I'd like to ask the host or the interpreter currently on the Spanish channel to commence interpretation of the meeting.

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Claudia, will you please restate this in Spanish?

Thank you very much.

Back to you.

Welcome everyone.

The time is 2 30, and we can call this meeting to order.

Madam City Clerk, would you please call the roll?

Thank you, Mayor.

Councilmember Rogers.

Present.

Councilmember MacDonald.

Here.

Councilmember Fleming.

Councilmember Van Wells.

Here.

Councilmember Alvarez.

President.

Vice Mayor Krepki.

Here.

Mayor Step.

Here.

Let the record show that all council members are present with the exception of Councilmember Fleming.

Thank you.

We'll move on to item 3.1 regarding our conference with legal counsel over anticipated litigation.

We can uh open this up to public comment.

Are there any members of the public wish to speak?

Mr.

DeWitt.

Hello, my name is Dwayne D.W.

I'm from Roseland.

I wanted to thank you for having these types of items on the agenda.

But I do believe, especially for something where there might be a potential case, that here on this little device you have for the public to get information about your items.

If you were to look at a different item, it would actually have a report.

It's been about twelve, thirteen years ago.

A lot of money was spent to make sure we were going to open up our governmental processes so that the members of the public, the taxpayers, would be able to be better informed.

We're not saying that you should break the confidentiality of this legal type of discussion, but you should at least put that subdivision up there and let people see what you're talking about in that format.

And then when you go to the next session, study session, your revenue enhancement, you will see that they put extra stuff up there on that device where a member of the public could actually hit something and get information.

So it's just actually following up on your previous approaches to open government and making it all better.

Thank you.

I'll be here for further adventures.

Thank you, Duane.

Uh seeing no other members of the public in person.

Let's go to our Zoom host, Madam City Clerk.

Any online public comment?

Lauren, take it away.

We're now pay taking public comment via Zoom for item 3.1.

If you'd like to make a public comment, please raise your hand.

If you dialed in by telephone, dial star nine to raise your hand, and star six to unmute.

Once I enable your permissions, you will have two minutes for your comment and a countdown timer alert at the conclusion of that period.

I'm seeing no hands in Zoom.

Thank you.

We will reconcile we will recess in the closed session then we're going to be a good idea.

The time is three o'clock, and we'll reconvene in open session.

Madam City Clerk, would you please call the roll?

Thank you, Mayor.

Councilmember Rogers.

Councilmember McDonald.

Here.

Councilmember Fleming.

Councilmember Ben Wellows?

Here.

Councilmember Alvarez.

Present.

Vice Mayor O'Krepke.

Here.

Mayor Stepp.

Here.

Let the record show that all council members are present.

Thank you very much.

All right.

We'll go on to item four point one, our study session on revenue enhancement.

And we have our CFO, Scott Wagner, and Misty Woods here to present.

Thank you both.

Thank you, Mayor Stepp and members of the council.

I'm Scott Wagner, the chief city's chief financial officer.

Bear with me for a moment.

With me here today is Misty Wood, the city's uh communications and intergovernment intergovernmental relations officer, and we're very pleased to present this item regarding revenue enhancement as a study session item to the city council today.

In today's presentation, we'll be covering really the last history of the city of the last three or four years.

On where this presentation has come from and why we are here today.

This is not the first step of this process here today.

It is not the last, but it certainly is a critical moment for us as a city in determining what is the next step of this significant financial structure deficit that we've been in.

We're going to talk about the city's existing revenue and some of the challenges around that and some of the long-term structural changes we've seen within the city's revenue.

Misty is going to provide a presentation on some community feedback and community engagement that the city's been actively doing over the past few months to receive information from the community on the services that it prioritizes most.

We're gonna talk about some successes that we've had.

This has not been a period where the city has not had many things to talk about as far as the positives that are happening within the city.

There's been many positives around restructuring, about getting efficiencies, and certainly a lot of good news around economic development, whether that's infrastructure development within the city, et cetera.

But finally, we're gonna land on where we are proposing that the city city council take a look at a very hard uh information on bringing forward revenue enhancement options for the city and really drill down on that term and what that means and what we're looking to do next as part of this process.

Uh lastly, I want to note that we'll be asking both Chief Kriegan from our police department and Chief Westrope from our fire department to come on down to give some better information and further information around impacts in our year two discussion uh around impacts to our public safety going forward.

So the big picture is that despite the many difficult decisions and a lot of work that's gone into fixing our financial situation over the past three years, we remain in a structural deficit.

Our structural deficit lies within the city's general fund.

The city has many funds, 128 actually is the total number of funds at the city that are each are dedicated for different reasons.

But the one really big one is the general fund.

And that houses many of the core functions that the community relies on, such as our police department, fire department, public works, planning and economic development, city manager's office, city attorney's office, finance department, parks, recreation, and human resources.

The general fund does a lot here at the city and a lot of our core functions.

The general fund at its core is the most flexible use of our city funds, and that we can the city council can direct how those funds are used.

At the end of the day, what we've accomplished here at the city, though, is really drilling down and making the cuts that are necessary to really build us to our core point of services at the city within the general fund.

Currently, what we will should be looking at with our projections is that we still, despite these many corrective actions, remain on a path that is unsustainable for our reserves.

We are spending the city's savings at a rate that cannot be sustained at our current service delivery model.

We are a full-service city.

Um really one that that I always mention punches way above our our weight class as a boxing term.

We provide many services within the city.

We operate a sub-regional wastewater treatment plant.

We have a transit division, we have a housing agency.

We have many specialized functions and services at the city.

Those though fall into governmental accounting structures that are restrictive.

And so if I think about the major funds of the city, I put them in really three different buckets.

There's enterprise funds that would that would count for transit or our city bus program.

There's our water programs there, whether that's water or wastewater, along with our parking division.

Those are separate funding sources from the general fund.

So oftentimes when we are uh helping the helping the public understand these complex financial issues around our government our city's finances, it's important to understand that we can't use water funds to short up our general fund.

We can't use water ratepayer money to fund police or fire.

Those are restricted not just from our own restrictions, but by state statutes that don't allow us to do it, and we don't.

Furthermore, there's CIP funds, and I think of those as special revenue funds.

One I would bring up right off the bat is gas tax.

When you when you buy gas at the gas station, a little bit of that money goes towards roads.

That needs to be spent in very specific ways, whether that's road maintenance or the enhancement of biking infrastructure or pedestrian infrastructure.

They are dedicated sources that needed to be used in a certain way.

So often what this is, those are all good things, and those are all things that we need to spend our money on, but it gives us less flexibility towards shifting those monies towards different needs.

We can't pull from a road project that was funded by gas tax and fund a fire station, et cetera.

We are restricted that way.

So I'm going to very briefly cover what we all know in here is three years of very, very long meetings and a lot of information.

And I'm going to try to sum that up very briefly.

But the big picture is that we have been involved in a historic fiscal crisis at the city.

This is absolutely akin to the Great Recession, which was the greatest cut at the cities in its history.

We are right on that same level.

Now, what's interesting though is there is not some major macroeconomic crisis to point to, like in the Great Recession, which was a housing bubble collapsing, which has landed us here.

But we're gonna talk about why the city has ended up in the position it is versus long-term trends.

And really, those long-term trends are in two areas, and that's expenses and revenue.

The city's done a lot with its expenses.

As I mentioned on this slide, we have cut 82 full-time equivalent employees in the general fund.

We've shored up our reserves by taking 10.2 million dollars worth of discretionary funds and put it into the city's savings.

We have gone out to the voters to ask for revenue enhancement through a TOT increase, which are transit occupancy taxes, which is hotel taxes, and asked them to increase it, and they did.

Those two measures brought in roughly $4 million, which was very much needed and critical for the city at that point.

But facing where we started this conversation from a close to a 40 million dollar deficit, that $4 million alone was not enough to solve our problem.

We've increased cost recoveries here at the city.

We've come back to council with increases within our recreation programs to charge more fees to better recover against these popular programs.

I'm happy to say that that has not affected our demand against these programs very much at all.

Um, furthermore, we've we've gone back and we've looked at permit costs, we've raised those.

We have really, I think that one of the themes of today's conversation is all of the knobs that have been available to us to turn.

We have turned up until this point.

Another turn that we need to make is really not for us to decide, though, it is for the voters, and that's what we'll be suggesting here later in the presentation.

We've not only been tackling this problem through cuts, we've been trying to set up the city in a better way and really address some of the larger financial issues that the city head on.

One of which that I would bring up is a restructuring of 482 million dollars worth of pension liability that this council successfully achieved.

Um, that successful pension program that that again we're very enthused about is gonna save us 28 million dollars over the next five years.

It's also going to pay off our debt quicker.

It's not just a matter of kicking the can, we're actually making this problem go away faster and in a smarter, more efficient way that we can all be proud of.

We've gained efficient efficiencies through cutting departments.

We have lost entire departments through this process.

We no longer have a wreck and parks department, we no longer have a CERO department.

We have consolidated.

We have gained efficiencies through taking these functions and shooting them off into different areas of the city to create efficiencies through uh different departments.

The finance department is very proud of our transparency, accuracy, and the soundness of our financial projections over the past three years.

Um, we have done everything possible to facilitate clear communication and transparent communication, not only with council stakeholders, whether that's our labor groups in the community.

And some things I'd like to highlight as part of that process is that we went did a line-by-line review of city budgets with our long-term financial planning and audit subcommittee.

I I do not believe that has ever happened at the city to give that level of review to our to elected officials.

We were happy to do so.

Um, we've also engaged with independent review, not just our own review here as a city, but to bring folks in from the outside that have different perspectives or different knowledge bases to look at what we've been doing.

Some things I would highlight there is um our financial forecast was deemed as industry best.

Um our projections have been sound.

We've done an independent review of department functions through an additional contract throughout the city to gain efficiencies and to look at the different services we provide to try to attain better efficiencies.

We have created a city manager budget working group of different community members that have come in from all different perspectives to take a look at the city's finances.

We've been meeting with this group monthly to talk about the city's um situation, and frankly, we're looking forward to maybe to that group coming back to council and having an opportunity to share some of the things that they've been learning through the process.

That's been valuable from both sides.

We've been able to get great feedback on areas that the city should be looking at, which has helped inform some of the actions that we've taken over the past years, and they've certainly appreciated the information coming back to them.

We'll note that we have not had any audit findings as part of our annual comprehensive financial report.

The old auditor or the old accountant in me still gets very excited about that one.

I will also note that during this period, the government finance officers association has awarded the city a certificate achievement for excellence and financial reporting, along with a distinguished budget presentation award.

Budget difficulties and crises are very difficult for a finance department.

And I will say, as the head of this department, that I could not be prouder of my colleagues that I work with on a daily basis and how they have navigated this moment here at the city with integrity, accuracy, and transparency.

I will not shy away from saying how proud I am of that, and we should be.

So we've made a significant impact on the deficit.

Unfortunately, we are just still at a level that is unsustainable.

One note that I'll add is coming in, what you'll see is in fiscal year 3031, it takes a pretty big jump from 14 and a half to 23.3 million.

And that really represents the current sales tax measure Q, which helped funds the general fund at a half cent, falling off only at about a quarter.

We only lose about a quarter's worth of revenue.

So about three months worth of revenue for measure Q at the end at the end of that fiscal year.

That deficit, um, what I would I would like to note is where we really again coming back to history as being so important.

COVID was a very odd time in government finance, really across the state and for us too.

And that we had really, really large vacancies at the city.

We had such a hard time filling positions that that created what we call turn back and it's extra money at the end of the year.

We also had sales tax go up a little bit during that period when we thought a global recession would cause spending to go down.

And it was the opposite.

Again, we we were not uh prescient enough to know these types of things here at the city, and I don't blame ourselves for that.

So we had these periods during COVID where we we had a projected deficit, but then the end of the year came around and we were we were positive.

That has not been the case over the past three years.

As we've you know entered a more normal economic cycle without a global pandemic, we're seeing these deficits come to reality.

These are not just on paper deficits, is a way to put it.

We're seeing them actually reflect in our reserve balances.

Reserves are really just a uh fancy way of saving saying savings account.

Um, and we have a really important need and duty to the community for the city to maintain a savings account for two main reasons, and that's disasters, either economic or environmental.

We know that it's critical for the critical for the city to maintain a 15 to 17% reserves to be able to with sustain operations during something like the 2017 Tubbs fire, or like another great recession type uh event within our economy.

Again, as I mentioned, this is a unique, I think, moment economically in that it is a in many areas of the economy we're seeing very positive growth.

Uh, but specifically for us in government, this is very much like the Great Recession in our struggles with revenue.

And we do not have a true recession built into any number at the city.

So if there was some form of true economic crisis akin to the Great Recession or the dot com bubble or anything along these lines, the projections here would get much worse.

And what this chart really shows is I'll mention one thing I mention every single time is that due to governmental accounting standards, the years do not perfectly match up.

We live one year in the future.

Uh thank thank you to the governmental accounting standards board.

Um but what it shows here is that we spend down our reserves.

And what we know we need in our reserve account is around 45 million dollars, we'll call it.

And what the actions that council has taken is basically to look at that that spend down of the reserves and maintaining it not just for one year, but a two-year runway towards we know we're going to be able to sustain our reserves on a two-year basis.

That's where we fall within that box to the right hand side of that chart.

So what you'll note is that we are down to 49 million dollars by the fiscal year 2028, which is the year we're talking about today.

And then we start falling off much quicker.

And this the concerning number is that by the year fiscal year 2030, we would be down to 11.5 million.

That is not enough to sustain the city should a disaster occur, should an economic crisis uh to happen.

Frankly, this rundown of our chart is still unsustainable for us as the stewards of the city.

I'd like to drill down on the last year's proposed budget that was just adopted at the end of June.

Um, in that we brought forward what we called a two-year proposed budget strategy.

It was a one-year adoption of what was over $9 million of deficit reduction strat uh solutions for the city.

We started out the proposed budget with a 17.5 million dollar deficit that we were able to successfully bring down to 7.8, a very significant reduction of what that deficit was.

But as part of that discussion, there was a year two part of the component of the adoption where we were transparent and explicit around what types of decisions the city would need to be making in year two.

We are going to again touch on the areas of public safety that are going to be impacted as part of this year two potential reductions.

But again, coming back to the big picture of the historical context of this moment.

During the Great Recession, the lights were out in the city of Santa Rosa, our streetlights were out.

We were browning out fire stations.

Our parks were going brown.

The community was seeing the impacts of our financial difficulties as a city in their day-to-day lives and within the really the quality of life standards that we have at the city and importantly the public safety.

We've been successful throughout this three-year process now of mitigating those visible impacts the best that we could.

That has come from very difficult decisions from council and very strategic and innovative approaches from staff.

That well is dry now.

I can't think of as CFO any we've already done the pension thing.

We've already cut our staff to the point of being at a critical level.

There's just a not enough tools in our toolbox anymore without having a harder conversation around revenue and having a more transparent conversation directly with our community.

What's important always to bring up is that our general fund is 77% salaries and benefits, and the majority of it is made up by police and fire.

We are a public service agency.

The majority of our allocation of funding goes there.

By any historic measure, we are funding the police and fire department at a higher level, whether that's dollars or percentage allocation of our general fund than has ever been done at the city before.

That has been a very conscious effort and conscious decision made by council and staff proposals to ensure that we maintain public safety.

Going forward, we are going to have much harder conversations around those public safety impacts.

But when we look at the overall, what would we need to balance our budget?

We're talking about another 42 employees that would need to be eliminated from our budget in fiscal year 27-28.

Most of our administrative budgets have already administrative departments have already taken either 25% or 33% cuts to their staff already.

There is just nothing else there to cut.

My own department, again, I do not have the positions at this point to cut from finance.

My own department, again, I do not have the positions at this point to cut from finance, a department that's been already cut by 25%.

I need to be able to maintain the city's ability to issue payroll.

I need to be maintaining the city's ability to issue checks.

We are doing the basics from an administrative department perspective.

And again, I'm very proud of our staff from doing so.

We will continue to do so.

But we need to have some realistic conversations about we have an operating issue at the city, not an administrative issue, not a bureaucracy issue.

By any measure, those functions of the city are at the lowest points, either through staffing or funding allocations that they have ever been.

And that really is best illustrated in this chart.

