beginning.

There's some people in the room who were there at the beginning.

When I started in 2005, there were no plans to build anything except for a concept on a piece of paper someplace, and it was not at this location by the temple, someplace else.

So we picked that up when I started, and probably in earnest, I want to say 2010 or 11.

We started to have meetings, planning meetings about what people thought would be important to share at a facility like this.

And then incrementally, we started to think about what it would look like and how it would be built.

That was a long time ago.

And we finally got the contract or order for construction, really bad timing, December 2019.

Everything sort of stopped in March of 2020.

We had to like gather and figure out a lot of things then because of the pandemic.

And we were hoping it would be done by now.

And that's not happened, obviously.

It's a set of unfortunate circumstances.

We took uh the contract for construction to our commission in December, just four months ago.

And the questions we got then and the things we reported then are all still the same by and large.

There are a couple things that need to be done in the building before we can say the construction is complete, and then my group would take responsibility for running the facility and the programs around it.

And generally, those things are related to leaks from rain, which we discovered when it poured in December.

Um, so that was new information, those things are being dealt with.

Um, some of the exhibits also need to be modified and repaired and made changes to for good reasons that we gave the contractor, and those things are also in play and taking longer than we expected.

And those are really the top two things.

It's just a couple things that need to be worked out.

When they went to the commission in December, the extension of the contract was through June of 28.

That doesn't mean we're gonna finish in two and a half years.

That meant that we thought we were gonna be done with the construction in the spring this year because there's a two-year warranty period on the contract that includes maintenance to the building that we need to operate and maintain it.

So the working assumption then was that we would be done in the spring, and that's probably not gonna happen.

Um I don't have a schedule that I can share with you right now, otherwise I would, and I don't want to promise something that I we can't deliver on.

So the construction team is working really hard with the contractor to get those things worked out.

When we have a schedule, we will share that so everybody knows more about what that looks like.

Um and there's lots of good things that are gonna happen eventually when the building does open.

And I know Connie, there's uh on the agenda it said, like what can you expect when you get there?

I think a lot of folks have heard us talk about what's in the building and what's going to happen, but at a high level, uh we started the Sunol Ag Park with at the time, another nonprofit organization called Sustainable Agriculture Education, uh, Savella Krauss for folks that were around then.

I'm sure but Jim probably remembers.

And a big part of the ag park uh for us was the education programs around that facility and to have people come out and also school programs come out and make use of it so that we can talk about the watershed, talk about the YAG park and talk about the water system.

Um, and so the watershed center, which is right across the street by the temple, builds on all of that.

So we're trying to expand those programs and really make it a facility that is going to be able to be used by a lot of the school programs.

Some of the folks that probably came out and helped uh put up Sinbad Creek because the watershed's so big, it's hard to describe and to get people to go out into it because it's so remote, uh, it's hard to get into.

A lot of it's privately owned, and we needed a place where we could talk about those things, talk about the water system that we operate, talk about the watershed, how it delivers drinking water to our system, talk about the history of the valley, talk about Native Americans.

Um, and facility does all of that in a really great way.

And there's gonna be a chance to come back when we have a schedule and talk more about those details and for people that come to the facility and visit, it'll be open to the public.

It's not just for school programs.

People come, they're gonna be able to walk through the exhibit hall and look at the interpretive elements and gather that information.

There's a very beautiful two and a half acre discovery garden outside of the building that is all native plants.

It was the seeds that were collected from the watershed by our staff in Corona Dog Nursery, which is right next to the watershed center.

We'll need help to run it.

We don't have a lot of people that are going to be at the building, they're gonna be staff.

We're gonna lean heavily on uh volunteers to be docent for the education programs and even to help us with the native plant garden out front of the building.

Um, so all those things are coming.

It's a chance to help if you want to help, it's a chance to go to the temple.

Um, it's a chance to also go into the district center.

Um, it's not a facility that we're gonna lease out for other purposes, except things that we need to do for ourselves as a water utility.

So it's not a place to have weddings, it's not a place to have other private events because we're a public agency and a water provider, we're subject and bound by state requirements and state laws, including Prop 218.

So everything that we do, whenever we do something, we have to think about why the ratepayers are paying for it.

So that's sort of our marching orders.

We talk to our staff about what we're doing and why are we doing it?

We have to be able to connect those dots.

A lot of people in town are ratepayers, so you want to know how we're spending your money.

It's got to be for a purpose that's a utility purpose.

And education is the purpose of this facility that we're trying to make sure drives all of the programming and the education, not just for the school program, but anybody who comes to the temple and wants to explore it on their own.

And there'll be time for that in the program as well.

So you don't have to come and wait for a school program or make a reservation.

When it's open, people can walk in and walk down to the temple, walk into the building.

So that's that's my high-level update of where things are.

Um, and if I had more specifics, I would share them.

I don't want people to think we're hiding anything.

We want to be super transparent.

A lot of people here worked really hard on this project with us, and we're as anxious as anybody to get it done.

Um, I know some people um are very excited about it, and you should be.

It's gonna be a really great facility for people to be able to gather that information and then to pass it on to people, um, especially the school programs.

So I'd be happy to answer questions if you guys have any for me.

I do excluding the building, excluding staffing.

When can I walk my dog on that property?

It's been forever.

We don't allow dogs, it's also in the watershed plan, and that part's not changing.

Okay.

So I can I walk my dog on that property.

No, okay.

Not even on the road, not even on the road.

Walk down and back.

I can't walk the dog.

Dogs that are providing system to individual people are allowed, but no.

I have a dog too.

I love my dog, but I can't take my dog to the yard.

Got it.

Okay.

I'm sorry.

I didn't either.

That was never there was never a no-dog sign.

Yeah, okay.

Hopefully, people won't focus on that part of it.

Um, but we generally have those signs at all the places we have public access.

Um, and that's one of those things.

And the watershed plan, the old watershed plan and the new one.

There's a great section where it describes all that in a very quick concise way.

And if you want to be able to be pointed at that page, I can share that with you, so you can go right to it and go.

I'm okay.

Okay.

No dog.

Okay.

So did you say you were updating the watershed plan, or you have updated it?

We are updating.

Okay.

Um, and city planning has to go first.

This is an environmental document, so they're the C will lead agency.

So they're the ones who have to review all the material and make the determination, and that's happening right now.

And they're we're hoping that they finish that in May.

Will that be available for public comment?

As it turns out, it's not going to be.

Some of them are going to change just because pragmatically they didn't work the way that they were, but there aren't any new uh impacts.

And so there isn't going to be a chance for anybody to have that opportunity, but it will go to our commission in June, which is public.

So if folks want to say something about it, that's your chance to share those comments in a public forum.

And that'll be noticed in advance of the meeting.

So we'll make sure that we'll hear about that as well.

Fishing opportunities at Calabares Reservoir.

Yeah.

Is that going to be managed by Us Bay Regional Parks, or is that we'll do that?

Our staff will do that.

Okay.

Yeah.

Now you haven't had a lot of people focused on public access.

Miranda and Adrian, I think are the only ones there in the watershed center.

How is that going to be managed?

There's a lot of interest in more public access all the time.

I don't know that you hear about it necessarily, but we hear about it all the time.

The Sunol Wilderness, the Park East Parks runs, a lot of that is our property that they lease from us.

It's under a very old lease.

And it's managed and governed by their ordinances, not by ours.

So that's a place that there is public access.

The watershed center where it's located, there's a long-term plan.

East A Parks, I'm sure you've all seen this before from Spain Parks.

They've got lots of plans for regional sales on the ridge and going up and down the valley.

And there's a conceptual plan to get from our watershed center when it's done all the way up on the hill to Vargas.

And so we're leaving space for those systems at some point when they're constructed.

East Bay Parks would manage those when they're completed.

We don't generally get involved in public access per se, but we do it in some locations when it makes sense for us to do.

So at this point, given it the scale, I think we're going to be able to fold it into our operation.

It is more work for sure.

We'll have to have that code for the gate because you have a permit to go in through the gate.

So it'll be highly regulated.

But we're going to be doing that part of it.

But most of the time when we do public access on the watershed lands in the Bay Area, it's through another public agency, like in San Mateo County, Crystal Springs Regional Trail.

Some show county parks manages that for us under these.

Whenever there's dumping, please let us know about that because we do our best to work with the people, the other landowners to take care of that.

If it's RP titled, then it's our job to get rid of it.

That's in the road or the right-of-way might be Caltrans or Alamid County.

Um, but generally our folks know where that line is drawn, and then we get the people who we need to to make sure that we get it from if you see something, please reach out to the people here, Miranda Clayton, the watership keepers, let them know and we'll take care of it.

So we have one person who is um filled out a slip for a comment.

That's Kelly.

So um, yeah, just step aside for two minutes and they'll use the podium.

Well, anybody's been to uh Texas and you drive down the freeway.

Uh you every every time you enter New Valley, it says, Do you want to entering the Rio Grande watershed?

Watershed, but here in California, no one knows what a watershed is.

So uh I'd say that we should come up with a better name, like a natural cultural history center or something, you know, something that's everybody knows what it is and they all already believe in it.

Um the SFPC believes in watersheds, but you know, uh it's not a thing uh in California.

Um the uh the purpose of this thing, at least the the oh, also if you want to be transparent.

I just drove down the street.

I looked at it a few moments ago.

It says uh finishing end 2025.

Okay, you know, just change the number because it's obviously you're not gonna meet that date.

Um, and then uh and that's always been the case.

They've always been rolling back that number pushing back.

Uh but now that it's here, this thing costs close to 35 million dollars.

You know what else cost 35 million dollars almost exactly?

