The Santa Rosa City Council met on August 6, 2024, in a combined closed session, study session, and regular meeting. The meeting began at 1:31 PM with a closed session for labor negotiations, followed by a study session on the Development Services Strategic Business Plan and the Vision Zero Implementation Plan Update. The regular session started at 4:00 PM and included approval of consent items, a second reading of the retail tobacco sales ordinance, and two major ballot measures: a Transient Occupancy Tax (TOT) increase and a General Business Tax overhaul. The meeting adjourned at 6:40 PM.
Good afternoon. I'd like to ask the interpreter currently on the Spanish channel to commence interpretation of the meeting. For those just joining the meeting, live interpretation in Spanish is available, and members of the public or staff wishing to listen in Spanish can join the Spanish channel by clicking on the interpretation icon in the Zoom toolbar. It looks like a glow. If you are on your cell phone or tablet, locate the three dots, tap them lightly, and put a check mark on your preferred language. Click done to activate and begin the interpretation. Once you join the Spanish channel, we recommend you shut off the main audio so you only hear the Spanish interpretation. Claudia, will you please restate this in Spanish? Yes, thank you. Thank you very much. Back to you. Councilmember O'Krepke. Here. Councilmember McDonald. Here. Councilmember Fleming. Here. Councilmember Alvarez. Vice Mayor Stapp. Here. Mayor Rogers. Present. Let the record show that all council members are present with the exception of Councilmember Alvarez. Thank you. We will now proceed to item three, which is our uh 3.1 conference with labor negotiators. Madam City Clerk, can you please facilitate public comment on this item? Thank you. We are now taking public comment on item 3.1. If you are in council chamber and would like to comment but have not yet provided a speaker card or your name, please make your way to the podium. You'll have three minutes and a countdown timer. Will alert at the end of that period. As you approach the podium, please state your name for the record if you choose to do so. Speaker on the East Lecterin, please go ahead. If not, please ask about it. We can't negotiate here. Um we're kind of in a cycle where the city council negotiators have different roles, obviously, right? Um, but we can't pass the buck back and forth. There is authorizations that needed for real negotiations to take place. And as we all know, our city charter um talks about a comparable city survey. Um that's how it's supposed to be done for us. Uh it's been done that way with all the other city units that I'm aware of. Uh it's also been done that way with city executives. Um, this is an important foundation of how these labor negotiations are supposed to go. What we need from you guys is authorization for that process to actually happen. Um, if the negotiators are bound by a hard and fast number that everybody else has gotten, we cannot have those good faith negotiations occurring. So we're asking for you guys to um come up with the ability um to make that happen and authorize the negotiators to do that. Um issue is not something that can be swept under the rug at this point. You know, um, you guys all heard our firefighters speak a couple weeks ago. Um since then they've been blowing up my phone. Um everyone was absolutely you know stoked after that meeting, um, expecting that they'd hear something good from their friends at council.