City Council - Special Meeting

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Uh good afternoon everybody and welcome to the uh city of Antioch special and regular City Council meeting of Tuesday, May the 12th, 2026. Mr. Clerk, can you please take the role? Thank you. Council member Torres Walker is absent. Council member Wilson is absent. Council member Roachcha here. Mayor Prom Freighus, present. Mayor Bern here. Thank you. We have a quorum at 4:14 p.m. All right. Will you please stand and join me in the pledge of allegiance? I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for it stands one nation under God indivisible with liberty and justice for all.

All right. This is for close session. We have one item. If um our city attorney could please let us know what that is. Okay. The close session item tonight is a conference with labor negotiators pursuant to California government code section 54957.6. The city designated representatives are Jason Uert and Anna Cortez, the acting city manager. Employee organizations that are up for discussion are the management union, Treatment Plant Employees Association, Operating Engineers Local Union number three, confidential unit, Antioch Police Officers Association, and Antioch Police for Management Association. There are no other items. All right. Thank you. Do we have any public comment? We have no public comments for close session.

All right. We will adjourn to close session. Meeting is adjourned at 4:15 p.m.

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Oh, hey. Heat. Heat. All right. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the the uh Antioch City Council meeting of Tuesday, May the 12th, 2026. Uh, if I could please get uh the city clerk to take the role.

Thank you. Council member Torres Walker is absent. Council member Wilson is absent. Council member Roachcha here. Mayor Prom Freighus present. Mayor Bernal here. Thank you. We have a quorum at 5:07 p.m.

All right. Will you please stand and join me in the pledge of allegiance of America and to the it stands one nation with all we are here for a budget study session. Uh there are two items on this uh study session. The first one is a user fee study uh discussion and then the uh second one is um the fiscal year 2026 27 budget development. So, uh, we'll turn this over to, um, our, um, acting city manager to, uh, introduce this.

Thank you, mayor. Uh, good evening, uh, mayor and council members. Uh, so this, uh, item in front of you is the user fee study. Uh, it was conducted by Wilden Financial Services. Uh, staff is requesting feedback and direction from, uh, the city council regarding the proposed fee updates and recommendations. Uh we also have a representative from Wilden Financial Services joining us via Zoom. Uh they'll be able to provide you with additional information. Good evening. Hopefully we can get Pitty Patel on Zoom. She should be waiting.

Hello. Can you hear us? Hello. Great. Yeah, I can hear you. So, um Wen Financial as the uh prepared our fee study. Um they also did it as part of the cost allocation. um update and those uh charges for cost allocation and our fully burden hourly rate were used to compile this fee study. Um I just want to give pretty a little have her give a little bit of a introduction and kind of the methodology for how um they came up with these fee recommendations and then we can start to um review the specifics. So pretty if you don't mind.

Hi my name is Pretty Patel. Um good afternoon. So the fee study what are user fees? User fees apply to voluntary services that provide a private benefit. Um, state law requires fees to be reasonable and proportionate to cost. And then user fee levels are established through city council adoption and are intended to recover the cost of services provided. So the fees that are included in this user fee study do not include taxes, utility rates, or impact fees. And a reason why cities should update their user fees is when user fees do not recover the full cost of providing a service, then the general fund subsidizes those services. And then that reduces the available funding for broader community priorities such as public safety, community programs, or special events. And then over time, continued subsidies can impact your service levels and responsiveness for some of uh the services requested. And then updating the user fees allow the city to better understand cost recovery and plan for future service delivery and ensure uh compliance with state law. And what we used to uh create the user fee study, we used um expenditure data, staffing structures with the city, uh essential service and indirect overhead, productive billable hours and time estimates from staff that we collected for each of your fees uh that are on the user fee schedule. And then we calculated what the full cost is based on those time inputs with the fully burdened hourly rates of the personnel that's involved. And then we calculated what a full cost recovery is to see if that fee is collecting um the cost of providing that service, if it's

underproviding or overproviding. Um and so now that we have the results, we're here to basically, you know, present it for a council adoption.

Yes. So, as Py said, this won't be for adoption. It's for council to give feedback. Um, we have the fee study recommendations attached um for council to deliberate and provide direction. Um, whatever is um consensus to bring back for approval or if they if you don't like some of the fee, we'll incorporate that. And there's a public hearing scheduled for May 26 for actual um adoption of the rates which will go into effect in fiscal year 27. Um, so most of the rates would be July 1st. The rates related to building, um, those actually have a 60-day window for the effective date on those. Um, and um, hopefully Py can point out exactly which ones those would be as we go through um, the attachment of the um, user fees.

Yes, you have a question.

I So, Miss Merchant on on the the staff report under discussion. So we actually did the last um fee study in 2028 and then there were updates you know to the class allocation in 2020 and 2022 and then we're here today. So looking forward and kind of institutionalizing the review process. It it seemed like we were doing them every two years to come back. Well, so for the master the the the user fee, what we call is the master fee, um as you said, we had done a complete study in 2018 and then there have been some adjustments based on CPI, which is um definitely a reasonable way to ensure that you're meeting cost recovery with uh by using the consumer price index. They it is overall recommended to revisit an overall study at least every five years. Um, unfortunately we had kind of COVID in the mix during this window and there was a couple years that council didn't want to do anything with the rates because of COVID. Um, so that is why we went out to RFP to get this underway to have a new user fee study done um to make sure because when we didn't do any rate increases during COVID, for example, we kind of lost the momentum of keeping up with with the consumer price index. And as pointed out in the report, um if city council is on board with increasing these fees as proposed, we can incorporate um just about 1.8 million in community and economic development fees um that we can build into the budget, which will help, you know, offset our deficit that we're looking at for next year. They're not in the draft numbers that we have now because we have to uh review these fees. But a majority of the fee increases do relate to community and economic development versus the police department, for example, because some of the fees aren't collected very often. So, it's not going to make any impact to um the numbers, but the fees that are in community and economic development in

terms of building permits, planning fees, other fees collected, those are occurring daily for permits. So, that's where we see the biggest impact of cost recovery numbers. So the reason why I'm raising that is to institutionalize how we will do this going forward and I think five years is way too long. Uh but I would would suggest that annually we take a look at some of these rates with regards to CPI. I assume we're

Yes, the the city um ordinance is actually requires that the master fee be reviewed annually. So it is actually brought annually and we do make suggestions for CPI adjustments. It's just um they say to have the overall study like this, they recommend at least every five years, if not sooner. But what just ballpark figure, what's the the price to do this? Um this contract was um just about $41,000. Okay. So, I would think maybe every three years, you know, so we adopt do it, we adopt it, we we'll look at CPI those two following years and then we redo it again.

Yeah, we could. I think, you know, for for us particularly in financial situation we find ourselves in, we need to institutionalize this so that whoever is on council, you know, we'll we'll get the most current information possible. That's that's just a general overall statement. So, Mr. Mayor, are you going to go section by section? How are you? Yeah, I think I would like to walk walk through this. Yes. And I do have um if we can get this presented up on the screen

before Before we do that, could I ask a quick question? Uh, so the um I just wanted to walk through the one line of the spreadsheet here just to explain what each one of them is so everybody's clear on that. And I I'd like to use um number five, the bicycle registration on the page one is kind of the example. So So we have the the item number, the title. This is my understanding. You can correct me. It's currently $7. It should cost $2542. Correct. Fully costed out. Yes.

Then it shows a 2% subsidy. Now, is the subsidy something that the city count is that is that an existing subsidy that's in place or is that a proposed subsidy or is that what how does that 2% number where does that come from? Um I would like Py to explain that. This is uh the document that she put together for us if you don't mind prey. So, it's 2% because um that $2542 is your full cost per state law. Um you don't want to round up your fee, so you're rounding down. So, those really small percentages is just a sense and that's based on the full cost and suggested fee amount of $25.

Got it. Understood. And then so the next line is the suggested fee, which in this case would be $25. And then the the $18 at the end it says fee. If it's a positive number, that's the increase. And if it's a negative number, that's the decrease between what the current fee is and what the proposed fee. Is that correct? That is correct. Okay. So, and using this as an example as we're going through, if council said bicycle registration, we think $25 is too much. we want to set it at say 10, we we have the authority to do that. Correct. Or

absolutely. This is um other than uh if you see a line that says statemandated and we've not recommend, you know, you can't change any of those um but what we're asking is for consensus to either, you know, bring forth the fee as suggested um or or not. Okay. And then there was one more. There was that large blacked out area. So on on one of these pages, we'll get to it. There's a there's a big blacked out area that seems like it's it's covering something up. So

and I do know when we get to it, um there is like a blacked out area for the um water monthly service charges because that's not part of the speed study. That's a separate 218 process. So um that's what some of those black but we'll get to that when we get to the page. That's what that means is that it's not for consideration in the master fee schedule. So looking uh at the the titles when we when we read current fee slashcharge when we say current is that 2020. That's the fee that isn't from the master fee adopted July 1st 2025 in effect. Okay. In in effect for fiscal year 26.

Okay. I just wanted clarification on the suggested fee. Is that coming from looking at other cities other I'm not sure where that's coming from. Is that something that maybe So as prey um explained and if I if I um miss anything she can correct me but they took our staff time estimates our salary information in our budget and calculated what it cost us to provide that service. So it's not comparing it to other agencies. It's what we're actually spending to provide that service. Okay. Yeah. That's helpful. I was just wondering how they came to that number. Yeah.

And so Miss Merchant, you talked a little bit or about administrative overhead in the county, you know, departmentally and divisional, we have administrative overhead and it's it's the cost applied to everything. So is this when you talk about administrative overhead, do we have administrative overhead that's applied to everything? Um I will let um PT if she can answer if the cost allocation piece is included in these fees that Yeah. So, um the indirect volume up or back room.

So, the indirect support cost is coming from the cost allocation plan. Those percentages are applied to the salary and benefit rate for each of the positions with the city. So, that administrative overhead, the indirect support is included in that full cost. Okay. All right. So, like on number one and and this is a question I'm going to be asking. So, we call this a local record review. What is a local record review? I I don't even know what it is. I would have to ask the uh police chief to come up because it's under the police department. I am not sure what it is.

I think it has something to do with the record, but I'm not sure. So, yeah, it probably does. Does someone have a copy or can we pull it up on the screen because I know there's multiple items for records.

Sorry, I know it's a little small on the screen up there. It's the very first row. Item number one. Yeah. going to I believe that's going to be the internal records review for release. I still don't know what that means. When someone comes in and asks for a copy or a record for review that needs to be released, it needs to be put together. It needs to be redacted and then it needs to go out. So when a request So we're suggesting going from $43 to $76. Correct.

Why? because the staff time when they talk to the police department for the staff that do that, that was the cost calculated based on the salary and benefit information and the time to prepare that record. What I'm just curious what's the classification that actually usually does this? There's several in records depending on what record is coming from where. Uh, I can take a peek and see who handles a majority of the records in that area, but our record section's broken up into a couple different areas, and their area of responsibility is very different depending on what their primary function is.

So, I'm I'm a concerned citizen. I go to the police department. I want to have a record. And in order to do that, I have to pay $76 depending on the record. Yes. Okay. So, are we I'd like to I'd like to check these off as we're going down the list. Are we okay with increasing this from 43 to 776?

I mean, based on based on the information that's being provided about covering the cost of personnel time, I my answer would be yes. If that's how this is being calculated, yes. So we'll we'll keep we'll keep that one at the 76 or or we'll uh suggested at 76. Um

and then I do believe the chief should say uh number five bicycle reg uh registration we're at $7 we're going to $25. That may be the true capture but I would think that we want you know uh people to register the bicycles. I'm just curious how many bicycles in the city of Antioch are registered. I would I'd have to come back with that number. I don't know off the top of my head. The consultant now

I I um that I don't know if they got the actual number of bikes registered. It was the the staff time again, but I can tell you for this revenue number we get under $50 if that sometimes zero a year. So, I think this should be encouraged in the community, not discouraged. So, I'm not in favor of $25. I would suggest 10. Can I ask for clarification? Um, what why would someone be inclined to registering their bike? Is it because they're using it for work? Is it Are we talking about ebikes? What are we talking about? Typically, it's uh the registration to get issued a sticker number in the event it gets stolen for a regular bike. Okay.

Super loud. Sorry. That's okay. No, that that makes sense. So, by registering it to the property owner, then it's there's a record of it. Should correct. Okay, that makes sense. So, we have a a proposal to to um take it from 25 down to 10 or increase it from seven till 7 to 10, however you want to look at it. Are you okay with that, Council Member Roacha? Uh, I mean, knowing it generates $50 a year, Miss Merchant said, you know, at $50, you know, I you're only doing a couple. This is something This is not, you know, getting for your pets. I I I'll agree with that. It's a slight It's a slight increase. It's not going to drive people away. So, I'll say yes to that.