That useless parking garage in Dublin.

These people, they had a goal, they it took forever, they're still not done, but at least it's valid, and there will be a public need, public demand will be a use for this thing.

This will be uh a treasured public resource, and just like the Monterey Bay Aquarium, people want to uh rent out uh for their uh uh corporate parties and uh and uh and and drink all night or whatever they do.

And I think that they should be able to pay you a lot of money just like they pay the Monterey Bay Aquarium uh for cultural and uh community events, and the purpose of that is not to advance is to make a lot of money to help cover your expenses, just like Monterey Bay Aquarium does.

And uh the you know, at least this thing is useful, and when they built that parking garage in Dublin, they had it was after the pandemic, they it was useless.

It's now up for rent, and it was a complete white elephant, 35 million dollars.

Okay, I'm not sure.

Did you have a comment on this?

On this item.

Okay, okay.

Thank you very much, Jim.

Appreciate it.

Lots of news.

Look at that sign change.

I've asked them to do that, so we'll take care of that.

Maybe you heard it loud and clear.

Um, so dating sign.

Yeah, apologies for that.

Um, and again we put on the new date for the signs.

That's a really good question.

I'm not sure the answer to that yet, so I'm not gonna get one by race.

Yeah, um, we'll make a change and um we'll share that as soon as we can find out what we should put on the sign up.

We don't want to be wrong, obviously.

So again, um, and I acknowledge that as well.

Like this is taking too long, and we know that.

Um, and thank you everybody for your patience.

Um, even though some people may not be patient about it, we appreciate it.

Um we'll get this finished.

And I'm happy to come back.

Yeah, when are your trucks?

The signs on the trucks gonna change to be the Sonol water temple instead of the fulcus one.

Logos are their own little thing.

Um, and that's a very old logo.

Yeah, and we love our logos, so I'm not responsible for logo or branding in the organization, so I can't answer that question.

I don't think there's a plan to make a change.

They like those.

We did make one for the Alameda watershed.

We didn't have one for this side of the bay on the operation.

Um, and so one of the things that came out of the pandemic.

This is an indirect answer to your question.

We made a little logo that shows the water temple, this water temple, and the hills behind it and oak trees in it.

And that's what we see on my staff's uniforms when they come out to work at the watershed center.

So we did want to do something that was unique to this area, it won't be inside of the trucks, there will be on their shirts and their hats because we wanted to make sure that people were consistent with the things they're responsible for and having the locust water temple um wasn't consistent.

So we didn't make a small thing.

I didn't have one I didn't have actually have a question.

You some she brought up the golf course.

Did you want to remove the clubhouse with any plans future envisioning long term for that for that property?

Not at the moment.

Um the grazing operation is the plan at the moment.

Um, and if there's other things that come up, then we'll make sure that people know about that.

There are some other utility uses people to show exploring that could be used.

We always need places to use the staging.

Um, that's what it was before.

When we had to move out of the yard for the R to be built, we're there for two years.

Um, we don't have a lot of open space like that.

question you some she brought up the golf course did you want to remove the clubhouse with any plans future envisioning long term for that for that property at the moment um the grazing operation is the plan at the moment um and if there's other things that come up then we'll make sure that people know about that there are some other utility uses people show exploring that could be used we always need places to use the staging um that's what it was before when we had to move out of the order for the R to be built we've got there for two years um we don't have a lot of open space like that that's flat that's paved um so we'll all be used use it we need it from time to time um but there's not another long term plan besides the current race and operation that changes we'll make sure people know about it thank you very much Trinity Andrew Connie Connie to drop them there's no item number on it there's no item number on it what what item did you want to talk on so this would be we'll just make it over here oh yeah sorry back to Jim I just wanted to make a point um that article that um quoted Connie and uh Mr.

Romeris and there was another quote there were several links in it and one of the links went to a pretty very spectacular documentary about what happened when they discovered the um Loney tribes um bones there it is a very worthwhile documentary uh if you have informed CINOL you received it and I made sure that the links were live so I encourage anybody who wants to know more about one of the big delays it turned out to be a fascinating story about what happened with the um burial grounds of the Ohlone tribe that are there and it's it's really worthwhile thank you I just wanted to say party I apologize I didn't get home so I'm gonna kind of walk out like the first sponsors did I want you to think anything of that but I give you I remember that last time thank you and I'll be back okay thanks everybody last time Tim was here he left we we thought we were done and then somebody had a comment afterwards okay so we're on to three B mosquito abatement Judy Pierce Davidson is here talk about mosquito abatement and I can't believe that we have mosquitoes already I found them in my fountain and the water's moving all the time but there's still mosquitoes so I'm glad you're here.

It's gonna be a rough year unfortunately all right so I'll back up oh great um so for this slide should I just say advanced slide would that make it easy?

Great wonderful thank you.

So thank you everyone for having me my name is Judith Pierce Davison.

I am the public education officer for the Alameda County mosquito abatement district and so today I'm presenting um about concerns that we have for Alameda County and I am going to be sp specific about concerns here in Sinnol.

All right and then just also our mission is to protect public health by controlling mosquitoes in Alameda County.

And we've been doing this for over 95 years now.

All right next slide so as many of you probably know mosquitoes are more than annoying they can also spread deadly diseases such as dengue, Zika, malaria and more I had um my first son during the Zika crisis.

I wasn't working in mosquito abatement at that time but I do remember um being really confused about it being not sure what I should do and being really confused about which mosquitoes could give me what is it was a kind of a scary time so I feel for anyone that um reads the news and is concerned about um mosquito diseases.

Next slide so where do mosquitoes come from in Alameda County in Alameda County we actually have mosquitoes year round um for the most part the abundance of the amount of mosquitoes is what's going to change but you can find mosquitoes in any part or in many parts of the county throughout the year even January's um I'm from the East Bay I'm from Hayward originally and so um a few you know when I was growing up you probably wouldn't find mosquitoes in Hayward all throughout the year but now it's pretty typical um due to the warming of the weather and so forth.

You'll also see in the top picture on the top right um green pools so pools that are no longer in service that are no longer being chlorinated appropriately those are major major sources of mosquitoes because you have tons of water lots of really good organic material and no one disturbing the water that allows mosquitoes to plurifray.

But even smaller sources such as the middle set um picture over here that you can see um forgotten pots um different things that people want to grow or have a cool idea of oh I saw this online I'm gonna grow something and then they forget about it or something like tires.

I think it's great that you guys have a waste disposal coming going on pretty soon because um getting rid of your tires is one of the best way to lower your risk of mosquitoes in your um on your property.

And then in the bottom picture you see, this is my colleague over in the coyote hills area, which is very close to Cinnol.

Um, he goes out every week to treat.

He goes out to treat for mosquitoes, he uses a mosquito specific pesticide that um kills mosquitoes without killing anything else in coyote hills that we like to enjoy.

So mosquitoes can come from all variety of sources, things that people designed years ago, things that people forgot about, or even our marshland areas.

All right, next slide.

So for the Synol specific mosquito sources.

So my job, a component of my role is I speak to people when they call on the phone and I handle all the service requests.

So I've spoken to people here in Synol.

I also spoke to our technician for this location.

His name is J or J.

I call him JB, but you probably all know him as uh John Bosom.

He says that what he sees typically are people calling, saying the creek is stopped, and now I'm getting mosquitoes.

But usually it's not the creek, it's usually people calling about themselves accidentally or their neighbors.

So a few of the pictures that you see here, the holes of trees, and I know Synol, you have an abundance of trees.

It was very pretty driving in here, actually from Fremont.

Um, there's so many trees that have these cavities that have these holes in it.

Those are perfect environments for mosquitoes because they have nice organic material, they have leaves that have fallen in, maybe a bird has made a nest in there and flown away.

Those are great for mosquitoes.

So if you have a tree hole like that, um, you could put netting on it, you could put bacteria in it, you can even fill it up with um dirt.

There are different ways to just work on your own property to get rid of mosquitoes.

Um, things that you also find are just forgotten containers, kiddos in particular, they'll play with something and then leave it out.

Um, or and I will confess the bottom picture, the nasty green pond, that's my home.

I was gone for two weeks, and my mosquito fish were dead, and my pond was full of larva.

It was it was very frustrating for me as a mosquito expert.

So things like that can happen really fast, especially.

I mean, like you were saying, Connie, like the the heat has been extraordinary.

We are already seeing mosquitoes.

I have no doubt there's people that went abroad for a month or two, and then they'll come back and find sources like these of mosquitoes because we had not prepared to have such immense heat during March.

Here in Synol, you also have a very aggressive mosquito called 80s tarsalis.

So, mosquitoes, this is kind of wild.

I didn't realize this until I started this role.

There are thousands of types of mosquitoes in the world.

There are over 3,500 species.

So mosquitoes are not just one type of mosquito, they're more like birds or like dogs or your favorite cereals.

There's tons of different types of them.

And so 80s tarsalis, this one that you see right here, that loves tree holes.

That loves containers.

Those are the ones that we find here in Synol.

So if you're getting aggressive daytime biting, give us a call, let us know.

But we suspect it'll probably be from those tree holes in particular.

All right, next slide.

So, what can you do?

It's you know, I don't want to just give you all doom and gloom and then tell you a tough luck.

There's a few things you could do.

So the first one is to place screens on tree holes and containers.

I actually brought a bunch of mosquito screen today, but I forgot to have scissors.

So after this meeting, if someone could, you know, borrow scissors from a classroom, we could cut some container um covers out.

Um you can fill the holes, especially the holes in um trees with dirt or um that the little screen, that's a great way to get rid of mosquito um sources.