And this chart shows the historical staffing levels of the general fund.

And what you'll see is that very first number of the 885 employees was pre-Great Recession.

So 2007, 2008.

And what you'll see is a dramatic cut down to 705 employees by 2010, 2011.

You'll see we gained back over the next seven, eight years through 2018-19, and now we we've had this little blip, and now we're right back down to 707.

That's a lot of numbers.

But the important thing in the numbers is that the community is different in many ways from what it was in 2007-2008.

We have a higher population.

We have annexed Roseland.

We have, frankly, uh, the community has more needs than it did back then.

Our volume of calls, whether that's police or fire, has gone up during that period, even higher at the rate of growth than uh our population growth.

Uh these are realities that we need to approach when understanding that we've made a 20% reduction in our employees, have had a 12% increase in population, and the demands on the city are higher.

And with that, I'd ask Chief Cregan to come on down and we're gonna talk about uh specific impacts to the police department if we need to make up these cuts purely from a focusing on expenditure reductions within the police department.

Thank you.

Mayor Stepp, I'm John Krieg and our chief of police here in Santa Rosa.

And I wanted to first set the stage for where we've been over the last few years.

Last year, obviously, there were devastating uh budget reductions across the city to be able to balance our budget and be able to survive and move forward.

The police department and last fiscal year, we eliminated 15 positions from the police department, nine sworn police officers, an equally important six civilian members.

Uh it was a total of 3.2 million dollars in staffing costs with an additional 400,000 of overtime uh loss.

Those have had their impacts, but but having a lot of community discussions on this topic over the last few months and really looking into historical staffing at the police department, it helps us put it in perspective about the what the impacts of future cuts would be.

And we had 91 civilian team members that are working, and that's our dispatchers, our evidence technicians, and so many other uh qualified staff that help with our operations.

Today we have 175 officers, that's 15 less police officers, but we have 74 civilians, uh so 17 less civilians.

So that's 32 less employees, fewer employees that we have at the Santa Rosa Police Department than we did in 2006.

But when we look at our historical sworn staffing, we look at our 175 that we have now, and how does that compare?

In 1999, that was the year 27 years ago that I started as a police officer, we had 183 sworn police officers.

So we look at in 27 years, we actually have eight police officers less than we did in 1999.

Since then, the population of Santa Rosa has grown by roughly 39,000 community members in our city.

So the job has gotten much more complex for our public safety uh staff members, but the staffing, and I and I use that just to put the historical staffing and look at what these impacts would be.

After the cuts last year, we really dissected it with my command staff team.

We worked with our labor groups and thought where can we most strategically make these cuts where they're gonna have we knew the cuts would be painful, but where would they have the least operational impacts?

And that's what we're really work to do.

We worked with our specialty teams, we eliminated uh portion of our traffic team, our canines, uh our uh many other positions across the department.

Now, when I look, if we have to make future reductions, and we look at the without any type of revenue generating measures, cuts are looming for the police department, and I'm already working on where would those cuts from.

And we're looking at for next year's budget up to another three points.

So basically mirroring what we did last year, the 3.1 million with 11 sworn positions eliminated from the police department.

So that would put us below where we were in 1996.

So we're taking another step back.

Then if we continue to look at it, well, like what it looks like in 2030 as the structural deficit continues to stack up and stack up.

We're looking up to 24 sworn police officers.

So now we're going down to critical positions of the in the 1980 staffing for the Santa Rosa police department.

And I just really want to stress that this isn't just as a leader, I'm looking forward, what can I do to be a city partner, but really just want to educate our community and our city leaders on what there's gonna be grave impacts to see the police department having the same staffing levels than we did in the early 90s and the late 1980s.

What I'm gonna have to do is continue to look at it strategically, but we're not gonna be able to take any more from patrol.

We have to have, when you call 911, there needs to be a police officer who's able to respond to that.

So what we're gonna have to look is our specialty teams, and we have a host of specialty teams, and we have some mentioned here on the gang teams, the narcotics team, the traffic team, our special enforcement team.

And when you look at it at first blush, you can say, well, it won't be that impactful to take these specialty teams, they're specialty teams.

What I really want to highlight is the impact, though, that removing these specialty teams has on measurable crime impacts across the city of Santa Rosa.

But now it's not allowing patrol officers to be able to focus on their job, which is the rapid response to 911 priority one calls.

It's not allowing them to do that because they're now absorbing all of the work of these specialty teams.

And that's where we really start looking at that.

We've been trying to get our priority one response time under six minutes.

That's been a struggle with our staffing, but we're making actual progress in this area.

If we see this level of cuts, we're gonna see our priority one response time to violent crimes to all crimes across the city rise dramatically, and that really has a safety impact when you're the one on the other end.

We've seen even struggles lately when officers asking for priority response time of calling for emergency assistance when they're on the scene, and we've seen delays in that with our current staffing levels.

This will get to an emergency level if we were to see this level of cuts with 11 sworn or 24 sworn in the future.

What I'm really been working to is our city.

We have four operational objectives at the police department, and those are our core focuses that we have as a police department, and I set those our leaders' intent, and those are violence reduction, traffic safety and enforcement, the quality of life and property crime.

So working with lower property crimes cases and mental health assistance in our city.

And the fourth one is community engagement.

It's so important for me of being out in our community, engaging, building trust with the community.

When I look at those, each one of those core operational objectives are gonna be impacted by this.

You're gonna see violent crime impacts across the city by not having the staffing, by not having the resources to be able to uh focus on that.

We've had in the last four years 37 homicides in the city of Santa Rosa.

Our incredible detective team and working with our resources have made arrests in 36 of those 37 homicides.

That doesn't happen across the nation.

That's because we put the proper resources, we have the great staff to be able to do that.

You're not gonna see some of these arrests made in these cases, and what happens is then that offender continues to repeat some of those offenses, and you see more violence across our community.

Same thing with traffic safety.

Last year we had eight fatal collisions in the city of Santa Rosa, 683 injury collisions in the city of Santa Rosa.

You're gonna see impacts of that with the traffic safety with injury collisions, with fatal collisions, the same thing with property crime.

You see an impact with that, and that really affects someone when a community member comes out and their Cadillac converter is cut off the bottom of their car, their rims are taking off their car, their cars broken into our more complex cases with financial elder abuse, those take resources to be able to solve those cases.

And at the end of the last one is community engagement.

We're not gonna have officers out at tacos with a cop, our national night out when we don't have enough officers to respond to 911 calls.

So you start being able, all those things start going away.

And those are the things that I really want to be able to stress to our community as a leader, there's gonna be significant measurable impacts on our city, and it's gonna start with some of those all four of those operational objectives, but we're also gonna see just the impacts of what the level of service we're able to provide for our community.

And those things have a also a ripple effect on our staff.

This is a complex job for both our police and our firefighters for what they're doing.

And when officers, firefighters don't have those resources, it starts being harder to retain them to work for our organization, and they're gonna go to places where they feel that they do have that support and they have the staffing to be able to safely do this job.

And they're gonna go to places where they feel like they do have that support and they have the staffing to be able to safely do this job.

So that's something for me that's such a always such a difficult job at the police department in the recruitment and the retention.

And I wanna be able to show them that we're building a police department, our public safety departments where they have that support, where we people who want to come here to work for the city of Santa Rosa, they want to stay here for the city of Santa Rosa.

Because I know as chief, when you have the skill set, when you have that experience, they provide a better level of service to our community.

And that's what I'm really proud that we're able to do right now.

And I'm worried about what this future impacts may have on the police department to our staff, and most importantly, to the end of the day to our community and our ability to be able to respond to those calls in a timely and an efficient manner.

Good afternoon, Mayor Staff, members of council, Scott Westrope, Fire Chief City of Santa Rosa.

Um very similar to the police department on the work that we've done over the last few years to um not to overuse the term, but um cut any fat that we had on the bone, and and we're down to cutting bone off bone at this point.

So what I want to start with is is sort of like Chief Krieg is talk about our core services.

For us, our core services, um, and I'll come back to this at the end, are the 10 fire engines we have on the street, our two ladder trucks, and our one battalion chief.

At the core, that's what we have, and we have had for the last several years since about 2007.

We've been very fortunate recently to be able to enhance our services through Measure H outside of the general fund and outside of PSAP to add a heavy rescue, an ALS squad, and an additional battalion chief.

But for context, what's that what that's done for us is it's put us in a place where we are meeting the goals that were established in our 2016 strategic plan and standards of coverage.

We're just now catching that up a decade later.

So you can imagine, and you and you all know how much the world and how much our community has changed in the last 11 years or so.

Um so we need to grow and we need to expand to meet the needs of the community.

Um, what we've seen in prior budget years in uh 2024, 2025 fiscal year, um, the fire department reduced out of the general fund 2.125 million dollars.

Um, on top of a lot of other things that most importantly eliminated six firefighter positions, a deputy chief, a deputy emergency manager, and an admin secretary.

Um in 25-26 fiscal year, we reduced uh we had a net reduction out of the general fund of 2.1 million dollars.

Um that eliminated 19 uh grant funded positions that were no longer funded, uh, 12 in the safer program, and seven on in response.

It eliminated a full-time equivalent uh community outreach specialist, and then working with the city manager's office and finance, changing our uh capital fleet purchasing program from from purchase to leasing saved about a million dollars as well.

So the story is that we have done everything we can as an organization to make major cuts all the way down to minor cuts.

Um we've cut personnel all the way down to linen services, the shop towels and things we get, we're no longer we no longer have those services.

So we've really crossed the spectrum there.

Um we've done everything we can to just like the police department make these reductions without a major impact of service throughout the community.

But with the proposed changes or the proposed cuts without additional revenue, um, we're gonna be looking at falling below our minimum service levels that we have today.

So jumping into uh the slide you see in front of you with the projected budget cuts, um, one of the things that we have to look very closely at is a fire station closure.

One of the reasons that we're already to this point is that we are 78% salaries and benefits.

So everything that we've trimmed we can trim, and now it's going to come down to service delivery.

Um, with the closure of a fire station, and we have 10 fire stations strategically located throughout the community.

Um, there will be an impact to call response times.

Um, this will particularly impact EMS calls or emergency medical calls for service because that's what we do about 75 70% of the time, it'll impact our core service uh core fire suppression readiness.

For the fire department, um city council has a goal for us of meeting our response times within five minutes, 90% of the time.

Um, we saw that drop coming out of COVID to around 59%, and with the enhanced resources we had in SAFER, we saw that creep its way up to around 65%.

So we were making very good progress.

The point is, even with the resources we have on the street today, we're not meeting our response times goal.

So if we reduce an engine company, which is 9% of our fleet, it's gonna go up significantly.

We'll have a reduction of our wildfire prevention and wildfire response capabilities.

Focusing on the response capabilities, this will lower our daily availability to cross staff our wildland apparatus.

As you all saw yesterday, we were impacted by a 16.5 acre fire just outside the city limits, but we had a lot of resources there.

Um there's a potential that one of those stations could be closed, and we're not providing that service, um, even though it's outside the city limits.

We'll reduce the ability to call people back.

Um when we have a large scale incident, we have to call our personnel back.

Um so with less personnel, we're gonna have the uh less of an ability to upstaff additional resources when we have a major event.

And one of the things we talked about last time is there's going to be a point where we're gonna have to make a decision to say no, um, particularly in a mutual aid events.

So we've been very, very aggressive in providing help to other communities like they helped us in 2020 2020 and 2017 and all the years in between.

Um we've been very aggressive in that, but we're gonna going to have to reach a point where we say we can't do that anymore because we have to protect home base.

So we're not gonna be able to provide that mutual aid support on the wildland basis.

Um we could see a reduction in special operations capability.

Um, and we're talking about technical rescues, water rescues, et cetera.

These are really core truck competencies.

So the closure of a truck company would um have a major impact on our special operations capability.

And one of the things we highlighted last time is that we have the only staffed ladder trucks between San Francisco and the state line.

So we don't only provide mutual aid for wildfire events, but we've been other areas to use our aerial apparatus with our trained and staff personnel are specially trained and staff that equipment full time.

We're we're facing the potential of our resources dipping below where they were when Measure O or PSAP was implemented in 2007, in which time we've seen an increase in call volume of 66%.

We were running about 17,000 calls a year for service at the time, and this year we ran or last year we ran over 30,000 calls a year for service.

Just like Chief Cregan, um, we see a major impact on our recruitment and retention efforts.

Um, one of the things we highlighted was that there's two main reasons we see that people come to Santa Rosa.

It's the opportunities that we have here, and it's the team that we have here.

Um, and without that, they're gonna seek other options just like they would in the law enforcement world.

So with opportunities, we have everything anybody could want to do.

You can pick your specialty or in your niche and really follow that.

Um, but we may not have those special operations teams anymore.

And the team is really what they saw.

We were seeing a lot of um an effect of the tubs fire where other um they came from other communities, saw what we had as a team and as a city and as a community, and they want to be part of that.

So we could be losing a lot of really, really good candidates in Santa Rosa is a destination fire department, but we could see that with our with a lack of stability.

So one of the things I want to highlight for council is that we will do everything we can and explore every option to reduce the service impact delivery.

We will focus on the community and our workforce first and foremost.

But at the end of the day, with any reduction of this magnitude, there will be service reduction impacts.

What finance has laid out and what we've talked about as a team is that as of July 1st of 27, the proposed eight FTE reductions or the equivalent of 2.5 million dollars.

That is the elimination or closure of a fire engine company.

So that's nine people, they equate to $3.2 million or total operating cost for an engine company.

We'll be losing one of our engine companies, which is a 9% reduction in our in our engine fleet.

As of July 1st, 2030, the 18 FTE uh proposed reduction and 5.8 million dollars on top of what the engine that's already closed, it would be the closure of a truck company.

A truck company is 12 FT at 4.9 million dollars, and to make up the difference, we would have to close an engine company for another six months.

So as of July 1st, 2030, without additional revenue, we could have two engines closed and a truck closed.

So all that being said, that's the that's the doom and gloom.

But one of the things I really want to emphasize is as of July 1st of this year, as of this new fiscal year, our personnel count in the general fund is the same that it was in 2007.

This fire department needs to grow.

Um, it has not grown commensurate with the growth of the community, population density, or the evolving risk risk matrix that we live in.

So without those increased revenues or finding a new way to uh generate revenue, we're at the threat of falling below pre-recession levels, meaning we will have to eliminate core services and that core impact that I talked talked about at the beginning, and we we we will not be able to maintain our current staffing levels or our current response times to the to the community that they really deserve and need to thank you, Chief Westrup and Chief Cregan.

Uh for the next few slides, I'm gonna give a brief discussion on the why this is really happened and why we found ourselves in this issue.

And the primary revenue of the city's general fund is sales tax.

And this city is more reliant on sales tax than other agencies our size or our complexity.

I'm gonna talk about why.

But from a big picture perspective, our sales tax collection by the end of fiscal year 2025, which is our last audited completed fiscal year, was 2.1 million dollars less than it was three years earlier.

And the city operates just like any other organization.

If you look at your primary revenue source, and you look at a three-year period, and over that period it went down, especially over this period where we're all experiencing increased costs within our personal budget.

The city faces those same strains on growing expenses within its budget.

There is just a something that is completely out of line.

The thing that's troubling is that we see that misalignment not as a blip on the radar, but as a feature of a sales tax mix going forward statewide.

Sales tax is challenged right now due to online sales.

The city does not retain the same amount of sales tax from a purchase on an online seller like Amazon or Walmart or any other vendor that sells something online that it would from a brick and mortar location.

More and more of those sales are happening, and the sales tax is going to where the original origination point or the fulfillment point of that sales tax transaction, i.e.

American Canyon, where there may be a uh Amazon center or any other agency that does have one.

We've seen also a change in consumer behavior that's been lasting for a long time now, where non-traxable transactions are eating up a larger percent of folks' budgets.

This next these next couple of pictures really show a concept that I describe as you know, many times when we talk to the community, what they expect from services provided by the government, ours are typically the first that they mention, but we are last when it comes to receiving those revenues to help support us.

We receive 11.7% of every dollars that goes into property taxes within our city.

Um that is very, very low.

We would expect an organization of our complexity to be much closer to 16 to 18 percent.

There are agencies within Sonoma County within our own county that uh that retain 20% of their property tax.

The reason for this is very simple.

