We're ready when you are.

In November 2020, the 24th Preservation Commission meeting, the meeting is now called to order.

Will the clerk please call the roll to establish a quorum?

Thank you, Chair.

Commissioner Murker?

Commissioner Ambacher?

Commissioner Burns?

Commissioner Rika noted he would be absent this meeting, Vice Chair Nair and Chair

McSloffkin.

Thank you.

We have a quorum.

Thank you.

I would like to remind members of the public and chambers that if you would like to speak

on an agenda item, please turn in a speaker slip when the item begins.

You will have two minutes to speak once you are called on.

And after the first speaker, we will no longer accept speaker slips.

Speaker slips.

We will now proceed with today's agenda, beginning with the land acknowledgement.

Please rise for the opening acknowledgments in honor of Sacramento's indigenous people

and tribal lands.

To the original people of this land, the Nisanan people, the southern Maidu, Vali and Plains

Mewak, Patwyn, Wintun peoples and the people of the Wilton, Rinshariah, Sacramento's

only federally recognized tribe.

May we acknowledge and honor the native people who came before us and still walk beside

us today on these ancestral lands by choosing to gather together today in the active practice

of acknowledgement and appreciation for Sacramento's indigenous peoples history, contributions

and lives.

Thank you.

Please join me for the Pledge of Allegiance.

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic

for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all.

Thank you.

Before we get started with today's agenda, I believe we have a special presentation from

the clerk.

Thank you, Chair.

Yes, hi, this is Cecilia Ventress with the Office of the City Clerk.

As this is our last regular scheduled meeting before the current terms expire, the Office

of the City Clerk would like to extend our sincerest gratitude for your service to the

Preservation Commission.

Your service has been invaluable to this commission as well as the City of Sacramento.

So I will now hand out the certificates to some of the members and turn it over to the

Dias if you guys wish to speak.

Well thank you for the certificate and for the comments.

I believe all three of us are still going to be here for the next term.

So it's a bit of an anticlimactic farewell.

It's been a pleasure to serve as Chair and to work on these experience projects in the

buildings we've landmarked and it's been a fun year.

I'll just bring that.

I said I've only been since March and I'm looking forward to serving on the next term.

All right, well thank you so much.

We'll now proceed on to the consent calendar and our first item of business, the approval

of the minutes from our last meeting.

Any comments or motions from the commissioners?

I'll make a motion to approve the minutes.

Great motion from Vice Chair and I are to approve the minutes.

I'll go ahead and second.

Will the clerk please call the roll?

Yes, thank you Chair.

And for the record we have no public speakers for the consent calendar.

Commissioner Merger?

Yes.

Commissioner Ombacher?

Yes.

Commissioner Burns?

Yes.

Commissioner Rika is absent, Vice Chair Nair?

Yes.

And Chair McSloffkin?

Yes.

Thank you, the motion passes.

Thank you.

Moving on to the discussion calendar and item two on our agenda, Preservation Commission

draft, 2024 annual report.

And it looks like we have a staff presentation.

Yeah, just a or report, Chair, Sean DeCorsi, Preservation Director for the City of Sacramento.

The Council rules of procedure establish an annual report requirement for all legislative

bodies including the Preservation Commission.

The Preservation Commission reviewed the draft annual report at their October Preservation

Commission meeting.

Consequently, the report on this agenda is for recommendation to the personnel and public

employees committee for the City Council and is the final draft.

This concludes my remarks.

I look forward to any comments or questions.

Clerk, do we have any members of the public who wish to speak on this?

Thank you, Chair.

I have no speakers for this item.

Thank you.

Any commissioner questions or comments?

I had one question for you, Director DeCorsi.

Was the, I think it mentioned several grants upcoming or kind of pending for next year

in the looking ahead.

Could you remind us, and I'm sorry if I've just forgotten what those grants are that we

might be winning for next year?

We have three outstanding grant applications currently awaiting a decision.

One is for the National Park Service Network to Freedom Program, and actually I was going

to get to this in our Director's Report.

We were successful in that grant application, so we hopefully will be working on that project.

I'll get into some more of the details about the project itself, but we were awarded that

grant.

And we are, there are two other grants we have not heard back on.

One is a grant to create a digital inventory of all properties identified in historic reports

or evaluations, not necessarily listed in a register, but identified as potentially eligible

and creating an inventory that's successful to the public and to staff of all those properties.