You can place BTI, which is a bacteria, um, a bacteria from soil.

Um you could place that into holes as well.

Those are also great at the bottom of little pots.

You could also just remove or throw away containers.

If you're not gonna use it, I'm very guilty of this myself.

I see a good box or I see a good container, I'll hold on to it.

If you don't need it, try to throw it away, get rid of it if you can.

And then also turn over or just remove fountains or ponds that are not maintained, especially as folks you know have limited mobility, or if you know you're not gonna be there, or if you're gonna rent out your property for a while and you're not sure if they're gonna be able to maintain it, just remove it if you can.

All right, next slide.

So these are the common things that we see, not just in Sinnol, but in other areas.

Uh, I call them well-meaning intentions, but with itchy results.

So the image that you see on the left is a water um water barrel that someone is using specifically to capture rainwater.

Great idea.

We've been in droughts forever.

You know, water is becoming more expensive by the year.

However, if there's no strain or if there's no BTI bacteria in there, you're going to get mosquitoes that take advantage of that warm water that's sitting that has no natural anything to fight against those mosquitoes.

So look out for those types of big water jugs.

People love them, but unfortunately, they can be major sources of mosquitoes.

You see another example of that on the bottom middle picture.

That's an example of someone that has it connected to their rain gutter.

So you want to get that water from the gutters going into the barrel.

That's completely fine if you have something, some sort of mesh or screen, something that makes it easy to make sure the mosquitoes don't go in there.

How it's exposed, mosquitoes are going to find it and they're going to take advantage of it.

The image above, that's plant propagation.

We've been seeing a lot of people, especially with the pandemic, a lot of people got into gardening, wanted to have more greens, some nice things in their home.

We're seeing plant propagation where people have plants, try to give it to someone else, and accidentally they have mosquitoes in that water, even a mosquito eggs just around the rim of the glass, and unfortunately they're passing mosquitoes around.

And then to my right, this is where this is especially frustrating to me.

And a former professor of mine that I didn't like is really promoting these.

So I'm especially like on the war path about this.

This is called the mosquito bucket of doom.

The mosquito bucket of doom sounds amazing.

It's this bucket that you put out, fill it with water, fill it with mosquito killing bacteria, and then watch them die.

This is the thing.

If you don't have the bucket full of water, they're not coming over to bite you.

So you don't even need to do that.

Flip that bucket upside down, put that bucket in your house.

You do not need to make this area specifically for mosquitoes.

People believe, like people will say, oh, well, that means once the mosquito bites you, then they'll lay the eggs in the water.

The water will be bad for their future generations.

Unfortunately, if you have water there, that attracts them to your yard.

So come on.

Um, so please don't do the mosquito bucket of doom.

I um I just I just my eye twitches when I think about it.

All right, on to the next, the mosquito life cycle.

So the mosquitoes go through a life cycle similar to a caterpillar becomes a butterfly.

And I will say I've been presenting to third graders all day, so I might do it a little more third grade focus.

But basically, mosquitoes go from adult mosquitoes, they lay their eggs.

So you see that that little where the water line is, that blue half blue circle.

They lay their eggs in egg rafts or perhaps one by one.

Um, and then once it's nice and warm and there's enough water, the mosquito eggs will pop open, and then they turn into larvae.

So the larvae is the second stage, it's that wiggly stage.

A lot of people will think they're tadpoles or worms, and then they don't deal with it, and then they start getting bites.

So if you see anything wiggling in your pond, as Connie was mentioning earlier, um, that is very likely to be mosquito larvae.

If you've never seen mosquito larvae, I actually have some that I found in a pond about two hours ago.

I won't tell you exactly where it is, um, but I might.

Um if you want to see it, let me know.

I'll be here after it's impressive.

The third stage is the pupa stage.

That's somewhat similar to their chrysalis stage.

They don't eat, they barely sleep, they just move around really fast, and then they emerge into a blood-sucking, biting mosquito.

And then I just want to um put your attention to the bottom right picture.

There's a picture of someone's finger of um a fingertip, and you see a little bit of like black dots around there, those are mosquito eggs.

It looks like maybe dirt, it looks like maybe grime, but it's actually mosquito eggs.

Mosquito eggs are incredibly small.

I have a few examples as well.

Next slide, please.

How long is an adult mosquito live?

Um, depending on the species, between one week to one month.

So, how about the Sinnol mosquito that we're famous for?

It depends on how fast you are.

I mean, it just it depends on a few different things, but um, most likely probably two weeks.

It depends on how hot it is.

There's a few things.

Okay.

Um, so this one is one of our major points right now.

Only the female mosquitoes bite.

Female mosquitoes bite because they need the blood in our protein or the blood or from a dinosaur or from an iguana.

Like I said, I'm in the third graders all day.

They need blood to strengthen their eggs.

Without blood, they are not able to have viable eggs, and their eggs die, and then oh no, no more mosquitoes.

But unfortunately, they are very clever, so they know how to get around us.

Um, yes.

So they need to reproduce, like I said, a blood meal from animals.

Um, the second one is they need standing water to lay their eggs, so bird baths, um, tires with water in them, pools, they love any areas where there's standing water.

And it can take them from five days to two weeks to hatch and develop.

With the heat that we're experiencing now, it's going faster.

They're moving through their metabolism faster.

All right, next slide.

All right, and this is the uh this is the bad part.

So invasive mosquitoes, some of you may have heard about these called 80s egyptie mosquitoes, they've been found in livermore and in a lot, um, a pretty intense way.

Um, they've also been found in Pleasanton, Dublin, and also Fremont.

I'm sorry, it looks like my PowerPoint is kind of a little messed up right now.

Um, but basically, they have been found in areas where there's lots of containers, people that love gardening but don't always um dump out their water when they should.

They've been found in areas where people like to propagate plants, and they've been found in areas where people have bromeliads.

So those beautiful plants that kind of like look like big leaves and they have tons of water sitting in them.

That's where we've been finding mosquitoes, um these aggressive ADS egyptie.

And as you can see in the middle section, Ades agypti, not only are they incredibly aggressive and they bite during the day, but they could also spread those really nasty diseases such as Zika, dengue, chicken gunia, and yellow fever.

Um, and not I I am opposed to scare tactics, but dengue was found and transferred in Los Angeles for the past few years, and during like October to December.

We know that it's only a matter of time before dengue becomes more widespread.

And so, what we're trying to do is connect with the public, make sure you guys know how to decrease your risk of mosquitoes, because we really just don't want this type of disease as a daily part of our lives.

Next slide.

This is where we found invasive 80s agypti in the Tri-Valley.

We did find it in Fremont too.

But you can see, um, especially for Sonola, I thought this would be particularly interesting.

Livermore has a lot of clumps of 80s agypti, the aggressive invasive mosquito.

We see a few clumps in Dublin, a little bit in Pleasanton as well.

We first found it in Pleasanton, um, near the fair or at the county fairgrounds, and then it had spread beyond the that area.

Um, but in Livermore, we found multiple, multiple um 80s agypti through, I believe it was it was the day after I came back from summer break.

I was very annoyed that it popped up.

It was um in in late summer, and then we found it all the way until November.

So they can they can survive even when it's really um warm or when it's really hot, but also when it starts to cool down as well.

Um, and because of all the rain that we have and all the sun, we're getting we're getting these mosquitoes coming out.

Thank you.

Next slide.

All right, so this is just a cute little graphic that's really quick about all the different places you might find mosquitoes in your near your property.

So things like open trash bins, um, dog poles.

One of our biggest things that we've been noticing is lawn drains.

Sometimes people call them French drains, I just call them yard drains.

If it's a drain that could be stopped up by um leaves or other garden debris and it's not draining, mosquitoes love those areas.

Remember, they want standing water, they want something that's nice and um full of organic material.

Um wheelbarrows, also shocking to me.

But a lot of people that have wheelbarrows, especially our new gardeners or our avid gardeners, if they're not pouring out that water every day, they could be accidentally producing mosquitoes.

Next slide, please.

All right, so this is a lot of information on one really short um uh slide.

But basically, what we really want you all to do is start getting in that habit of eliminating breeding sources, the areas where mosquitoes can produce.

So drain, flip, or toss away things that can hold water.

Um, we want you to contact us if you need mosquito fish in ponds or pools.

Mosquito fish are little fish, little guppies that are voracious and will eat mosquito larva.

Um, they're not appropriate for every spot, so we have to be a little discriminatory about where we can put them, but um they are a great option for like a small pond.

Um, we really encourage folks to keep your pools treated and maintained.

If you're not able to, give us a call, we'll come out and figure out a long-term solution that's low cost to you.

We really want folks to cover their ring barrels and add mosquito dunks to the water.

Um, mosquito dunks are a great way to kill the bacteria and still be able to use the water for things like gardening or for um providing to birds and whatnot.

And also keep an eye out for things like mosquito larva, pupa, mosquito bites, especially if you're like, why did I get 12 bites on my legs?

I didn't see anything.

Call us, let us know.

And also dead birds.

And Sonola's been really good about this in the past.

If you see a dead bird, what we'll do is we'll come out and pick it up, depending on the species.

We'll pick it up and test it for West Nile virus.

West Nile virus is a virus that um is transferred by mosquitoes.

And so if you find dead birds, especially crows or ravens, please just Google really quick Deadbird Hotline California, and then um we'll we'll be dispatched to pick it up.

Next slide, please.

All right, and just in general, we need your help to enhance outreach and mosquito prevention.

So we ask you to amplify our messages having us here tonight, especially that was such a quick turnaround.

So thank you so much for having me so quickly.