It is Prop 13, and is that we were locked into an allocation percentage of property taxes that was very low.

Santa Rosa had low property taxes back when Prop 13 passed.

We are stuck with that now, kind of going forever.

Additionally, for sales taxes, our sales tax rate currently in Santa Rosa is 10%.

For every 10%, every 10 cents, we receive 1.75 cents.

With Sonoma County receiving two and a quarter and the state of California receiving six cents.

We are last when it comes to receiving our sales tax personal percentage as a city.

When we look at our neighboring jurisdictions, this is how Santa Rosa stacks up against our neighbors.

I will add that um I you frequently have heard me say, I'm I'm not always very keen to compare us to other agencies, because the reality is we are a full service city.

We provide a range of services that is frankly greater than most agencies our size and smaller.

We have our own police department, we have our own fire department, we have a dynamic service delivery model within our general fund.

But when we look at our neighbors, we are currently at 10%.

While cities like Sebastopol, Sonoma, uh Katati, Petaluma are all above Santa Rosa, ranging from 10 and a quarter to 10 and a half percent.

When we talk about sales tax in California, when we look at it nationally, California does have a high sales tax rate.

But we are it's important for us to note that while the rate is high, there is a compressed level of activity that is taxable.

So you will find in other states that um groceries or certain areas of health care or education are taxable or services, whether that's general contracting services, et cetera.

In California, we have a smaller base of taxable sales, but a higher percentage.

California actually does not rank, although our percentages are high from a total adjusted rate.

We do not have the highest sales tax rate in the country.

With that, I'll pass it over to Misty.

Thank you.

As we shift this conversation towards the community outreach efforts that have happened around budgeting, I wanted to start at the beginning.

As this council knows, in February of 2025, you adopted strategic priorities, and that first priority was achieve and maintain fiscal sustainability and budgeting excellence.

That includes not only addressing our budget challenges, but improving our financial transparency and public engagement.

And that is exactly what we've done over the past several months.

Next slide.

Thanks.

CFO Wagner covered all of our corrective actions really well, and our proactive economic development efforts are an important part of the conversation too.

Because as we've been out in the community and having these conversations, one of the first questions we get is what is the city doing to support businesses and support our local economy?

The short answer is a lot.

The city has invested significant effort into attracting, supporting, and retaining businesses.

Some of our recent efforts include a variety of studies to better guide our business recruitment efforts, engaging with over 50 national companies and commercial real estate agents as part of our recruitment efforts, launching the business concierge program to support businesses and entrepreneurs, and expanding technical assistance, training, and resources for our business community.

Next slide.

So let's get into the community engagement process and feedback.

This started in August of 2025, as CFO Wagner mentioned with the city managers budget working group.

We did a survey in January of 2026 to initially identify resident priorities.

In March of this year, we launched the Let's Talk Santa Rosa, which was a bilingual community engagement initiative to broaden feedback and education and expand our reach.

Through that effort, we received over 2400 survey responses and have conducted 14 meetings and presentations with more scheduled on the calendar as well.

And finally, we conducted a follow-up survey in June of 2026 to determine whether community perceptions have changed at all as the public has learned more about the city's financial situation.

Next slide.

In short, the top priorities were maintaining emergency medical and fire response services, including prevention and preparedness programs, maintaining police response, particularly for violent crimes, and maintaining streets in public spaces.

You can see that while fire and emergency services rank number one, there's not a large variation between all of the five priorities that are there.

One of the most important takeaways from this survey is that community members don't view these priorities as competing with one another.

We often heard that all of these services are important and that community members had a hard time ranking them sometimes because they see them as all important to their day-to-day life.

Next slide.

80% of respondents ranked that as extremely important or very important.

That is up 10% from the January survey.

So that was a noticeable change.

When we sit back and we consider all of these surveys in their totality, there are a few themes that emerge.

Community priorities are influenced by individual lived experiences.

Everybody wants to feel safe, although safety looks and feels different to each person.

Our community members of found it difficult to rank core services because they value all of them and see them as important.

The challenge that we are facing is that with our budget reality, it makes it increasingly difficult to meet our community's expectations.

We are facing a loss of potentially 42 positions in summer of 2027, which is just one year from today.

The impact of that loss, as we've heard, includes fire station closures, elimination of police response, I'm sorry, elimination of police violent crime teams, reduced maintenance of streets and parks and street lights, and elimination of recreation programs and other city services.

To be quite blunt, without additional revenue, the city will not be able to meet our community's expectations.

And these are services they've told us they want and that they deserve.

What we heard consistently was that it's about maintaining the services they currently rely on.

So when we talk about revenue enhancement, it's a discussion not just about funding, but about how to maintain those core services that our community has told us are important to them.

CFO.

Thank you, Misty.

Uh so a couple more slides for me to cover.

Um, but when we talk about revenue enhancement and we're gonna have a conversation around sales tax.

It's important to note that that is not the first place that we've gone to.

Uh we've been we've increased our cost recovery, we've increased our fees, uh, we've increased the business license tax, we've increased transient occupancy tax, property tax is uh a non starter uh when we look at polling or popularity as far as impacting the property tax overall.

We we are we're hamstrung with that.

Utility users tax is some is an effort that the city has taken in the past but has been unsuccessful.

Um we've ultimately the last bullet on here is sales tax.

And without action, we will be substantially reducing 20 and 2031 through measure queue's uh sunset, the total revenue of the city for sales tax.

Um staff is recommending for council is a reauthorization of measure queue at one cent versus the current half cent level until repealed by voters.

It's important to note that 100% of the sales tax would stay in Santa Rosa, would not depend on a countywide allocation.

The majority would come from brick and mortar sales, the remainder from online sales.

This would estimate to bring in an additional 47 million dollars annually in resulting in 23 and a half additional revenue to the city.

A general purpose tax would allow the city to fill critical funding gaps without legal restrictions, and will require a simple majority of revote of over 50% or 50% plus one, as we are frequent to say.

Thank you.

In the June 2026 survey, 53% of respondents stated that they believe that the city has a great need or some need for additional funding.

35% uh believe that the city has a little need or no real need, and about 12%, which is shown on gray on your screen here, are undecided.

Next slide.

Residents were also asked how likely they are to support a sales tax reauthorization as discussed today.

Over half of the respondents, 55% said they definitely or probably would vote yes.

And uh the support increases to 62% when including those leaning towards yes.

These results have an approximate margin of error of 4.9%.

What this means is that if the council would like to consider placing a revenue measure on the November ballot, it appears that it could be a viable course of action.

Next slide.

Excuse me, fire and emergency medical services, maintaining police response, particularly violent crimes, and maintaining streets and infrastructure.

If approved by the voters, additional revenue would help maintain those core services that our community members have told us are most important to them.

It would also help us address unfunded infrastructure needs, including street maintenance.

Santa Rosa is seeing growth and successes that our community values and that need continued civic support and investment to maintain momentum.

Recent examples include the rebuilding of fire station number five in Fountain Grove, creation of the special enforcement team, which is a which was formed to address violent crime specifically, delivering approximately 150 million dollars in public work projects over the last 12 months, and decreasing homelessness by 16% over the last four years.

These are just a few examples of accomplishment that reflect years of investment by our community and by our city.

With that, we will conclude the staff presentation.

The city manager's office requests that council provide direction to staff about whether to return with ballot measure language for council consideration.

Thank you.

Scott and Misty, thank you so much.

And thank you for for highlighting how long this process has been, how many years we've been working together.

Thank you both for what you and your teams have done.

Bringing it back to council for questions on this item.

Uh Ms.

McDonnell, did you want to ask a few questions?

Thank you for the presentation.

I know we've touched on this during the budget sessions, and we touched on the need for an increase in revenue.

And I appreciate all the statistics that you put into today's presentation and painting the picture of what happens if we don't increase revenue, I think is critical for the community to understand and know.

I just want to be clear because on one side it shows the breakdown of the tax.

And in this particular tax, I just think it's important for council as well as voters to know that this tax would 100% come back to the general fund.

It's not something we break down.

And I just want to make sure I'm clear on that.

Yes, thank you for that question, Councilmember McDonald's.

It's important to note that a transaction use tax, like the one staff is proposing, 100% of that money goes directly to the city so that the city has control within its general fund to program it out.

Unlike a county tax measure where we are reliant on the county to receive a small portion of that amount, this would go directly to us to program.

Any other questions from council?

Oh, Ms.

Rogers.

I have a question that I've heard before, and that is um if the money is going to the general fund, what prevents future councils from doing things like let's say art or other things that people have not listed as their core.

Because I think that's what the public wants to know.

It's like, yes, we entrust you to do this, um, but then you go and you want to put an art piece that I don't think is significant.

I'm not saying me.

The person doesn't think is significant, um, but they voted for for the measure.

Can you address that, please?

Yes, thank you, council member.

So I think where we are structurally is the critical starting point of that conversation in saying that this sales tax measure would not be creating extra for the general fund.

This is fundamentally going to go to closing a 14 and a half million dollar budgeted deficit, along with really what will be required is a critical listening of the community in the areas of maintenance.

Maintain is the critical word that we've heard from the community.

Maintain is the critical message and and feature that we are going to be bringing forward through council of maintaining what we have.

The core of the conversations that we've been having at council from the finance department is that that core deficit number of 14 and a half million dollars is actually a lot less than it should be.

We are missing significant holes within our deficit that need to be addressed.

This is an opportunity, frankly, to hear directly from the community, and they have made their voices heard very clearly to this council.

I believe, and I and I I frankly don't want to get ahead of a conversation of how this council is in a unique position to set future councils up for success, because you all have had to make the very difficult cuts.

You frankly have had to become financial experts, where not necessarily you asked to be, but you had to be.

That sets you in up in a unique position that with additional revenue coming in, it will be really the direction of council and the direction of staff would be to maintain the current deficit to make sure that we're not getting into more cuts and to start maintaining properly the infrastructure of the city.

I will I will address art because you brought it up.

But we we love art, arts and civic art's important, all of us do here.

I I can't think of a single dollar from the general fund being spent on art in a very, very long time.

Those are, as we mentioned at the beginning of my presentation, those are funds that cannot be spent on anything else but art.

And so those are very specific funds.

So I thank you for your question.

Are there questions from council?

Ms.

Ben Willis.

Thank you, Mayor.

Uh thank you for the presentation.

Very thorough.

Um, I just uh I may have missed it.

Um how would this work with measure Q that uh is in terms of I guess an ending date now if we extend uh 2031, how does that all work?

How does that all work?

Thank you for your question, Councilmember McUh Ben Willows.

So currently measure Q sunsets in 2031.

And what we've seen from the community feedback is that the more modern approach towards these sales tax measures is to enable the voters to repeal or to change the the sales tax measure at any time.

So instead of saying, hey, we're going to have a sales tax measure for the next 30 years, we want to give the community the ability to change the sales tax measure at any point they feel that it should go back to the ballot.

What we're essentially doing is Misty helping with the exact verbiage.

Until repealed by voters.

So that is the exact language if the council chooses to go down this road, that is the recommended language that we would include.

Okay, so um that's great.

Except um, how would that come back to the council?

I mean, if the voters came to us and said we'd like this to end, um how did how how is I hear I understand the wording, but I'm just not clear on how you know, or does the council say, okay, we don't need this anymore, you know.

How would that work really?

Council member Manuelis, let me step in here.

Uh I this the potential shift in reducing the tax in the future could either come through voter initiative or through council authorized um process to take it back to the voters.

Okay.

I'm not really quite satisfied, but I just be only because Measure Q currently has an ending date, and and it can be renewed, of course.

But I've I'm wondering if the voters would feel better if there was something like that as we extend this, you know, two one cent.

Through the survey that occurred um in June of 2026, there was hypothetical ballot measure language as part of that when we asked the residents, would you likely support this or not?

And that language was included in that statement until repealed by voters.

So I think it's a fair question, and it was part of part of the the surveying that we did.

And I'll and I'll just step in again.

Um in working with our ballot consultant, uh, the language that be that we're utilizing in polling is the the common language that's being uh incorporated by other jurisdictions attempting to do the same type of uh the TUT uh on this.

And so um from a ballot measure perspective, we're conforming to what the norm um and the norm practice is around the state, and and we feel fairly confident that the language is is appropriate, provides flexibility necessary for our community and the constituency here that if they want to see a change, they have the opportunity to come back and see a change rather than being defined and uh or uh to a specific uh term.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Other questions?

Just one from me.

And um you both alluded to it at points during your remarks.

But could could you um flesh out the context of how Santa Rosa's request is also being mirrored mirrored by other cities in the county and across the state, how that some of this is particular to our city, but a lot of this is a more general California story.

Mr.

Wagner, are you able to touch on that?

Yes, thank you, Mayor.

Um so to your to your question.

Uh our our problem is not unique here in Santa Rosa.

These issues around sales tax are being felt by many agencies.

Um and frankly, we are behind if you look at us from a from a sales tax percentage, even with some of our neighbors on where they currently are.

What I think is very safe to assume and what we've seen out there is that it is not just us that is approaching this sales tax issue.

It is really many, many agencies across the state that have taken a very hard look and will be pushing this forward.

Thank you.

I think it's fair to say that with Prop 13, California has a unique funding model for its municipalities, and that combined with it with a change in the in the sales tax uh situation is created um has forced a lot of a lot of agencies, a lot of cities to to look at how they are bringing in revenue, and Santa Rosa is one of those.

So thank you very much for this very thorough presentation.

Uh with that, let's open it up to public comment.

Let's see.

Uh Mr.

Hilbert, I see you at the podium.

Then let's go to uh Mr.

DeWitt and then Gregory Ferron.

Mr.

Hilbert, lead us off.

Well, I can lead off.

Thank you.

Um did you read a long-winded written uh commentary by Fred Albach on this matter?

It's just literally stupid, you know.

He advocates that you devote your energies to lobbying for the repeal of proposition 13.

This county is full of lazy hippies who don't know real work is, and they think their authorities on things.

Everything he had to say in that nonsense should be disregarded.

And I had this um if you're gonna put a half percent tax increase on the November ballot, you're gonna get made fun of.

You're gonna be characterized as incompetent, money grubbing liberals, unfit to be in office.

You bet there's gonna be a uh an effort to defeat it.

People are fed up with you know getting stuck with these ridiculously high taxes.

Uh your previous um city manager Marisca Smith proposed some serious cuts of the type that would write the structural deficit problem, some serious reductions that are needed to eliminate the structural deficit issue.

And what did this council do?

It balked at them.

So um, you know, if you want to increase measure Q, you know, you there's gonna be uh effort and an argument against it.

And I understand Fred wants to speak here.

Uh uh last time I was told that if you submit written comments, you are not allowed to uh comment orally, so you should enforce that equally, not just me, but everybody.

Thank you as always, Michael.

Dwayne, you're up to the Hello, my name is Dwayne DeWitt.

I'm from Roseland.

I'd like to propose two revenue enhancement techniques that you could do in case your tax increases do not pass.

The first would be to put fees upon the vendors that go to the parks.

On Saturday, we had a park volunteer day at Southwest Community Park, and I thank the parks people for being there.

Every day now, there are a number of vendors who come to the park.

I do not think they are licensed.

If you would begin a process in which every park in the city of Santa Rosa was allowed to have legally licensed food vendors, you could then enhance a revenue stream from that, and it could be helpful.

Also, the city owns a lot of property.

It owns property that's quite valuable.

You should not trade any of it away to any developer.

None of these developers are really trustworthy.

I've watched that over 30 years.

Basically, you should sell your properties at high market value prices.

You sit on them for long periods of time.

You do not do deferred maintenance, and then down the road you say, well, because it's not maintained, we got to get rid of it.

Well, sell these things for high prices.

You've got prime downtown land, and it could be useful to honest developers who would actually do what they say they are going to do.

That didn't happen with the ATT building right over here at 520 3rd Street when we were promised affordable housing would be built there if we gave them a deal under redevelopment.

Didn't happen.

Sell our properties, no increase in taxes.

Thank you, Dwayne.

Gregory.

Mayor Staff, members of the council, my name is Gregory Farron.

Great presentation.

And I think uh one of your slides had a uh uh line at the very bottom that said, more civic engagement, and I want to encourage you to do that.

Um a few months ago I made a similar presentation to the Board of Supervisors when we were giving out 10 million dollars worth of measure o money, in which I said, okay, the party's over.