So that's another grant that's a national and down for the Humanities Grant.

And then we have a third grant, and that is a underrepresented communities grant through

the National Park Service to update the National Register listing of old Sacramento historic

district with underrepresented communities' stories as part of that effort.

So it would be updating the historic context statement and identifying groups that are

not present in the current historic context of old Sacramento.

Great, thank you.

We'll all go ahead and move that we forward the 2024 Annual Report and 2025 Work Planner

for the Preservation Commission to the Personnel and Public Employees Committee for Consideration

and Approval.

Is there a second?

I'll second.

And Vice Chair and I are seconds.

Will the clerk please call the roll?

Thank you, Chair.

Commissioner Spies, unmute.

Commissioner Merker?

Yes.

Commissioner Ombacher?

Yes.

Commissioner Burns?

Yes.

Commissioner Rica is absent.

Vice Chair and I are?

Yes.

And Chair McSlovkin?

Yes.

Thank you, the motion passes.

Thank you.

Item three on our agenda is the LGBTQ plus historic experience project final draft historic

context and the historic building survey findings.

And I hope that we have a presentation from Henry Fuse.

Go ahead, Henry.

Thank you.

Good evening, commissioners.

My name is Henry Fuse, preservation planner with the community development department for

the City of Sacramento.

I'll be presenting the final adoption for the LGBTQ plus historic experience project

that we have been working on since January of this year.

So this is a project as you have heard twice before actually that is molded on the African-American

experience project historic context and survey.

This was a project that we completed last year in our department and we followed it up

this year with a grant to do a survey and contact statement for the LGBTQ plus historic

experience in the city.

So this was funded in part by the city and the state parks grant.

The project included creation of a historic context statement of LGBTQ plus history prior

to the city's, prior to the city's founding to about the recent past, which in this case

we decided to be about the year 2000.

And it also funded the creation of a survey of a potential historic district and five

potential landmarks associated with this important history.

So the project began in January of 2024 and it was a one year grant timeline which we

are now coming upon the completion of.

And so we began this project by identifying important stakeholders in the community to

first create a first draft in historic outline of the important themes and places people

that are significant to this community.

And so we came out with our first draft of historic context statement in June of 2024,

had a public comment period in several public meetings, traditional and non-traditional

public meetings to educate the public about the project, gather public input and really

make a second draft and final draft that were really developed and had as many stories

as possible within them.

We also held to complete this historic context statement.

We also held seven small group oral history sessions at various locations throughout the

city so that people could drop in and share their history with us in an informal manner.

And those were held at different times and days so that people could accommodate different

schedules and make sure they can incorporate their comments into the project however they

would like to.

We also held multiple one on one meetings.

That was a really important part of the project for us was really meeting people where they

were and meeting the important folks that were the trailblazers in our community to get

their important stories within the document in addition to just oral history interviews.

So Claire, who you had from last time and myself, we met with a lot of folks for just getting

coffee to kind of ask them one on one questions to get clarity of what should be in the document

and what shouldn't be in the document.

And I really make those connections that was really the kind of core importance of this

type of project to make sure that we are recording the history that people want us to be recording.

And then also as I mentioned, this is the third presentation, the preservation commission,

this being the final.

And then we are also holding one more presentation of the City Council proposed for December

3rd.

In addition to all those other public outreach events, we also held presentations with

employee resource groups, walking tours.

I tend to Sacramento Pride for both days.

We attended community center events, religious services, meet up groups, festivals.

We even attended a birthday party to really kind of just meet people and get the word out

to as many people as possible to share the story of this project.

In addition to all those outreach events, we also had to do actual archival research.

And so on the screen, you can see a variety of sources that we used of newspaper articles,

journal articles, books, oral history interviews that had already been completed to fill in the

historic context statement from members of the public may have passed away or no longer

able to speak for themselves.

And like I said, we supplemented that with additional meetings and phone calls, public

comments on the first and second draft to really create a second and final draft that's

really quite robust in our opinion.

And many of the members of the public who worked on the project have voiced their support

for that as well.

And so you can see on the screen as well the five themes that we developed that Claire went

into more detail of with last month that really kind of was informed by the research that

we had.

And we multiple time for making sure that we were asking community that are these these

themes that you really feel like we should be organizing the history into.

