Open Government Commission - Regular Meeting

Well, it's us plus sister too.

Okay, it's, it's started.

You got it city of Alameda.

Do we have okay welcome.

All right. I would like to, I'm Lynn Jones. I'd like to welcome everyone to the city of Alameda golf commission meeting on Tuesday, July the fourteenth. We will start with a roll call please. Here. All right. Thank you. First, we are going to open it up for the second agenda item, non-agenda public comment. Has anyone submitted any paperwork to speak?

We do have one speaker. Peter?

Put Pete. Do me a favor, in terms of anybody. You and I haven't met Lily, is it? Yes, hi, I'm Lily.

I am a former golf commissioner. Nice to meet you. And I was here in, say, 16, 17, and 18, and years of Greenway, a lot of construction and so forth. So I just want to go over some things that I don't think have been accomplished still today that we discussed in that period of time. Uh, I started with that. I usually just go to that. Okay. Uh, cart paths. When I was in the commission, they had completed the South course, and we were starting the North course and Mark Logan at that time asked us to wait to do the actual hard paving of the South cart pass until he could do all 36 holes at 1 time. He showed me a sample of a brown textured asphalt that was supposed to be put in. And when the North Coast was built, it was supposed to have the same rolling curves as well as this asphalt that was supposed to be put in. As everybody knows, we've gotten nut chips, which I think is better than dirt, but far So they were promised, I don't know if it was in writing, but I know for a fact that that was supposed to be completed. And the reason we delayed it and allowed them to delay it is that way they can do it in a more economical, feasible way where they can shut down nine holes at a time. It would take three or four days to get the asphalt in on those holes and continue play. And that's the reason we allowed them to have the extra time. As you can see, nothing has been done. I got to talk about this. Also the building. At one time, Ken Campbell, who's still there, presented some drawings of doing some features to the building to make it more modern looking, putting siding on it and so forth. That was presented to the commission in the year. Also ADA approval on the bathrooms. I don't think the bathrooms are still ADA approved. And all those things to me are items that The driving range, we have this every year. It's brought up. New mats at the driving range. They occasionally replace one, but it's still in disrepair. And that's something that's in the actual lease agreement, and they have not applied to it. Also, the lighting at the driving range. Who wants to bring that up? It's in terrible shape. They're lucky if 10% of the lights are working. And that affects you more in the wintertime when people are coming home from work. They would like to have a lit driving range, and they barely have able to see a golf course anywhere out there. So all these things are things that are at the golf course, as far as I'm concerned, that haven't been done. I have one other one here. I want to talk about rates, increases. I know that I see something, somebody there looking at the sheets that are presented back TO THE COMMISSION. I STILL CAN'T UNDERSTAND WHY THE WEEKEND RATE THEY'RE PROPOSING FOR THE SOUTH COURSE TO GO FROM $62 TO $70, WHICH IS A 12.9% INCREASE, WHY THEY'RE ONLY TALKING ABOUT ON THE NON-RESIDENT GOING FROM 89 TO 94, WHICH IS ONLY 5.6 CENTS. WHY ARE THEY INCREASING THE RESIDENT RATE DOUBLE OR DOUBLE WHAT THEY'RE DOING FOR THE NON-RESIDENT? DOESN'T MAKE ANY SENSE TO ME.

so i'm going to ask mr pucci i see that you're attending would you is there anything you would like to bring up or discuss during this agenda item if you do just raise your hand or unmute yourself all right i'm going to say that's not happening hi welcome

All these are being on the light.

No problem. I'm commissioner Jones. I don't think we've met halfway. I don't think so.

It's my first meeting. Oh, but then I haven't met.

All right. Well, welcome. Um, and we'll continue on and then at the end we'll go back around. Okay. Um, is there any other public speaking that we want to do? No one else has submitted. Okay. All right. Agenda then we'll move on to agenda item number three commissioner communications to any of the commissioners have anything that they wish to bring up.

Commissioner for not currently, thank you.

Mr. Shastri. Shastri. Shastri. All right. And then with that, the minutes from the last minute meeting from February 11th, we need to approve. those minutes. Does anyone have any?

Do you need to adjust the roll count?

We'll put it in the meeting minutes that he joined after the roll call. Okay.

Thank you. Are there any adjustments, changes, updates, corrections to the minutes from February 11th? I don't have any.

All right.

If not, may I have a motion to adopt Move to approve the second second. Okay. All in favor of approving the minutes. Hi. Any objections motion passes. There we go. Regular agenda items. We're now on item agenda item. Number 5, we'll start with 5 a, the Greenway golf facility report. Is there anyone from Greenway who is representing Greenway at the meeting tonight?