Uh Chris Kirsey said, Oh, great, we are having a party, and Gregory blew out the candles.

And then Rebecca Armasillo said no, he threw the entire cake on the floor.

You're doing that right now, and you should.

You should be waking up this community to the fact that if they don't pass this sales tax and you don't figure out ways of getting some other agencies who should step up to the plate more, who should support you more.

We're going back to the 1880s.

You're talking about 1999.

I'm watching a bunch of uh Westerns with Sam Elliott uh that are showing what it was like in California in the 1880s.

We're going back to that point.

If the if the people of Santa Rosa believe that they're gonna have a police department or a fire department or anything like what they have now, wake up.

You're not going to have anything like what you think.

And and the entire effort we've had for 50 years to build beautiful places with spheres of influence and good planning and places we are paying a lot of money to be in, it's gonna be gone.

Thank you.

Thank you, Gregory.

Fred, unfortunately, we you did submit written comment, and so we can't let you speak on this item, but we did we do appreciate the very thorough remarks you made.

Thank you, thank you very much.

Are there other members of the public here in chambers who wish to speak?

Seeing none, we'll go online.

Uh I'll call our Zoom host.

We are now taking public comment via Zoom for item 4.1.

If you'd like to make a comment, please raise your hand.

If you dialed in by telephone, dial star nine to raise your hand and star six to unmute.

Once I enable your permissions, you will have two minutes for your comment and a countdown timer alert.

We'll alert at the conclusion of that period.

Mayor, I am seeing no hands for this item.

Thank you very much.

Then we'll close public comment and I'll bring it back to council for final thoughts and recommendations.

Ms.

McDonnell, why don't you why don't you leave us off again?

Sure.

I don't think that this is a really tough decision, at least from my perspective.

We've been talking about budget and revenue enhancements, and um I've seen us cut staff, you know, down to those bare bones to where we were in 2007 with the increase of population as you talked about earlier today.

I think it's also important to note when you hear how many times it's important to the community about public safety.

We're already far below the national average of how many officers we have on duty per community members.

And that doesn't even include the amount of people that come into the city of Santa Rosa on any given day um to support everything going around uh around us.

So I think the potential of cuts to public safety, not only all of our other departments, as you suggested earlier, Mr.

Wagner.

You already been cut 25%.

And I'm sure there's statistics in every single department in the city of Santa Rosa.

So when you look at how long it takes to get things across the line, it's because we don't have enough people to work on these projects.

So from my perspective, I'd like to see language brought back um to support the general fund.

Uh I I think earlier uh we already know general fund supports 77% of that goes to benefits and things that eat.

So the ongoing need of something uh is is critical.

So I think that voters and what you're hearing back from community members on we want this to be in place.

Um I'm I'm interested in that same type of model moving forward.

And I think there's not much more to say other than I appreciate the picture you painted in budget discussions so that we knew we were already coming to this, and I appreciate what Mr.

Farron said about getting out to the community to let them know um the reality of what we're dealing with and that it is in their hands to help us figure out how to handle these things and help us to prioritize.

So thank you again.

Thank you, Miss Rogers.

Thank you for all the time and dedication you put into this.

Thank you for all the community outreach that you have done.

Um so as a community member, I can say that I work really hard, I work about three jobs, and I don't like paying taxes.

Um that I have better things to spend my money on.

But thing is though, Santa Rosa is so good at educating not only us but the public, I think that the alternative would be detrimental to the beautiful city in which we all live in, um, where we can work, play in you know, more play.

I like to play a lot.

And I think we have a lot of things going on in Santa Rosa, and I want to continue to see that.

And I want it to continue to be safe.

So I definitely support um bringing language back to us so that we can we can look at this and we can move forward and for us to go on the journey of communicating to the community and continuing to educate them on what it would look like our beautiful city if we don't pass this ballot measure and what's gonna happen then.

And TMI.

Um, my husband recently had a heart attack in April, and I was told that I affiliate like I make connections by what goes on with me personally, and I'm proud to do that.

But my husband recently had a heart attack, and our fire came when I was out doing work for the city.

I was in Sacramento at a conference doing work for the city, and I couldn't be with him.

But our fire staff was there with him, and they took care of my husband, and I knew that he was being well taken care of.

And I want that for every single community member, whether they're calling fire or police, that they feel that they will have that when our public safety responds.

So I'm all in, and I'm a yes.

Thank you.

Thank you, Ms.

Rogers.

Mr.

Alvarez.

Thank you, Mayor.

A couple of months ago, we had this discussion about cuts.

And one of the comments that I made is right now we're getting out the scalpel before we know we're sharpening up the machete.

And I do appreciate the candid conversation that we've had today and the comments made, where reality is a bucket of cold water.

And hopefully, as we continue the conversations that can't those candid uh examples, candid statements continue to be made, because whether we like it or not, this is our future, this is what it looks like.

And we are definitely looking at ways to protect the quality of life of San Rosens.

But it's definitely gonna be a rough ride, and I and I foresee that.

So again, I appreciate the the candid conversation.

Thank you, Mr.

Alvarez.

Ms.

Banwellos.

Thank you.

Uh thank you again for um all the presentation.

I really appreciate all the all the information and all the time that you took.

Thank you.

Um I just want to say, Chris, this this is not an easy thing.

Um, I know for some of our residents, and especially uh for folks who are low and low income.

And I just want to say somebody who's had two to three jobs since 2016, I know how hard it is, and I know how hard it is for everyone right now.

The flip side of that is that um being someone who represents part of downtown and railroad square and the west end, uh, where there are several homeless facilities, I hear the other end of the need for public safety, fire, and how important it is, and how they have really felt the cuts that we took.

So I know how important it is for and people are not feeling safe.

So um, in view of that and having to, you know, put those two realities together, um, I support bringing back some uh language for a ballot measure as well.

And of course, I sort of I sit on long-term finance, so I knew this was coming, but um it's still very hard, and I'm not gonna, you know, sugarcoat it, it's gonna be a little bit hard.

But looking at the other jurisdictions, um, which are all much smaller than us, and we're not even as high as as all of those, and many of us spend money in those neighboring cities.

So I think we can actually support Santa Rosa uh uh so not just for now but for the future as well.

So um thank you.

Thank you, Mr.

O'Krupkey.

Thank you, Mr.

Mayor.

Um thanks so much for that presentation.

Uh uh, and I think a certain level of diplomacy and in which you've delivered some of this news.

Um, one of my favorite slides that you I've seen you use in a couple of your presentations, number 17.

I don't know if you have it readily available to put up or not.

Um as a visual person, it really does help.

Um there you are.

Uh what that shows is that the city of Santa Rosa within the county is a donor city.

We send more money out of our city via tax than we than we can keep.

Um, and I think that is extremely important to understand uh because as we've heard from the public, um, and as we've heard from up here, and I tend to agree, is like nobody likes paying taxes.

They understand the need to a certain extent, but when you look at these sheer numbers of what we're paying and where it goes for residents, it's not going to the city in whole.

Um especially when you look at that property tax uh number, as you pointed out, there's some other municipalities that are nearly double that uh within our county.

So it's important for us to keep all of that in mind.

Uh I'd also want to say that we've talked about a lot about public safety, um, and that's because of where these cuts are gonna have to come from because of the of the the large amount of the general fund that uh supports public safety.

But uh they're not the only ones that are stretched in.

Um I know that uh there's people in public works that hold four or five hats uh for jobs that they do.

I see our parks team here, and I know that um they we've said it before, they do not have the resources to be able to take care of the parks that we ask them to.

And um it I I'd assume it frustrates them to not be able to do the job and and do the upkeep that they want to do and that they take pride in doing.

I know that we have um planners that have almost double the amount of applications they are responsible for as opposed to neighboring jurisdictions.

So uh I think it's important to have uh a holistic um view of what this what these impacts are.

Uh there was something else I was going to say, and I forgot it.

So I'm not gonna say oh, that's what I was gonna say was um I appreciate the ideas of of fees or the passing of the hat in in the in the uh metaphorical sense.

Uh but correct me if I'm wrong.

If we took uh housing and community services, the CFO's office, the city attorney's office, the city manager's office, HR, um, and cut all funding out of the general fund for those, we wouldn't be able to make up the delta of this structural deficit.

Is that correct?

That's correct, Vice Mayor.

So, yeah, all of those, all of our administrative functions could completely go away, and we still have a deficit.

As I mentioned earlier in our size, we fundamentally have an operating issue.

Our ongoing revenues are not sufficient to uh meet our ongoing operating.

Thank you.

So, with that, um, I know uh I'm I'm sure the mayor in his typical fashion is going to focus on a lot of the good that we're doing to help offset some of uh these conversations.

Um I'm used to being the bad cop when the two of us are together.

So I'll hand it over to him to do that, but I am in favor um reluctantly of putting this forward uh to maintain the services that we're providing.

You know me too well, Vice Mayor.

Yes, let's go back to the bright side for just a little bit, and I'm glad we highlighted that in our presentation.

Uh so if you live in the city, you've seen some of the great changes that have taken place over the last 10 years.

You've seen the businesses that have come in to Montgomery Village to Railroad Square to Sevastopol Road, you've seen what we've done downtown.

Downtown's so much better than it was even even 10 years ago.

You see the huge amount of capital development that's going on in the city.

We mentioned 150 million in the slide, but we're talking about multiple bridges, one completed, one underway, multiple fire stations, a library, significant increases.

We've doubled the amount we're putting into our roads, all our main arterials at least, not so much the neighborhood streets.

That's what we that's when we want to move forward with this with this sales tax measure.

But there have been a lot of improvements in the city, and we want to keep that momentum going.

And here we are as a community at a really interesting crossroads because with so many of these ballot tax measures, the impacts are abstract.

If you think about the famous ones from recent recent years, measure H, Measure I, Measure D D, they pass, you don't really know how they're impacting you.

This one you will.

If we don't want to tax ourselves, and that's what we're doing here, it's all of us living in the city deciding whether or not we we want to pay more.

If we don't want to do that, we're gonna see the service impacts immediately.

If we do want to grit our teeth in this California model and yet again agree to a tax to a tax measure, then suddenly we have no more budget deficit.

We potentially have extra money to put into our infrastructure.

We've got we we keep the amazing momentum going that we have in the city.

So we're at a real fork, and it's gonna be up to up to the community to decide how we want to proceed.

Uh I appreciate Gregory's call to action there.

Um, let it be known that the city team, including everyone in this dais and our senior staff, we have been out constantly really over the last 12 months reaching out to every community stakeholder, every group that will meet with us to give a version of this presentation.

We are spreading the word as loudly as we can.

For this one, we need the community's help.

We need people like Gregory, like those of you who are sitting in this room to be making up your own minds, thinking clearly about how you want to proceed with this particular tax initiative, and talking to your friends and neighbors because the impacts, again, they will be concrete and they will be quick after November.

And so we are hoping that as the polls show that we can convince enough of our fellow residents to come to the table on this one, because it could mean good things for the city.

And there will be consequences on the other side if if we decide not to.

With that, I will just say thank you for all the work from our finance team and from our communications team.

We the presentation was right on point.

I'm firmly supportive.

I'm glad to see that we have the support from from all of my colleagues up here, and we very much want to see what you come back with in a couple of weeks.

Thank you both.

All right, that ends our study session.

Uh we will go on to all right.

We'll we'll we will relax for a moment with our proclamation for the evening.

Oh, excuse me, I I skipped over one.

Uh we have a report on closed session.

Madam City Attorney, any report.

Thank you, Mayor.

There are no reportable items this evening.

Thank you.

All right, we'll go on to our proclamation for the evening, and we are glad to see our parks team here.

Our it's item 7.1, our proclamation for July is parks make life better month.

And I'm going to uh Ms.

Rogers.

Thank you, Mayor.

Whereas Parks and Recreation promotes physical, emotional, and mental wellness through organized and self-directed fitness, play, and activity.

And whereas parks and recreation supports economic vitality by partnering with local businesses, nonprofits, and community groups.

And whereas parks and recreation creates memorable experiences through youth sports and activities, teen and senior programs, adult enrichment, and free community events.

And whereas parks and recreation foster social cohesiveness by celebrating diversity, promoting social equity, and ensuring all people have access to its benefits.

And whereas parks and recreations supports human development and countless learning opportunities, fostering growth and people of all ages and abilities.

And whereas parks and recreation strengthen community identity by providing facilities and services that celebrate local heritage and culture.

And whereas parks and recreation facilities community issues resolution by providing safe spaces and key points of service that help our communities heal, and whereas parks and recreation sustains natural resources by protecting habitats, connecting people to nature, and promoting ecological stewardship, and whereas parks and recreation remain versatile and innovative in delivering vital facilities and essential services during emergencies.

Now, therefore, may it be resolved that our mayor, Mark Stapp, on behalf of the entire city council, recognize the importance of equitable access to local parks, recreation, trails, open space, and facilities for the health, wellness, development, inspiration, and safety for our community.

Do hereby proclaim July as Park Make Life Better Month.

Thank you.

All right, Mr.

Castro and Mr.

Wilkinson, are you on tap to say a few words?

Oh, it's Mr.

Tibbetts.

Oh, there we go.

I miss I misread.

Come on down, gentlemen.

All right, you've got a you've got a room full of fans here.

Thank you for all that you do.

We rigged the deck with our fans.

Uh Jeff Tibbetts, Deputy Director for Recreation.

Uh, thank you, Mayor Stapp, Vice Mayor O'Krepke, Council members.

Uh, July is Parks Make Life Better Month, and we appreciate the proclamation today, acknowledging the importance that our parks play here in Santa Rosa.

It is not just a slogan, it is a reality that parks make life better.

When you think of parks in Santa Rosa, you might think about community events ranging from cultural celebrations to movie nights to free speech events, or private gatherings where we celebrate milestones in our lives or reconnect with family and friends.

Our parks are a place where we reconnect with nature, get exercise, play, and socialize.

Whether it is our neighborhood parks where we build community, our community parks where we create memories, or our special recreation spaces, spaces like Howarth Park, community pools, community centers.

These places are not just where people go spend free time.

They are the places that make Santa Rosa unique, make Santa Rosa feel like home, and make Santa Rosa a better place to live, work, and play and play for Council Member Rogers.

As amazing as parks are, they are not magical.

Parks require a lot of work, so as we recognize July as Parks Make Life Better Month, I would also like to take this opportunity to share my appreciation for all the people who work so hard to make Santa Rosa Parks possible.

As we've been through different reorganizations over my 23 years with the city, I've seen us structured a lot of different ways.

Bottom line is no matter how you structure us, it comes down to the people that make these spaces uh so special.

Now, I might be a little bit biased, uh, but I think it's easy to make the case that our volunteer program as it relates to our parks and recreation programs is the best in the city.

So the special people start with our community members.

This is evident in the strength of a programs like Adopt a Green Space and our Park a Month program, where our community contributes thousands upon thousands of volunteer work to support our parks every year.

And through our work experience program, where over 300 teenagers volunteer to provide over 30,000 hours of volunteer service every single summer in our recreation programs.

So big thank you to our community.

But while our community does so much, we are also dedicated with or we also blessed with a dedicated team of staff.

Any park system starts with planning, and our park planning team has been has a lot of exciting things going on right now.

Council, you've been uh receiving updates on existing uh council's been getting updates on existing new projects in the works, such as the development of the Southwest Greenway, Roseland Creek Park, and Kawana Springs Community Garden, Parks and Garden.

Renovations at Dutch Floor Park, Cook Park, and South Davis Park have all been completed in the last several months.

Uh, and renovations like the tennis and pickleball courts at Howarth Park and Gowan Park underway or underway, and more to come in parks like MLK Park and Rinkin Valley Park.

Mayor, hopefully, the optimism I covered well for you there.

A big thank you to the planning team for their hard work.

Uh, you are truly delivering and creating a lot of excitement in our parks for Santa Rosa.

But even the best planned parks require maintenance, and in Santa Rosa, we have a small but a small park maintenance team, but they are a mighty team that does a lot of heavy lifting.

There's a saying that has been around for the last 23 years that I've been in the city of the Santa Rosa, and that is Santa Rosa loves its parks to death.

Well, I've said it many times, I've always left out the most important part.

Every day, park maintenance goes back there and brings our parks back to life.

I'll let uh Superintendent Castro speak a little bit more on park maintenance in a moment.