Um telling us about community concerns, especially if you're seeing any misinformation about mosquitoes, especially that mosquito bucket of doom, which I'm so irritated by, or the agency.

We are we take pride in the fact that you're a small but mighty organization.

We're 20 full-time staff for the entire county.

We believe in strong um agency response and government transparency, and so we're really proud of the work that we would do, but we can't do that if people are spreading lies about us online.

So if you see something about us, let us know.

I'm the one that gets to respond, and I like to fight.

And um, if you are getting daytime biting, especially, let us know.

That's that's an indicator to us that it might be the base of the mosquito, and so we really want to get a uh head start on that if possible.

All right, next slide.

Thank you for your time.

Again, my name is Judith Pierce.

Um, you can reach me out, Judith at mosquitoes.org.

We got our website in 1999.

That's why we're mosquitoes.org.

We have our um our phone number and our website.

Um Liz Beth Martinez is my my newest colleague, and she is helping with the 80s Egypti response in particular.

She can't be here tonight.

Um, but if you have any questions or concerns, please reach out to us.

Thank you.

Range of mosquitoes in terms of I keep my place clean, they swarm in from somebody else.

Do they have a an area that they go with?

So the invasive mosquito, the one that we're really concerned about, that's only about maybe 200 yards.

So that's why we're very focused on if you clean up your property, especially larger properties like this, you we might have a fighting chance.

Um, something like 80s dorsalis, which is a mosquito that's from the marsh, they could fly up to 20 miles.

So that's what I mean.

I mean, mosquitoes are amazing, and unfortunately they're amazing.

But for the most part, the ones that are biting in this area are pretty short range.

So that's why if you're able to find the containers with water, you find the tree holes that are real full of water.

Though um, and if you're able to get rid of those, that might be a really good fighting or fighting chance.

Fair enough.

Okay, mosquitoes.

Great.

I did bring up visual aid.

Oh, yeah.

The mosquito dunks.

So if people don't know what you're talking about.

Yeah.

So what the the um way to do those is on the label, it says you just put a dunk in the water and let it float.

What we know is if you break it up into five pieces or so and sprinkle it in like a bird bath or a pond, it's going to be more effective.

Because the dunk will kind of, if you leave it as a whole as a donut, it'll slowly dissipate, but it doesn't, but the bacteria dissipates a lot faster than the actual donut itself.

So break it into five chunks and then redo it like every I don't know, three months or so, depending on the amount of water.

Yeah, I think workbench has the granules.

Oh, great.

Yeah, Richard has the dunks.

As long as there's something, that's that's better than uh that's great.

And then it's also awareness, right?

It's been like you're looking out, you're trying to see if there are larva.

If you go from that larva, that little wiggly one, to that squirrely, shrimpy looking one, then you might want to um give us a call and then we can talk to you about the next steps.

And also, we're a district's uh, we're a district service, so I all of our services are free of charge.

You pay um your money to us through your tax dollars.

So we are not coming out and asking you for money or at all.

Great.

Thank you.

Yeah, two people with uh comments, Andrew.

Yeah, um actually have questions for you.

Oh, yeah.

Sure.

Is that okay?

Yeah, grab the water.

Well, first of all, we appreciate the fact that you bring the fish to those of us with horses.

Yes, that's right.

Andrew, can you could you dress the council?

Oh sure.

Um, tell us the questions you'd like us to ask the council to ask her.

I want to warn my fellow horse owners and people who own cattle, those uh anything that with the big water.

Um it is a problem, and we've been able to use um the services um we met a long time ago, and so we do we do that.

Um of my concerns is uh I have a chicken water, so and then I have a cat.

Well, I you know, I I feed the cat outside, and then of course we know about the horses.

One of the questions I have is is there um I have heard that I can get like a solar powered um uh something that just moves the water, and I I just wondered what the efficacy of that is and other things that those of us that that depend on having a lot of water available to our our um our agriculture uh animals.

Yeah, sure.

So yes, that's how I know you about this um council uh through Andrew.

Uh so in terms of fish, fish are great for troughs as long as your horse isn't eating them.

Um, but it seems like it works out pretty well.

You want to have enough, you want to have a deep amount of water.

So sometimes people will call us and say, Oh, I have a little pot, can I put mosquito fish in there?

That's not appropriate for fish.

That's better to just turn out the water.

In terms of cat dishes, dogs, uh like dog dishes, if you're changing the water every two to three days, that should be fine.

Um, our bigger concern is um if someone has um what like things that are sitting out that they forget about.

So it's like different pots, different pans that they might forget about.

Um sorry, and then was there an additional component?

Oh, yeah, if I have a um that I might be able to move my water and that would help.

You know, I if it if you had asked me for four hours ago, I would have said it's completely fine.

But then I went to this place where I found all this larvae and they had a pump in there, and I was really surprised.

So I think it's one of those things that you kind of see what works.

You if it's a it's a bubbler that actually moves the water fast enough so that the mosquito larvae can't catch on, um, then it should be fine.

But I don't know every pump, I don't know every bubbler, I don't know every pond.

Um, what I would recommend is try it if you're able to, and then just keep on looking for mosquito larvae.

Um, but sometimes bubblers don't work as well as uh they say they're going to, unfortunately.

Okay, one more.

When I'm when I don't have my fish in the pond, right?

Sometimes at the end of the day, I just go and push the water all over the place and create a lot of is that help?

I mean, is that that should because basically the idea is uh mosquito larvae, they've they breathe with um basically like their noses on the top of their head.

So if you swish around the water enough, they should drown.

Um, but typically they do like to stay on the corners.

So you'd probably really want to focus on the corners, focus on like they're not gonna be really in the middle of low trough, they'll be on the corners.

Thank you very much.

Okay, Kelly had a question comment too.

I think ninjas in here though.

I thought there was a visual aim.

They're all all tied together.

We had um Mediterranean fruit flies in the middle of Fremont, and they put a zone of whatever contamination, and it was all the way to here.

This was part of the we you were part of our contamination zone.

Uh, and I just looked it up.

Uh mosquitoes and flies are related, all but mosquitoes have specialized feeding habits, so it's hard to say if if legally they count as mosquitoes or whatever Mediterranean flies.

Um, or these guys may not may not be involved.

This agency uh has a lot of lessons that you know you just watch them and oh, yeah, of course that's how they do it.

That makes perfect sense how they operate and whatever, but it's the same thing with um um infectious diseases like measles, like the uh uh like uh um what uh uh smallpox, whatever uh the the uh mumps, whatever.

And uh the they figured out what the what how to you know address the weak uh the the um weaknesses are the most effective leverage point uh in the lifestyle of this disease vector and all and uh probably vaccines are the effective way for the other ones.

So uh, you know, you it's all the same thing, whether it's uh the diseases are going through uh from child to child or from whatever uh mosquito to human, whatever.

And then finally, look at this organizational chart.

The organizational development and organizational structure of this thing, they have they're a county agency and they've got a public information officer.

And you can go down the list, fire department probably has public information officers, maybe the sheriff does.

Uh it makes it makes sense, right?

But try to find me, find your your public works agency.

Try to see if you any public and for any uh you know public affairs people.

No, there's nobody.

And as you go up in the to the county administrator's office or the politicians, they don't exist on the org chart.

So very nice.

Thank you.

Okay.

Thank you very much, Judith.

Appreciate it.

We'll go on to item 3C.

Um site development review.

For a new home, I think.

Good evening, council members, members of the public, Aubrey Rose, Alameda County Planning Department.

I'm sharing a PowerPoint slideshow here.

This is case number PLN 2025-00091 at 9925 Foothill Road.

Uh proposal for the Olive Grove House.

Not the olive houses in the state of the staff.

This requires an agricultural site development review because the zoning code requires it for a um for new homes in the uh agricultural zone, and this is on a 10 acre lot.

This application was submitted in June of last year.

Slightly so the proposals to construct a one-story 2500 square foot residence and site improvements, including a driveway and sort of on this 10 acre lot.

The property owners are here, as is the applicant.

The location of 9925 Foothill Road is off of G Road access easement.

It's about a mile north of here.

It's about a third of a mile uh west of Foothill.

General plan designation for the property is East County Area Plan Rural Density Residential.

And again, the zoning is the agricultural.

This application is exempt from C Coronal Review under the California Environmental Quality Act as a uh one by three zero three exemption for a new facility.

Next slide, please.

And here's uh architect's uh rendition of the new uh proposed home, one story, uh two story high windows at the living room.

We take advantage of the view.

Uh it's not on a ridge line, 2500 square feet uh site improvements would include extension of the existing driveway and also construction of uh 784 square foot garage decks.

Uh home would consist of three bedrooms and two bathrooms, uh height 21 and a half uh feet at the living room, and the decks would uh the living room windows and decks would wrap around the home eastern side.

That's again take advantage of the views.

Garage would be rearloaded and accommodate two cars, home would be installed with fire sprinklers, two five thousand gallon water tanks will be located nearby.

Next slide, please.

Zoning history of the site was zoned agricultural in 1956.

Um hundred acres minimum is a zoning code requirement uh for a billable site in the agricultural zone.

Uh and this uh site is lacking on both.

It's 10 acres and is accessed by easement in 1972.

A variance application to uh approve the the lot as a building site was uh filed and denied in 1981.

A similar variance was filed, denied, and then approved um by the Board of Super Advisors on Appeal.

So this is a building site, and again, the application um before us was submitted last year in June.

Next slide, please.

And just briefly, the uh application was referred out to the following agencies uh with these uh comments uh to county public works who had um comments about how the uh grading would um would be handled, environmental health regarding on-site wastewater treatment system or septic.