I don't know if Mr. Pucci is.

Okay. Then we'll move on. So we have no report. Please note it. Do we have anyone from Jim's on the course that wants to do a facility report for Jim's? All right. No one from Jim's is attending. And we will move on to 5C. Since the Director of Parks and Rec is here, would you like to speak?

As part of my regular update, I will provide information on a variety of things, as I've done in the past, about other things that are going on outside the Commission. And then we'll get to some updates specifically tied to the call from Greenway. So just wanted you guys to know about some community events and engagements that are happening. We have our volunteer coastal cleanups. They take place at the second Saturday of the month at 10 a.m. at Seaplane Lagoon. And this is organized by the Community Action for Sustainable Alameda. We have an event on Saturday, July 18th at Franklin Park from 12 to 2. It's our Rhythmics in the Park series. This is a accordion, soul, and line dance. Everyone's welcome. It's free. And then our Alameda Walk series takes place on Saturdays at 9 a.m. The next one takes place at July 25th. It's going to cover Old Town Alameda. And then August 1st will be at Ensenada Beach to the Alameda Point Promenade. And again, those take place at 9 a.m. at those different locations. You can also visit our website for more details and history about some of the other walks. From department highlights, we had over 500 participants and over 2,000 community members enjoy the sandcastle and sculpture contest that was on June 20th at the Crown Memorial State Beach. Our annual Leisure Club talent show took place at the Mastic Social Hall on June 25th with approximately 100 attendants. And then the 4th of July had 190 entrants with 60,000 spectators. A big thank you to Pat Russey and his outstanding team. They're the ones who make it happen every year.

Just a side note, fabulous. Fabulous.

meeting starts in January. So with that, just also to know that our fall and winter registration programs open this month. So if you're looking for after school care for your kids, I know it's summer, but sometimes we have to plan for events that come sooner than we want. So all those activities and programs have opened for fall and winter. For our youth programs, our Tiny Tots and RAP, fall season's open, there's still spots available. Some of the locations have already sold out. Our summer camps, there's a few spots available if you still want one or two things to do before the end of the summer. um you can check out our website for those and then there's special interest classes ongoing for dance fusion lego robotics karate and many more variety have openings not a lot but you can still find some stuff and then we're offering our community rec which is a free program that takes place weekdays from one until four at gene sweeney in lincoln park so you can drop in with your kid there'll be activities for them to do and there's no cost Then our tween teen summer program includes a lot of field trips such as the Discovery Kingdom, Cold Canyon, and many others. They've done some whitewater rafting even. So there's a lot of fun events for teens. For adults, specialty classes include salsa, the kayo, and the art of storytelling. We also have tennis lessons for private and group instruction that are available. and we're offering indoor roller skating Wednesdays from 9 p.m. to 10.30 at the Alameda Point Gym. This has been a sold-out activity that was brought to us at the request of a community group, and we have over 60 people who enjoy it every week. So it's a fun roller skating at the Alameda Point Gym. Back to some other, for some of our older adults, we have Fitness with Kendra. It's a full body workout. It's easily modified for all fitness levels. This takes place at the Mastic Senior Center, Thursdays, August 6th through the 27th, from 11.45 to 12.45 in the social hall. And then we have programs that take place about the knowledge is key, know your Medicare rights. This is taking place Tuesday, August 11th at Mastic in the CERC Media Room. Our aquatic swim lessons are open and I encourage everyone to sign up if they want. We have a full gamut of programs throughout the week and weekends. I just want to point out for our many events that take place through the year, our office assistants at ARPD really do a lion's share of the work. So I'd like to thank Amanda Denoso and Sandy Gottlieb for all their hard work in coordinating the over 1,000 picnic rentals throughout the summer. as well as other family celebrations, all the rentals at the Oak Club, and all the end-of-the-year school facilities. They were both key and essential for our department to do that. We have some project updates. We upgraded the lower Washington athletic field lights to LEDs. A galvanized mainline was rerouted and installed at Cruisy Park. Godfrey Park, there was a shape structure that was vandalized and we've had that repaired and the site has reopened. At Lincoln Park, many of you may know, the driveway has been closed. We have been working on the netting to provide security for the adjoining properties to the field. We're anticipating the road and parking lot opening early next week. We've done a good share of vegetation management at Jane Sweeney Park from Webster to Wood Street. This is all in part of preparing for the future community garden park. And so if you get out to Jane Sweeney, to take a visit. At Longfellow Park, we're installing a new ADA pathway that will connect the center of the park to Haight Street. This is a fully accessible pathway and provides a second entrance into that park. And then the Leidecker Playground has been ordered and expected to arrive in September with installation happening. So now to probably the meat and potatoes of what you guys probably want to know a little bit.