Uh but last not least, obviously, I have to give a shout out to my recreation people.

Over the past 23 years, I've had the pleasure of meeting so many amazing people through the recreation division.

I now get the honor of representing an amazing team of people who truly love what they do because they're so passionate about supporting our community.

Yes, recreation issues around 1,500 permits every year for the community to hold events and gatherings in our parks.

Yes, we have over a hundred thousand passengers on the K Land rides in Howard Park.

Hundreds of thousands of participants enter Ridgway Pool, Finley Pool, Finley Community Center in Person Senior Wing every year.

Thousands of youth play in our camps and thousands of adults play in our sports leagues.

I could ramble off more stats, but as the saying goes, parks make life better, not parks make data points.

So with that said, I want to share my appreciation to my incredible team and all the staff in recreation, not just for how much you do, but for what you do.

We foster community and we improve the quality of life for Santa Rosa residents.

Thank you all for your hard work.

And I'll pass off to Superintendent Castro.

Mayor Stapp, Vice Mayor Kropke.

Council members, my name is James Castro.

I'm the park superintendent.

First off, I'd like to thank you for this proclamation.

Parks Make Life Better is a statewide recognized campaign to raise awareness around the benefits of parks and recreation.

During COVID, park usage increased by up to 63% nationwide, and those numbers have largely persisted post pandemic.

Organizations such as the National Recreation and Parks Association as well as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recognize parks as critical infrastructure because they support public health, environmental sustainability, social equity, and economic prosperity.

Parks are especially important in our underserved neighborhoods by providing free recreation, regardless of your income, safe places for children to play, youth development, accessibility for seniors, and opportunities for cultural celebrations and community events.

I would like to give a special thanks to Councilmember Natalie Rogers and Councilmember Diana McDonald.

Not only do you guys talk the talk, but you walk the walk for advocating for parks.

You show up at our events, you speak out on our behalf, and your advocacy has greater impact than you know.

I also want to thank City Manager Nutt and the rest of council for your commitment to not reducing park staff any further.

We currently have 23 maintenance staff to maintain 109 park spaces.

That's 1100 acres of park land and an additional 65 acres of roadside landscaping.

Santa Rosa Park's staffing levels are less than one-third of the national average, and we continue to develop parks without additional maintenance for them.

No one wants to see our park spaces more beautiful than our park staff, but we need your help to make that happen.

Parks are no longer simply recreation amenities, but critical public infrastructure.

Parks do make life better.

Park staff make parks better.

Thank you.

Thank you both.

Before we go to public comment, any thoughts from council.

Mr.

Alvarez.

I want to definitely thank our park folks because the reality is I love hearing my phone ring and someone's on the phone saying, I just walked by Davis Park, and oh my God.

It was about time.

And it's so beautiful.

I'm not scared to take my children there.

I'm not scared to go there in the evening.

That's how you're improving my community.

I thank you from the bottom of my heart that you're putting the work to make that happen.

Thank you.

Miss Rogers.

That was very nice.

Thank you so much.

I will say being a single mother of three, sometimes the only place I could take my children or afford to take my children with the park.

And so that's why I'm a large advocate for parks.

I think they're very important, even if you have money.

I think that it is a place where everyone can go to recreate for free.

In addition to that, I do want to thank the staff.

I think you guys are awesome for everything you do.

I know one day we were driving down the street, and Andre goes, oh, the grasses are really high.

I didn't make a phone call, I didn't do anything.

I said, they'll get to it.

And it was within one or two days that the median was cut and it was looking nice.

Everything by the park was looking nice.

And didn't even have to do anything.

So I'm sorry that you guys have so much to do with so little, but I am thankful that you continue to show up and come to work despite all we're asking you to do.

And I'm hoping that we can remedy this.

Um, I know it won't be tomorrow, and I know it won't be next week, but um, you have my promise that we're gonna continue to try to find ways because we do realize how important parks are.

Thank you, Miss Ben Willis.

Thank you.

Um, I just want to say thank you for all that you do.

Um I of course, just like every district, I've got lots of parks in my district, and I get nothing but positive feedback about all your staff.

And it's always good to hear that I don't have that's one area.

I mean, we worry about what's happening in parks, but I never worry about the staff because as um my colleague was saying, I know it's gonna get taken care of.

Even though, and and I too am very sorry that you are short staffed and you're really doing we're asking you to do more with less, and I recognize that.

And I hope I wish we could change it tomorrow.

But I really appreciate the fact that that doesn't stop you from doing your job, all of you.

So thank you.

Thank you, Miss McDonald.

Yeah, just thanks to the park staff.

I go to many of the volunteer events, and you're always there.

Um, some of you on the days that you're not even supposed to be in.

So I just want to say thank you to all of you for all your hard work and to the recreation department as well to make sure that there's programs that children and families and our seniors get to participate in at a very low cost.

You know, the parks are beautiful, so we can have the recreation programs there.

Um, but it is important and it's critical.

And as um Councilmember Rogers said, to be able to have open space for families and people to go and recreate in, that's free or no cost, is specifically through our recreation department, is critical for the health and well-being of our community.

So thank you to everybody.

Thank you, Vice Mayor.

Thank you.

Yeah, to um both of you, thanks so much.

Um to recreation.

Uh as someone who has a kid come home and talk incessantly about how much they love uh Camp Yucci.

Uh I really appreciate it.

Um, she loves it.

And um, you know, she spends uh I think it's 10 hours there with it with early arrival that we we put her into.

So I can only imagine how much worth it's worth to every other kid in their family that goes to those and to the parks department.

Um the maintenance crews, especially.

I I did a poor job of explaining just how hard you guys work.

And so, James, thank you so much for putting those statistics out.

Those are we we know them kind of inherently, but like when you put the exact number on it, it really shows just how much, excuse my language ass you guys kick for our community um with what you have, and we really do appreciate it.

Thank you, Nito.

Everything's been that's been said.

So we've added what 50% or increased our our parks uh land by 50% over the past 10 years while cutting our staff in half.

So we're we're familiar.

We know we need to invest, and we know that it you're that you're beloved by everyone in the community and everyone here on the on the dais.

Speaking as a personal user of the parks and of the pools, um, I very much want to uh want to make sure we stay strong in this area.

Um I think I'll I'll leave it there.

Let's throw it open to public comment.

Uh Mr.

DeWitt, I think you're first up.

And if any other members of the public would like to speak, say nice things about our parks and our park staff, then head to the head of the podium.

But Mr.

DeWitt, kick us, kick us off.

Hello, my name is Dwayne DeWood.

I'm from Roseland.

I definitely want to compliment the parks maintenance people.

Definitely on Saturday at Southwest Park in the Bellevue District, Saturday at nine to noon.

You had Tim Finnegan, Lorenzo Perron, and you had maintenance workers out there.

You had a couple young volunteers named Asher and Elias.

You had a really good day out there.

And I'm always gonna be in the corner of the maintenance workers for parks because it's all about management and maintenance.

It's not about planning, it's not about saying we're gonna buy some more parks.

It's about taking care of what we have.

So we've got some really good maintenance workers, and I think Mr.

Castro just coined a new term for these folks.

We make parks better.

That's what the maintenance crew is all about.

I think we should actually, and I will kick in.

I'm a volunteer, I'm out there.

I'll volunteer to buy 23 t-shirts for these guys to have their own motto that says, we make parks better.

Because they're all about it, and it's not this other stuff.

We could blow smoke and happy talk all day long.

It actually comes to the folks that are out there that take care of the place and make it all better.

So you got it here from me.

Gotta tell me the sizes of the shirts.

I'll get them and we'll make it happen.

And you know, one other good thing on all this.

I don't know if you caught yourself earlier there, Mr.

Opkrepki, but you actually mentioned Southwest Greenway.

And that's how we think of the park at Roseland Creek and having a bike trail there that's been talked about for 22 full years since the Roseland Creek concept plan was adopted by the City Council.

And we're moving forward out there.

We're never giving up.

So we make parks better because we're volunteers for it also.

Thank you.

Thank you, Duane.

Are there any other members of the public who'd like to speak?

Mr.

Farron?

Mayor Stapp and members of the council.

My name is Gregory Farron.

And if they didn't have enough work to do, this is sort of a good news, bad news thing.

We're the Board of Supervisors today added one more park to the county.

The Tier de la Rosas um Park Plaza received two million dollars from the Ag and Open Space District.

And it it's probably going to be maintained by you guys.

I don't think the county's going to maintain the park plaza in the middle of the city in uh in your district, uh Eddie.

But I think it it it illustrates, and I'll join Dwayne.

It illustrates the extent to which an overworked, understaffed group of heroes are making it so that it's not just state parks and regional parks that people go to.

It's your city parks.

Those are the mainstay, the core of what most people need and love.

Thank you.

Thank you, Gregory.

Um, and there you go.

There's your heads up, park staff.

More more on the way.

Any other members of the public wish to speak?

All right, let's we'll close public comment or we'll close in-person public comment and we'll go to our Zoom host.

Any online public comments?

We're now taking public comment on item 7.1.

If you'd like to make a public comment, please raise your hand.

If you dialed in by telephone, dial star nine to raise your hand and star six to unmute.

Once I enable your permissions, you will have two minutes for your comment and a countdown timer alert.

Will will alert at the conclusion of that period.

Mayor, we have no hands.

Thank you.

We'll close public comment and we'll invite all the members of the park staff, parks department to come down and uh for for a photo.

And of course, our recreation team as well.

Oh Mike, did you ask him if that was his name?

What?

Did you ask Alvarez if I asked his name on that?

I don't need to.

If you look up this criminal record, you'll see a new chart.

No, you don't trust me that one.

Don't worry about it.

We don't have to do it.

Thanks again to our parks staff and recreation teams.

Thank you for coming out.

We'll move on to item 8.1.

Our public outreach for the Greenway Connectivity Study.

And do we have Ms.

Wilson here?

Tarina, welcome.

You do.

I'm ready, but everybody left.

So oh, I I think many are coming back in a moment.

Dina, would you be able to share the PowerPoint?

I've got it up here.

Oh, perfect.

Okay.

Well, hi, Mayor Stapp and Council members.

I'm Torina Wilson.

I'm the city's transportation planner.

I'm here with very quick staff briefing.

I'm not gonna go over all of my slides, but I have extra ones there if you happen to have questions.

Something we know is that we have a fabulous Southeast Greenway project that we're now moving forward with on the east side of town that's gonna drop into one of three wonderful parks that we have for the community.

And we also happen to know that on the west side of town we have equally as fabulous multi-use trails, creek paths, um, a lot of opportunities for recreation, walking, and biking.

And we know, like on the slide in between, that city staff and council have a really great opportunity to look at closing the gap between those two locations.

And the goal here really is that we have a full east-west connection across town, multi-use paths, low stress, comfortable for the community.

We know that Smart is working on the same thing north-south, and so this is a really wonderful opportunity for us to make sure that all across town we have some connections for our community.

So knowing that there is a gap uh once the Southeast Greenway project goes in.

City staff about a year ago came up with three project alternatives.

Uh, we took this to a group of stakeholders to make sure that there wasn't anything that we were missing.

And now we have a period of public outreach where we're asking the public of these three alternatives, which is the one that you prefer.

Um, and the one that does reign supreme is the one that we're gonna focus on implementing first, and we will focus on timing that with the Southeast Greenway project so that we can put everything in, hopefully at the same time, or at least focus on the multimodal components of the projects at the same time.

I won't go into super detail of these three alternatives.

Um, if you have any questions, I can certainly answer those.

What I will tell you though is these three alternatives are here because they are specifically feasible.

So we're not taking anything to the community that would be so outlandish to implement that it would be too difficult.

Everything here is possible.

Um, and it is possible within the timeline of when a multi-use path on the Southeast Greenway project uh site could go in.

Um again, three alternatives.

Each of them are a little bit different from one another.

Um, I do have some visual simulations that kind of show the differences between the three.

Um, some visual simulations that show what they could potentially look like.

But again, I'm I'm moving through quickly just because this is a staff briefing.

What I want to focus on is this slide.

We have a project web page where all of our materials are up.

We also have an online survey in both English and Spanish that we're asking the community to take.

We already have over 550 responses to that survey, uh, but we really would like to have a higher number, as many as we possibly can.

What we've done so far, we've done about 10,000 mailers to property owners and business owners in the immediate area around each of the three alternatives.

We've done a series of focus groups.

Um tomorrow is actually another focus group that we are hosting with Latino service providers.

Uh we did one with Montgomery High School students, and we have a couple more on the books.

We've done a series of in-person pop-up events.

This last Saturday, uh, Dan Hennessy and I were at a community bike ride.

We met at Prince Gateway Park.

We had about 35 people show up and we rode two of the alternatives and had a great time.

Some of us even went and got lunch afterwards because we were a little bit hungry.

Um, what else?

Uh, the one other in-person event that I want to highlight is on July 29th in the evening.

We will be having a in-person community workshop across the street in the large conference room.

Uh, there will be free child care and there will be refreshments at that uh public workshop.

And we're again hoping that people will take the survey.

What I'm asking for you tonight is just to be aware that this project is happening, um, that there will be a gap closure that uh the city is city staff is looking into.

And I'm also inviting all of you to please take the survey and then maybe send it to everybody in your network, your friends, your family, your enemies, anybody that you think you could get to take a survey, it would very much appreciate it.

Um with that, I think that's it.

This QR code will take you to the webpage.

This is the URL, or to Google, you can just type in Greenway Connectivity Study, and you should be taken there.

Thank you.

Outstanding.

This is such a great project.

Any any questions from council?

So, Tarina, you you kind of hinted, you kind of hinted that there was an alternative that was preferred at the moment.

Can you say a bit more about that?

You mean uh preferred already in the survey so far, or I'll take either.

What's which which way are people and or the city leaning?

So it was funny.

The before we sent out the mailers, alternative number one was the most popular, and then we sent out the mailers, and number two has become the most popular.

I get a lot of questions from the community, like, well, all of these are great.

Does this mean you couldn't do all three?

Technically, we could, but we all know that we have limited funding.

And so what I'm hoping is that in the survey it's very clear that there's one alternative that comes out on top.

That's the one we will focus on.

And then depending on things like pavement maintenance schedule and grants that we get, it's possible that we could do more than one.

Excellent.

And has has Dan Hennessy already committed to the Sonoma Avenue uh protected bike lane with the with the hard curve protection.

He told me we've got a lot of right-away, so I'm not throwing anybody under the bus.

All right, well, we'll let that stand.

I won't I won't press any further.

But I I do like the visuals.

Uh, if there are no other questions from council, we'll open it up to the public.

Well, would any members of the public like to speak?

Mr.

DeWitt.

Rosalyn, I'm a bicycle rider.

I'm very appreciative of all the hard work of Miss Tarina Wilson and Mr.

Hennessy.

Since they've gotten here, there's been some good things coming forward.

I'm a firm believer also that you can look at all the alternatives and have them ready to perhaps be acted upon in the future.

And as always, I have to advocate for the Roseland approach too.

If you look at that first map that she showed up there, the idea of having more than one crosstown, having it well both.

This is the way I look at it, that you'll have that southwest greenway along Roseland Creek that goes all the way out to the Laguna da Santa Rosa area coming on in to the city and meeting up with the Joe Redoda Trail that's there by what you call downtown Santa Rosa on Dutton Avenue, the downtown specific area plan specifically called that area out.

It's there at Sebastopol Road and Dutton Avenue.

So there's ways you can make more connections and you can do more things.

I know you'll always be broke.

As a matter of fact, every year I've ever come here, what I've always heard is the government pleads poverty.

We can't do that stuff.

We don't have enough money to do those things.

But I bet you we could find money from both the state and the feds.

It might not seem that way with the current federal administration, but there's actually monies that are there hidden away in those federal highway transportation funds, different approaches, economic development.

And you have two really good workers here with Ms.

Tarina Wilson and Mr.

Alex Oseguera helping Mr.

Hennessy dig for the money.

You could actually be getting more funding and getting more things going by being proactive on these types of approaches.

I'm very supportive of all their efforts.

Go bicyclists.

Thank you, Duane.

Are there any other members of the public in council chambers that would wish to speak?

Seeing none, we'll go to the Zoom host.

Anyone online?

We're now taking public comment on item 8.1.

