The Folsom City Council met on September 14, 2021, in a special session at 5:30 PM for a closed session on real property negotiations (955 Riley Street), followed by a regular meeting at 6:30 PM. The regular meeting included presentations, approval of consent items, discussion of a professional services contract, adoption of a new park naming policy, introduction of an ordinance on subdivision map extensions, and the first public hearing on transitioning to district-based elections. Key decisions included approval of the Mangini Ranch Trails design contract (4-1), adoption of the park naming policy (4-1), and unanimous approval of the map extension ordinance. The meeting also featured community service day presentations and quarterly development reports.
The regular meeting of the Folsom City Council for September 14th, 2021. Council members Aquino. Yeah. Chalem Chairla. Howell? Here. Rodriguez. Here. And Kozlovski. Here. And if everybody will join me for the pledge of allegiance. Okay, Madam Clerk, do we have any agenda updates? Mr. Mayor, you have two agenda updates this evening. One is a request to pull item five from the consent calendar. And the council has been provided with additional written comments on item number 22. Okay. All right, fantastic. Okay, we will start with uh business from the floor this evening. This is the um point in the meeting when members of the public can comment on items that are not already on the agenda. So do we have any speaker cards for this part? You have one request to speak this evening from Dr. Cindy Meyer, if you wanna come on down to the podium. Okay. Yes, that one by the laptop. Yeah, there you go. Good evening, Mayor and Council members and residents in attending from Folsom. Thank you for the opportunity to comment tonight. I'm here tonight as a resident of Folsom and also a mom. I've been working in environmental management for 25 years, including local, state, and federal levels. I have two issues to bring up tonight. The first is the flexibility for distance learning during temporary classroom closures. Assembly Bill 130, which superseded Senate Bill 98, does not allow the same flexibility for the schools at their discretion to switch onto a distance learning platform temporarily. Classes are being quarantined on a regular basis, especially in the elementary schools. The primary schools are still very vulnerable to COVID cases as they cannot be vaccinated. And I would strongly recommend and encourage you to reach out to your contacts at the state to address this issue. These children cannot fall behind like they did last year by missing out on education. The second topic I'd like to discuss is the water conservation and the hydrologic forecast. I do appreciate the flyer you sent out that stated all the different water conservation measures for the citizens. Sadly, it may be too late or too little. Many competing demands on the water supply exist in California, as you well know. Not only human health and safety, but also the Endangered Species Act requirements, agriculture, and many other competing demands and balancing for the ecosystem. The 2022 hydrologic forecast is very bleak. We're looking at another La Niña year. We've suffered severe water supply deficiencies from 2021 and not taking water conservation measures seriously early in the year. We also have a reduction of the inflow due to increasing temperatures in the mountains. Some may say climate change, other may say natural cycle. Either way, we're seeing less inflow into the reservoirs from the river system. So as we look towards as we look at these years, we have surpassed the 2014 and 2015 drought. We're actually going into the worst sequence sequential two-year period on record since 1896.