And this was actually what we kind of came out with from the gate and this didn't really

change too much besides maybe a couple tweaks of the year.

So we really kind of were able to continue with our initial start and themes and kind of

just fill them in where we got more information along the way.

That's not to say that there's not information missing from this document.

We fully recognize that but we like I said we're kind of limited to a grand timeline but

there's absolutely ways that this document can be updated and infilled in the future with

oral histories more public outreach.

And like as we all know history doesn't end in 2000 or whenever historic context date

and end.

So this is going to be updated hopefully in 20 or so years when they can look back on

this period of time with a scholarly perspective.

So the second part of this project was the historic context excuse me historic survey.

So there was the potential historic survey of Laptor Heights neighborhood and the additional

five landmarks that were scoped as part of the project as part of the grant.

That doesn't mean that there's only five properties that are potentially eligible.

There's actually over 120 that we identified that are in the appendix of the report.

And so those are going to be potentially as projects come in or as staff has availability

will be doing research on those properties and potentially landmarking them in the future.

So far we have about five properties that are potentially landmarks and potential lavender

Heights historic district.

So here are the just the sampling of the properties in the lavender Heights historic district.

There are 12 contributing resources I believe there's about 40 total properties.

It's a continuous district around lavender Heights which is around 20th and K Street.

There's just a couple photographs of the important buildings that are identified.

And there's really I think one of the important things that we heard from people in the beginning

of the project is that we don't want it to just be focused on bars and that's the only

part of the culture.

There's the lavender Heights historic district is really a great example of how much diversity

is there is within the community and what the different businesses organizations religious

institutions were available during the period of significance.

So we have AIDS organizations.

We have the community center.

We have a bookstore.

We have a doctor's office that then became a bookstore.

We have a church.

So there's so many different opportunities in this historic district for people to really

identify with different aspects of it.

And then lastly we have the five proposed landmarks.

So on the top left we have the alternative coffee shop.

I should also mention that this was we wanted to really also kind of highlight multiple

different types of properties with our landmarks in addition to the lavender Heights survey.

So we didn't want to just choose all bars.

You'll see here we have an alternative coffee shop.

We have the incredible edible which was a restaurant.

We have Bojangles which was one of the first gay bars in the city of Sacramento.

We have the mom guess what offices which was a one of the earlier newspapers in the community.

And we also have the blue moon which is a lesbian bar on Franklin Boulevard.

Obviously.

So with that I had that completes my presentation for the final adoption.

But if there's any questions or comments we'd love to hear them.

Thank you.

Thank you so much Henry.

Greg do we have any members of the public who wish to speak?

Thank you chair yes we actually have one speaker John.

Good evening chair and commissioners my name is John Marshaq former chair of the preservation commission.

As of about five and a half years ago I'm this being on the commission.

It's really exciting work that you do and I thank you for the work that you are doing.

I'd like to support the staff's motion on this project.

It's been a really good project.

Great outreach the document that they produced is comprehensive and it fulfills a really real need to document the history and culture of LGBTQ in Sacramento.

So thank you very much.

Thank you for your comments.

Chair I have no more speakers.

Great thank you.

Thank you for the comments.

Commissioners any comments or questions for Henry?

Commissioner Murkert go ahead.

Thank you for your presentation.

I'm curious about the property surveys and the fact that some of the properties have no architectural significance to them.

I understand the significance is more about the memory of the place.

When or if any of these properties come up for permitting.

Is there anything in place that would kind of support a building owner to understand how to interpret that.

That work within their their project on that property.

Yeah that's a great question.

So in the final report there's also an eligibility standards integrity discussion.

So there are some identifications of important features.

In the case of the lavender heights historic district that will be like all of our historic districts.

There will be a historic district plan created that will outline what property owners can do and what they are not able to do with their properties.

And that's a discussion that a lot of us I think we're all having at the same time.

How do we kind of preserve cultural history and also let property owners make changes to their properties.

Because with state laws a lot more difficult with objective standards to create a preserve culture than just an architectural standard.

So that's something we're still working out.

But I think there are some standards like I said within the integrity discussion and the future historic district plan that will assist with that.

Henry I had a question also about the land marking the outreach to the building owners for like public education purposes and plaques and stuff like that.

Where does fault that fall in the timeline?

Is that later after the actual land marking?