If you'd like to make a public comment, please raise your hand.

If you dialed in by telephone, star nine to raise your hand and star six to unmute.

Any takers?

No hands raised, Mayor.

Thank you very much.

All right, back to council for any final comments.

Seeing none, we'll just thank you for the presentation and we'll look forward to whatever the final result is.

Oh, and we need to send that we need we we need to take the survey and send the survey to our enemies.

That's what I took away, took away from that.

Every single one of you.

I'm gonna track IP addresses.

I don't know how to do that.

I'll figure it out.

All right, thank you, Tarina.

Thank you for the presentation.

We'll go on to item 8.2, our community empowerment plan update.

Ms.

Horta, I assume.

Come on down.

Welcome.

Good afternoon, Mayor, Vice Mayor, and City Council.

I'm Anna Orta, community engagement manager with the communications and intergovernmental relations office.

And I will be presenting the community empowerment plan update for the month of July.

From July 12th to August 16, enjoy the city of Santa Rosa live at Euler Park concert series.

Leva Julia has grown into one of the most anticipated events in the cultural calendar, bringing together artists, audiences, and vendors in the celebration of creativity and artistic excellence.

Everyone is invited to join this free celebration at our beautiful Julia Community Park in downtown Santa Rosa for concert dates, artists lineup, and more information.

Please visit srcd.org slash live at Julia.

On July 16, join Santa Rosa Water at their Creek Protector Adventure Day at 4227 Flat Rock Circle from 9 a.m.

to 12 p.m.

This is a fun outdoor event where kids get to explore the shaded banks of the Santa Rosa Creek with naturalists as they discover plants, birth, and wildlife.

Enjoy the scavenger hand and learn about creek restoration projects that improve natural habitats.

Best suited for ages 5 to 12.

Adults must stay with their children.

This is not a drop-off event.

Pants and close toe shoes or water shoes are recommended.

To register and learn more, visit srct.org slash calendar.

On July 18, Santa Rosa Water is hosting a creek cleanup at the Prince Memorial Greenway.

All agents are welcome to participate.

Volunteers meet at Olive Park Footbridge near 1698 Hazel Street at 10 in the morning.

To sign up, also visit srcd.org slash calendar.

Also on July 18, the Rural Cemetery Preservation Committee will host their monthly volunteer work day from 9 in the morning to 12 noon.

Projects includes the cemetery beautification efforts such as landscaping projects, painting, and various maintenance work.

As you heard, Torina, the Transportation and Public Works Department is asking our community to help shape the future of Santa Rosa Trails Network by participating in the survey, but also in the Greenway Connectivity Study in-person workshop.

The workshop will be held on July 29th at 6.37 First Street from 6 to 7 30 p.m.

Learn about projects alternative, ask questions, and provide input.

Free snacks and child care will be provided.

The study will help identify a preferred route to better connect Santa Rosa's existing greenway and multi-use trails.

Learn more and take the survey at SRCity slash greenway connectivity study.

And finally, on August 4, the Santa Rosa Police Department and the Santa Rosa Fire Department will be hosting and participating in the National Light Out event at Dix Sporting Goods Parking Lot 1975 Cleveland Avenue from 5 to 8 p.m.

This free and family friendly family friendly event will feature booths from local organizations and public safety agencies, food, drinks, and fun activities for kids.

National Night Out is an annual community building campaign that promotes policy, police, community partnerships, and neighborhood camaraderie.

And that concludes this month community empowering plan update.

Thank you.

Honor thank you so much.

A full agenda as always.

Uh bringing it to council for any questions.

Seeing no questions from council, we'll open it up to the public.

Mr.

DeWitt.

Yes, hello.

My name is Dwayne DeWitt.

I'm from Roseland.

Thank you for Ms.

Horta for giving us the information about the Empowerment Plan X.

I believe it's really important that we understand the community advisory board is also a part of this activity.

And they've been giving money out to different organizations.

One of the things that's happening is the money is going to the people that are already well off.

The disadvantaged neighborhoods, they're not getting their chance to get in there and get these small, they're not big in one sense.

They're 2500 grants.

But they're the kind of thing that shouldn't go to the richest neighborhoods in the city.

It should be the kind of thing that as a part of the empowerment, they go to the disadvantaged neighborhoods.

On this Thursday coming up, the board is going to make some decisions.

I mean, the library, excuse me, has more money than they could imagine.

They're set.

They got tons of money.

And they're doing real well with it.

So the thing of it is these small $2,500 grants could be helping smaller groups in areas like Roseland to the north of the Bellevue District where there's needs.

We've got lots of needs.

We just don't have that, I guess you call it the social capacity.

We don't have the social capital to get down there and understand how to get the money out of the community advisory board.

Skyhawk gets it, they get it more than once.

Other rich neighborhoods get it.

So how about we start spreading that money around?

Let's not put it on the wall of the new multi-million dollar.

Uh I call it a boondoggle in Bellevue.

We could have done a better library up along Sebastopol Road where we were promised one at that new county site.

Thank you.

Thank you, Duane.

Are there any other members of the public who'd like to comment on this item?

Seeing none, let's go online.

I'll I'll ask our Zoom host if anybody is wishes to make comment.

Okay, we're now taking public comment via Zoom on this item.

If you'd like to speak, please raise your hand.

If you dialed in, please press star nine to raise your hand.

No hands.

Mayor.

Thank you very much.

All right, we'll close public comment.

Back to council.

Any final comments?

Surprisingly, no comments today, Anna.

But I again that you continue to do great work.

The entire city continues to reach out with the resources that it has to the community.

So it especially as we're talking about in the time of limited resources.

The fact that we're doing as much as as as we are in so many in all of these ways, it's a testament to you, and it's a testament to the city.

Thank you very much.

It's teamwork.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you, Ms.

Horta.

All right.

The time is five o'clock.

So here's what we're gonna do.

We're gonna jump around a little bit.

We're gonna go to our first public comment on non-agenda matters.

This is a chance for the public to comment, any members of the public who wish to speak to comment on items not listed on the agenda.

We'll take the first 12 commenters uh who are here in person.

And then if there are if there's any time, if there are any commenters still remaining, we'll take those at the end of the evening.

So again, are there any members of the public here in council chambers who wish to make comment on any items not listed on the agenda?

All right, Mr.

DeWitt, you have two minutes.

I'm curious why it has to be just two minutes.

There's nothing else going on later this evening.

Shouldn't we keep it at three minutes like the multi-decade tradition we've had here?

With that in mind, I came to speak about trusted developers.

I don't believe the city of Santa Rosa actually has any trusted developers.

I go back to 1994 when the Tuxhorn effort out in Southwest Santa Rosa came forward, and the developer said he'd put in 64 apartments and got special incentives to be able to do that.

Then he didn't do it.

He put it off onto the city with Burbank Housing and Burbank Housing, didn't build apartments.

They built for sale self-help houses that then were turned around and sold down the road without being on a covenant for affordability.

So recently it came up that you folks have been in secret discussions for quite some time to offload this seven and a half acre prime downtown site where we are right now to so-called trusted developer.

In the presentation, there was a picture of 520 3rd Street.

And if that's the place, that place was once city-owned property through the redevelopment agency, and it was sold to a person at a discount with the promise that there would be housing built there.

That did not occur.

That you'd trade this seven and a half acres here for that one building at 523rd Street.

That folks is called bamboozling.

You should not be letting that happen.

This is the kind of thing where you folks should be watching out for our assets, taxpayer-owned assets.

Sell them, don't trade them.

Thank you, Dwayne.

Are there any of the members of the public in council chamber who wish to speak?

Seeing none, we'll go online.

I'll ask our Zoom host, Lauren.

Anyone online?

All right, we're now taking non agenda public comment from Zoom.

If you'd like to speak, please raise your hand.

If you dialed in, please hit star nine.

No hands, Mayor.

Lauren, thank you very much.

All right, we'll close public comment on non-agenda matters, and we we will move on to our public hearing for the evening.

Item 16.1, our public hearing uh related to the TEFRA public hearing and issuance of tax exempt revenue bonds by the California Statewide Communities Development Authority in an aggregate aggregate principal amount not to exceed 20 million dollars for Santa Rosa Garden Apartments, 4601 Montgomery Drive.

And we have, let's see, is Miss Ms.

Morgan?

Perfect.

Good evening, Mayor, Vice Mayor, and Council members.

The item before you today is to request.

Sorry, give me one second.

Thank you.

Uh is to hold uh the it's a request to hold public hearing and approve the issuance of bonds for the Santa Rosa Garden Apartments Project.

Jurisdictions are required to hold a public hearing, receive public comment, and approve bond issuance prior to an award by the state consistent with the tax equity and fiscal responsibility act, an internal revenue code of 1986.

This action will not result in any fiscal impact to the general fund, and the financial responsibility shall be of the borrower for this project.

Uh it shall be TTG Santa Rosa Garden Limited Partnership.

The project is an existing affordable housing development located at 4601 Montgomery Drive in the Southeast Santa Rosa area and was built in 1970.

It is conveniently conveniently located near parks, public transit, pharmacy, medical offices, grocery stores, hardware stores, restaurants, and a variety of other nearby businesses.

The project consists of 111 rental units, of which 26 units are targeted to households with incomes up to 30 percent of area median income, 55 units targeted to households at 50 percent area median income, 28 units at umits at 60 percent area median income, and two unrestricted manager units.

The unit mix of the project includes 16 studios, 20 one-bedroom units, 53 two-bedroom units, and 22 three-bedroom units.

The housing and community services department recommends that the council one conduct a public hearing under the requirements of the tax equity fiscal responsibility act, an internal revenue code of 1986, and California Government Code, Section 6500, and two by resolution approve the issuance of tax-exempt multifamily housing revenue bonds by the California Statewide Communities Development Authority in an aggregate principal amount not to exceed 20 million to finance a portion of the acquisition, rehabilitation, improvement, and equipping of Santa Rosa Garden Apartments 4601, Montgomery Drive within the City of Santa Rosa.

This item has no impact on the current fiscal budget year budget.

This concludes the presentation.

And in addition to staff, we have Peter Wallace participating remotely on behalf of uh uh the project sponsor to answer any questions that you may have.

Thank you, Angela Kelly, and Peter.

Bringing it back to council.

Any questions?

Have there ever been any questions on a TEFRA hearing?

Did you?

Oh, I would have we'll have to we'll have to talk about that.

All right, no no questions from council, surprisingly.

Let's open it up to public comment.

Would any members of the public?

Oh, Fred, thank heavens.

This is your time.

The first ever public comment on a TEFRA hearing.

Um, I'd like to support this item.

Thank you.

Thank you very much, Fred.

Are there any other well, actually, it's not that I should, I gotta I gotta actually open this up.

All right, I'm opening the public hearing.

Fred will count you, we'll grandfather you into the public hearing.

Are there other members of the public who would like to participate in this public hearing who are here in council chambers?

Seeing none, we'll go online.

Lauren, anybody online?

We have anybody on Zoom who would like to make public comment regarding this item, please raise your hand.

If you dialed in via telephone, you press star nine to raise your hand.

Mayor, we have no hands raised.

Thank you.

All right.

I will now close the public hearing and I will look to Miss McDonald for a motion and any final discussion.

Thank you, Mayor.

I move the adoption of the resolution of the council of the city of Santa Rosa, approving the issuance of the tax exempt revenue bonds by the California Statewide Communities Development Authority and an aggregate principal amount not to exceed 20 million dollars for Santa Rosa Garden Apartments 4601 Montgomery Drive.

And waive further reading of the text.

Perfect.

All right, we have a motion.

We have a second by Miss Rogers.

Is there any final discussion?

Seeing none, Madam City Clerk, we can call the vote.

Thank you, Mayor.

Councilmember Rogers.

Aye.

Councilmember McDonald.

Aye.

Councilmember Fleming.

Councilmember Ben Wellos.

Yes.

Councilmember Alvarez.

Vice Mayor Krepke.

Aye.

Mayor Step.

Yes.

Let the record show this passes unanimously.

Thank you all.

All right.

That includes so we're all of our time-sensitive items are taken care of.

Let's uh let's go back to where we were.

I think it was number nine.

Our city manager and city attorney's reports.

And it should be uh thank you both, Angela Kelly.

Thank you, but thank you both.

Sorry that there weren't uh wasn't more engagement this time around.

Um go to our city man, our item nine, our city manager and city attorney's reports, and it should be noted that this is the first time we have both our we have our our full new team present here with our new city manager Jason Nutt and our new city attorney Ashley Crocker.

Welcome to you both officially.

This is this is your time to shine.

Any any reports from either of you?

No reports from the city attorney's office this evening.

That was your inaugural right there.

And thank you, Mayor.

I do have a brief report.

Uh, I'd just like to start by thanking the council for appointing me as the interim.

Um, and I'm both excited to keep things rolling as we continue down the path of achieving both organizational fiscal stability.

Um, but with my transition into this role, I'm pleased to announce that I appointed Dominique Blanchi as the acting assistant city manager.

Um, for those of you uh in the audience, you may know Dominique through her role as human resource director and previously as risk manager.

Uh she has a extensive knowledge of the organization, collaborative leadership style, and strong commitment to the employees and community, and I'm excited to partner with her in this role.

Um we also want to talk about our recreation and Paul uh recreation and parks fall winter activity guide.

Uh I'm really pleased to share that Santa Rosa Recreation and Parks is releasing its new fall winter activity guide this week, packed with opportunities for residents of all ages to stay active, learn something new and connect with the community.

The guide will be available online at Santa RosaRec.com beginning Thursday afternoon and features everything from youth and adult fitness classes, top programs, senior center activities to sports leagues, tours, special events, fall swim lessons, mayor fall swim lessons, um, winter camps and more printed copies will also be available starting Friday, July 24th at Finley Community Center.

Uh we encourage community members to take a look and start planning their fall and winter activities now.

Registration opens at 7 a.m.

on Thursday, July 30th, and many of these popular programs will fill quickly.

So early registration is recommended.

I'd like to also take a moment to invite our community to participate in the Santa Rosa, City of Santa Rosa blood drive on Tuesday, July 21st from 10 a.m.

to 145 p.m.

Uh the Vitalent Blood Mobile, uh Blood Mobile Blood Mobile will be located at the City Hall campus at the corner of First Street and Santa Rosa Avenue.

A single blood donation can help save multiple lives, and the need for blood remains constant throughout our region.

Appointments are recommended and can be made at SRCity.org forward slash calendar.

We hope you'll join us in supporting this important community effort and helping ensure life-saving blood is available when it's needed most.

And on July 13th, the City of Santa Rosa will be issuing and accepting candidate nomination applications for residents interested in running for city council in districts two, four, and six in the November 2026 general election.

That's today.

I found my calendar.

Um prospective candidates have until 5 p.m.

on August 7th to submit all required documents and demonstrate eligibility for more information, including the city's guide for elected officials, nomination timeline, and district maps.

Visit SRCity.org forward slash council candidate.

That's one word at council candidate.

And thank you for correcting my calendar.

That's all of my uh updates for today, Mayor.

Thank you, City Manager Nutt.

All right, we'll open it up to public comment.

Would any members of the public in chamber like to comment on on either of those reports?

Seeing none, we'll go online.

Lauren, our Zoom host, are there any online public comments?

Zoom folks, we are now taking public comment on this item.

If you'd like to speak, please raise your hand.

You dialed in, please press star nine to raise your hand.

No hands, Mayor.

Thank you.

We'll close public comment.

Uh and we'll just say uh welcome and congratulations again to both of you, Jason and Ashley, and of course, also to Dominique.

Welcome to the ACM roll.

All applause there.

We'll have quiet applause.

All right.

No welcome.

We will then we will close this item.

We'll go on to item 10 of statements of abstention or accusal by council members.

Are there any statements of abstention or recusal this week?

Seeing none, we'll go on to item 11.

Mayor and council members' reports.

Are there any members of council who wish to make a report this week?

Ms.

Rogers, kick us off.

Thank you, Mayor.

I'll make mine quick.

So I've been quite busy.

It seemed like we had a pretty long break.

Um during that break, I was able to go on a ride along with our our lab to see what they do as far as our asphalt congregate is concerned.

I I learned something, uh city manager.

Um and then also tour our village closet.

I wanted to take a quick second to thank our mayor, our vice mayor, and council member Alvarez for me seeing a need in the community and helping to donate um over 25 winter coats for the children in our community, um, and also other very cute items that I saw at the store.