So the fire department that requires uh issued certain requirements on the uh road access and house be strengthward and uh for water storage, which is all part of the uh proposal and zone seven water agency who uh issued a wealth permit.

So here's the site uh on the left.

You can see uh sort of that it's uh about um a mile north of downtown Sinnol on the right, zoomed in to show this 10-acre site.

It's uh sort of rectangular and shape, it's upsloped, going from uh south to north and has about 60 uh mature olive trees um running across the middle of the lot.

There's a flat building pad towards the top of the hill, but it's not on a ridge.

Next slide, please.

Here's some site photos.

The first photo is looking from the uh driveway back to uh G Road towards the north.

Uh second, that's starting on the left.

Second is uh looking up the driveway towards the uh gate, third in the middle is uh looking to the south.

That's the the view that you would see from the home when it's complete from the flat building pad, and uh fourth is looking uh northwest, uh further up the hill, and then uh the fifth uh image on the right is uh looking from the flat building pad back towards the top of the driveway, so uh facing north slide three.

Sorry, it's not more visible, but this is uh site plan with uh uh topo lines that shows that this is uh that that the easements along the um the right or the east side, the uh flat um billable area is uh towards the uh the north or the uh the top of the slope.

And next slide, please.

Here's a floor plan again, showing the uh what proposed one story home, three bed, two bath uh uh living room uh facing east, uh rear loaded two-car garage.

Next slide, please.

Some elevations, so viewing um towards the north at the top, and then towards the south at the bottom.

So one proposed one story home uh approximately two story in height at the um at the living room.

Uh next slide, please.

Staff analysis.

This uh proposal informs to a few of the east county area plan policies.

Um rural residential development policy 21.

The county shall recognize existing rural residential development outside their green growth boundary, including SONOL and other existing rural residential areas.

Policy 222, the county shall continue to provide rural services to development within existing rural residential areas, including SONOR.

Three considerations for this type of zoning, planning and zoning permit, agricultural site development review uh to ensure one that it's compatible with the site and the surrounding environment, two not obtrusively visible from scenic corridors, corridors does not interrupt ridge lines, and three has adequate access and fire protection.

So staff feels all of these um considerations are met by this proposal.

The um again, I'm sorry that the uh the image is coming out as small as it is, but the uh lower right hand um uh uh graph is to depict that the surrounding eight lots of the surrounding eight lots um around this 10-acre lot, which uh measure between uh five and 15 acres in area as uh five of the are developed of those all three are uh larger than that the home which is proposed, and of those five three are our two-story homes.

Most recently bill when built in 2009 records.

So, in conclusion, uh staff recommends, and we're trying something new here.

This is gonna be a mouthful.

Staff recommends that the SNOL Citizens Advisory Council recommend approval of this agricultural site development review case number PLN 2025-00091 to construct a one-story 2500 square foot residents with site uh to the Alameda County Board Supervisors, planning department staff will convey the Cinnol Citizens Advisory Council's recommendation to the planning director.

So that concludes staff's report, available answer any questions you may have, and again the uh the applicant architect and the owners are here as well for any questions that might not be why you're saying this does not go to the planning commission.

Does not is that different?

Uh the new homes where uh a site development review is required are uh decided by the planning director.

So it's an administrative decision.

And did you say there's a swimming pool?

There's an indoor swimming pool.

Very small.

And that we can include it in the 2500 square feet or no.

Pardon?

Is that included in the 2500 the little pool?

Yeah, okay.

And that is on stage nine.

Uh sorry it's not labeled on that.

That version of the store screen.

Yeah, left.

Where is it?

Page nine, uh slide nine for plane.

Outside the house.

It's not inside the house, it's it's covered, but not conditioned air.

Okay.

So it's under the shaded area.

Yeah.

Okay.

No, pretty true.

No.

So are you gonna harvest olives and have olive oil?

As time permits.

It'd be much easier if we live there.

Yeah, okay.

Yeah, this looks good to me.

Yeah, impressive.

Yeah.

Nice.

Very nice.

Motion to approve as written on the last page there.

I'll second that.

Recommend approval.

We recommend approval and I'll second that.

Yes, definitely.

Council member Conan.

Approved.

Council member Harrison.

Approved.

Councilmember McLean.

Approve.

Approved.

Chair DeGrange.

Approved.

As you ask.

Come on.

Approval.

That's a lot of applause.

We're not allowed to do that.

That's why.

Oh Andrew, you had said you wanted to comment on everything.

Thank you for asking.

No.

Thank you.

We'll go on to item D, which is a continued conditional use permit for telecommunications tower.

Hello, everyone.

My name is Michael Fleming.

I'm with the Albany County Planning Department.

Um item number D.

Um 2025 00153.

It's a conditional use permit to allow continued operation of an existing telecommunications facility.

It's a renewal of an old 2014 permit from Team Mobile.

Umer and operative uh uh Joseph Kimbrough Melissa K Trust and Signal Acquisitions uh Jim Lee from Count Castle.

5764 or 5770 mission road.

This APN is 96-56-8-14.

Um it's uh uh from CEQA to do it being existing facility.

Um next slide.

Uh here's the site here, it's right.

Um this is I think it's east of the 680.

No, or is that snow is this now it's west of 680.

North.

All right, well, by either way.

Anyways it's by 680 and it's uh on this same site there are uh actually um uh a couple other sites that are already there and um I'll show that on uh a later slide um next slide um in any event the zoning is agriculture and it's in resource management general plan um so the planning findings um so this site um is is key um to boost uh communication services on the 680 corridor um it's really transportation uh available to the site to to get to it um it's um has no it being up on the back side of a hill there's no safety concerns um no one can even really go up there unless you're know how to get there and you probably work for T Mobile um and it's um similar to the the clauses and the performance or the development standards of that site so it's not as far as the planning findings go they met on all fronts next slide well here we go okay so um that's what I was looking for my north arrow so it is north of 680 and um and mission roads right there also uh it's man hard to see a little bit but um basically it's to the north west of 680 by mission road um uh next slide um this is just um uh site plan zoomed in basically you have um up in the uh that upper square up there is where the the cell tower is and then uh you have some equipment um uh down um a little bit away from it uh next slide um so basically this is um you know a lot of times when we look thing of cell towers we think oh it's such an ugly thing or whatnot but this is on the back side of a hill I did the street view from mission road you can't even see this thing um maybe if you had a drone or something you'd be able to see it but you'd have to hike hike up the hill to see it um next slide um this is just some antennas um look there appears to be four antennas at this site on this tower uh next slide so this is the coverage map um and basically as you can see um without the site is on the left hand side it's a little hard to see but um if you look on the with the with the site on the right side where that red circle is it's all green where with with the site and without the site there's a lot of peppered in green areas and it's not fully covered so um this helps expand coverage for people's cell phones for emergency services and from just people trying to talk to people in this area uh next slide please um it's just uh a photo of the site you can see um uh the sites over on the right hand side um it's on the back side of the hill the hills kind of off to the right there um next slide uh the equipment area it is in uh barbed wire um fenced area so any hikers in the area are not gonna the doubt doubtful that they will try to climb this for I don't know what reason but I doubt they will um next slide um it's just another site closer up uh next slide um one more last picture uh next slide so um this right here shows that there's an ATMT uh Verizon on the right there and the T Mobile is on the bottom left those are those are two applications that's the old application number and the new application number um the reason why this is because this was put this facility was put into place before they came up with the thousand foot radius for not allowing other sites to be close to other sites.

Um with today's laws, they're not allowed to do that anymore, but this predates that.

Um next slide.

Um staff recommends that the SNOL count citizen advisory council recommend approval conditional use remit kill in 2025 0153 to the Almania County Board of Supervisors planning staff will convey the SNOL Citizens Advisory Council's recommendations to the East County Board of Zoning Adjustments at the next hearing during the deliberations of this item to allow continued operation of an existing telecommunications facility, the renewal of 2014 00134 for team mobile carrier based on drawings marked exhibit A received September 16, 2025 on file dominant county planning department.

Um should SNOL Assistance Advisory Council recommend approval of this application, the following conditions, which are in the staff report over on that table.

Uh shall uh the conditions on the draft resolution should be considered.

Um just go to the next slide.

The next slide's just says questions.

Um staff is available for any questions you might have.

When was the uh how long did this just expired?

So looking for how long when was it last approved and how long was that for?

Well, these I can look at the but it probably expired in 2024.

How long of a CP was it can working under 10 years?

10 years, yeah.

Uh it might have been a little closer to 2025 based on the number.

I can look it up in the exact date, but it it's if the PLN was 2014, the last one, then it's 10 years from that.

Any of your conditions talk about camouflage or any foliage around the fence or anything like that.

Based for if this was a more urban area or and not hidden by this massive hill, that would have been more talked about.

Um the last page here, you can see the freeway.

You can see all the cars.

Uh if we can if that if we can see the cars, the cars can see that tower.

Okay.

And uh, and the so and we we get these often, and it would just and every single time we talk about this every time that we want you know some camouflage, we want some foliage.

We have you know, they have the things on the towers that make it look like a pine tree.

Um, and it's to the point now that if we didn't we didn't ask for that or up recommend approval, provided that we put some camouflage, but wouldn't be fair to all the all the other ones we've approved because since I've been doing this, this is probably the sixth one we've done, and every single time we ask for um some sort of camouflage to cover that up.

And I appreciate what you're saying, hikers, all that stuff like that, but that last photo right there.

I mean, you can see all those cars, and they can they can see that and it sticks out like a sore thumb.

Sure, sure.

That's my only comment.

Was a notice given to the adjacent property owners?

Yeah.

