The Santa Rosa City Council convened with all members present except Vice Mayor Alvarez. Key agenda items included interviews for the Personnel Board, proclamation of Zero Waste Week, community event updates, and a public hearing to adjust recreation and parks fees. The council also made appointments to boards and approved several consent items, including contracts and an ordinance amendment.
Y a mí, 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 and zoom toolbar. It looks like a globe. 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, would you please restate this in Spanish? Yes. Councilmember O'Krepki. Councilmember McDonald. Thank you very much. We'll move on to item three, our closed session items. So Janice is shaking her head. No. Dwayne, did you have a comment? Alright, Dwayne, you're up. Hello, my name is Dwayne DeWitt. I'm from Roseland. I wanted to thank the city manager for all the activity during the time she's been here. And I see that number 3.3 is talking about her uh temporary replacement as she goes elsewhere. So, with that in mind, I wanted to make sure that as you also look at the Cornerstone Communities Lawsuit, you folks do some hard headed fiscal oversight and don't spend any extra money if possible. As a matter of fact, that great deal that the city manager gave you on not raising her wages for the next year after this one, keep that in place, no matter who you're recruiting to come and be an interim. Also, on the conference with Cornerstone communities for perhaps arbitration and settlement early. Tom, look, you know, uh, we're not going to give you a lot of dough. Basically, this has to be the kind of thing that gets settled through the law system in a way that the counties, excuse me, the city's taxpayers are favored, if you will. Then back to the interim city manager situation. Don't go on a big hunt again and spend lots of money like you've done years before, a number of times, and then get people that don't stay for the long haul. Essentially, a lot of money spent, and we're still in the same boat we were a few years back, if you will. So, here's an idea. Do a reduction in force at the top, let some folks get golden parachutes, take off, get their retirement, do what they do, and hire from within with the younger workers, the ones that'll stay here for 10, 12, maybe even 15 years in that position. Mr. Blackman in the past was here for decades. So it can be done that way, and it helps the city to have stability. Please don't go back to any of the previous managers either, like we've done before. That didn't help us. It just cost extra money because they say, hey, we're worth more, we've been there. Let's stop doing that. Let's look at this like okay, we gotta save money because we're gonna have even more difficult financial times ahead of us. In order to save money, let's look within our own department. Keep the position filled as an interim. Don't promote up to the top, keep it as an interim position until the time period that Ms. Smith would have left with that wage freeze then ending. At that point, do your hire of somebody from within. You will have saved us hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of dollars. That might not be a lot to you folks, but that the taxpayers that really is a lot of money, and it does matter. So thank you for your time. I'll be back at public comments later today. Thanks, Duane. Janice, did you change your mind?