So thank the three of you for allowing me to go shopping for the children in our community that need it the most.

Um, or one of the groups of children in our community that needed the most.

I know there's a lot of children in our community that need help.

Um I was also able to take a water supply tour, so thank you to Director Jennifer Burke and Sonoma Water for taking me on the tour.

And lastly, I wanted to give a shout out to um Chad Hedge, who is our parking manager for putting on a fabulous golf tournament yesterday for tunnels to towers, Sonoma County Golf Tournament.

Um, if you do not know what tunnels to towers is, I would definitely Google it and look it up.

But it is great to see um our staff participating and contributing not only when they're at work, but when they're off work when they see a need in the community.

So thank you so much, Chad, um, for your hard work and dedication to our veterans and um public safety.

And that concludes my report.

Thank you.

Miss Ben Wellos.

Thank you, Mayor.

I just had a really quick one uh from uh my last meeting with the Sonoma County Homeless Coalition.

Uh just a couple of things.

Um County staff presented on the Behavioral Health Services Act Integrated Plan, which includes approximately 41.7 million over three years for housing interventions for people with serious behavioral health conditions, including homelessness prevention, non-congregate shelter, housing navigation, and landlord outreach, rental assistance, and permanent supportive housing.

And the second item is county staff reported on the federal uh continuum of care notice of funding opportunity, the NOFO, that was released on June 1st.

The NOFO creates uh contradictory best practices at our state and federal levels, and it puts 115 units of permanent supportive housing at risk of being lost and shifts funding's priorities towards new transitional housing and service-only projects.

Uh so things are really changing under the federal government, particularly.

If any projects close, residents will be transferred into existing projects as units become available through turnover or into new projects supported by Behavioral Health Services Act funding, likely delaying housing access for people currently experience homelessness.

So conversations are ongoing regarding project reallocation and sustainability.

And so, of course, we have a lot of um concerns about these changes, and um hopefully we have a special meeting in August besides our regular meeting to address some of this.

So hopefully I'll have more information coming.

So thank you.

Thank you for that update.

Um Vice Mayor O'Kropkey.

Thank you.

Uh two things to highlight.

Um, first, last week on Thursday, I was able to attend uh Love of the Land by the uh Sonoma County Farm Bureau.

Um it's always uh a great reminder about the agricultural community in this uh uh county.

Um while more recently we are known for wine and wine grapes.

Uh there is a long history of dairy and lamb and other uh agricultural products that built this um county and this city.

So it was a great time.

Uh and so thanks to the Sonom County Farm Bureau for putting that on.

Secondly, um, another shout out to Chad Hedge, uh, not only for the tunnel to tower um golf tournament, but he was able to talk to the Tunnels of Towers Foundation and get an event uh or get a um a unique experience for our community, which is Steel Across America to come to Santa Rosa and camp out uh at um Windsor Golf course.

Uh Steel Across America is the um uh is an exhibit of a uh steel beam salvaged from ground zero and was part of the South Tower of the World Trade Center and is traveled across the United States on this uh 25th anniversary.

We're approaching of that uh incredibly tragic day.

And uh I had the honor of being asked by um by Chad to be a part of a uh police and fire escort to bring it from where it was being stored.

So special shout out to the fire department for storing it at their training center.

Umly enough, we sorted the training center because it was the safest place closest to San Francisco.

San Francisco what didn't have a place safe enough to store it, so we stored it for them uh for a couple of days.

But we um Santa Rosa Police Department, Sonoma County Fire, Santa Rosa Fire, the Sheriff, uh Sebastian Pool PD, CHP, uh license sirens um took it up there, and um the shout out to the honor guard from both fire and police, as well as the um color guard from the Coast Guard who and the bagpiper who gave it the proper respect it deserves.

It was a it was a really uh incredible thing to be a part of in the city.

So thanks to Chad for putting that together and for our departments for working with him to honor that.

Thank you for those.

Any other updates?

All right, we'll go to public comment.

Would any members of the public like to comment on any of these reports?

Seeing none in house, we'll go online.

Lauren or Zoom host, are there any online comments?

We're taking public comment via Zoom for this item.

If you'd like to speak, please raise your hand.

If you dialed in, please press star nine.

No hands, Mayor.

Thank you.

All right, we'll close public comment and we will move on to item 11.2.1, an appointment of an alternate to our zero waste Sonoma agency.

We have uh historically had a staff representative, and until recently, until recently, this was Josh uh Christianson.

But because Josh was having conflicts in his schedule, and because Dan Hennessy has lots of open time slots on his calendar, Dan has volunteered to step up and be the uh be the staff appointment.

Uh and so I'll ask for a motion and a second here in a moment, but let's first go to public comment.

Are there any members of the uh are there any members of the public who wish to comment on this item in in chamber?

Seeing none, anybody online?

Madam Zoom host.

Is there anybody online who'd like to speak on this item?

Please raise your hand.

No hands, Mayor.

Thank you.

We'll close public comment and I'll look for a motion and a second to appoint Dan Hennessy as the as the alternate to the Zero Waste Board.

So moved.

Second, all right.

We have a motion by Mr.

O'Krepke and a second by Ms.

Rogers.

If there's any any discussion on this item.

Then let's call the vote.

Madam City Clerk, whenever you're whenever you're ready.

Council Member Rogers.

Aye.

Councilmember McDonald.

Councilmember Fleming.

Councilmember Banuellos.

Yes.

Councilmember Alvarez.

Vice Mayor O'Krepke.

Aye.

Mayor Stepp.

Yes.

Let the record show this passes unanimously.

Thank you.

And congratulations, Dan.

We'll just let that let that sit for a second.

Item 11, we'll move on to item 11.3.1.

Uh a request for an agenda item regarding unpermitted food vendors.

I believe this came up last week with Mr.

Alvarez and also Ms.

Rogers seconded.

Uh so we'll we'll determine whether the council wants to send this forward.

But do I remember correctly that that Mr.

Nutt, our city manager wanted to say a few words on this item, or did we have some staff feedback?

I think this area I'd like to uh invite Director Osborne to come down and talk about there.

There are some areas within our existing purview that can uh cover a number of these spaces, and we want you to take that into consideration before you move this forward.

Thank you, city manager, and good evening, Mayor, Vice Mayor, and members of the council.

Uh mobile food vending is currently regulated by city regulations.

It also has protective measures under state law.

Um we've gone through over the last year a pretty robust educational campaign to instruct community members on what the rights are for mobile regulations.

And I also need to point out there's a heavy element of Sonoma County Health.

Uh so due to some of the confusion because state law has changed, state law has provided allowances over the years.

There's been two pieces of legislation that have really went after local jurisdictions for heavily enforcing on mobile food vending.

Uh so what's asked recommendation would be at this point if the council elects to move this forward, it may be helpful to conduct a study session first that goes over existing regulations.

Uh we can partner with our other agencies, specifically Sonoma County Health to understand their enforcement.

Uh, we also have an enforcement effort through Santa Rosa Police Department and Environmental Crimes.

Uh, that's very specific to illegal discharges, is some of the concerns that were brought up in the previous conversation.

Uh so we believe we can just conduct that through a staff briefing or a study session to allow the council to better understand the various regulations and provide feedback to staff for direction moving forward.

Thank you, Mr.

Osburn.

Uh questions or comments from Mr.

Alvarez.

Thank you for that.

I do appreciate that.

In fact, uh the first words that I have on my paper is study station.

And the reason is, and a little bit of context to the to the issue is being that Santa Rosa incorporated uh Roseland almost a decade ago.

And it's relatively a new problem that we are facing as a city, which are the unpermitted food vendors.

And I do understand that it's also a public safety issue among amongst other things.

So for me, the purpose of bringing this item forward was really to get a better understanding of the limitations and obstacles that code enforcement does face in regulating uh the the environmental or negative environmental impact that's being done.

So for me, it's definitely educating myself and hopefully through that education, being able to develop a better support system for our staff to enforce the policy that we have in place with the intent of really seizing the opportunity to support the entrepreneurial spirit through compliance and also through tax revenue generation.

So I definitely do agree with the study session, and I hope that we can move forward with that.

Thank you.

Other questions or thoughts?

Ms.

Benwellis.

Yeah, I just want to support that.

Thank you, Gabe, for clarifying.

Um I just want to support that because I know when we do sink of the mile every year, it's really confusing, especially since annexation, about where it's legal and where, you know, and and the health concerns also come up.

But what happens for us is vendors come out of the woodwork and there's so many.

So I understand that there it would be additional work for code enforcement as well, big time.

So I think I really want to support a study session so we can really look further into this and see if it's even feasible.

So thank you.

Thank you.

Other questions?

Let's go to public comment before doing a motion.

Uh Mr.

DeWitt.

Hello, my name is Dwayne DeWitt.

I'm from Roseland.

Yes, I support having a study session.

And I do hope that you folks will work out a cost-sharing method with the county so that you can look at this as a tax and revenue enhancement effort.

This is the kind of thing we don't want to squander the opportunity that comes forward from these entrepreneurs who are out there doing what they do.

And let's bless the whole city with it.

Roseland's blessed.

Everybody should have just as many blessings as Roseland has.

You should be able to do this anywhere in the entire city limits of Santa Rosa and pay your legal fees.

If these people abide by the law, you'll get some increased revenue.

And if you work with the county's department of health and make sure that everybody's on the same page, the county will also be benefiting.

So city and county would work together and it would pay its own way if handled correctly.

So I'm all for all those folks doing what they do, whatever their uh their wares are, if you will.

Let them pursue that path of private entrepreneurial enterprise and move us all forward.

And I'll get some good burritos and tamales and some other good stuff down the road also.

And not to forget, you got Las Frutas.

And not to forget, you got Las Frutas, you got to ask, you know, it's halados, man, it's the time of the year.

So let's let everybody jump in on this.

Thank you kindly.

Thank you, Dwayne.

Mr.

Hilbert.

This had been about consideration of issuing a permit for Greece disposal for unpermitted food vendors, whereby a permit to dispose of Greece properly would encourage a proper disposal of it.

But you know, that's obviously untenable just from a legal standpoint.

You can't issue a permit to an unpermitted food vendor.

Um you know, it's really more like a code enforcement type matter.

Uh you're not gonna be issuing a permit for uh Greece disposal for unpermitted uh food vendors.

And uh I think Dwayne DeWitt also brought up the issue of um uh sales tax collection.

Uh so it's certainly unfair to the to the established licensed vendors who are collecting sales tax to uh uh force them to commit compete with um you know some people are selling food uh for cash and no taxes collected, so that's another issue.

Thank you, Michael.

Are there any other uh individuals in council chambers that wish to speak?

Seeing none, we'll go online.

Madam Zoom host, is there anybody online that wishes to make public comment?

Anyone participating via Zoom would like to make a comment, please raise your hand.

Star nine if you dialed in.

Mayor no hand.

Thank you.

We'll close public comment and I'll look for a motion and a second.

Mr.

Alvarez?

Yes, I would like to make a motion that we hold a study session to address uh unpermitted food vendors.

Second.

We have a motion and a second by Ms.

Rogers.

Madam City Clerk, you can call the vote whenever whenever you're ready.

Councilmember Rogers?

Aye, Councilmember McDonald.

Aye, Councilmember Fleming?

Yes.

Councilmember Ben Wellos?

Yes.

Councilmember Alvarez.

Vice Mayor O'Krepki.

Aye.

Mayor Staff.

Yes.

Let the record show this passes unanimously.

Thank you.

We'll go on to item 12, our approval of minutes.

We have two sets of minutes this week.

Item 12 point or uh item 12.1 are June 2nd at 2026 minutes, and then item 12.2 or June 16th, 2026 minutes.

Are there any amendments to the minutes looking to counsel?

Seeing none, I'll ask for any public comment in chambers.

Are there any members of the public who wish to comment on either set of minutes?

Seeing no one in person, Madam Zoom host, anybody online wish to comment on minutes on the minutes?

Would anybody participating via Zoom like to make public comment on this item?

Raise your hand, please.

Star 9 if you dialed in.

No hands, Mayor.

Back to you.

Thank you.

We'll close public comment and we will adopt the minutes as submitted, which brings us then to our consent calendar.

Uh, we have 10 items this evening, items 13.1 through 13.10.

Are there any questions or any desire to poll any of the consent items looking to counsel?

Seeing none, we'll we'll go to public comment.

Would any members of the public in council chambers wish to comment on any of the consent items?

Mr.

Farron, we'll start with you.

Well, 13.8.

As you know, I'm on the oversight committee for the county for the allocation of uh measure O funds, and we have a constant dialogue between the city and the county, and between all cities and the county over the use of measure O funds.

So I want to point out to you and to the public that this morning.

Well, first of all, you're getting 4.6 million dollars.

And I hope you appreciate that.

We fought hard to do that.

But I also want to point out that we gave 3.2 million dollars just to the cities of Qatati, Runner Park, and Sonoma State this morning, and 3.2 million dollars to Petaluma this morning, all out of measure O.

We also gave 1.8 million dollars out of the uh what used to be called the uh Mental Health Services Act, which is now called the Behavioral Health Services Act.

So a total of 12.8 million dollars was given out this morning to a lot of cities and to yourselves.

And as your report indicates, we've given you five million dollars over the last four years.

That's 18 million dollars out of a pot that never anticipated any of this dollars going out for this cause.

If you read Measure O, one of my jobs is to make sure that the voters get what they voted for.

This is sort of precarious because no one ever said we want mobile crisis units.

Now I say that to say that we're doing it because it's a need and because you asked for it.

But we're also asking you and the public to renew this tax.

In four years, we're gonna, it'll be over.

This 240 million dollars worth of local taxes is point well taken, Gregory.

Thank you.

Well advocated.

Mr.

Hilbert um object to this 4.6 million dollars.

It's a waste of money and inappropriate spending.

Um I tell you, I was smart enough to vote against measure, and I only wish a lot more other voters were smart enough to you know vote against these taxes because it ends up being money wasted.

If you look at uh what I submitted for item 14 general public comment, it bears on this because I included some commentary and a couple of pictures, so take a good look at that.

Um, since the people in the audience can't see it, I'll tell you what it shows.

It shows uh a methamphetamine user sitting on the sidewalk along 4th Street with his pipe right there out in the open, like you know, that's a normal thing.

A meth user with his pipe just sitting there in broad daylight.

The reality is that San Rose is up to his ears and methamphetamine users, and that's the number one problem, not mental health, it's a drugs.

You quit the lion, look at the look at what the reality is.

Um, you know, I just saw him with the witness firsthand in response in action.

There was a Jackta methamphetamine user throwing a fit and they were trying to calm him down.

You know, what they did is they offered him uh free new socks, you know.

He don't need free new socks, he needs his drugs taken away from him.

That's it.

Thank you, Michael.

Mr.

DeWitt.

Hello, my name is Dwayne DeWitt.

I'm from Roseland.

On the consent items tonight, there's some big money being spent in some places that I think we need to kind of rein in this type of spending.

On 13.

You look at it like, well, it's other people's money.

But to spend almost 40 million dollars to put a bike bridge across the freeway is stunning.

We had one over here.

The city tore it down.

We've still got one over at Davis Park.

They work well without having to spend such large amounts of money for these Cadillac kind of situations.

If you could save money there, that would help you elsewhere, perhaps.

And then on 13.6.

Community gardens are the type of thing that the community is supposed to start themselves, and they don't necessarily have to have the government support with money.

It's stunning to give almost two million dollars to some people to say we're gonna put a community garden in.

It got started up with the help of the city deeding or perhaps not made that word, but allocating land to land paths and letting them run a community garden there.

They're a lot of work.

Folks usually just don't step up and start doing garden plots unless somebody's helping them.

Giving two million dollars, though, for a community garden is just stunning.

It's like, wait a minute, folks, you could be out there with your plot of land and get it going and not have to spend these uh large amounts of money.

Although to many people I realize millions don't seem as much as they used to.

And then last but not least, I want to make sure on 310 that the drought response, you work hard on that.

Thank you, Duane.

Are there any other members of the public in council chambers who wish to speak?

Seeing none, we'll go online.

Lauren, any online public comment.

For folks participating via Zoom.

If you'd like to make a comment on the consent calendar, please raise your hand.