Can I just ask you what the status of the improvements to the park over by Admiral's Cove? It's next to the soccer field over there. Yeah, Estuary Park Phase 2?

Yeah, yeah, sorry about that. I didn't know what that was. I look at it on the map and I don't see a name. Sorry about that. Yeah, Estuary Park, it's our second phase. This park has six pickleball courts in it, two dog parks, an ADA accessible playground, new picnic area, full basketball court. We're anticipating construction wrapping up in late September. Then we have a maintenance grow-in period. We anticipate the park opening to the public sometime in that December, January timeframe. But currently it is on schedule and moving forward. So it's another five and a half acre park for the city. It's off of Mosley. Yeah, Mosley and Mitchell. So it'd be another great addition to that neighborhood since there's not a lot of access to the joint parks. Alright, so with that I'm going to give an update on the Greenway settlement. This is just, this is meant to be brief. You guys know that the settlement was fully released to the public. Overview number one is the agreement that neither party had to make a financial commitment to either one. So the city potentially have an obligation of up to 15 million and so settled for $0. um there's a series of lease updates that was requested most of it is removing language that no longer is applicable as you well know we have three different lease updates and so what they're going to do is compile them all into one agreement and get rid of erroneous outdated information As part of that, one of the negotiations was around a reserve capital fund. The reserve capital fund is not going to be considered required any longer. The original lease, or second update, had it amended to there having to be a quarter million dollars placed into a reserve fund. Should those funds get reduced at any given point, you have to go back up to a quarter million dollars. The real question that we've all run into and was put forward was, The quarter million dollars is really going to be no major number to draw on. Plus the coordination of trying to figure out if it's sitting in a city account, who's going to require the actual work and a lot of complexities. This is probably a simpler model. Now with the settlement done, the golf fund will have a relatively healthy reserve and that will actually be more appropriate for the city to be able to use in the future as that fund continues to build, should there be an underground utility emergency or something that needs to happen. The city also negotiated rights to the audit rights. So the city has the right to do full financial audits with some parameters around the timing, working with an independent auditor. The city has even agreed to pay 50% for the audits to make sure that both parties are committed to it. And so they have those rights. There's some stipulations in there around requirements for the auditors and everything else that our financial team added into those agreements. Another one was This is the first commission I've ever worked on where a lease gave commission agendas and minutes rights to a third party. It's always a city entity that runs those. So ARP will now be responsible for all the agendas and minutes for the commission into the future. What is written in there, it does allow the Greenway to attend virtually. It's not required that they're in person, but it would be required to either do one or the other. So then we also put in a caveat about a meet and confer before a notice of violation is issued. That would be 20 business days so that we would notify them, we'd have time to rectify the situation so that it just sets a timeline and parameter for that. And then probably sort of some of the meat and potatoes that you would like to get to for the green feeds. So in late 2025, early 26, I presented their most recent request for fee increases. As part of the agreement, the city negotiated enacting those fees at the signature of this settlement. But what it also said in there was structure for any future that Greenway committed to. There'll be no more than one fee increase ever in a year. If Greenway chooses not to increase the fees in one year, they can't bank them. The maximum increase to any fee has a maximum of 8%. So that's the maximum they could ever raise any of the fees on residents is 8%. And then they also agreed that no fee increase will take place From the time of signing of the agreement until December 31 of 2027 so there won't be any adjustments to this next year. And then every category will have a minimum of a 10% separation right now there's no parameters in the agreement until this that this is at the minimum. there could never be more than or less than a 10% separation between resident, senior resident youth. Now many of those percentages right now are far greater than those and he has not proposed increasing the junior rates at all. So just putting those out there, those are the key things that occurred out of the settlement. There's a lot of small language adjustments. One of the components that was put in there was there is a statement about both parties working in good faith to have a positive working relationship. So that's run into the agreement. There's also a statement around elected officials and talk disparagingly around Greenway. And that is defined in the document as slander and libel in the state of California. So standard and libel in the state of California is exceptionally difficult to prove. But so it's not so that it's a limiting of what the commissioners can say or the politicians can say, but really it's meant to put out there. It's like, we can talk about problems with each other. We can talk about positive things that we wanna work with. So they're pretty extreme. So these are the high levels of the agreement. We anticipate the back and forth on language will probably take several months to get through we also have our city attorney who's leaving us so during this process there's a little bit of complexity on timing we also just got our new city manager jerry bowden so he started on june 29th so we have a bunch of new players in there and one other consideration i just want to put in there is that the any major revision to the north course the south course any of those that are substantive changes that are in excess of a million dollars would require them to come and present all of those to city review so these are really major changes we're talking about if there's minor changes renovation work that's just considered normal operations but if someone wanted to say we don't want a lot to part three we want it to be something else that's going to take extra review so there's been a lot of uh back and forth this is where the agreement ended so um with that i'll just close my director's report and welcome commissioner down the shaft street this is his first meeting that hasn't been cancelled so i'm welcoming here to that and uh with that that's including my reports

