The Santa Rosa Public Safety Subcommittee met on April 21, 2026, from 9:01 a.m. to 9:58 a.m., with Chair Jeff Okrepkie and Mayor Mark Stapp present; Council Member Victoria Fleming absent. The meeting focused on an update on the city's illicit massage business enforcement, followed by reports from the Police and Fire Departments.
Chief John Cregan and Planning and Economic Development Director Gabe Osburn presented a joint update on implementation of the massage ordinance adopted in March 2025 and amended thereafter. Enforcement is led by the Police Department’s Domestic Violence/Sexual Assault (DVSA) team and Code Enforcement.
Chief Cregan provided a high-level overview of operations:
Chief Scott Westrope presented an update:
I'd like to ask the interpreter currently on the Spanish channel to continue 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 globe. Click done to activate and begin the interpretation. Mayor Stapp here. And Chair O'Krepki. Here. Let the record reflect that all council members are present with the exception of a council member Fleming. All right, thank you very much. We have no remote participation today. We have no staff announcements. We do have approval of the minutes to do from the February 3rd meeting. Any additions to that? Seeing none, we will adopt those as submitted and move on to public comment on non-agenda matters. This is your opportunity. You will have three minutes to talk about anything you want under the purview of the public safety subcommittee meeting or of subcommittee. So if you would that is not agendized, so if you would like to say anything, you can move towards one of the microphones. Nobody's moving, so we will go ahead and close public comment on non-agenda matters and move on to our new business item 6.1 illicit massage business update. And when you're ready. I'm John Kriegen, our chief of police, and I'm joined today by our director of planning and economic development, Gabe Osborne. And we're gonna go through this presentation together. It's been really been a joint collaboration between the Santa Rosa Police Department with our domestic violence sexual assault team and the code enforcement team addressing this uh vital community issue. Thank you, Chief, and good morning, Chair and members of the committee. Uh Gabe Bosburn, director of planning and economic development. Um, as we kick off today's presentation, we thought it made sense to first really just give an overview of where we are for on the enforcement of illicit massage. Um in March of 2025, the council adopted an ordinance that essentially created more regulations associated around the use of massage as a business type. Uh that regulation injected a certification process, um required inspections and quite a bit of regulation on the actual use of materials and behavior and certification inside of the business. Um, what we did more recently is the council adopted amendments to that ordinance to really tighten up how we handle the review process. Um what we actually saw as we started going through the review is that businesses that had somewhat of an evidence of illicit activity were actually going through the permitting process. So the more recent council action tightened that up and made it easier for us to deny permits. So really what we've seen, and these numbers are very fluid, uh, so they are different today than when we added the slide. Um so we've we've made a few changes on the number of denials that all verbalize. Uh so we've received 83 applications. Um, and if the committee recalls when we first went down this journey of understanding the total business use, uh, there were around 130 identified massage uses within Santa Rosa. Uh 80 feels like a norm more normal number um for the size of our city. Uh so that's really what we saw as we we had the cutoff. Uh, my guess would be was we see more of these trickle in as businesses change over, and as some of the legitimate massage uses start coming back into the picture. Out of that 83, we approved 40. So there's 40 businesses worth certifications. Uh what we've seen through that process is we wanted to put as many resources as possible to educating the legitimate business community on this. Uh really the balance with this ordinance is to ensure that we're not overly penalizing those that are attempting to operate as a small business in Santa Rosa. Uh so through that, we had six denials, which is actually nine now. So we had some changes there. Uh so really as we bolstered up that language, it made it easier for us to deny the applications. Uh, we have 37 that are pending review. Uh, what we've seen through this application process is we often identify flaws in the application, which are very similar to any plan review process. The applicant is given time to address those flaws and resubmit. Uh, that would be the 37. Uh, we typically put those businesses on a clock. Uh, they can't hold that in perpetuity.