Okay. So, we have concurrence to make it 10 $10 for number five. Um, but we'll we'll we'll just go down if you have any you have one of these

again number six and number seven. So card room permit regulation fees per table per year it's $787. And then the next item is card room permit new $3,100. So I'm a little confused. I mean why is there such disparity between the existing you know fee versus a new fee? And I'd have to ask Miss Patel if she can help us out with that one. I don't What is the Do you know off the top of your head our total overall card fee? Well, there's only there's only one place in town. We only have one. There's only one place. I can answer.

Yeah. Kevin, our our our senior planner can answer this question. It used to be Kelly's was the second I think because that closed out because of the because of the the ordinance that changed. There's only one card room in the city of Annie. Okay. It's 19th one. Yeah. So, it's a per table fee for existing. I I believe that's probably an outdated fee for when someone would come in for like a use permit to do a new card room, but actually our ordinance doesn't allow for new card rooms to be established. Well, that's why I'm ordinance does not allow new card rooms. So, why do we have a fee? This has been on the master fee for a long time. So, we can remove it. I mean, we can be notical.

Let's just make it. Let's just remove it since it's not consistent with our ordinance and then we'll keep the number six because that's the renewal. Okay. Okay. Did we talk about number two? Uh no, but you're you're welcome to if you want to. Well, number two, that's one where I see there's a loss. So, well, the reducing it's not a loss. It's just that the we're the current fee based on the staff time is a little high. So, we need to lower it because and we can't keep it at the 30 because we can't overcharge for the service. So, right. So, right right now we're charging $5 more than the study shows. Okay. Got it. That's what the rationale is. Okay. I'm just trying to clarify, but I saw the negative, right? So, the negative just means that the fee would be going down.

Got it. So, we're going to bring it down from 30 to 25. That's agreeable, right? Right. Okay. Uh, number 15. Number 15. I just don't understand it. Video and audio redaction fee. There's no charge. So, what is this? We'll have the chief come up again, but I I I believe, you know, it relates to when they have to um yes, redact go through all the video and watch all the video frame by frame and redact information that's not public. There's no charge here. There is a charge. It's fully burdened hourly rate for staff involved plus outside cost.

Okay. So, what what would that cost be? It depends on who's doing the work. Okay, tell me, give me an example. I want to know. Oh, I believe it could vary very it could vary very widely because you're saying how long a range it could be. You're asking us to approve fees and we don't know what the fees are, nor do we know the range. I'm not going to approve something that I don't know what the range is. Well, it could be it depends at all. It could be for two minutes of video. It could be for three hours of video. Okay, give me a range. It could range anywhere from uh analyst one all the way up to an off uh sorry cso.

Okay. So I'm not going to approve this because there we don't have a range and I think that would be true for a lot of these. I think you're asking us from a policy perspective to approve fees. We need to understand what those fees are. So I'm not going to approve something that I don't know. But but is there a fee on number 15? I'm looking at it is. So for example, so as part of the study, Wen Financial has prepared a fully burdened hourly rate, okay,

for all employee classifications. And so for example, if a fully burdened hourly rate for a position is $50 and that's salary benefits overhead, and it takes 30 minutes for that position, say it was an analyst that did it, then it would be $25 would be the fully burden ally rate. However, if it was the city attorney and say their fully bored and an hourly rate was $200 and it took them an hour to go through the video and redact, then it would be a $200 charge. So,

and then what's the do we do we know what the increment is that we charge people? I mean, is it half hour minimum, hour minimum, because that should probably be established as well if something's, you know, otherwise people are going to say, "If it took you five minutes, I only want to pay five minutes worth." So, is there you understand what I'm saying? We Yes. We do not have per our master fee an established minimum. So So do they the employee would be recording however much time it took. Okay. So So if it's if it's 27 minutes and they're going to charge 20, you know, whatever that is of an hour. I mean that's how closely we're going to monitor our time. So

I'm just trying to be realistic like how if somebody asks you know how are we going to how you going to do this? What's going to like a one hour minimum or round up to the nearest hour? I I think what you're saying like what's the range? Like is it is it like $5 to 100 or is it $5? No, I'm I'm just asking how they measure what's the amount of how do they measure the amount of time? Do they is it the exact time it takes them? You set a stopwatch and you start and finish or and then you say that's exactly how long and we're going to charge you based upon the burden rate. Is that I mean that's fine if that's how you guys are going to do it. Um

do you know if uh the consultant when they reviewed it did they study did they do anything like did they look at at least one um review?

Well you know when these when the areas of the fees went to each department for example and they took our existing master fee. So this is our existing master fee. It was because it's a a staff in performing work. It was yes, it would be a fully burdened hourly rate because it could take a different amount of time depending on what they're redacting. So, it was kept the same. But again, information wasn't given to the consultant to say on this type of thing, this employee does it and it's this cost because it could be for sometimes it could take five minutes, sometimes it could take a half an hour. But I don't know and I can ask um Kevin is is it acceptable to say fully burdened hourly rate in minimum 15 minute increment? I don't know if that's something that's

uh it it would be fine to set a like or some type of increment some type of incremental schedule. That's what they do with a lot of legal billing. Legal billings you bill by the 10th of the hour. So that's that could be a way to go about that for a way of tracking it. Yeah. Yeah, I mean it's basically it's based on an hourly rate. So, right, but we're able to take that hourly rate and, you know, do it in 15minute increments. So, I mean, that would be helpful. We could add to 15. We could have it say fully barn alley rate and then put increment 15minute increments and that would be consistent for all of these in that use this. Yes. Several of these that are in here.

So, if council um is agreeable that language, we could add in in you know. Yeah. Yeah, because then you can break it into quarters, half 3/4 or whatever. Yeah. Kevin said just like a legal fee charge. Okay. All right. Number 16. Just what is CAD event? What is CAD stand for? CAD. CAD computer. Yeah, that's the drafting. Sorry, there it's hard to hear it and not see it without having the list. Yeah, that's the CAD call print out or anything related to the CAD computer aided dispatch

dispar. All right. Anything else on the first page?

20 through 23. I don't understand. So, there's a recommendation of a $379 charge for carry concealed weapon license fee and then hat dash new permit initiate initial fee refundable. Then in 21 again $37955 application renewal amendment issuance fee and then 22 renewal permit $379 and amended permit $123. So what is the differentiation between 2021 and 22? I I I don't get it.

So you're talking about carry carry concealed weapon. It's the different levels for the permit and if the permit needs to be amended to add correct or take away um the renewal permit pretty self-explanatory. The fees have went up significantly since we started. Well, Chief number 20 says carry concealed weapon license fee new permit initial fee. Correct. Refundable. Correct. What's refundable? The whole $379. Correct. Because there is a process to it. I still don't get it. So, I come to your I knock on your door. I want to have I want to I want to conceal.

You don't knock on the door. You do it online. Yeah. So, there's different things someone has to do to get the permit. There's basically, if you will, a checklist. Um, for some parts of the checklist, some people can get disqualified, not meet the not meet the standard, miss a piece. they will not be able to be issued a permit. So before I before I even start to answer apply the application, I have to pay the $379. It happens all at one time when you start. So maybe

so how do you Okay, so it starts so I pay the $379 and it's initial permit but number 21 says application which I take it as initial renewal or amendment $379. Can you clarify the difference between those two? I don't get it. And then 22 says renewal permit $379.

So now I'm confused. Well, because it does look it does look I understand. So my suggestion to staff is maybe work with the chief on this and maybe clarify so that we know what it it seems redundant and I'm just not sure. I don't I know Captain Bitner went over this at one of our meetings when Yeah. 20 and 21 do look redundant like it's I remember there was new fees I think what from what I understand one is for new and then for people who have it already and they're going to renew it because I think it's every two years it's a total separate process in the same program. Yeah. So it's it reads like it's the same but one is for like a new initial getting issued and the other is if you already have it and then two years later you got to renew it. It comes back again.

Okay. how it's listed here. It's very confusing because even I'm confused. 20 is, you know, license fee, new permit, but 21 is application. If I'm if I'm applying, it's it is confusing. You're right. So, I'm just suggesting to staff that if you could please take a look between 20 and 23 and maybe clarify it so people looking at this will understand it. Noted. Thank you.

All right. Anything else on the first page? None. We will go to the second page. I I 24. It says duplicate $30. It's going to $61. Duplicate means what? If I'm wagering a guess because it only says duplicate that it's for a duplicate uh permit to get a copy of it. Okay. Again, when you're taking a look at it, could you just

correct? Is it part of the CCW? I believe it is. It was like continued from the It should be a continuence. And again, that's where it gets confusing because you're looking at all the numbers and they're not categorized together or grouped together related to a category. I mean, a duplicate to me is making a copy and I'm paying $61 for a copy. It's a card. Okay. So, it's not it's not just a photo copy. It's a stamped hologram card. Okay. What is this related to CCW still or is I believe it is. They should all be grouped together. Okay, got it. Okay, just got to the next page. It's not part of the limo taxi fee then, right?

Okay. So, okay. So, yeah, we'll get clarification on that one. Number 40, um before that number 28, it says uh parking enforcement established by council resolution as the current fee. What what is the current resolution? What's council's current resolution on that? Um I'm not sure what the resolution number is, but the parking fees are set by I'm sorry. Oh, sorry. Um I'm not sure what the resolution number is, but I know there is parking. So are those fees in the fee schedule then or

No, because they're established separately. So how would somebody know what the parking enforcement fees are or how would you know? Is this like if you get a citation for parking? Yes, I believe that would be so whatever the parking citation amount is, it would be on the ticket that you receive. Shouldn't we shouldn't we have that or is it variable? Is that why it's not on there or shouldn't it be shouldn't it be listed somewhere besides the resolution? I mean, shouldn't it be on like a list like this? I mean, this is a master fee schedule. Shouldn't it be on there? I am not sure by um we'd have to look at what the resolution says because I'm not sure how it says we just have that brought back like we're doing with the CCW. Yeah.

Okay. Um that's 28 prom. So, holy crap. Sorry, I'm just fired. One of my favorite.

All right, Kevin. It's huge. Oh my god. Thank you, Kevin. Thank you, Kevin. Wait, you didn't kill that, did you? We're a catch and releaseleas city, so um that's not going to work for us, I don't think. Sorry. I'm terrified of fighters. We found out. Chief, I have a question for you. Chief, yeah,

you might want to stay here while we finish your section. But so this is under massage establishment. Is this number 40? Owner practitioner $422. But then on 44, owner nonpre practitioner 422. What what's is it if the person's the owner and doing a massage versus there's an owner and they hire a person to do massage? That's a question I cannot answer. Okay. At this moment. Uh we were just having a conversation about that in the back. Okay. All right. I I just again I don't know what it means.

So would it help if come back with us? You tell all these I'll come back and make sure we get answers. Yes. All right. Anything else on um on this on this page here?

Did you go for I'm on number 54 special event regulation group putting on event time materials chief time materials and overhead costs. So this language is a little bit different from the the the you know the burden and why is this different from you know some of the other where where we talk about the burden hourly rate and in here where we now say it's time materials administrative overhead costs now I'm really confused which administrative overhead cost. So I think in particular to this number, this is for the officers that go out and work the events. That's not being done by records people who are redacting police reports. Um these are the officers who are out at the events. So event charge for we assign a police officer, a corporal and sergeant all at overtime rate step Even though they may not be at step E plus a 25% administrative fee. And then event charge for reserve police officer at step a rate regular officer a scale plus a 25% administrative fee. Why wouldn't we say that the whoever the assigned officer corporal or sergeant whatever their step is that's that's what you use. Why would we use the top step when they're not there? Is that probably a finance challenge to go through every officer that's doing I mean that would be what I would suspect and then I don't know if that's the reason why it's set there.

Um I I do not know. I mean this is how this fee has been.

If you could just please take a look at that. Thank you. Um, so then I I was surprised at 56 the subpoena, the civil administrative fee, clerical cost maximum of $15. I I have to believe that most of our clerical staff are above $15. Is this mandated by the state? Is there some legal requirement that deals with the establishment of fees here? Usually the cost of subpoenas are established by statute. For example, if you look just above there for the um the appearance fee. Um I need to I will have to look at this to see what the established fees, but I'm sure that's established by statute. It it actually I saw here it lists out um per 1563 EC, which I'm assuming means per 1563 evidence code. So it may be in there to see that statute. I mean, I just I looked at I I I doubt that our clericals have an average $15 per hour cost. Yeah. That's below the state of California minimum wage, isn't it?