Yes so that would be before land marking happens.

So just to clarify for everyone there's no actual historic designation being added to the properties right now.

We're not land marking or making historic district but in the future we're going to be just like we're doing with the African American Experience Project properties.

There's going to be significant outreach to the property owners so that they're aware of the process and what restrictions there are and education.

Now probably be like next year about if we're going by the same timeline as the African American Experience Project.

Thanks.

One comment I guess just while I'm here that the business outreach we think of was the 2565 Franklin building.

I just went actually with my son it's a new burger spot.

It's pretty good.

Very much recommend.

And I thought the story in the report was just so cool and such a encapsulation of why this is also important.

So I just want to share a couple snippets of this one building which is at kind of right near Gunther's ice cream if you've been over there.

Buildings earliest known tenant was a lighting and ornamental ironwork designer and manufacturer in 1931.

So very like old timey Sacramento vibes with that.

Next it was in use as Lejos tavern, a prohibition era bar that was rated for possessing an illegal cash of untouched alcohol and a secret cabinet behind sliding doors.

How cool is that?

Later in the 80s and early 90s it seems when it was the blue moon it was the home to the first miss leather Sacramento competition.

And also it seems kind of like the unofficial hangout of the Sacrum the River City ruggers Sacramento's women's rugby team.

Like what a building and who would have known if we hadn't done this for well I wouldn't have known if we hadn't done this report.

And I think a lot of people in the same boat and it just adds a lot of dimension to our history beyond like.

Some of the more cliche things about a wealthy person built the railroad and now has a very fancy house.

So all to say thank you for the report I think it's really well done and the work you've done from I saw you doing the B-roll news photography with the like KCR a reporter whoever that was to go into a birthday party.

So who knows what else you've done to make this all happen so thank you for all of that.

There are no other comments or questions I'll go ahead and make a boat commissioner or vice chair and I go ahead.

I'll just say kudos to the city team and consultant team and all the volunteers involved it's a really cool project.

Thank you.

I'll go ahead and make a motion that we recommend the city council except the LGBTQ plus historic experience project historic context statement and historic building survey.

Findings concerning potentially historically significant resources is there a second.

Second.

Mr. and I are seconds thank you what the clerk please call the roll.

Thank you chair commissioner's please unmute commissioner Merker.

Yes.

Commissioner onbucker.

Yes.

Commissioner Burns.

Yes.

Commissioner Rika is absent vice chair and I are.

Yes.

And chair McSofkin.

Yes.

Thank you the motion passes.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Next on our agenda is the directors report director de coursey.

All right thank you again chair and that's an exciting recommendation that you just made so congratulations and thank you Henry for all your work on that project.

I have a few items for the directors report this evening the yesterday the city council listed 1146 street and 1341 45th street on the Sacramento register.

As well as adopting the amendments to the R street historic district both as recommended by the commission at your October meeting.

Next the PNPE met yesterday and they have reappointed commissioners McSlavkin onbucker and Rika to their seats as well as appointing a new commissioner to the at large seat previously filled by commissioner Montaume.

This recommendation is still subject to review and approval by city council but the new commissioner who was appointed is Ella Cross who was formally an intern with our department who actually presented to the commission at one point.

She has a master's degree in historic preservation from Sacramento State University.

And then lastly I'm pleased to announce that the national this is mentioned earlier in the in our meeting tonight that the National Park Service Network to Freedom Program recently approved $14,000 in grant funding to our office.

The grant award will allow us to retain a consultant who will document and nominate the Hackett House site as a network to freedom site.

This is a site that was identified as part of the African American experience historic context statement.

Just for context the National Park Service Network to Freedom Program honors and preserves and promotes the history of resistance to enslavement through escape and flight.

The Hackett House site if you recall was where Archie Lee sought refuge from his captors and was again identified as part of the African American experiences or context statement so the project would be a follow up to that to that effort.

That concludes my comments and I can answer any questions you have.

Thank you, Director DeCoursey. Any Commissioner comments or questions for Director DeCoursey?

Thank you very much. Next up is Commissioner comments, ideas and questions. Anyone have anything to share?

Public comments matters not on the agenda clerk do we have any members of the public who is to speak.

Thank you, Chair. I have no speakers.

With that we will wrap up the meeting. We have no meeting next month, correct? Yeah. So see you all next year. Have a great holiday.