It always is um because I can see a piece of property right over there that I have been asked to go up and look at, and they're talking about their view being really ugly with the um Stevens Great Quarry there and this tower.

Um here that area was uh thousand foot radius of the site.

Oh, so probably didn't go to that property.

Yeah, so um that's typically for in urban areas we do 500 foot, and for out in areas like this, we do a thousand foot.

Um typically don't do more than that though.

That those property owners on Sheridan have expressed concern about this in the past.

I think how tall is the tower?

I'm assuming it's it's not very tall.

It's yeah, I think it's like maybe uh no, I don't think so.

Uh give me one second.

It might be 25 feet actually.

Let's see here.

No, the ATT is at the ATT is 25 feet.

The T Mobile.

Uh 15 feet tall.

The other ones are a little bit taller.

There's uh there's an ATMT out there that's that's looks like it's 25 feet tall and a horizon that's 30 foot tall.

This one's 15.

And do you know when the ATT and the Verizon are coming up for review?

Uh I think uh yes, I do.

One second.

Okay, so the ATT expires on in February 2034, and the Verizon expires in 2031.

So they had more recently within the last five years or so renewed.

I'd like to recommend we put camouflage on this too.

Yep.

Yeah.

I mean, a thousand feet in a hilly area.

I mean, we're looking across the valley.

We're looking way more than a thousand feet across the valley, which means they can see back to this as well.

I agree.

Camouflage is the only way to go.

And that's consistent with what this isn't anything now.

Again, we advise this.

Yeah, we can um we can talk to the provider and have them what are you look seeking?

Are you wanting to have it?

Is it make it a tree?

Or uh do you uh you want it painted green?

Or I mean, do you have an idea of what you're looking for exactly?

You as the planner, you can go look at all the other ones we've done over the last five or six years, right?

And then you could probably sense that theme of how we can.

Well, I'm just thinking, but is this in this particular circumstance?

There's two other sites up there that aren't gonna be camouflaged.

Um, so as far as like this particular, like I think the most popular one now is the pine, the pine tree, not not like a straight up pine tree, but like the pine tree that has branches like this.

Yeah, that's the more that's the better one.

That's the better one.

So we can recommend that.

Yeah, okay.

Comments.

Do you do um camouflage defense as well?

They have.

Yeah, it looks like I agree.

I don't know.

Some claim I think it's more fencing strats slaps it.

Okay.

Some green, some green slats in the in the cyclone fencing.

Yeah, we can do that.

Yeah.

Okay, we have a request for comments from Kelly, Abrew.

You think gauge slats would be better?

I mean, uh I'm up, I'm up not today, but mostly here.

Oh, okay.

I get you.

Um we have to wait to talk.

Um do you have a preference on the slats, or should we leave it up to what we think the best is gonna be at the time, uh whether green or beige.

I'd say either one.

Yeah, I think either one would probably be okay.

I mean, part of the year one's not gonna look good, part of the year one's not gonna look good.

So it's a dynamic situation.

Hey, maybe should we do every other slat?

Okay, we have comments from two people.

We need to hear those comments.

Oh Kelly.

Okay.

I have no problem with this uh cell phone tower that we're talking about today.

It's just fine.

Um, whatever.

Uh but I uh I do have a big problem with these telecom companies and city and planners coming in here and making all these, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, we can do that, we'll do that, whatever.

And in this case, this is leave Happy Valley Road, uh uh over crossing uh of 680 heading south, and uh they used to have a tree in front of this thing, and you couldn't see it most of the time.

So I no, I nobody noticed it.

Then they made it bigger, fatter, uglier, and they got rid of the tree.

So you driving straight into this thing, and it's about 15, no, uh 25 feet off the road or whatever in your face, driving down the freeway.

And I was at it at the hearing when they talked to some, I think it was uh boards when whatever it was.

Oh, yeah, yeah, but we have to get this thing put in now because we're rebuilding the freeway, we gotta go, blah, blah, blah.

And we'll we'll fix it later.

We're gonna put it somewhere else, the permanent place.

This is just temporary.

We're gonna just shove this in your face, but it's temporary, so you couldn't put up with it, and don't worry, it's gonna be fine in the end.

Well, it's never moving, you know, and it's ugly as sin.

All right, and then there's another one, the one right here in Synol, whatever whichever direction think it's that direction, that we had a hearing here.

Everyone said, 'Oh, yeah, we want to put in the trees or make it pretty.' I look, I've looked all over the place, look for the fake trees.

I can't find them.

So they told you, oh, yeah, we're gonna do your Synol thing.

Yeah, yeah, well, whatever.

That never happened.

Never happened.

If anybody can show me the fake trees and the pretty uh cell phone towers over there, I'd like to go and walk out there and uh and on private property, get some access and go look for the show me.

The the the show me the the pretty cell phone towers.

I'm I am sick and tired.

I am sick and tired of all these phony promises about cell phone towers, and oh yeah, yeah, we'll do it.

And then you wait about what a couple of years and nothing happens.

Or maybe they put up maybe they put up the ugly things that they wanted to in the first place and said, whatever.

Well, we we got our cell phone tower up and nobody's gonna notice because they they're not gonna remember.

Yeah, this is this is a really serious issue in Sinnol, and I'm very concerned about the way that uh that this is being handled in the planning when we use terms like a thousand feet or five hundred feet that makes sense when you're talking about maybe a residential area or um or something flat, but Sinnol is a place that has um a lot of spectacular beauty, and it's one of the reasons why we love it.

Now I love my cell phone towers because I can use my cell phone.

I think that we should have cell phone towers.

Now, one of the things I was um I have to address the uh the group despite the fact the guy wanted to hear us over here.

Um I had the fortunate uh opportunity to attend a Zoom meeting that was done within Alameda County in a just different district, and there was a long long list of all kinds of things that you could choose from a menu of things that you could choose from to mitigate these towers.

We're not being made those available in our area, and so you guys are up here having your discussion.

Well, I maybe you ate a green or whatever.

That's awfully informal for what is available.

I call for the county to be uh give us the full menu.

The second thing in my 29 seconds is that um uh ATT came here and just started whining that they were being treated unfair because there was five different towers, and why are they the one that had to be fixing it?

All we hear is whining, and we don't get mitigation when it comes to these things.

I think that we need to take a strong stand against this until the county behaves can I come back to this.

I will say I I don't know the exact full long list um of what is available out there.

I have seen water tower or faux water towers, faux flagpoles.

Uh I suggested the pine tree because I think that's the best situation for this particular tower.

Uh I have done another site that was in uh East County area that did a water tower.

Um if you have any preference.

Um I think the faux tree would probably be best if we can over time if we can convince the other three or other two sites to be faux trees, also.

I think it would they're more blended better.

So my question is, but Andrew said, doesn't that's a lovely suggestion?

But we don't know what our options are, we don't know what to suggest.

He's saying that there's a list somewhere in Alameda County of possible camouflage treatments, and we don't know what that is.

So we can't suggest to you, oh yeah, the pine tree's great, but maybe there's something else that's better.

Well, uh, I don't think there is, but um, from what I've seen, there are you have the cypress tree, the straight up and down trees.

This just like a cylinder.

You have uh redwood, the pine tree that that is has little branches, like I'm talking about, like arms like this.

Uh, there's um uh faux eucalyptus, I believe you can do, which I don't know if that would look so great right there, but it might.

Um, there's the water tower, there's the flagpole.

Um there are other ways of just painting it or having it more stealth design.

Um meaning that there's uh cactus, you can get them uh cell phone tower just look like a cactus, the camouflage, and there's also palm trees.

Okay, thank you for helping.

Um hopeful.

You are helping helping.

I appreciate that.

I'm kind of putting on the spot.

Um so I is there any else that you saw on there?

Nothing that pertains to that area.

Okay.

So I I still think the the pine tree with the the multiple branches would probably be the most universal.

Um I think the only other thing that would look or make sense would be maybe the water tower with a fake fake water tower.

Uh obviously, if you have three sites up there, you're not going to do three water towers.

It probably look not so smart over time.

But um I can also bring back to the planning department that um that Snow CAC would like to see um a better list of options, and that they are tired of non-camouflage poles.

Well, I think I think the point is that we're not tired of non-camouflaged poles.

We're if what Mr.

Bruce says is correct, we're tired of recommending approval based on wanting camouflage and then it going through without the camouflage.

I think that's the point of what he's saying.

So, what is happening?

What is happening after we say that it's conditional recommendation with camouflage?

For example, what would be on the hillside above the four corners?

That's been more than a year, and nothing there's no camouflage at all on it.

Well, I I don't know about that particular site.

I can tell you what's gonna happen with this application is the next step is to go to ECB ZA, but before it goes to E C BCA, we're gonna send it back to the applicant and say you need to come up with a camouflage design, otherwise we're not gonna recommend approval.

And then it'll probably take I don't know, a couple months for them to draw up new plans and have a camouflage design of the pine tree, and then we'll take that with the new, and I invite you to come to the ECBCA meeting when it comes or even virtually or wherever you just watch it or just to check up on us.

Um, and it'll the with the new camouflage design that will go to ECB CA.

And also keep in mind that we write whenever we have a meeting like this, we write a background section of what came of this meeting.

And so, and we do review the the minutes and we do review the recordings, and so whatever is said here is gonna regard what I end up doing, is gonna go into the report on the background section saying that Synol wanted a camouflage, and ECBZA is going to expect to see camouflage design.

So then it could pass, and then and then what?

How do we know that it's actually going to happen even once it's been approved?

How long do we have to wait for it to be put up?

Um, well there we do have umone from um T Mobile on the line virtually.