Yes. Uh but the purpose of this is so, you know, when somebody wants to subpoena the records to keep the cost low to make sure that the the city can recoup some costs, but people still get their day in court, they still get their they still get kind of the records that they're entitled to through the court system.

Okay. I again, you know, we're trying to be as accurate that as we possibly can. Please check that. And then number 58, the adult uh business permit and this deposit as determined by police department plus charges at fully burden hourly rates for all involved personnel and any outside costs for a permit. And that one's still at a zero. So I would have to look in I don't think we've had any in the last three or four years. Okay. I I just I mean the description seems a little We'll look at that. Yeah.

I can I can confirm I can confirm the costs for 52 or for 56 and 57 are established by statute. No, I'm talking about 58. I know. Uh but I I think it is. Yes. the the clinical costs are established by statute by the evidence code and that's a that's a state action. Yes. Even though minimum wage in the state of California is more than $15. Yes. Sure. That makes sense. Okay. On number 59, the fire firearms range. I didn't know that you could rent out the range or you can go there and shoot. Is that We don't. So, should we We don't typically um should we take this off then? We

prematurely we were in early stages to have a conversation with the city attorney about what that would look like if we were going to do that. Um because we are fortunately one of the only agencies in the county that has an indoor range that can be used year round. Um a couple agencies have looked have reached out to uh to utilize our range. I think we need an updated cont if we were going to go down that route an updated contract. Look at the fees. look at the costs. Um, we haven't been doing it. Um, but I think we're to a point now if we were to open up um and offer that as an option for other agencies as a conversation we need to have with the city attorney's office, which would probably include adjusting the fees. Uh, it might be more so aligned to come back uh for at least a conversation and finalization the next time we look at the we do a uh have a fee study session. Can we do it as part of will we have time to do it as part of this fee study ska schedule do you think or no

probably not because I I without having a contract or anou in place we will be talking about drafting something from scratch specifically for us and I just don't think with everything else going on in the city right now uh that it's something that we could have done in the next month or two if if we're not doing it why wouldn't we just put na not applicable Well, it's I mean we can remove it's on there now. So we what what happens with the master fee each year is we showed the existing and we redline and say these are the changes remove whatever. So it would be if you guys want to remove it from the master fee we would show it on the night of the adoption and redline it that we're removing it.

Yeah. Because it's like the it's like like the card room, right? This there's only one permits allowed in the city. Why would we even have it listed? So, Chief, are are you anticipating that this is something that you want?

It is something we could talk about moving forward. Um, I just know in terms of all the work we've done to the range to upgrade it in the last year, uh, $105 isn't going to cut it uh to come and use the range. Um, just in terms of the capabilities of the range, the use, what it costs to clean it, and what it costs to maintain that range within state regulations. Uh again, it's a conversation we need to have with the city attorney's office about pricing if it's something that needs to come back to you and then drafting an MOU and an agreement um for people that would like to come and use the range. Well, I I I'm in agreement with council member Roachcha. I would just delete it and have that discussion and come back.

And then I think the other thing is to clarify that this is for other uh agencies, not for individuals in the community that want to come shoot at the range. Correct. Correct. Yeah. So that was kind of my question was can people if you read this you might think oh 105 bucks I can go shoot shoot shoot shoot shoot shoot shoot shoot shoot shoot shoot shoot shoot shoot shoot shoot shoot shoot shoot shoot shoot correct you might think but again that would be something if we were going to talk about if it going down that route what that would look like from a legal standpoint with the city attorney okay so we can just take it out for now and and then put it back in when we're ready to come back with that all right anything else on this page all right on the next page

services no I'm on fire uh fire alarm and uh alarm users. Any alarm user questions?

Oh, I'm sorry. Um Oh, so under 64. So it says one. Yeah, I assume one false alarm. U there's no charge and then it shows two dash school or 100. I I think there's missing words here. I I I don't know what that, you know, so if you have one false alarm, there's no charge. I guess if you have two false alarms at a school, it's a $100. I mean, there seem to be some words that are missing there. Well, I think um when I was principal, thinking about the fire department, for example, if a false alarm, someone pulled in the old pull switch pull on firearms, I mean false alarms, um if we notified the fire department before they arrived, there wouldn't be a charge. But if you didn't get a hold of them in time when they arrived, then there was a there was there was a level one, two, and three. So, there was a cost if it happened more than once. I don't know if law enforcement works the same way.

We do not, but there is some wording missing here and we could bring it back with the correct wording. Yeah. And that's would be true for G64 and 65. It looks like there's a dis you're distinguishing between I guess residential and schools like I guess it gets it's confusing what you mean. Yeah. Yeah. And it'll be and it might be just the reduction of getting it into here, but when this comes back on the 26, it'll be our existing master fee schedule in that format with the wording as it is and then the you know, okay. I just as we're can only respond what we get. So I just think Yeah. Are any of are any of these new fees that we're looking at here? Do you know or are these just all existing fees?

I don't recall if there's any new fees. Um the consultant, she would know, right? Yes. Priy, do you know um if there's any new fees that you can recall or if we're going to have to No, but there are in other departments. Okay. Yeah, the police department didn't have any new fees. It was just updates based on some of the laws that were passed um and some of the standards in some of the areas.

So, Mr. Mayor, number 68. Uh this is with regards to the alarm company. Failure to report new install. I assume it's installation. Whose responsibility is that? Is it the the um alarm company to tell the city that they're installing? Is it the the business or resident that's supposed to be telling telling the city? Who who's supposed to who's responsible for telling the city? It should be the resident. And do they know that? It would depend on the resident. I've had a I've had a alarm in my house. I've never received a bill for years. Yeah. I I think it just depends. Apparently, I'm out of I'm you know,

I think with all the alarm options now, it's very hard to keep track of who has what, who reports to what because there's a lot of systems that can be done through alarm companies. There's a lot of uh systems that run off of your home Wi-Fi that alerts you directly and doesn't go through an alarm company or a third party vendor. So, it's it's very different now than it was, say, 20 years ago. Could Could this be just could this be just old language? It could be old language because like nowadays you can get Ring cameras and put them up three or four of them around your house and I don't believe those are going to be register if people have a Ring camera. Do they do you want to know that? The police department.

Yes. And we've uh through our community meetings have been talking about citizen rims and registering your cameras through rim citizen rims like the neighborhood watch they give that information out if you want to have the ability. So, Miss Cortez, I I would strongly ch strongly suggest that we look at this and, you know, get the word out to the community what our responsibilities are because right now I'm I guess I'm in non-compliance. Yes, I do recall when I was working at the police department that yes, it was the resident's responsibility to uh and a lot of it to if nobody tells us it's our responsibility, then guess what? We don't do it

right. So, maybe you can work on communication with the community. So I would suggest on 67 to 72 if you just take a look at that and get back and and and talk to the PIO about informing our residents about what our responsibility work. I believe the in intent from reading it and going to the neighborhood watch meetings is that um the police department I would believe would like to just know residents that have cameras that they would like to register to so they know that if something happens in a particular neighborhood that they can contact uh is that am I interpreting that you are and typically we don't charge people for the false alarm calls um

I mean you know whatever our responsibility is we just need to know what it on how to do that. I mean, and I've been at the neighborhood watch programs, too, where, you know, police department representatives say, you know, help us, let us know what you have, but there's really been no campaign that I'm aware of or information. You know, maybe the VIPs could I don't know. It it seems very important. It seems it would support, you know, the police department and the public wants to do, you know, help the police department whenever possible, but nobody knows what what we're supposed to do. Easy enough. And I'd like to know how much we're going to go back and back charge mayor promises for not paying his fee for the past 20 years.

Yeah, we'll pull we'll pull all the calls there for the last six years. Okay. Well, please check that out. No faults. Okay. Next next page. We're up to adoption fees. Anything on these? Um I guess I I just number 39 and 40. This is animal services. 39 is potentially dangerous slashvicious animal slash day per day, I guess. And then number 40 is potentially dangerous slashvicious animal. And but that one looks like it's redacted.

No. So what that is is under 40 that number 41 is the impound fee related to potentially dangerous. 42 is the So that's just making the header for the fees below. Okay. So what's the difference? Okay. So So number 39, what potentially dangerous vicious animal day? So that falls under on the previous page there's boardcare fees. That's grayed out. So then 36 the dog per day and then 37 it's just it falls onto the next page. Okay. Thank you. Right. Anything else on this page? Nope. Moving on to the next one.

And this is 798081. So there is a discussion about um unaltered dogcash cat penalty state law. And so I assume that these fees are dictated by the state of California food and drug code for first offense, second offense, third offense. Yes, I believe so. Okay. Thank you. All right. Anything else on this page? Next. Nothing on this one.

All right, moving on to planning and engineering. Um, Chief, you're you're off the hook for a minute, I guess, and then we'll I'm sure we'll have something else. All right, so anything on the on this page for the planning fees?

For the planning fees, it's number um I guess three, four. I just need to understand maybe Mr. Scodero can help us. So number three, it's minor administrative use permit. Nonprofit pays 50% of the fee and we're going up to 609. Number four is major administrative permit fee. So we're going to we're going from a minor at 567 to a major at 1556 or 1597. I'm sorry. 90 97. Yeah. Why such a incredible difference?

So the major administrative use permits are typically like special outdoor event fees where we are coordinating with other departments whereas minor are typically much less time and they're handled within our department. Okay.

Yes. And does that um indicate because it says um I say nonprofit Does the nonprofit have a different rate compared to private? Is that what that's saying? Yeah. So, they would pay 50% of the fees. So, the city council has chosen to subsidize the permit basically for nonprofits. Now, I remember in the schools, we used to do that too with facilities. We would have two different rates depending on nonprofit versus private. That makes sense. Okay. And then on number um 11, sidewalk vendor permit. So, that's going from 141 to $320. So our fee was way under.

Yeah. So we've learned since we established that fee. So that was a relatively that's a new state law which requires us to approve sidewalk fender permits where we don't have local control over it. So I think when we originally established that permit, we took our best guess and we've actually got a real influx of these and they take a lot more staff time than I think we had originally anticipated. So this is somewhat a legal question. So why do we permit sidewalk vendors? I mean people who literally are on our sidewalk. To me that seems to be a liability issue.

So state of California requires us to allow them subject to certain standards um outlining mal code like the sidewalk has to be a certain width. So you can't obviously block ADA path of travel, but um there are lo some location restrictions where they can be permitted, but that was a state law that was passed I want to say like five or six years ago. So, we did update our municipal code to reflect the state law. I can tell you on 18th and A Street, there is a sidewalk vendor. You cannot get a wheelchair past her. We can refer that to code enforcement. Yes. Okay.

Okay. And then just a question on all of our deposits. So, they haven't gone up at all. So, they're adequate to cover annexations and DAS and final development plans and all that. Uh, yeah. Um, you know, in my time here, I've never worked on annexation. So, um, typically it will be time and materials. So, it's monthly billing. So, when you have that level of deposit, you're typically not going to be billing that much per month. So, that's kind of the security there. Okay. Got it. Anything else on that page? All right. Moving on. Next one. This is more deposits.

All right. Moving on to building fees. Any questions on uh this page? Not on that page.

All right. Any any questions, Lee, on that? All right. Not on that. Go on to the next page number 26. So, pool residential plus map check. The current fee is 40,000 and the suggested fee is 60,000. So, if a person wants to put a pool in just for the fee or they have to pay $60,000. I'm I'm not in the building division. Um that does not seem right to me. Um I might I don't know if Hillary has knowledge on that. Um that doesn't read right to me. Typically, it's going to be because we have one right under it,

but that's what's being suggested by the company, right? No, no, it says current fee is 40. Suggested is 60. I'm I'm shocked that 40. Yeah, I I I will I will get back to you. I don't work in the building division. Um that does not re Hillary Brown is able to stop at 400.

Hello, good evening. Hillary Brown, administrative analyst uh in the community and economic development department. I did work with the building division um for their user fee study. I worked with all the divisions actually. Um so if you notice for the pool residential plus plan check so 26 item 26 that item is including the plan check fee in it and then the contract price for a pool commercial for commercial plan check is is that's the price the price the 60,000 includes all inspection right all inspection all staff all plan review right all reasonable plan review so someone could literally bring in a set of plans and re and bring and resubmit like eight times. And we would be charging them this for reviewing the plans, processing the permits, issuing the permits, inspecting, doing final coordinating on all safety pieces, making sure all state standards are met. So that's that staff time that you're seeing there for including in plan check.