So I think I need to go back to the commissioner communications because I forgot that I had a meeting with Justin and Matt. About 3 weeks ago, something like that. Okay. Um, to I just wanted to get some feedback on the, the Greenway. Settlement and what specifically I was concerned about what non disparagement meant, because with that halt, our ability to conduct a meeting and say publicly opinions publicly. And also, I wanted to know about. What role the commission would have if Greenway was going to, were they required to participate in this meeting? Would they contribute? anything to our understanding of their operations or what's going on with the course, because that would just greatly hamper our ability, in my opinion, to do our job. So I don't know if you want to comment on that, but essentially covered everything else I was asking about regarding the settlement itself.

Before you answer, let's talk about the disparagement comment. So let's take an example from what Pete brought up earlier. I think if we say to Greenway that there is a concern about the quality of the driving range maps, that they're substandard compared to what we expect and they should be rotated and they should be taken out, that's not disparagement. So, you know, to have a conversation that says you need to powder coat your amenities, things like that, that's all fine to, I think, bring to them their attention in our role as being a conduit for the constituents of the city and to talk to them about things that are working or not working, driving range and all those kinds of things. Yes, and I'm hopeful that having a greenway here on a regular basis, we can have those kind of regular conversations so that we can make sure that we've got a good communication flow and we're seeing action taken on things that are a direct concern to to the residents so talking to them in a about if you will criticism is not a problem you know so Yeah, but we want to do that in a respectful, polite way.

I understand the definitions of it, and I'm comfortable with it. And it is, I mean, it's my hope that we're going to have a collaborative relationship so that we can contribute.

Exactly, exactly. And then the second part of yours was the concern about, what was that? You had two parts to that.

The participation in the meeting itself, either with reports or in person or some other whatever.

Are we hopeful that maybe, is it possible even if the lease isn't signed, the renegotiated lease, that we could ask that GEMS and Greenway are here for the September meeting? In the spirit of cooperative moving forward in a positive manner?

I think the meeting date would be prior to the reality. There is a deadline in this agreement of September 30th to make sure that the lease is amended by then. I don't see it going beyond that. If it was done before then, Greenway has indicated through the city attorney that they will attend once the lease is resolved. anticipate that to be September 30th but that's not the signature date that's just kind of leases resolved so soon as might be November yeah I think I think if I'm correct the language in the agreement said that it had to be signed by the 30th so which means it has to go in front of council which means it has to go for a public vote and be approved so um so that would have to happen by the second meeting in September in order to meet the 30th deadline

Can I ask a question back to the ADA compliance issue? I didn't think that was related to just Greenway Golf. I thought it was, yeah, it's kind of a mandate and somewhere. And I have been at the range where several times I've had to assist women who either had a wheelchair and or a walking disability. And those doors actually don't open and they're very City Council Chambers, So it is a concern in that it's I think it's a state mandate and it's probably a federal mandate and i'm not really sure that it is a issue not related specifically to cream but related to accessibility on the course.

City Council Chambers, And I will say that the city last year, past the transition plan for city facilities and improvements.

That would be helpful because I've had to help several women into that.

And it's not just the driving range. Yeah, it's not. Right.

Specifically, the driving range is the worst. Because it takes a while to get back to the regular side.

I'll follow up with it. Thank you so much. Did you get what you needed answered? Yes.

Well, I have one more question. I don't think we covered it. Was there any resolution to the... all the drainage report.

Who's got that now? It's the public works director. So again we've gone on this many times and we've given you responses before from the public works director of work that's been completed and would report and so that's not part of this negotiation. So the public works director is the one who is working

Okay. Is there anything else?

Nope.

Anybody here?

I'm not supposed to do that, technically. I apologize. I do take notes in my phone.

I'm not texting. No, I'm not assuming.

Sorry. With that, if there's nothing else, we'll move on to agenda item number six. The next meeting is September 8th, 2026, 630, same time, same back channel, same everything. All right. With that, is there any um any response online anybody would like to say anything before we adjourn the meeting they can't technically they can't no oh okay oh yeah you're right sorry i know it's a different structure i know i know that anyway with that um i need a motion to adjourn would you like to make your first motion mr shotry i'd like to make a motion to adjourn perfect may i have a second no Okay, we have a second. With that, all in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Motion passes. Thank you so much.

Thank you again.