Star nine if you dialed in.

No hands, mayor.

Thank you.

We'll close public comment and I'll look to our vice mayor for a motion.

I'll move to adopt consent items 13.1 through 13.10 as submitted by staff.

We have a motion and a second by Mr.

Alvarez.

Madam City Clerk, you can call the vote whenever you're ready.

Thank you, Councilmember Rogers.

Aye.

Councilmember McDonald.

Aye.

Councilmember Fleming.

Councilmember Benuelos.

Yes.

Councilmember Alvarez.

Vice Mayor O'Krupkey.

Aye.

Mayor Stepp.

Yes.

Let the record show this passes unanimously.

Thank you.

All right, we'll move on to item 15.1, our report, our diversity report on city council boards, commissions, and committees.

Ms.

Manis, our city clerk.

This is this is your moment.

Welcome.

Good evening, Mayor, Vice Mayor, Council.

Thank you for having me here this evening, Dina Manis, City Clerk, here today to present to you the board's commissions and committee diversity report data on 2025.

So today's highlights, we're gonna cover the charter requirements for the annual report.

Um and we'll do an overview of the 2025 data that was provided, and we'll touch briefly on the diversity data portal that was developed in 2025.

Just making sure we still have a quorum.

Thank you.

Um the charter requirements include uh or section 11 of the charter requires reporting on the following boards and commissions that you see on the screen.

And while the section of the city charter states that it doesn't apply to the district commission, which now is called CAB, and or the personnel board, the building regulation appeals board, or the housing authority boards, we felt it important uh to report those statistics because council makes full appointments to those boards as well.

So here's the overview.

In 2025, applicants we had 106 applicants from 81 unique individuals, and from those 106 applications, we had 45 appointments made.

On those appointments, we had 100% provide gender and ethnicity information, 89% pro reported age range information, and 100% reported home and home address information, so we could track to see which districts they are being appointed from.

You can see here on this slide on gender, we had 81 applicants as previously stated, 45 appointees, and we had 25 female appointees and 22.

I'm sorry, 23 female appointees and 22 male appointees.

And women and men continue to apply in more or less equal measure, and in 2025, females received about 60 percent appointment rate compared to 2024 appointment rate, uh, when women saw an appointment rate of just 19 percent.

Uh there's an indication there of a concerted effort to make advances in gender equity and representation and appointments on ethnicity.

You can see here uh a significant breakdown on this bar chart, uh, but we're gonna move over to the next table that uh provides a little bit more detail.

So on this table here on ethnicity diversity, it compares the applicant to the appointee to the community information found on the 2020 census.

And despite being the largest group of applicants, Caucasians represent Caucasian representation among appointees is now within 16 percentage points of the community representation, which is 48 percent.

Hispanic appointees, a total of 15 percent of the appointments exceed their share of the applicant pool, which is 11 percent, reflecting strong outreach efforts and inclusion efforts.

Um, and it's emphasized by the high 78 percent appointment rate.

However, Hispanic appointees remain under the 30 37 percent of the community representation.

African American applicants received two appointments this cycle, addressing the gap presented in the 2024 cycle, where zero African American candidates were appointed.

Applicants who identified as others saw an 80% appointment rate, which may reflect an enhanced inclusion effort as well.

Here is the standing bar chart on the districts.

Again, and a few years back, we shifted to tracking by district boundaries rather than cab boundaries.

And in 2024, the annual report identified districts two and seven as being underrepresented with zero appointments made from either district that year.

Both districts saw a substantial substantial increase in representation with 70% of active members from the districts being appointed in 2025.

Districts four or pardon me, district four continues to lead with 25 applicants and 31% of total appointments.

So the number of older applicants or 56 plus continues to lead.

However, the relatively low appointment rate of 32% suggests more concerted or more accurately reflect the composition of the community.

The 18 to 35 age range saw a strong appointment rate relative to its application share, suggesting an ongoing effort in youth representation, although youth might, depending on who you talk to, 18 to 35.

That's a really broad bracket, and maybe 35 isn't useful, but to some it is subjective.

And yet the 18 to 35 year olds still under apply.

So in reviewing the applicant rate, reviewing the appointment rate helps assess how effectively applicants from each group or district are being selected.

It may reveal whether certain demographics are fairly represented and highlights areas where efforts are needed to address the inequities.

A high appointment rate may indicate strong alignment with selection criteria.

Or successful diversity outreach, while a low rate may suggest barriers or mismatches in the selection process.

The city may leverage recruitment information or recruitment response data to better inform targeted outreach strategies tailored to each group's preferred communication style to further enhance the diversity of the City of Santa Rosa boards and commissions.

We are always looking for ways to diversify our recruitment efforts.

You can go to srcity.org forward slash boards to apply.

You're gonna hear me plug this several times for the remaining couple of slides.

So historically, our recruitment efforts have included advertisements in the Press Democrat and LaVos and on some community boards, but over the last few years, the deputy city clerk, myself, and the community engagement team have really tried to increase our efforts with more listings in the City Connections news letter that goes out.

The social media reels are getting replayed and getting some traction on appointments or applicants.

Receive our monthly or quarterly recruitment flyers with updates as needed.

That other categories, the broadest sometimes it is one that people use this just to catch all when they're reporting data or responding to questions.

Again, our community engagement team has been doing wonderful things at every community event they attend.

They have our recruitment flyers on your behalf at every table that they support.

They're talking to community members.

If they're rolling up on bicycles, I know the meeting that or the event that I was supporting, every bicycle person who rolled up or was wearing a helmet or pushing a scooter.

I was saying, boy, you look like you could be a candidate for a perfect applicant for our bicycle and pedestrian advisory board.

Um, and just starting to engage people and have a conversation about the appointment needs for our boards and commissions.

And you can do that too.

I know you you all do.

Um I am considering putting a bot uh a flyer up at my gym.

Um, just little efforts like that.

You know, if you need flyers to post at your frequent haunts, we will happy happily provide them to you so you can post them at the Swim Center.

We're posting them over at uh Finley.

So we are we're continually looking for avenues to explore.

So if council members have ideas that we can explore to help improve your recruitment efforts, please say the word.

Uh the deputy city clerk and I want to uh give you a pool of applicants so when you have an unexpected vacancy, you have um some wonderful candidates to select from to uh represent you in your seat on those boards and commissions.

Our current vacancies include seats on the APPC, our art in public places, the bicycle and pedestrian advisory board, the board of building regulation appeals, the board of public utilities, the community advisory board, the design review and preservation board, and the public safety and prevention tax citizens oversight committee.

For those watching, you can click on the or take a picture of this QR code and go to city uh srcity.org forward slash boards to apply.

And if you're curious, uh in 2025, our administrative analyst, Luke Faser, developed a diversity data portal, and the interactive dashboard allows the public to dynamically explore and compare the data presented in the report statics graph, static graphs, and council members can also use the uh dashboard as well.

With that, mayor, vice mayor, council, the city clerk's office recommends that the council by motion accept the annual report on diversity of city council appointees and boards and commissions for the reporting year of 2025.

Madam City Clerk, thank you so much for all the work that went into this report and for the even more work that you do recruiting people to the boards and managing this process.

Um it's it's so important to the city.

Thank you very much.

Uh any questions from council?

Ms.

Rogers.

I don't have a question, but I would like to say thank you very much for you and your team for the recruitment efforts and being very innovative.

I know that when I agreed to run for council, um, I was not told the full truth about the extent of the work and or um what it entail.

And so um I think it's very important that you're providing very factual good information for our community members to make uh educated choices about whether or not they want to participate.

So thank you so much for that.

Thank you, council member.

Thank you, Miss Ben Willis.

Thank you, Mayor.

Thank you, um, Madam City Clerk for for your report.

It's it's very thorough.

And I just had a one quick question.

Um slide five, there it's it indicates there's uh in 2025, the number of applicants was 106 applicants, and forgive me, I don't know what 81 unique means.

So um say you were applying for a board and commission, and you decided you as one person you wanted to apply to five, so you'd have a better opportunity to get appointed to at least one board.

Okay, and so it's um you submitted five different applications.

So 106 applications by 81 people.

So so 81 people submitted more than one.

Is that what you're saying?

81 people submitted 106 applications total.

Oh, okay.

Exactly.

All right, that's another way of saying I think I said the same thing.

Okay.

And just so you know, I am still struggling to fill the bicycle and pedestrian.

I'm trying to fill bicycle and pedestrian.

I am interviewing someone who hasn't quite said yes.

Um, and just so you know, um, even the chair um called me and said, When are you gonna do this?

So that's been my one struggle.

I don't know why.

Um, but thank you for all your work and all the work that um Rhonda as well does.

It's it's um really important work.

Uh, you know, I've served on three committees back in the day, so I know um how hard it is to find folks who um are committed and and have the time and and that I think that's the biggest obstacle.

So thank you so much for all your work.

Yeah, and I think you bring up a very good point, Councilmember Ben Wellows, that it is challenging.

We know that you guys are actively, as you are out in the community um supporting and serving the city of Santa Rosa, you're actively looking for your board and commission members and asking people to apply.

Um but we also understand that the challenges are um it's hard to find time to volunteer and take time off work or have opportunities from your work that are flexible to pull off your your paid position to come volunteer.

Um there is limited flexibility in the Brown Act about remote participation and how we can apply those provisions.

So we're up against it.

It's it's not unique to the city of Santa Rosa either.

It's um agencies up and down California.

Thank you, uh Ms.

McDonald.

Thank you for the presentation.

And I just have a couple questions.

Is it in our city charter that you have to be over the age of 18 to serve on some of our advisory committees?

Is that a state law or is that our law?

That is um in our city council policy on board appointments.

You have to be 18.

And there have been some carve-outs made recently.

I think the Board of Um Park and Recreations does have a non-voting under 18 position.

Yeah, so there's a votes are one thing.

I'm asking about straight appointed positions.

Is it in the charter or is it in it's in a policy book that we could bring back and consider potentially?

I can look to confirm that whether or not it's in the I don't think it's in the charter, but I do believe it is in Council Policy 06 on board appointments that um appointees have to be 18 or over.

I appreciate that.

And my only comment to that is I do think there's some positions that might be um filled potentially from a younger student, like a uh maybe a senior in high school or junior in high school, and that would be like art in a public place or the bicycle pedestrian, people who actually are in uh art programs or or that our youth in the community.

And I don't see any harm in in maybe if we're having a hard time filling positions, expanding it to maybe some of our youth community members that have an interest, unless there's some legal reason we we can't do that, it might give us um a little bit more latitude of who we could recruit.

Um, and oftentimes some of those young students go to our JC, and then there's like a whole nother area of uh um voice that we might not be hearing in our community.

So it's just food for thought.

I'd be interested in seeing how that could be.

And then my other question to you, Dina, is I know some of our meetings are set like at five o'clock in the afternoon or at specific times, plannings all day long.

Um, there's certain ones, Board of Public Utilities, I know those are different voting boards, but have we ever looked at the time that we're holding our meetings and asked maybe um in a survey, is that part of the problem of why our volunteers aren't able to commit the time frame?

So um oftentimes we think we're gonna have a meeting at five o'clock and that works for everybody, but not if they don't get off work till 5 30.

And so I'm just curious if if we've looked at that.

Thank you, Councilmember McDonald.

Those are terrific questions.

Um, and I in my time as city clerk, I have not pulled the community related to their um the challenges they face to serve as a board or commission member.

And that is something that I have, you know, through assistance or interim city manager and our director of uh intergovernmental relations with um director would um I can see about doing a poll similar to that to see what the challenges are to try and identify the challenges for people who are in the world.

No longer spare time, do you know why you need to do this?

But I I just find that um since we're struggling to get some of those positions, sometimes it's really incumbent upon us to reach out to the community to say, is our timeline not working for you?

And um, we found that to be so a lot of times in schools when we were hosting meetings or having a PTA meeting, it just wasn't working for parents and families, and so um maybe that's something the city needs to take a look at is how our model is working for community members or how it is not.

If we really want diversity and equity and to make sure that all our voices are be able to be at the table, but I appreciate the information being put in black and white for us to realize and appreciate all your recruitment efforts for you and your whole team.

Thanks, Dina.

Thank you.

Thank you.

All right, we've got a public comment.

Any members of the public wish to comment on this item?

Mr.

Farron.

You're up.

Oh sorry, we've are we are forcing our city clerk to multitask.

Dean, I didn't mean to make you sprint.

All right.

All right, one moment, Gregory.

Gregory, you're up.

Mayor Stampin' Members of the board.

I was one of those kids in high school that served on a board, and I appreciated it.

So uh Diana, I really appreciate your comments.

I think there is a role for young people.

In fact, I also want to report that my wife and I have incorporated a new nonprofit here in Sonoma County, took it all the way to a 501c3.

It's called Sonoma Transitional Age Youth Advisory Board.

It's a real nonprofit, and we are trying to pay for out-of-pocket costs, transportation, food, and uh other kinds of costs for anyone between the ages of 18 and 25 to serve on either city or county boards uh to be able to provide the kind of support that they need.

So if all of you, if any of you run into somebody who wants to serve on your board and expresses a little difficulty because they either you know can't get to it because they don't have a car, they have problems, whatever they are.

This new young advisory board is going to be working on helping their friends and colleagues get onto boards at the city and county level.

Great to know.

Thank you, Gregory.

Mr.

DeWitt.

Hello, my name is Dwayne DeWitt.

I'm from Roseland.

Thank you for council member McDonald's comments.

It's really good to see that these directives are being followed.

I was at the first meetings when these first studies were being discussed and brought forward.

We still don't have much diversity.

And I'd like to see a lot of young people.

Open it up to 16 and 17 year olds.

Set it up so a lot of meetings are after the school day.

I think having meetings in the middle of the day is actually counterproductive.

And then really reaching out to the youth and helping them understand this is a foot in the door to possible employment in the future.

If people were able to understand that they could utilize experience that they obtain by serving on a board or a commission to then enhance their employability in the future, they will see those positive things.

There was a body that I first started with called the Waterways Advisory Committee.

And it was an excellent thing, but it was like at eight or nine in the morning.

Young people could be involved with things like that.

I don't know exactly how you're going to handle all this, but when you've only got two black people, two Asian people, and in a city of 180,000 people on boards and commissions, we're still not getting there.

So we really need to get the youth and let them see that there's a possibility for them to enhance our community with their viewpoints.

It will all turn out for the better.

More volunteers the better.

Thank you, Dwayne.

Anybody else, anybody else in Council Chambers wish to speak?

Seeing none, Madam Zoon host, any anybody online?

Folks participating via Zoom.

If you'd like to make a comment, raise your hand.

No hands, Mayor.

Thank you, Lauren.

All right, bring it back to or do we have final comment?

All right, Ms.

Rogers.

I'll make it quick.

I always say that.

Okay.

I just wanted to say that I think um Councilmember McDonald was on to something because youth also have to do so many hours in school of volunteer service, and this could be a way that they're introduced to local government and get those volunteer service hours.

Um in addition, talking about the difficulties of um getting volunteers on our boards and commissions.

I can't let this opportunity pass without for my entire council stating how grateful we are and thankful for those that are currently volunteering because we know that it is a struggle, um, but you're making time, and so thank you so much for doing so.

Thank you.

You're here, thank you.

Ms.

Fleming, do we have a motion?

We have a motion to accept the annual report of the diversity of the city council appointees for the reporting year 2025 and feedback from staff.

Second.

Madam City Clerk, you can call the vote whenever you're ready.

Thank you, Councilmember Rogers.

Aye, Councilmember McDonald.

Aye, Councilmember Fleming?

Yes.

Councilmember Ben Wells?

Yes.

Councilmember Alvarez.

I Vice Mayor Krepke.

I mayor stop.

Yes.

Let the record show this passes unanimously.

Thank you.

All right, we'll move on to item 17.1, our legislative update.

We just want to highlight that we have five different uh letters there listed underneath the legislative section.

We'll move on to item 18, our last public comment on non-agenda matters.

Are there any members of the public who have not already commented who wish to make public comment on any items not listed on the agenda?

Seeing none, we'll go online.

Anybody online wish to make public comment?

Zoom folks, this is your last opportunity to make public comment for this meeting.

Please raise your hand or forever hold your peace.

No hands, Mayor.

Thank you, Lauren.

All right, we will close public comment and we are officially adjourned.