$40,000 for us. Yeah, that's what Could I could I request staff to take a look at that? Absolutely. I don't know how much a swimming pool costs, but let's just say it costs I don't know 60 80,000. Yeah, you can look at this one. Then you're going to charge Well, the recommendation is to charge 60,000. I'm saying yeah, it's 40, but they want to bump it up 20,000. Well, I'm I'm I'm shocked at 40. I just I maybe there's a zero that's been added. I don't know. It just seems excessive to me.

Not that I know of. And and this one didn't I mean to be honest I there's quite a few building fees and there were a lot that we did do a lot of like review on staff time. So this one I mean let's take a look. I think that's a good point but I do know that that we did have the discussion specifically about some fees including a plan check and not being separate on one earlier item. It may be a fee and you're only permitted twice to come back or you know having it openended seems counterproductive to me. Yeah, we you know so that fee and that permits you I don't know two three times to do it instead of eight times. Right. I mean yes. So we'll definitely review that one.

If I'm paying 60,000 I I think I will try to get it right once. And then on on number 28 spas plus plan check 7100. Can you check that one as well because that seems like that might be a little high also. Okay, might as well just if you could just stay there. Um, it's under re- roof number 36. Um, and it says under 20 squares with tear off. What's a what's a square?

Whatever form of roofing you're using. So, it's kind of just a way of it's a way of measuring your roof roofing square footage that's used in the industry, if that makes sense. So, if I have 20 composite square of roofing, you're going to charge me to propose $8,467. Yes. To look at 20 squares. Well, 20 It's probably meant to be square foot to be honest with you, but yes, that's correct. We can look at this fee too as well. We can I'll pull this fee out as well and we can look at it. And that would be true. Next one 37 is over 20. This is

so I'll make sure that that language is supposed to be either right material or if it's square footage. I It's very possible that in Yeah. number 37 says over 20 with tear off but its fee is 13,000. I don't think it's square footage. I I if you could I think absolutely. Yeah. I mean that could just be a simple um is comp over composition shingles. Is that what that is?

Yes. So, if I have existing shingles and I put down new ones, I'm going to have to pay $5,862 to do that. These fees just seem awfully I mean, what? Why am I paying the city to do that? They just seem excessive to me.

We'll review. Yes, we'll review. We'll come back. It sounds like what would be a great idea and gold coordinate is just to get Craig Andrews, our our building division manager, to give you really detailed information about these fees, how they've been traditionally charged and how they looked at their time and what the process is, not just the description of right the work, but the process to review that work per the building code. So that would help a lot. I mean, I'm trying to understand why these fees are so extensive. Sure. for staff to say this is what needs to be collected. I It's like how many times does an inspector go out there? Five, 10 times. Sometimes.

I'm just wondering if that's a cost that the contractor passes on to the consumer. Like if you're getting very expensive roof. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if you're getting um so if you're getting a roof put on like like get an HVAC and you're put having to put on your rooftop, the commercial company you're working with to put that up is going to give you a cost that you have to, you know, figure out what the cost can be. So that's built into that cost. Is that how that works? That's how I understand it. But again, that's what I'm trying to clarify. So the person who did my roof, Bob Plumber, you know, he's got a business in town. I've known him. So that's probably a fee that goes as part of the um licensing to get that.

No, I I understand that the question I mean the reason why we have the fee is because there is a staff there's a city expenditure. So yes, I mean that's just a that's just a pay through for that dollar but that dollar amount what's the reason for being that's the question. It's like why what is yeah that sounds like person getting for $6,000. Yeah. And then number 43, I just there's WMP C and D. Yes. I don't know what it means. That's okay. That's correct. Yeah, that probably would have been helpful to write that out, huh? Waste management plan. Oh, construction and demolition debris. So, yeah, I would just ask that.

So, actually, fun fact, this is a fee that we used to charge a very small amount. I believe it was $35 um for almost any Yeah, correct. Thank you. Right. That's wouldn't that be nice if I'm looking at I'm looking I'm just looking at the suggested fee and really focusing on that. So what we decided to do there is to not charge this the nominal fee um on the permits only charge it if someone was non-compliant. And the reason why that was was because we had a lot of people who were doing either sort of not complying with putting in their initial information about their waste management plan and their construction and demol demolition debris or they were giving um like incorrect receipts um for their actual dump runs and it was becoming a really large burden on staff time. So, we wanted to make sure that on the average permit, we were not we were just rolling that into our existing uh cost recovery, but we wanted to create something that would account for those extra um much more hightouch uh process and permit permit processing. So, that's in case you're curious, that's a little more information on that one.

All right. And then on the on the following page that has the Antioch building permit fees based on valuation, that's where say a roof is between um $25 and $50,000. It says the permit would be $1,100, right? And that's where on the other page, the 40 and 60 just seem way out of whack because a roof is probably falls in that range. And I think we should bring some clarification back on those for sure. So, got it. Yeah. Okay. Um moving on to code enforcement page. Any questions on this? I'll stay here in case you have more of these. So, yeah. Number five, shopping cart abandonment or impound fee. We're going from $53 to $550.

I don't know that that fee has been touched before now. I don't think anyone looked at that fee. And there was a change to the law which allowed for much higher fees to be charged for the shopping cart impound fee. That's a new law that just went into effect. Yeah. So the idea of these fees are what does the city expend charge a fee and collect it not to make a profit. I mean we're going I mean this is I don't know this is I I understand and I think the reason why the law was updated was because the cost of the shopping cart impound was so high

and that was something that was established by state law. So then the legislature went and upped that so then the cities could then up it and they could recover the costs for that work. All these user fee are not for profit. They're for just cost recovery because we're not allowed to make a profit. And that's that's why I'm raising from $53 to $550. It it's an extraordinary cost increase because it's incorporating the burdened the out the burdened rate for the process of. So let me ask you, you know, the item is shopping cart abatement or impound fee. Does that mean we we somebody goes and finds a shopping cart and

yeah, let's say someone reported a shopping cart that was left, right? If a code enforcement officer, it was on private abandoned on private property, right? Then it would that's what it would cost to impound that cart and return that cart to the property owner from where it should have been already abated and returned to, if that makes sense. So, if I'm Safeway and a customer comes in, buys some food and takes the cart with the food to their house and leaves it on a private property, right?

And you know, let's say they're elderly 80 years of age and it's right outside their front door and she or he bringing the food in and it it's there. Code enforcement comes and sees it and can charge that person proposed $500 and some odd dollars. who they're charging it to. I don't know the answer to, so I can bring that back to you. Okay. I think it's usually the com theway I believe it's Well, I don't believe it's not Safeway's problem. I mean, they didn't cause it to happen. Why are we It is right. I mean, that's how I understand it. It's their problem. They keep it on their property.

Yeah. I think the genesis is, you know, it's they're responsible for keeping on their property and maintaining their cards. And I think what you'll see a lot of today, I'd be curious how often we collect this fee because now I think if you've ever been at grocery stores now, they actually have technology on there where like it'll stop you once you get past a certain time. So we could actually look into see how often this fee has been charged. I don't know how often it has been, but there obviously is multiple people involved in this abatement. So, if it's a code enforcement officer and then they're contacting public works to bring their vehicles out to put these in their in their trucks, you know, there's multiple people involved and they all have a fully burned hourly rate to um to do that.

The the VIPS years ago used to do that and literally go through town and pick up the cards and take them to the stores. There were no charges. I mean, that's what they did. Yeah. I mean, and obviously, you know, this is the fully burned hourly rate. If council wanted to subsidize that service, that would be at their discretion. Okay. All right. Um, moving on to residential rental inspection program. I don't believe we currently have one of those. Correct. So, do we want to and we haven't had one for probably since 20 years ago now, right? Yeah. I think it was um disbanded in 2008 as you know, we were going through significant layoffs. But does it stay on our fee schedule since?

Uh, that's I believe so. Yeah. So, do we want to remove it from the fee schedule since we don't have this program in place currently? And I don't think we intend to reestablish it right now. If council wants us to remove it, we can. Um, the reason it's carried over is because it was established by a separate resolution. The program itself hasn't formally been Yeah, there's been no resolution to say we're not doing the residential um program anymore. So, that's why it's remained on the schedule. Um, so council can remove it just with knowing that if the council does decide to um reestablish the program, it's going to have to be, you know, added back to I I guess to your point, it we we want to we'd have to resend that resolution probably to formally remove the program, which I'm not sure we

right. Removing this master fee here does not remove the program. It just means that um we can't charge for it. If we decide that we're going to um restart the program, then we would have to bring that back to council to establish fees to restart, but the program has not officially been disbanded by resolution. Understood. So, do we want to keep this on the schedule? That's all right. Okay. We'll leave it there. I I I remembered the debate in 2000. All right. Anything else on this page? We go on the next one. Miscellaneous public works fees. Anything there?

Uh, at the very bottom number 24 is public work service hourly rate streets. I I don't get it. What What is it? Says streets. That's all it says. Streets. Good evening, mayor, city council. Uh, yeah, it basically is streets. It would be streets workers. They would be pulled out there. they would be charged at whatever their hourly rate would be fully burdened. Uh exactly what work would be encompassed under that I'd have to come back to you. But that would be for streets workers performing street work. Okay. Because right now it's Yeah. I believe on the actual master fee um it's a a little bit more clear. So we'll make sure that's clear. Okay. Just

Yeah. And frankly that's going to be true for 25 26 27 28 29. I mean signs water ways. I mean there's really what description? Yeah. So it's the public works if you notice the 23 it says public works services hourly rates. So it's saying that for streets and then for anything related to signs, anything related to water distribution, wastewater, storm channels and landscaping. Um so it's but we'll make sure that so who gets who who gets charged this fee? I mean, it's like, okay, I understand who who gets charged.

I guess it would depend on the work that was being done. Um, if there was being done by a private developer and they would need our crews, then they would be charged for it. Um, it would I mean, if you can just articulate that. It's like it's like, okay, you got it. Who Who are you charging? Yeah, that'll come with like like the the finance director was saying, we'll give you a little bit more information from the master fee schedule and we can build that into it. Okay.

All right. Um on and that that's onto the next page. At the bottom of the next page, we have the uh recreation vehicle storage facility fees. So those are going up it looks like pretty significantly. You know, like 20 20 or 25 ft spaces going from 75 to $119 um 87 to$1 131. So, have we given any of our folks that are renting those spaces a heads up or are we just going to drop this on them in July 1st? Well, the idea would give them the heads up if it was the direction of council to go with this. We would definitely give them a heads up that these things were changing. Okay. My question is how many spaces do we run? I would have to get you that number. Ballpark?

I don't know. Okay. Please give me the number. I'm just curious. All right. Uh, so I think I think we're okay on that on those fees there. Um, engineering fees. Anything on this? Um, number 48. This is the weight list free for non-ten uh tenants, non-refundable. What What is this? I mean, get on a list to rent an RV space. Yes, I'm going to have to pay $44 a year to I assume

initial and to stay on that list. I'm going to pay $44 a year. Really? No, I don't think it's $44 per year. I believe it's a one time you get on the wait list fee. Are there a lot of people I mean that I don't know. It just seems to be awfully expensive to put your name on a list. I think the occupancy has gone up and down throughout the years. Um, I don't know if there's currently a wait list for the facility, but I know in the past it has been full. So, if I'm interested in being on the wait list, I give you my name and my address and my, you know, cell phone, and I'm going to be charged $44 to have it put in a database.

That's my understanding. Yes. But, but does that indicate that being on a waiting list when your name comes up because you paid that fee, then that space becomes available to you? Yes. Is that the line? What the waiting list would be for next in line. Is that familiar with like boat like births at a harbor or if there's not a space and you have a certain size boat, you can put your name on a waiting list and so if someone you pay uh you pay put your name on the list, I would imagine. Yeah. In a harbor, I could see that happening. And then when the space comes available, then you get contact to see if you want that birth or not. I'm using boats as an example. Um RVs, I would imagine could potentially be the same. There's a demand for it. No, I I think the weight list is fine. Just $44 to put my

I think it just needs to be clarified what that means. When you pay a weight fee, is that that you're registering your vehicle for potential space? Is that what you're doing one time or every year? Yeah, we can clarify that. That's how I interpret it. Okay. All right. Um, anything else on on that page? Moving on to the next one. 62 sidewalk repair inspection. So, our current is $484 and it's proposed to go up to $842.

Why? We've consistently lost money on the program. These are based on the fully burden rates and the hours of the people that do the work. You're looking at an inspector that's making possibly two to three visits out there, three to five hours worth of work. um whatever that was, the the the amount was calculated based on uh the actual cost cost of service uh that we would need to to recoup for this type of work.

