On July 14, 2026, the Santa Rosa City Council met in regular session beginning at 2:30 PM with a closed session, followed by a study session on revenue enhancement at 3:00 PM, and a regular session at 4:00 PM. The meeting lasted until 6:07 PM. All council members were present except Council Member Victoria Fleming for part of the closed session; she joined later and participated in all votes. The council discussed the city's structural deficit, community feedback on services, potential sales tax ballot measure, approved bond financing for affordable housing, adopted consent items, accepted the annual diversity report, and directed staff to schedule a study session on unpermitted food vendors.
The consent agenda was approved unanimously (7-0).
I'd like to ask the host or the interpreter currently on the Spanish channel to commence interpretation of the meeting. For those just joining the meeting, live interpretation in Spanish is available, and members of the public or staff wishing to listen in Spanish can join the Spanish channel by clicking on the interpretation icon in the Zoom toolbar. It looks like a globe. If you're on your cell phone or tablet, locate the three dots, tap them lightly, and put a check mark on your preferred language. Click done to activate and begin the interpretation. Once you join the Spanish channel, we recommend you shut off the main audio so you only hear the Spanish interpretation. Claudia, 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.