I believe his name is um uh Jacob Hamilton.

Um you could um put him on and we could um ask him about how long things are gonna take.

Hi, are you there?

Yes, we hear you.

Yeah.

Hi, my name is Jacob Hamilton.

I'm representing Crown Castle.

We are the applicants here.

So essentially Crown Castle is a tower infrastructure provider.

We build the towers, sign the leases with the landowners, and then we have tenants such as T Mobile VRIES and ATT, they lease space from us, and then we manage the infrastructure.

And you know, obviously, I've done hundreds of these sites.

I've done a ton in Alameda County before.

I've gone to the East County Board of Zoning Adjustments, the West County Board of Zoning Adjustments, I've done continuances, I've done appeals, I've uh I've seen pretty much any type of design that you can see.

And I know that there was requests for camouflaging, which is obviously pretty general at this point.

Uh, I think one of the points though is that by nature this site is 15 feet high.

That's the ultimate stealth.

I mean, generally a carrier in order to build a site wants a hundred feet.

I mean, obviously, we're not going to build a hundred foot tower here.

But initially, when they built it, the thought was a 15-foot tower is the absolute ultimate type of stealthing by having a low-lying facility like this.

So sometimes you'd have three carriers stacked on top of each other and maybe a hundred-foot pine tree or mono eucalyptus or other type of tree, but I believe just due to the stealthing concerns due to the aesthetic concerns, these are what we'd call ground mounted facilities.

Um, there are options we can do, though, with that said.

I mean, I will say a monopine or monoucalyptus or other type of trees, they don't even make trees this small.

Yeah, anything under 40, 50 feet, you're not even gonna be able to find steel that can be manufactured into.

I mean, you have no trunk, you don't have enough space for branches.

It's such a short tower, which is good.

That means it's a stealth facility.

But to think that it could be a tree, I don't think is realistic.

And also, when we talk about stealthing something, it's not as simple as adding branches or adding something.

We're talking about doing structural calculations, wind loading, reinforcing the tower.

And if we have to swap the tower, now we're talking about leasing additional space from the landowner where they have all the leverage, so it's usually not a favorable lease.

Because when we're excavating and tearing out that existing tower, we need additional space.

And while that construction's going on, you have to bring in a sell on wheels.

Now you have to trailer in new sites, put them on air temporarily, lease space for that, acquire a temporary use permit.

So we're talking about not tens of thousands, we're talking hundreds of thousands of dollars.

And at that point, it becomes a business case whether or not to even keep the site.

With that said, I think that there are more granted, I'm going to be more biased towards an economically friendly type of stealthing agreement.

But I think that's what we've done in the past and Alameda County in particular.

Essentially, we do uh paint the 15-foot tower green, get everything green or beige or whatever color we decide.

And usually it is green, because even when you have most of these oak trees are fairly evergreen, they do have a brown tint to them, but the foliage is generally green.

So we'll do kind of um a sock.

So you've probably seen socks over antennas that are having branches and needles and almost like camo netting.

We can probably place that over with some support so that essentially you're covering it.

And from a distance, this is 500 feet from 680.

It's 200 feet in elevation higher.

It's 500 feet.

There are certain spots where it's visible, but not very many.

It's pretty hidden.

And there are some oak trees that do that are between the freeway and the facility, but there's open spots also.

So we can either do slats, which is probably the more affordable option for us.

The other thing we've done is a faux ivy.

So basically it's kind of uh it looks like ivy, and we put that around the fence so that it's a total stealth.

In other words, you can't see through it at all.

And it's it's a faux ivy, so it looks like ivy, and it goes over the fence.

And that, particularly from a distance, you cannot tell the difference between whether it's real or not, particularly in an ivy, which has kind of a um silky foliage, a kind of waxy material anyway.

And then we do a paint green and we do a sock over the antennas so that it looks like a tree.

Any other solution where you're trying to add branches to a 15-foot stubby tower like this, it's just going to add bulk.

It's gonna bring your eye to it.

I mean, you can say that I'm biased in that, but I've seen hundreds of these, and the more you add, particularly if you're concerned about aesthetics and you're concerned about your eye being drawn towards it, it generally isn't better.

And the idea of a stealth isn't necessarily to make it look like a tree, it's so that you don't see it, so that your eye doesn't really focus on it so that it kind of blends into the background.

So, I mean, I'll that's what I have to say about it.

And I have done a bunch of these, and we have stealth these.

And one of the challenges too is with natural landscaping, I know we haven't discussed that much, but trying to get water up here is impossible for the most part.

And then you're talking about a manual watering service, and they always die.

I mean, as well-intentioned as natural foliage is, it's very difficult to keep alive up here, particularly without a um constant water source.

So, in summary, there are things that we can do.

I would advise against any type of swap where we're talking about excavating and bringing heavy machinery up here.

That's going to be painful for the neighborhood too.

If we're talking about a full construction project, leases, it takes years oftentimes to be able to get a solution just from a leasing perspective that allows us additional space.

So we would love to work with the existing facility that we have that does not require leasing additional space.

Um, but with that said, like I said, there's things that we can't do.

And I think they're really good solutions too.

So we do photo sims also.

So we'll do a photo simulation that shows what it looks like now, and then we could take it from the 680 from Mission Road, show what it's going to look like with photo simulations so that you can see basically before we invest.

And even stuff like that though, does require structural calculations.

It doesn't take months, I don't think, you know, it could take probably six weeks because there's additional wind loading that's that's gonna happen, even if you're adding just a limited amount of stealthing, even for the a faux ivy, because now you're adding what was uh a situation where air can pass through the facility.

Now you're basically putting up a sail where you have wind that's stopping and having to go around or go above.

So there is a little bit, there could be some reinforcements needed, but probably not.

Point being is that there's always much more involved uh when we're talking about in general with stealthing.

Jacob, this is uh Benjamin.

I I think that I mean that you did exactly what we were kind of asking because we don't even know what options are, and I'll I'll sure yield yield to my uh my my fellow council members here.

But if you just painted that entire thing green and put up like camo netting or faux ivy around that, I think that that for me at least that's exactly what we're talking about, and it's it's it's simple and it's not gonna be expensive, and it can provide some sort of stealth, and I don't think you're gonna notice it in the spots that it's visible from the freeway.

So I'm not sure what you guys think about it, but that's that that's that's just like we thought branches and all the other stuff.

That's our only options, but like you said, painting it green and doing that stuff, that's exactly kind of what I was what I was thinking about.

Uh, another question for you, Jacob.

This is Ian McLean.

Um the different entities, who bears the cost of what's going to be used for this camouflage.

Uh it's generally Crown Castle, the company that owns the infrastructure.

I mean, you know, look at go ahead.

I'm sorry.

So the question I'm leading to is um who makes a decision between the the two dollar version and the hundred dollar version.

Uh that usually uh we don't have there's really not many options or generally for something like this because it's a fairly specific product.

And we do number one, we only have expensive, unfortunately.

I wish it wasn't that way, but because of the custom nature of anything that we're talking about, whether it be even the faux ivy, it's just not a heavily used product, generally speaking.

Um it has to be we have to match the photo sim.

So if we do photo simulations, I mean we're gonna have to match it.

And there is an inspection that happens.

We take pictures of everything that's done, and we have to submit that to the planning department, and they have to buy off on it and say, Yeah, you did what you said you're gonna do.

I know what you're talking about, though.

I mean, you see, we've all seen the trees that are out there, right?

Like just the Charlie Brown poorly branched, um unnatural.

Yeah, I've seen acid.

Yeah, I I've seen good ones and bad ones, and I think the bad ones look worse than just a bare tower.

And yeah, you know, I'm I personally would feel more comfortable.

Um it sounds like this is a question I'm gonna be asked a couple times per year.

Um, I would prefer to have some type of uh menu presented to me, other than and telling my waiter, you know, just bring me a meal as long as it's a meal.

I think I'd be more comfortable looking at a menu.

Not looking for lots or nothing, nothing you know, fancy, but I I do think that we need to be more informed as to what our options are, so we can be more fair to you as a provider, also to the uh residents in the area, and future applicants, yeah.

Future applicants.

Um, it sounds it sounds like there are uh many options here.

Once we get a you know, kind of a list.

I imagine you contract out to somebody that does the camo versus you building the physical infrastructure.

That's right.

I mean, we have general contractors that basically specialize in that.

And this, you know, the menu is gonna change heavily based on the size of the tower, the location of the tower.

I mean, I can just say generally in the modern landscape, what we have usually the towers are much taller.

So usually you are talking about a faux tree, and there's three main faux trees.

There's a faux pine, which is gonna have a more pointed top and it's gonna be conical shaped and it's gonna taper down like a pine tree does, a dug fur.

It's a canary pine, technically, but it's just general pine.

A faux broadleaf, which is a faux eucalyptus.

People will talk about those as different trees, they're not, they're the same, a mono broadleaf eucalyptus, and those have a more rounded top and they have broad leaves.

Obviously, none of them are deciduous because that you know is obvious, it's not a real tree.

They're evergreen.

Uh, and then you have a palm tree.

A palm tree is never usually a good design because when you get that second carrier, where are you gonna put the antennas?

Right, you're gonna do it because it's a 6409, meaning you have to allow it essentially in some capacity.

And now you have antennas below the main fronds, and it doesn't look very good.

So we've gone away from that.

So your two main designs for a new facility that's a normal height, which is 50 to 100 feet, is gonna be a faux pine tree or a faux broadleaf.

And you have there are Italian cypresses, but those are usually pieced together by just adding leaves, essentially, because they're real thin, kind of hedge looking, and we do have those, but that's not a modern design that you're gonna see in a new tower.