So, I'm just speculating. I'm a resident. It look, you know, my sidewalk has a problem and I go to the city website and say, "Oh my god, I have to pay $842. I'll just repair it and not tell the city." I mean, I we want the residents to repair their sidewalks,

but if they see that they have to repair the sidewalk and pay $842, I think it's a disincentive. So, um the sidewalk in front of the residence is the residence to maintain. Um people doing work within our rideway without permits and not being inspected without being inspected is is not is not okay. These are fees that we need to keep our people paid for the work that they're doing. Yeah, the cost has increased, but so has our expenses also. And we've spent so many times losing money on these type of things because um it does take more than just an hour to go out there. Uh sometimes it's multiple inspections. Most of the time it's multiple inspections. So the these fees were designed to start recouping these costs.

I I understand that, but why do you have to have multiple inspections?

I don't get it. Why? Okay. So, let's take a let's take a concrete and and say we need to replace place concrete. First thing inspector is going to go out and they're going to take a look at the site. Assess the site. What needs to be repaired? What should be repaired? Mark it off. Typically, these are residents that might be called. Say there's a trip hazard in front of somebody's house. Somebody said there's a there's a trip hazard at X location. We send an inspector out there first to verify the situation to mark it off to see what might need to be done. Now, the cont the homeowner could choose a program that we have with our contract to replace that or they could replace the concrete themselves. If they choose to replace it themselves, then they would go into this permit process. We would again go out there. You would have to assess the concrete. It would get removed. You would make sure that the concrete had been removed properly, that it's squared up, that the subgrade had been placed uh had been compacted correctly. Make sure that it's dowed in. There's an inspection. They go to pour. You're there on the day that they pour to make sure the pore is done correctly. Then you're also going to go make sure it's cleaned up, that they've actually removed stuff from your rightway. There's an easy three visits and that's with nothing going wrong.

Okay. So, for each visit, you're you're basically saying it costs $300 per visit. That could take five minutes, could take an hour. It could take two hours. That seems a Okay. Could take five, but the the average I doubt it takes five. I doubt it takes more than an hour. I would disagree, but I understand. Okay. These these fees were these fees were based on the hourly rates that our people use and the fully burden rates that we're utilizing. So, I guess what I want is a breakdown. How many assump what are the assumptions that we're sending a person to the site? Okay. For for a concrete inspection, concrete

for a sidewalk repair inspection for $842. I'd like to understand how you came up with that number. What are your assumptions? Not a problem. And then also that doesn't would that include uh a driveway as well? Is that included within the sidewalk? Is it sidewalk driveway or they different two different things you'd probably get and do flat work within the sidewalk? It's going to be our rideway which is going to be an encroachment permit. Somebody on their driveway or within their property. I mean like a drive a driveway in the Oh, like a driveway approach. It would be within our rideway would be the same sort of thing. And then we're just saying regardless of whether this is one square or 20 squares, it's the same it's the same inspection fee

in some cases. Once the projects get larger, they do become a time of material because they might take more uh more inspection time. But typically, you're talking about a minor concrete, a few feet worth of concrete that's being replaced. That's what we're talking about. But things can become larger. Frontages could need more work. And and if something like that, the if the project itself is valued at a higher rate, then it might take more inspections. It might be done on a time material basis.

Thank you. Uh moving down to 64, the Lone Tree Way, Bridge, and Arterial Benefit District. Uh it says, "See the reszo concerning the lone tree corridor and then it blacks out the fee um what the fee would be." Is there a reason for that being that 65 66 all the rest of them have the fees written into them?

Um let me see. This is the loan. I actually have this up really tiny on my phone to try and see. So the loan tree and arterial benefit um the fee is not listed. It just references even our existing master fee resolution 9254. So would it be would it be okay to list the fee similar to not having someone have to go to resol the resolution to find it or whatever? Yeah, we can certainly get that added. All right. Anything else on this page?

Number 67. It's also a legal question. It's the Park and Luffy. So, I What is it? The Quimby Act is what I'm assuming we're talking about here. Are these um charges are they set by the state? Uh I am not sure, but it appears this is set by ordinance.

Okay. So, if it is set by ordinance, when when did we set it would be a question I know you don't have the answer now. Um because if it's been a couple of years, I think we need to revisit this item. You know, those people in park and recreation, they're expensive. So, I just want to know what what if we have looked at the fees and increase them. Thank you. It's 81. I don't This is under fire protection fees. It says commercial/industrial greater of either.

That's actually the um traffic signal fees. So, it's commercial industrial and it's greater of and then you go to the $70 um or off- streetet parking space required by city code or $195 each daily peak hour each trip. And then the development based on so all 80 through 86 is related to the traffic signal fees. And then are these being studied through the developer impact fees? None of these are. No, I do not. Mr. Scadero is saying no. Do we need to study them?

Are they old? Yes. So, our current development impact fee study is based on kind of that development impact fee program established through existing state law regarding, you know, impacts based on new residents versus existing residents and strictly facilities. The traffic signal fee, not quite sure the history there. Um, it doesn't fall under that state development impact fee program that we're updating. Um, we can look more at the origin of that fee. Um, but it definitely doesn't fall under our development impact fee program.

All right. Yeah, I think it would be good to look at that fee just just to make sure it's it's where it needs to be because uh again, it's not it's not moving right, sitting steady. All right. Um, engineering deposit applications. Anything on this page? No deposits. All right. Water fees. And so number two, new water account setup. It's going from $36 to $135. It just seems

Yeah. Um our the customer service team actually spends a lot of time um working with the customer, getting documents and inputting that into the system and getting the service order established for public work. So Okay. And then the question the the blackout Yes. So, the reason that's blacked out is because you will see for the metered watered sales five through um 28, those are all established through the rate study. So, it's not being addressed in That's what I thought. I just wanted to make sure that that's that would be true with backflow as well.

Correct. All right. Next page. Anything here? No. Next page. I think Miss Merchant, you know, so Same for the water service charge on the 68 through the um 83. True for the sewer fees as well. Yeah. Water meter tampering, all that. Water deposit, sewer fees. Same. Yes, that is correct. Same for the sewer fees.

Okay. Marina fees. Um moving on to that item. So, these are only going up very little. $6.30 to $650, $7.90 to $8. So, those are very nominal increases. Were those Have those been raised recently? Were they do we did we get them up to current? You know, last year we did propose some increases and um there was some public comment about it by um one or two residents and city council then said they did not want to increase the rates.

So, and so and that has been I think these rates have been around for quite some time. So, is this CPI increase then this the 630 to 650 um that I am not sure. pret. Yes, they Yeah, they added a 3% CPI to a lot of these fees.

Okay. And then do we know how competitive I know we had I think two people come out and complain about the the fees at the at the marina. Do we do we know how competitive we are with other marinas? Yeah, because last year what I recall was they were comparing Pittsburgh and other cities neighboring us, what their cost was versus what we were looking to increase too. So that's a good question. Yeah, I think you know that's running a pretty good deficit out there. So I think it'd be good to see if we're competitive and I and I think the the point with Pittsburgh Marina was they had more to offer than we did and so that's why they were saying that the fee shouldn't be increased that much. So, all right. Anything else on this page?

Number 24. 24. Yes. The public works director may offer discounted promotional fees of a limited duration depending on availability. What What kind of specials are they? I I have not found I I have not found a special yet that demanded that um fee. So I would recommend that that be deleted. Discounted promotional fee. I don't know. Can you find I think it might be first month off or something like that. I mean I know that they've done that in the past. So can we we can take we can take a look at that. But I think you're right, Mr. Mayor, that that there's some promotional things that have been mini storage or something.

Okay. I mean I Yeah, I think that's you would never under know that by reading this. I I think that's I think that's I think it's the the black bank. Okay, maybe we maybe we can find out what the Yeah, just let us know what types of specials are running. All right, moving on to the senior center membership fee waiver available. So, we're looking at the that section now.

I I guess number seven, I have a concern. It's so it's a late fee for not picking up children. It's scheduled release times. I understand that that's an issue and that's a problem. $10 per five minutes. You know, it it just, you know, as a former, you know, parent trying to get through the signal lights in City of Antioch, sometimes if you hit all the red ones, you're going to be late. I just think it'd be more reasonable, but 10 minutes, you know, I think five is a little little tight.

Yeah. And I think this is more for repeat offenders. Uh in particular, when we have summer camp, we have a couple parents that will call us ahead of time like, "Hey, I'm stuck in traffic. No big deal." But there's there's a couple parents and with this writing, it gives us the opportunity to apply this uh fee. But is it disparit enforcement? Some of the problem parents, they get this charge. Some of the others don't get the charge. Like I said, it's for repeat. We we use it as a repeat two times, five times, 10 times. I I would just suggest that you might want to go back and take a look at at that

because I mean, parents who try desperately, you know, they're six minutes late, they're going to get charged. I mean, it's not going to happen, I hope, very often. But repeat, I get what you're what you're saying. I mean, it does cost us because staff needs to stay there until those children have been dispatched. But five minutes, is it pretty short? It's pretty short in the city of Antioch. It's pretty short. Yeah, maybe like maybe 15 minutes.

So, there is a grace period and I I don't know off the top of my head, but I believe it's, you know, 10 minutes after you have 10 minutes after the time. So, let's say you get picked up at 4:00, you have until 4:10 and then it goes into the five minute increments. Okay. And that's in the parent handbook. All I'm suggesting is that that it should read that way. So there's no differentiation. Yeah. All right. Anything else on this? Same. Uh moving on to the next page. My next item is 102.

102. Okay. Moving on to the next page. All right. Next page 102. Yeah. When we say community park, are we talking about the Worthshaw park? Which one is the community park? Community park is Worshaw. Yeah. It has several names. Okay. But when it was dedicated, I was there. It was the Worshaw park to honor Worshaw. Hasn't been there in a very long time. I think, you know, recreation park and public works need to put put the name of Waraw back on his park. Well, well, there is a sign there because I did asked that question and I did kind of push that envelope. Is that recent? There is there is a worth shaw sign there.

Right when you come in when you come not when you first see but when you come in to the where the baseball fields are there's a sign right there in the middle that says worth Shaw. It would be nice because I think originally there used to be a sign. It was it was a big sign. Yeah. So when we do signage that's one of the things that I had requested moving forward. Good. I mean, you know, when when the city honors some of their own, we should honor them, you know, and if something falls apart, you know, please replace it. I please put that as a priority to replace it. Yeah. Me and uh Pvor have that on our list.

Okay. All right. Anything else in that area? Next page. Oh, this is just more information. I'm just kind of curious. I don't know, Mr. Wright, if you do this or not. Um, on p on number 134, the Anniac Park fees, we break down the the various, you know, um, designations, military, seniors, so on and so forth. Is there data that we collect that shows, you know, the admissions on holidays and weekends versus weekday versus after four? daily attendance.

Yeah. So, we we do have daily attendance. I don't know if we have it. We It would be probably a little bit more tedious to pull after four, but we can we can pull that information as well. Well, I mean that and that's part of my question. I mean, if we're not using it, why do we we have it listed? I will say after four is very popular. No, no, but I mean No, no. I'm talking about the the accumulation of the information. I mean, the council needs to be aware. We really there's no characterization of who is using the pool.

And I I looked at this and say, well, if you're collecting that information, it would help us understand who is actually using, you know, the facility. And we we did have kind of a brief conversation about that because um as as mayor pro Tim you just visited took a tour of the water park and I did last Friday and very impressed with all the upgrades that are taking place and looking forward to the opening. I think it's going to be in June.

Yeah. Um, and we had talked about because there have been some discussion about when we look at budget reduction, trying to look at where we're at with the water park, knowing is it something it's beneficial to have it open full-time, five days a week or we're sick, whatever it is. or or maybe some days you don't have it open as long because you have less traffic, less use, and to track that once you get the new um uh park opened up this summer because you're going to get a lot of business and like to know who's coming, what's the peak times, what's the the lowlevel time, so then we can kind of determine what makes the most sense of usage. So, I think that's something we we we

Yeah, I just I I saw it here listed. I just Well, if the information is there, maybe we might be able to do with the upcoming season, kind of somehow track who our attendees are. I don't know. Yeah, we can we can track uh peak peak time. I think we can pull it from active net right now. I know our last supervisor did a real good job of every day calculating and I actually talked to Brad about it when we were coming up with when I was coming up with the idea of just you know on the slow day maybe we're not open for general admissions but we're open and we can do a full day of swim lessons. Uh Tuesdays I believe is our slowest days. So the other days Mondays are popular Wednesdays and stuff of course the weekends holidays very high. So I can pull those

conversation I just think would be important to us. I and I also want to underscore there is a real false narrative that people believe that and that our park should be producing profits. I ran the counties you know recreation programs I had many public you know pools none of them not East Bay Regional Park District or any other city you know park facilities make a profit. It is a service that is provided to the community. But there we keep on hearing people rip our water apart because quote unquote the city of Antioch is subsidizing it. We're we're paying for a service for our community. And I just wish we would we would when it comes up correct that assumption. in public facilities from East Bay Regional Park District all the way down to municipalities, they do not return profits. And that's true for deck and has been true for decades.

