The Public Safety Subcommittee of the Santa Rosa City Council met on October 28, 2025 at 9:00 AM. Chair O'Kropkey and Committee Member McDonald were present; Committee Member Fleming was absent by prior arrangement. The subcommittee received updates on Measure H implementation, wildland-urban interface (WUI) mapping, e‑bike safety concerns, and the police department's response to the independent auditor's recommendations, followed by department reports.
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 the zoom toolbar. It looks like a globe. If you're 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 can only hear the Spanish interpretation. Gracias. Back to you. All right. Good morning. We're going to call this meeting to order at 9 a.m. Madam Secretary, can you call the roll? Yes. Committee member McDonald here. Chair O'Kropkey? Here. And committee member Fleming is absent by prior arrangement. Thank you very much. We have no remote participation. Any announcements? Seeing none, we'll move on to approval of minutes. Do you have anything to say about the minutes? Alright, neither do I. We will adopt those minutes as submitted. We'll go to item five, public comment on non-agenda items. Is anybody's opportunity to talk about anything under the purview of the public safety subcommittee that is not agendized? Seeing nobody moving at all, we will close public comment on non-agenda items and we'll move on to new business. Item 6.1 measure H implementation plan. Chief Westrope, take it away. Thank you. Good morning, Chair OK and Councilmember McDonald. Scott Westrope Fire Chief of the City of Santa Rosa. Today just have a brief update on where we're at with implementation of Measure H. Am I presenting. Thank you. So we've I've shown you this slide before and we've been through it. There's just some background on what measure H is and how it was passed. What I will brief you on that's new information is that to date with the three tax rolls we've received, the City of Santa Rosa's received 6.642 million dollars in sales tax revenue directly to the fire department through Measure H. So we're seeing what we predicted to be for a total of the sales tax measure to be around 60 million dollars countywide. Um, and then our 14.4% um roll of that, we're seeing that right on target. So things are moving on exactly as we had predicted. Um this slide, I've shown you this before. This was the leader's intent for the team to put together the Measure H implementation plan, working with finance and working with the city manager's office. Uh they did a fantastic job of putting together a plan that essentially what I would label it as it's aggressive to get resources on the street, but it's also um cautious and insulated to make sure that it's financially stable and that measure H remains financially insulated from any other of the of the other um funding streams that we have. So the really good news is that um we're moving along very well. We've actually, um, with the two fire inspectors, we've moved two of our limited-term fire inspectors that were um grant-funded positions. We moved them to FTEs under measure H. So we've retained those employees, and then Fire Marshal Loenthal's team has gone through and done interviews for uh backfilling the limited term positions that are grant funded that are um will be funded for the next couple years. So we have some good candidates for that, and we're moving forward on backfilling those positions. So we've increased our capacity in the fire prevention bureau by about 25 percent.