So those, and you mentioned a water tank and you mentioned cactus and other any custom design like that, carriers, infrastructure providers are going to fight back tooth and nail on a million dollar facility like that.

The cost is just absolutely extravagant and wind loading, lease space.

If you have a new site, it's a different situation.

So if it's a brand new site, we're in the leasing stage, we're designing it, then sure, everything is on the menu.

But when you have an existing site, an existing lease, an existing foundation, any solution that you choose that deviates from that.

Now you're talking about excavating new leases.

So that's when it's going to be especially problematic for my clients on an existing site when you're talking about any design that requires swapping towers, plus it's a massive construction project that it's just not necessary.

Jacob Jacob, I don't mean to interrupt you, but we're talking about a small tower in a small town with a small, probably inexpensive solution.

I don't know why we're talking about a million dollar 50 foot, 100 foot tower.

We're not talking about changing anything.

We want a camouflage, a little tower, and a little town, and we want to make sure that it gets done and gets done in a timely fashion.

That is all we're asking for.

I was just trying to give you some background because there was a general question asked.

So I was just trying to provide some level of education.

I thought you were looking for.

Appreciate it.

So I've got another question for Mike.

I'm sure it's Michael, right?

Um what is the what is the time period for one of these companies to make good on on getting camouflage up?

And what is the uh better question for Jacob?

Okay, because once it gets our permitting, it's on them to make sure that's it.

But no, no, it is a question for you because they don't comply.

Right.

So there's got to be some way of holding them accountable.

Yeah, I'm more interested in the enforcement side of it.

I mean, I will say if I'm still on the big challenge that we've had in the past is manufactured parts.

So when we get stealth stuff, the reason sometimes it takes a while, it's not that hard to install.

You know, it doesn't take but a week or less of construction.

It's when you have custom material like this, and very few companies that provide it, that's where we've been hit in the past with delays.

And yeah, so if we go to the solution we talked about, it's not that bad.

We can get that stuff, and we you know, I my client wants me to get as much time as possible because the big corporations, purchase orders, bid walks, etc.

But you know, we always have this conversation.

You guys want it done as quickly as possible, and I get that.

So usually we do maybe I try to get 90 to 120 days, you know.

That's what I'm trying to get from when it's approved to when it needs to be done.

And then sometimes the county says 90 days max, and you know, I want a hundred and twenty days, and then the county pushes back and says, Look, this has to be done in 90 days.

So that's generally where we end up.

We have an implementation uh clause and the conditions of approval that says that it um issue of a building permits, which is three years of approval days conditions within three years, did you say three years?

Three years will be no force or effect.

Um there are other benchmarks in the process.

You can condition it to get it done to get the stealthing done in a specific amount of days.

We've done that in the past.

Yeah, that's three years is like a standard condition, but we can add um for sure.

We can uh Jacob, you think you have a good idea of how long it would take once it's let's say it's already approved at BZA?

Um, how long from the approval of BCA would it take to uh get it uh camouflage?

I mean, I would like 120 days.

120 days from EZA approval.

Yeah, because I mean I wouldn't even have a from building permit, ideally, because the challenge is Alameda County can take three months to do my building permit, and it's totally out of my hands.

So if you could condition it from building permit, that's that would help because then it's actually in our court, you know.

Like there's nothing we can do if Alameda County's backed up and it takes them four months to get a building permit.

So if you can condition it from the building.

Issue.

Yeah.

How long does it take to get us a rendering?

Uh less than a week.

I mean a couple days.

Like I they can do it in a day, it's just get in purchase order out, that kind of thing.

But yeah, let's let's take a look at a uh a rendering and that's common.

Come back in April.

If it's adequate.

That's fine.

Could we need to uh vote on that?

I don't think so.

Okay.

Um you want to.

I mean, you need you.

I mean, you don't I don't know.

I I require it, but usually they vote to continue the item to the next uh available hearing or something like that.

Okay, if we're gonna do that, then I would say look we can continue the item, move to continue the item till next April.

And I'd also like some follow-up from the planning department on the antennas on the SFPUC property up here above four corners.

Do you have an address of that?

I do not so same company, Crown Castle.

They're all Kimbrough over and over and over.

Okay.

Uh but I can you get that for me?

That'd be great.

Um just because there's so many.

Yep.

It's probably one of my so you've made a motion, right?

To continue to April.

Continue to April, and we want additional information.

More information, and I will second that motion.

Conditional uh continue it to April wanting to get a schematic of rendering rendering of this and information on the other one.

Okay, yeah, that we asked for the past.

Yeah, okay.

Okay, so um let me just uh read it back to you.

So um continue to April.

Um when we come back in April, we're gonna have our rent the renderings of the camouflage site.

Um the tower painted green and the ivy.

Do you want do you want other options or is that option okay?

Or um do you want like a green slat fence version or two renderings?

Two two two options.

Yeah, we had the camo netting around the antennas.

Camel netting, okay.

Right, the stealthing to make it look like a tree.

Okay, and camo netting and ivy.

Okay.

You'll want it green too behind it.

Yeah, it's yeah, and the tower green.

Well, the metal green.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

Um then um, and then you have you want so that's for this site.

Right, and for what were you calling the other site?

Just uh might help me find it a little better.

It's up there with the water tanks above the four corners.

It's at the intersection of Paloma and Sinnel Boulevard.

Do you know who the uh is Crown Castle you said, right?

Yeah, yeah, okay.

Joseph Kimbrell, Melissa Trust, Crown Castle, it's the same okay.

Same company.

Okay.

Okay.

I will most likely um email you, Connie.

Okay, about getting um I'll basically show you uh is it this the site, and then you can go ahead and say that's that's the site, and then I we can move on from there.

And you're you just want as far as the other site is concerned.

You want information on what's taking so long, basically, or why is it because you did you guys already vote for it to be camouflaged?

Yeah, okay.

Yes, so but I don't know what happens when we hear no, I understand.

When we leave, it's there's like a vacuum.

So yeah, yeah.

Um where is that site?

If you guys have the address, I might know it.

Not that not because I call them, but Paloma Boulevard.

Uh Loma Way.

Bullma Way, sorry.

So Noah Boulevard is a snow bulb.

Not at that point, it's Sun Old Pleasanton Road and Paloma.

It's on the northeast quadrant.

Michael, if you can send me that information, I'll yeah, I I'll have access to that information.

Sure.

No, did you second that?

I second it.

So we need to have a vote.

Councilmember Conan.

Approved.

Councilmember Harrison.

Approved.

Councilmember McLean.

Approved.

Sorry.

Chair to Green.

Approve.

Motion passed.

Hey question.

I was gonna add one thing.

Hey, uh, Mr.

Hamilton.

Uh it sounds like there's um a lot of these towers.

Yeah, you guys several.

And I would just say maybe rec make the recommendation as these things come up in the future that you guys lead with this camouflage, a green painted tower, slats, camouflage netting, something like that.

And I think we could probably have some easy easier sledding the first the first night than having to continue it.

Yeah, we usually end up there anyway.

So I don't have a problem with that, you know, as long as I just have to explain to my client that I know if it's better to do it up front and get it over with.

Yeah, well, you can you say Sonola's gonna ask for this, and they may not may not have in the past, but that's you know, they have we have new council members that rotate through, and that's you know, this is yeah, we've been consistently asking for this every single time.

So if you hear any if you hear a little frustration and stuff, it's it's not you.

We've been asking for this.

Um, and sounds like there's some of it hasn't happened.

Um, so yeah, I guess in the future we will see these.

If you just had had the had the camouflage option on there up front, it would be appreciated and a lot a lot easier, like I said, easier sledding.

Um yeah, I can do that for sure.

I mean, we're we've done it a lot of times for whatever reason we can't get the renderings or wherever we need to be the April hearing.

Is it okay if we go to May?

I mean, is there gonna take a week?

Yeah, I'll get it done.

I'm just throwing it out there.

I'm just listening to what he had to say.

Okay, yeah, that's fine.

I just want to expert I just want to usually we continue to the next soonest hearing, but we don't always necessarily give a date just in case something happens.

So I think the motivation is upon the the one seeking the permit.

No, I know they they're they're gonna want to do it as quickly as I I just have to throw that out there just our motion talked about just to just in case you know I mean yeah, the design part's not the hard.

So it's just just in case.

All right, uh thank you.

Thank you, Michael.

Okay, thank you, Mr.

Hamilton.

Yeah, thanks.

Okay, approval of the minutes.

Okay.

Um before we get to the minutes, I just want to ask a favor of the rest of the members of the council, and that's um when to make sure that important things or commitments like this get into the minutes that we take it upon ourselves to maybe repeat what the speaker has indicated because we had Caltrans here last month.

They talked about the bridge.

They seemed surprised by your question about the community liaison and what they were gonna do and keeping us informed.

And um he ended he would the speaker said uh-huh, and yeah, and things like that.

But when you go back and look at the video because of the distance, you can't see that.

So even though he said yes, we'll have a community liaison, yes, we'll coordinate with a school, or he indicated that he didn't say it clearly.

Um so if you're we're asking a question like that and we get a we should reiterate the answer.

Yeah, we should for the record.

Yeah, right.

Okay, that's all right, Lila.

Thank you.

Sure.

Okay.

So any comments or corrections on the minutes.

None that so I move we approve the minutes for February 18th.

I'll second.

Council member.

Approved.

Approved.

Councilmember McLean.

Approved.

Council member start.

Chair to green.

Approved.

Motion passed.

Okay, sweet.

On item five, adjourn.

There you go.

Easy one.

Thank you very much, everybody.