Okay. And then just the just the general statement. So we're going to stay with the same fees as last year. I think you had talked last year during budget about the possibility of increasing fees to capture more.

Yeah. Yeah. I think I think we're on the same page of wanting to keep the fees the same and then also adding some some days where where we can have, you know, a senior fee um and stuff like that. So, just trying to keep it baseline and get more people in there versus, you know, we also have specials on Groupon as well. I don't want to put that out there, but we we saw an increase. We sold like 2,000 uh users on Groupon because I heard that families needed, you know, family packs. So we were selling family packs, four packs, three packs uh on group so families could come through. So uh this also prices is the cap price the the maximum price we can charge. So okay

and one thing that's not on here but it is very controversial that is when some of our 501c3 or community organizations reserve the stage and the cost of the stage with the personnel and I just we don't need to do it now. I don't think we have enough time, but sometime in the near future, we need to have a discussion about that and because, you know, I'm hearing from the nonprofits that it's too expensive. So, I think just having a public discussion about in the future would be helpful.

So, we just ran those numbers from public works and got the numbers and and that's the cost. That's the true cost of having those guys over time to come out, wait, set up, and take down. So, if the council would like to subsidize that for nonprofits, we can definitely look into that and put or maybe look at some other options. Um, tomorrow we're bring we're discussing uh park and recreation budget. Yes. Okay. because I hope tomorrow, you know, we revisit some of the recommendations that you made with regards to increasing revenue at our facilities. I just leave it at that. What What number is the stage rental? Do you know? There is no number. Oh, the

No, the mobile stage rental is on the master fee. I think it might be under It's under public works because I I remember it gone up quite a bit. Oh, there it is. Mobile stage. I don't know. It's It's number 13 and under Yeah. Second second page

of the list. So, yeah, number 13, the mobile stage. So government and nonprofit uses it gone from it was 55 561 to 561 1406 for commercial or private. So what category it's it's in the second it's in public works the very first public works the very first it's the second page in this spreadsheet. I'm sorry it's not the second page it's after the building permits. So, page numbers.

Yeah, I apologize. There was page numbers. I don't know what happened when I printed it. I do apologize if those didn't show up on the print. We don't have page numbers.

So yeah, I got to hear currently is it was 561 commercial use, private use, uh 1,400 deposit a,000, but again that was just the stage. That wasn't the Yeah, there's no fee increase proposed. Um so that so that's the cost to set it up and tear it down. That's that's the cost of the stage. That's not including the the cost of the the staff. So once they tell us once Yeah. Once they tell us how long they want set up and cleanup time, then we have to call public works and say, "Hey, how many guys are you going to have? How many hours is that in OT?" And then we forward that on to

Yeah. So it's the base fee per day and then it also says per day plus actual staff cost for delivery, setup, tear down, and hallway. I I I I think that's that reminds me of the school district when we do facilities for the school district if people wanted to use this the auditorium or the stadium or the gymnasiums. The issue the issue is that you have employees who have to come in and they're off hours. Generally it's overtime to come in to set up breakdown and that's why there's an additional cost to it because someone's got to do it and it has to be your employee group. So

yeah, I'm I'm just saying that let's have a discussion. Maybe there can't be an option because most of the people that are using it are nonprofits or they receive funding through CDBG or some other sources and it's like, okay, we're we're taking money from CDBG and we're paying ourselves, you know, that that doesn't I it doesn't seem logical to me. Yeah. I just think that typically if you're having things on the weekend versus during the weekday, there's going to be some additional cost because you're pulling re human resources out of their off time to come and do work that they normally would not be doing. That that's what I'm referencing.

I understand. I just I mean it is an issue in the community and you know if we have presentation discussion that's all I'm asking. All right. So, getting close to the end, drainage fees, copies, council chambers, and the last page is special events. All right. So, anything else on this? No. Finished. Okay. All right. So that that concludes um

and if I may um Hillary um let me know she does have some answers on the building just to circle back real quick to provide you about you know there was a question on the Yeah if she if she'd like to tell us what she came up with. Please be great.

When I looked at it just didn't I was it it haunted me a moment. So I wanted to clarify. So in the transfer of the master fee schedule into this you this working copy for our user fee study the formatting changed it so that the the valuation so let's go back if it helps. So are we talking about the 40 and the 60,000?

Correct. So we'll start let's start with the pool, right? So it's saying the valuation and then that valuation is used in the building permit fee to calculate the actual building permit fee. It's just changing the valuation component of calculating a building permit fee. It's not the fee itself. That's not what people pay. Does that make sense? It's how we value it in calculation. It's the way I was looking at it and I'm like, what am I missing? And I'm like, "Oh, because I'm so used to looking at the master fee schedule in the format it exists on our website." So, what happened is that the 40,000 that you see, like 26, it should say valuation at 40,000, which is then used to calculate based on the table that you're seeing at the end of this section, the actual building permit fee. Right? So, you'll see on the unit it says valuation or contract value. Um the way it got broken up what Hillary is saying it should have said 40,000 the permit fees based on the 40 value 40,000 valuation or the contract value whichever is greater. So they're bumping that up to 60,000 valuation or contract value. That's how the permit fee.

So it's just saying that whatever is correct and then you're using that to calculate the building permit fee based on you got it. And same thing with the re- roof. Same thing. So it's the same concept. And I just again wanted to clarify just since we're here and it's fresh in our minds, we don't have to revisit the No, that's perfect. Yeah. Does that help a little bit? Any other question? So the re the wording will be correct. And like I said because just the way as Hillary mentioned the way this formatted over into here, it's clear and I didn't c I didn't catch that when I was reviewing the final version. I just didn't catch that that formatting change. And then it's been a it's been a minute since we've done that part. So it new things have since taken up space in my mind. So thank you. Thank you. Clarify. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you.

Uh do we have any public comment on this part of the study session regarding SM1 user fee study? We have no public comments. All right. Thank you. So we are we're now at SM2 fiscal year 202627 budget development. We we're obviously not going to get through that in 10 minutes. So we have a couple of options. One would be to move this item to the end of this meeting and uh and then address it then. Um the other option would be to move it on to tomorrow tomorrow night's meeting um or tomorrow afternoon's meeting I guess. So does council have a preference on Let me just look I'm looking at staff. What what's your

um it is at the pleasure of the council what they want to do. It kind of depends on how long it takes to get to this regular agenda. Is it that we're going to be looking at this at 10 o'clock at night? Um you know based on everything. So, it's really up to what um the discussion if if it's incorporated till to tomorrow. I think we're meeting from 4 to 6. Is that right? Um how would we incorporate it into tomorrow's meeting?

Um because the although there is a staff report and it has attachment for some specific funds. Um we did check with the city attorney's office um for any scenarios that would come up because the general budget study session item is just listed as 2026 27 budget development. Um we are able to incorporate um you know from this special meeting incorporate that into um we are or we're not we are able to we are able and that would be my my recommendation tomorrow. Tomorrow we're going to be meeting tomorrow and focusing on budget development. Sure. Okay. So we will uh continue SM2 fiscal year 2627 budget development to the beginning of tomorrow night's meeting.

We do have a couple public comments on SM2. Move those as well. Yeah, that they would be heard at the at the next tomorrow. Thank you. Are you not Are you not gonna come out tomorrow night? Okay. Well, you know, you know what? We have a couple minutes. We we'll take we'll take public comment um on SM2 right now for Mr. So, we are introducing SM2. Yeah, we're then we will hold it over. We'll hold it over. Yes. So this was for the folks who came tonight that can't come back. So okay, can we please have Carolyn followed by Michelle?

Is this for any items on the agenda? No, this is for budget. This is regarding SM2 the finan fiscal year 2026 27 budget development.

Good evening mayor, council, city manager and community. I want to speak tonight regarding the proposal to freeze Antioch animal service manager position and why doing so would be a mistake that contradicts prior commitments made by the city. The animal services manager position was not created arbitrarily. It was recognized as a necessary leadership role following concerns and recommendations identified during the grand jury investigation into Antioch animal services operations. The purpose was clear to provide accountability, oversight, operational stability, and proper management of a department that serves both public safety and animal welfare functions within our community. In addition, when the city entered into partnerships and agreements with outside organizations, including the memorandum of understanding with animal rescue foundation, there were commitments made regarding the structure and support of Antioch Animal Services. The city also received significant capital improvement funding from Mattie's fund to help establish and improve the shelter surgical suite and operations. Those partnerships and investments were made with the understanding that Annioch would continue building and maintaining a functional, professionally managed municipal animal services program. These organizations invested in Antioch because they believed the city was committed to improving and strengthening its shelter system, not scaling it back or weakening the leadership structure. Freezing the manager position sends the wrong message not only to the public but also to the nonprofit partners, donors, volunteers, and organizations that have

dedicated resources, trust, and funding into helping Antioch Animal Services succeed. A department cannot operate efficiently long-term without leadership. The manager position is essential for oversight, compliance, staff coordination, partnerships, budgeting, program development, and ensuring the shelter continues moving forward instead of backwards. If the city wants to maintain credibility and uphold its commitments it has made over the years, then it must continue supporting the infrastructure necessary for animal services to function properly. I respectfully urge the council to honor those commitments, recognize the importance of this role, and move forward promptly filling the Antioch animal services manager position instead of freezing it. Thank you.

All right. Thank you. Um Mr. Clerk, um this would be for folks who would not make it tomorrow night to the meeting. So, if they have comments on this item, um Michelle or Dr. Jeffrey, can you make it tomorrow night? No. Okay, then Michelle followed by Dr. Jeffrey.

Good evening, Mayor, council, city manager, and community. I'm here tonight to strongly urge the city not to freeze the Antioch animal services manager position and instead move swiftly to fill this critical leadership role. Animal Services is not just a shelter. It is a frontline public safety department that protects both residents and animals every single day. Our animal control responds to dangerous dogs, bite investigations, neglect and cruelty cases, injured animals, loose livestock, sick and injured wildlife, and emergencies that involve animals throughout our community. These are essential services, and they require experienced leadership, oversight, and coordination. A strong manager is critical not only for day-to-day operations, but for long-term planning, staff retention, volunteer coordination, partnerships with rescue organizations, and nonprofits, budgeting, compliance, grant funding, and improving services overall. Effective leadership also helps strengthen field services, improve response time, increase licensing and enforcement revenue, and maintain community trust. Investing in leadership is not wasteful spending. it is responsible. Um, it's also important to remember that Antioch residents voted for local animal services through Measure A because they understood the importance of having responsive community-based animal control and shelter services. Our community deserves a department that is properly staffed, properly led, and properly supported. Back in 2016, the city entered into anou with ARF, now known as Joybound, to fund and establish the animal services manager position. That partnership quickly helped secure Mattiey's fund grants for major capital improvement at the shelter, including the surgical suite and all the associated equipment. Although the originalou has expired, Antioch residents and their pets continue to benefit from the ongoing partnership with Joybound through programs like the

pet safety net program, free vaccination and microchip clinics at the shelter and the lowcost spay and neuter mobile clinic that serves the community every Tuesday at Antioch Animal Services. These partnerships provide tremendous resources to our community at little to no cost to the city. In return, the expectation has always been that the city would hold its commitment to maintaining proper leadership within animal services. Freezing this position now would undermine those long-standing partnerships and the investments that have been made into this department in our community. I respectfully ask the council to prioritize public safety, operational stability, and community trust by rejecting any proposal to freeze this position and by moving promptly to recruit and hire a qualified animal services manager. Thank you so much,

Madam May. Mr. Mayor, point of order. Uh, Miss Cortez, the city council has not frozen this position. Not yet. It was brought for as a recommendation for council, but it has not been frozen. I just want to be clear, the city council has not frozen the position. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Jeffrey.

Good evening, mayor, council members, staff, and I thank you for respecting my time on this. I very much appreciate that.

