The Santa Rosa City Council held a regular meeting on June 16, 2026, beginning at 2:00 PM with a study session and reconvening at 4:00 PM for the regular session, adjourning at 9:02 PM. The meeting included a study session on the Downtown Economic Development Strategy, a proclamation for LGBTQ+ Pride Month, approval of a 21-item consent calendar, adoption of the FY 2026-27 budget and capital improvement program, and receipt of the Independent Police Auditor’s annual report. The council also approved revised fees for Sonoma County Animal Services and made appointments to the Library Commission and the RED Housing Fund Board.
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 globe. If you're on your cell phone or tablet, locate the three dots, top down 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 that you shut off the main audio so you only hear the Spanish interpretation. Thank you, Mayor. Councilmember Rogers. Councilmember Ben Wellows here. Councilmember Alvarez. Thank you from afar. Vice Mayor Krepke. Let the record show that all council members are here with the exception of Council Member Fleming. Excellent. I must confess, I was hoping for a bit more of a crowd. This item deserves to have a packed council chamber. So thank you. Thank you for being here today. And all of us have all of us on the day, so looking forward to the presentation. Ms. Scott. Thank you, Mayor, Vice Mayor, Council members. I'm Jill Scott. I'm the city's real estate manager, and I'm here today with the whole team. Gabe Osborne, our economic our planning and economic development director, Scott Wagner, our chief financial officer, and Scott Adair, who is our chief economic development officer. And we are very excited to be here today to talk to you about the downtown economic development strategy and how this strategy really supports Santa Rosa's long-term prosperity. So let's roadmap our conversation today because it's a bit of a long presentation. We have a lot of information to bring to council and to the community today. So we're going to start with Director Osborne, who's going to go over where we are today, our strategies that we have in place, our policies, and the progress that we've made towards those. Then he's going to turn it back over to me, and I'm going to talk about our challenges that we're facing in the city, our infrastructure, our deferred maintenance, and the costs that we have along with that. Then we're going to turn it over to our chief economic development officer, Scott Adair, to talk about the opportunity that we're going to talk about today, the exciting opportunity to bring housing, jobs, and revenue back into the city. And then we're going to come back to me. In fairness, we do have housing jobs and revenue in the city now. We do. We're going to just have more. More housing jobs and revenue. And then we're going to bring it back to me for the approach. How do we get there? What do we do? What's our approach? And then our chief financial officer is gonna talk to us about the financing of it, the fiscal uh, the fiscal impact of the whole program, and then back to council for feedback and some decisions. Um, so we're excited to get started. So we all know the five council goals that our city council has put into place to um bring Santa Rosa into prosperity, um, and for us to get better over time. Those are fiscal sustainability and budgeting, infrastructure investment, economic development, community health and safety, and housing and homelessness. Why we bring this up today is because there's a lot of us here in the audience and at this table that have been with Santa Rosa for a very long time. And it's not very often in our careers that we get the opportunity to bring one single strategy forward to council that meets or exceeds every single council goal for this community, and that's what this strategy is, and that's why, as staff we're very excited to bring it forward. So I'm gonna turn it over now to Director Osborne to talk about policies and the economics of downtowns. Thank you, Ms. Scott, and good afternoon, Mayor, Vice Mayor, members of the council. As Ms.