In a budget study, it seems appropriate to ask the question, what in blazes is going on with the animal shelter? The last shelter manager left almost two and a half years ago and the position is still vacant. And of course, in these difficult budget times, there is a temptation to say, well, we've done just fine without the position so far. Let's just freeze it. Well, we're not doing just fine. For example, just ask the people trying to deal with Antioch's feral and abandoned animal crisis. You will hear how the lack of spay and neuter services in this city is wreaking havoc with these exhausted heroes. And that's just one example. In other words, continuing not to hire a shelter manager is really a pretty bad idea. But wait, there's more. Now, we hear that staff is discussing some sort of collaboration with the county. What does that mean? We don't know because apparently it's it's a secret. Look, I know there are some issues that must be dealt with behind closed doors. Real property negotiations, personnel issues. But I also know that confidentiality has a bad rep because sometimes it's been used as a smoke screen in government for I don't know, reasons vary. Sometimes afraid of public scrutiny or they have their own agenda. Who knows, right? Well, I think it's time to clear the air and be transparent with the citizens of Antioch. The ask is really quite simple. Number one, who is involved in these discussions with the county and what are their qualifications? And number two, what is their agenda? In other words, what do they want to achieve? And I don't want to hear some vague answer like we're looking for opportunities for synergy and collaboration. I want to know what aspects of the shelter operations they think are

suitable to seek outside help. I think this would help clear the fog in which rumors abound, including the rumor that there is a plan to sell our county, sell our shelter to the county. Rumors, they waste so much time and energy and undermine goodwill. Let's stop the rumors and just tell us what's going on. It's really no different than saying we're going to hire such and such position and here are the job qualifications or in this case here are the aspects of the shelter operation we believe are suitable for outside help. Nothing confidential there. Unless of course these actually are real property negotiations or personal issues in which case maybe the worst of the rumors are true. Sounds like a fine topic for a future city council meeting. Thank you very much

Holly.

Good evening, mayor and city council members. I'm Holly Kuzzie and I'm the co-founder of a rescue group 501c3 called Positively Safe. And we founded the group over 10 years ago to serve East County Animals and sometimes beyond. And um we are in Antioch a lot because there are a lot of animals out in the streets of Antioch. Um especially since COVID and it's been really really challenging. And so I do want to say, you know, what we've noticed with the shelter is that often it's kind of the first thing that you look at cutting because it has to do with animals, but really it's affecting almost every neighborhood in Antioch. You you have stray animals, you have animals that need spayneuter, and when they're not spayneutered, you're causing more intake into the shelter. you're causing more suffering in the streets. You're causing some conflicts between neighbors even. And so I do want to support uh filling the manager position, keeping the shelter fully funded. Um I and of course we all know now that there's some plan to look at um having the county take over. Um so you'll just have to look at the pros and cons there. that may cost less if you look at the amount per capita which is $12.54 currently which is what all the other cities pay if you know 130,000 whatever that would be like I don't know 1.6 6 million. Currently, your budget's 2.9 million, but I know you have a lot of details to compare, which I could see you doing uh in the earlier budget session. And you know what we're seeing in the streets, I mean, I invite anytime come on a ride along with me any rescue here through Antioch and

you'll see what we're dealing with. It's heart-wrenching. You know, I've been talking to the one the one acco at Antioch. um wonderful, wonderful lady who's working very hard and we've been dealing with a homeless individual with dogs and that was selling puppies for drugs and it's all these things are happening in the streets and if we could somehow get control over that and work together and this person's going back and forth between like Antioch, Oakley, Brentwood. So there does regardless of if the county takes over or not, there needs to be more collaboration because now that situation is is with the county. So we're talking to the county now about that. But we need spayneuter. We need to have TNR spayneuter. We need to have spayneuter offered by the city. Without that, anything you do with the shelter is not going to work as well. So thank you.

Okay. Regarding the agenda item SM2, fiscal year budget development. We have no further comment cards. All right. Thank you. We have not gotten to a unendized public comments yet. This is on agenda item SM2, the fiscal year budget development. Okay. You you marked down general public comments. I'm sorry. Okay.

Yes. Yes, please. So my name is Lisa Kirk and if you look at the beginning of this, this is fix our shelters and abst. group what we've been dealing with and like I've said municipal sheltering is complicated. You now have restricted intakes which means you're leaving animals on the streets and if you look at the first paragraph these are some of the things that it's causing you know starvation a lot of restrictive intake does not include spay and neuters. So these are the things we're trying to advocate for on a state level and also to educate our elected officials about. If you look at the se second page, this is the estimated salary of Ben Winkkelback with Contraost Animal Services. The next one is your um manager payment for your current acting manager. So we've got 188,000 and 191,000. Ben Winkleback and Contraosta County oversees the county of 1.7 million exing out 120,000 from Manioch. On the third page is an email from Steve Berdau who's your public relations persons with CCS telling you what the contract cities pay. There seems to be a lot of confusion about contracted cities. You are not a contracted city. So all the 18

contracted cities pay $1245. It may go up, but like Holly said, that's 1.5 million or 1.6 million. So, you know, just to try to clarify some of the misinformation. I don't know if you're cutting. I don't know if you're freezing. I don't know exactly what you're doing with your budget. And I haven't seen an animal service budget. I see one director position at 277,000, which is unrealistic. And if you haven't filled that in three or four years, where has the money gone? It hasn't gone for spay and neuters for your citizens or to help nonprofits like me. I'm up here because we're being dumped on all the time because you're not providing services. Contraost animal services at least has provided spayneuters for Antioch residents in the past and hopefully that will we'll get through this and they'll start it again. the the one of the page on here is the animals killed in California. This was a bill we tried to get through AB 2265. So this was our first attempt. We were just volunteers at shelters fixing animals out on your streets and now we've had to have an advasty group and on the third last page we are going we go and we lobby our public officials in Sacramento and we're going to be doing it May 20th. So whatever you you want to look at, please look at this information because municipal sheltering is complicated now. Thank you.

We have no further comment cards. All right. Thank you. So So this is going to uh conclude the public comment portion of the fiscal year 2627 budget development uh for folks that can't make it tomorrow night and to our to the bud budget study session. And this item um SM2 will be continued to tomorrow um afternoon's 4 pm uh special city council meeting. Does that need to be voted on? Uh I don't think so. No, I think it's consensus the council. So we will go ahead and do that. Um if I don't have anything else, do I have a motion to adjourn this special meeting? So moved.

Motion. Council member Roachcha. Second by myself. Uh please cast your votes. Motion passes 300. All right, we uh meeting is adjourned. We are going to take a 5m minute recess and come back at 7:15 uh to start the regular uh city council meeting. Thank you. Meeting is adjourned at 7:09 p.m.

Good evening everybody and welcome to uh our city council meeting for Tuesday May the 12th 2026. Apologize we're starting a little bit late. We were in close session earlier and just finished up as many of you may have seen our u study session to go over our user fees and part of our uh budget. So uh if you could please uh take the role Mr. Clerk. Thank you. Council member Torres Walker is absent. Council member Wilson is absent. Council member Roachcha is here. Mayor Prom Freighus present. Mayor Bernol here. Thank you. We have a quorum at 7:18 p.m.

All right. If you would please stand and join me in the pledge of allegiance of the stand. We have returned, as I mentioned, out of close session. So, if I could have um our assistant city attorney um report out, please.

Good evening. There was one item on the close session calendar for today. That was conference with labor negotiators pursuant to California government code section 54957.6. City designated representatives Jason and Anna Cortez acting city manager employee organizations management unit treatment plant employees association operating engineers local union number three confidential unit police officers association and Antioch police sworn management association. uh direction was given to staff and there's no further uh reportable action. All right, thank you very much. Uh now time for public comment on non-aggendaized items.

Thank you. We have 13 speaker cards. Can we start with Carolyn followed by Michelle?

Hi again. Excuse me. Is this going to be on something different than you spoke on before? Um, yes. Okay. Thank you.

Uh, my name is Carolyn Steen. Um, I'm with Roy's Rescue. We are a 501c nonprofit that has partnered with Antioch Animal Services for several years. Um, I want to speak about public safety and the importance of maintaining strong local oversight when it comes to dangerous dogs and potentially dangerous animals. One of the biggest concerns many residents have regarding a transition to county animal services is the handling and release of dogs with aggression histories. Antioch animal services has historically taken a very cautious and safety focused approach regarding dogs declared potentially dangerous animals, also known as PDAs and vicious animals. Antioch Animal Services does not adopt out dogs that have been declared PDAs. Nor do they release dogs with known bite histories to rescue groups simply to move them out of the shelter system. That matters because once dangerous dogs are placed back into the community without proper safeguards, the risk is transferred to adopters, neighbors, children, pets, and the public. Many dogs released through outside networking systems are later returned due to animal aggression, bite incidents, or escalating people aggression. Antioch animal services also follows through when a dog is declared potentially dangerous, and there are clear requirements owners must meet before a dog can be redeemed, including safety measures intended to reduce future incidents and protect the community. In addition, the city of Antioch has an administrative board appeals process that allows residents and pet owners an avenue to address disputes or concerns involving PDA and vicious animal declarations. That level of structure and accountability and local oversight is important. Unfortunately, we've seen

elsewhere that raise concerns. Recently in Oakley, two neighboring Belgian Malininois reportedly broke through a fence, entered into a neighbor a neighboring property and into the home through a dog door, mauled two poodles to death inside the owner's home. According to reports, despite Ring camera footage allegedly showing one of the dogs with the deceased pet in the backyard, the dogs were initially neither declared dangerous nor impounded. It was only after the incident gained widespread attention on social media and through local news coverage that the county animal service director reportedly agreed to declare the dogs dangerous and impound them. That delay understandably raised con serious public concern. Public safety decisions involving dangerous dogs must be swift, consistent, transparent, and community focused. Residents deserve confidence that dangerous animal situations will be handled proactively. This is about protecting residents and their neighborhoods. Thank you,

Michelle, followed by Kathy and Michelle. This is different than what you spoke on last time. Okay. It's not about the manager.

Good evening, mayor, council, staff, and community. My name is Michelle Kouslitz and I want to uh I would like to bring attention to the uh process surrounding these discussions regarding the um takeover of Antioch Animal Services by Contraosta Animal Services that so many residents are deeply concerned about. Uh, the possibility of transferring AAS to CCAS appears to have been discussed behind closed doors with city officials, the county animal services director, and outside consultants, including individuals with no actual animal control experience. At the same time, there appears to have been no meaningful public input from the residents who rely on these services every single day. And perhaps most concerning of all, the very people who have firsthand knowledge of Antioch animal related challenges, our local animal control personnel and shelter staff, do not appear to have been meaningful included in these discussions either. The people working directly in this community understand the realities on the ground. They know the neighborhoods. They know the repeat problem areas. They know the dangerous dog issues. They know the enforcement challenges. They know the needs of Antioch residents because they live them every single day. That experience and local knowledge matters in our community. Tonight you you will hear about public safety concerns, dangerous dog enforcement, emergency response coordination, community services, disease prevention, budget realities, and the importance of local accountability. This is not simply a conversation about a shelter building. This is about whether Antioch residents continue to have a responsive, locally focused animal services department that protects both animals and people where we live. And the risks are real. In late April, a woman named Dearra Reyes was on her

daily walk in Stockton when she was viciously attacked by five stray dogs. She suffered more than 200 puncture wounds and lacerations to her head, neck, shoulders, arms, and legs. Reports indicate that she was being dragged into a ravine while fighting for her life. Thankfully, a neighbor heard her screams and intervened, helping fight the dogs off before the attack became fatal. Mrs. Reyes underwent approximately 6 hours of surgery, spent days hospitalized, and is now recovering from de devastating physical and emotional trauma. That incident is horrifying. But it is also a reminder of why animal control matters and matters in our community. Animal services is not a is not an option. It is not cosmetic. It is not simply adoptions and social media posts. It is public safety. It is emergency response. It's enforcement. It's disease prevention. It is community protection. The residents of Antioch deserve transparency, public involvement, and a seat at the table. Thank you, Kathy, followed by Karen.

Good evening, mayor, council, staff, and the Antioch community. My name is Kathy Cabrera, and I'm the president of K911 Animal Rescue here in Antioch. When people think of the Antioch Animal Shelter, I'm sure the first thing that comes to mind is that it's a place to bring lost animals, surrender a pet, or adopt a cute kitten or puppy. But Antioch Animal Services is so much more than that. Antioch Animal Services is not simply a building that houses cute animals waiting for adoption. It is a critical public health and public safety department. Antioch animal control officers regularly respond to calls for service to include dangerous animals, animal bite cases, aggressive animals, neglect and cruelty investigations, loose livestock, injured animals, wildlife concerns, and emergency situations that directly impact the safety of our neighborhoods. These are frontline services. When a resident has been bitten by a dog, when livestock are loose in traffic, when an injured animal is suffering in the roadway, and when neglect or abuse is occurring behind closed doors, people do not call a rescue group. They call Antioch Animal Services. Local animal services works because local officers know this community. They understand our neighborhoods, our residents, our challenges, and our needs. They build relationships, trust, and accountability within the community that they serve. R Regionalizing Antioch into an already stretched county system risks reducing responsiveness, reducing enforcement presence, and weakening the connection between the community and the people responsible for protecting both animal and residents. This is not simply about shelter operations. This is about preserving an essential city service that impacts public safety, public health, and community trust. In 1978, the residents of Antioch voted to pass Measure A because they understood something very important. Antioch needed its own local animal services program, accountability, direct to this

community, and responsive to the specific needs of our residences. For nearly 48 years, Antioch Animal Services has existed as the people of the city believe local control matters, and it still does today. Instead of dismantling Antioch animal services, the city should be investing in it, filling vacant positions, strengthening services such as adding affordable spayneuter for community cats and pets, improving response capabilities, and honoring the will of the Antioch voters who voted for you who established local animal control through Measure A nearly five decades ago. Let me just add that the staff and volunteers of Antioch Animal Services go above and beyond to get animals out of the shelter and into safe rescues and adopted into loving homes. They work tirelessly and they have made the connections with local rescue groups to pull animals from the shelter and they've made the connections with the community who support this shelter and come to adopt a shelter pet. Please keep Antioch Animal Services under Antioch. Thank you,

Karen. followed by Nicole.

Good evening, mayor, council, staff, and community. My name is Karen Cops, president of HARP Homeless Animals Response Program, founded in 2007. I respect the difficulty you have in balancing the fiduciary responsibility for Antioch and the need to ensure our residents welfare. The city has been considering turning over animal services to the county. Currently, the county track contracts with the other 18 cities for animal services. Antioch is the only city that has its own shelter services. The county is also facing significant financial strain. It is pursuing a countywide sales tax measure to help offset budget shortfalls. How will they provide service for our Antioch residents? They had a satellite animal shelter in Penol for years to serve the other part of Contraosta County. It was closed in 2020 in order to save money. Would the county shut our shelter by the Delta to save money? Then think about it. Antioch residents would have to travel to on Highway 4 to Martinez for services along with thousands of people in Brentwood, Oakley, Discovery Bay, Pittsburgh, and on and on. And right now, Antioc Animal Services has unfilled positions, some for years, including critical enforcement and operational roles. We'd like to suggest hiring animal control officers, management staff and support that personnel in this investment helps generate revenue and improve services but in generate revenue. Uh animal services collects licensing fees, uh enforcement fines, citations, redemption fees, permit fees, and other

revenue that help offset costs. How about applying for grants? Partnering with a large nonprofit to provide services that enhance the quality of life for our animals and the residents who care for them. That can only be done if someone is available to work on these revenue producing efforts. They can't do three or four jobs at the same time. Revenue cannot be generated effectively when positions remain vacant and enforcement capacity is reduced. Thank you. Nicole, followed by Raphael.

Good evening. My name is Nicole Martinez and I am an animal rescuer. Much like these ladies that have come before me and will come after me, none of us get paid for what we do. None of us get paid one cent for what we do. And much of the time, we're funding things with our own personal money just to get the job done because the resources have been cut and cut and cut since I started rescuing 12 years ago. Our dedication to these animals is fierce. Fierce enough to get out of bed early every morning. Fierce enough to give up holidays and our weekends. Fierce enough to know that we are on a losing uh we are on the losing end before we even start the day. Yet, we still show up every day. We still try to stop actions that don't serve animals. We plead with people that make decisions for animals and the constant overburden system. Many of them, these people that make decisions have never walked through a shelter in their entire lives or looked in the faces of any animals in need. And of course, we plead to the public to fix their animals and stop having unnecess unnecessary litters with nowhere to go. Most of us have been doing this for 10 plus years. We do this for the animals that have been discarded by this community. We do this for the animals that have been abused by members of this community. And we do this for the animals that have been left behind because their lives didn't fit into a budget nicely. Animal services is not an isolated department working separately from public safety. Antioch animal services works directly alongside the Antioch Police Department in situations involving dangerous animals, emergency response, and vulnerable residents. Because the department is local, response are often immediate and coordinated. When there is a dangerous dog posing a threat to the public, animal services and Antioch PD work together quickly to secure and situate the and protect the residents where someone before someone gets seriously injured. That local partnership matters,

but the collaboration goes far beyond dangerous dogs. Animal services also responds when police make arrests and pets are left behind needing immediate care and shelter. They assist in domestic violence situations involving pets, helping protect animals when they are often victims along with their owners. They respond when a resident passes away and a surviving pet is left with nowhere to go. They assist during fires when homes are destroyed and displaced animals needing emergency care and shelter. They respond during vehicle accidents when an owner is injured and a pet is suddenly left stranded or frightened at the scene. These are real emergencies and crisis situations happening in our community on a weekly basis and these responses require local knowledge and immediate availability. The part this department is not expendable. It is essential as the city considers the future of Antioch Animal Services. We urge you to recognize the critical role it plays not only for animals but for public safety, emergency response and community protection. Thank you for listening. Raphael followed by John and Liz.

Hello everybody. Uh my name is Rafael Tjo. I'm the owner of Tacos Salazador and the reason I'm here is because um I've been working with city area for almost eight years with my taco truck at Lowe's parking lot and I never have any issue. Um uh last month I get a paper I had to get out from Lowe's uh because I had to reply for a new permit and I did already and I have all the paper what you guys needed and I provide to the uh second floor even the contract I have with the um Lowe's corporation and still everything is fine and I pay already the the the fees whatever I had to pay but the reason I'm here is because they told me I had to get a 30 place from the parking lot. So, and I have and I speak by myself and my family and eight people I have behind me and I had to, you know, let it go them and look for something else because I don't have enough work for them. So, I want to see if you guys can do something about it because it's not fair to be out take a business for 30 days when I've been working with you guys for eight years straight. I pay all my my permits and everything and I see a lot of um a lot of things happen is not right. I know how to handle food because I have permits from health department and and I see a lot of things is not good for the city. So I hope you guys can help me and help all the people working with me. Thank you,

John and Liz, followed by Julie.

Hi. Uh, good evening, uh,

council members. Council members, this is the first time on the microphone, but anyways, I'm here to say thank you to a very special person that helped us out out of a big jam. We had our backs to the walls and we had gone to every agency that we could possibly go to to help us in this situation. None of them panned out. They all turned us down. out of uh instinct, we decided to come and see Don Freighus. This man was able to get us through. We were having a very traumatic um noise nuisance in our neighborhood. So, the adjacent homes to this particular residence was causing uh our quality of life to severely be impacted. It was affecting our sleep for eight straight months. Uh very difficult to get up and go to work the next day. Uh we walked around the neighborhood and requested some help from our neighbors. They we did a petition. We came here to the city and asked for some help. Um and we got it. Things have been resolved. We are incredibly thankful and appreciative to many of you that assisted with us. So, we just wanted you all to know that and the community as well that you guys were there to uh to see us through. Thank you very much. We appreciate it

from my heart. Thank you very much because now I get more than four hours sleep a night and the fact had uh I wish you would pass this on to uh Captain Bitner. Our gratitude also with him and his team that helped us and uh forever we're indebted to you guys. Thank you.

Julie followed by Mary Joe. Good evening. My name is Julie Carlson. I'm a 30 plus year resident here in Antioch. And been a while since I've been here. Um, I was quite active a few years back. But I hear you need some money. And what I've gotten myself into over the last eight years or so is a nice tidy little suit against the United States Internal Revenue Department and the US Treasury all by myself. And it's I've had um fortunate enough that I have learned all along the way how to file all those wonderful documents that you file when you're in a case like this. But they I noticed a problem with our federal government and how they were handling their cash and so forth. And as you know, their cash is our cash because it came from us. And if they're not handling it correctly, then that means our money is not being spent correctly. So I kind of applied the same vein of thought to what's going on here in Antioch and I started in and usually that means a ton of spreadsheets for me. And I decided I probably know more about this State Department than anyone probably in the United States. I would have to say I've studied it and looked at it and practically memorized it. It has 32 million records

in this department. And I had it was in such bad shape. I taught myself to scrub the data by basically manually and in doing that you learn things. So I started with the same thought here with city of Antioch. I found some stuff you guys might be interested in. But this is just a very small little spreadsheet. What was I say? Nine pages. And if you can see the orange little lines on there, those all belong to the city of Antioch. This is money that belongs to the city and it's sitting up there in Sacramento, not earning any interest, just sitting, waiting for somebody to come and get it. Um, starts off city of Antioch, City of Antioch, City of Antioch, City of Antioch payroll department, City of Antioch water and sewer. I I can go on here. Um, but I'd be happy to sit down with you with somebody from the city because there's probably a lot on here that I don't know actually is money that belongs to the city. Um the way this these information is entered in to this fund um is not always the best.

Thank you. I have eight and a half thousand here, 5 million here. Give me a call. Right. Thank you. Thank you,

Mary Joe. Followed by Patty. Make this a little lower. I'm 4 foot seven. Hello. Um, my name is Mary Joe Bruce. I moved to Antioch from Long Beach, California. And I know you're probably so tired of hearing about the situation with animals, but I just want to come. I I'm just a concerned citizen and I just wanted to show up. This is the first thing I've done here. Um, and just say that Long Beach and Antioch are very similar. Long Beach has a local animal services. Um, and they're not uh out to the county like so many others. Um, other cities down there are. And I got attacked by a pitbull with my dog, walking my dog. And um I'm so grateful that the animal services were local there because they were able to come and save my life and save my dog's life and um capture a very very dangerous dog who had attacked so many other people in the community down there. I've been here and I just experienced my first sideshow on 18th Street about a couple weeks ago and I rescued a little blind dog that nobody else was looking at and was able to give it back to its owner. It was 17 years old. Um, I'm afraid to come downtown because animals come to me and I might as well be a rescuer. Um, because every time I come down here to support the local businesses like the Merkantile and Hen and Drake and even this little bookstore across the way, I'm seeing animals and it's such a it's so awful. It's so awful to see the animal situation down here. and I just adopted a little dog from uh Antioch Services, a little Chihuahua um that somebody else had adopted and ended up being uh allergic and so I ended up adopting u my third dog. So um I just wanted to say please do the right thing. Please keep

it local. Please don't overextend another system that's already overworked. Please do the staffing you need. Please get volunteers. I am so ready and willing to uh assist in any way that I can, even volunteer. I would love to be involved. And I just I'm right now where I live, uh two other people moved in with big dogs and I'm really scared. I'm 4 foot seven. I'm scared I'm going to get attacked and not have anybody to call to come help me or my dog when I'm walking my dog. And I just want to have a neighborhood that I feel safe in. So, I just uh so um I wanted to just say that I think it's important an a very important issue to to handle and I voted for you and I'm really really counting on you to help the people of Antioch. And the animals, they're important. They're the heart and soul of a community. They're for people like me who don't have children. They're my children. and I don't want to feel unsafe or feel like I'm going to be attacked or I'm not going to have anybody to call if I am attacked. So, please do the right thing. Thank you, Patty. Followed by Miguel. Good evening everyone. Thank you for the opportunity to speak with you this evening tonight. Um, lot of lot of information, a lot of different opinions of which way we should go. Um, I'm going to always advocate for the animals of this community. I love animals and I think some people come with concerns that they're going to lose their jobs. I get it. Or that maybe they won't be protected from vicious animals. What I'm going to say, I believe that

the Antioch shelter in 1978 was efficient for our community that was 37,000. We're 120,000 people now. And I don't think it's for the services that we need, the full services that we need. I don't know if we can get there if it's a if we can do that ourselves financially. You want to cut the budget. um county from my experience they're doing spay and neuter large clinics for TNR there's talks about doing lowcost spay and neuter for residents it has to be everything they do medical they save animals lives and so I don't know if our Antioch shelter do we have vets and staff so I propose that we do go to county and we let them come in with their leadership They're already established. They have vets on staff. They have a director, which would save the city $270,000 in hiring one because there's already one in place. They have they know how to handle these spay and neuter clinics. They're already doing them. They have vets, so they're able to go and get grant money with those vets, and they're going for that money. In order to make those spay and neuter clinics happen, there has to be a compromise. I always believe in compromise. I don't want to see people lose jobs that are good people that care about animals. And I definitely don't want our citizens to be in jeopardy from vicious dogs. But I think also some of those vicious dogs are ones that are unneutered. And so that creates more of a viciousness in the dog to attack. They they band together. Um it's terrible. I would never want anyone to be afraid in our city, but I think there has to be I don't think we're I don't think we can get there quick enough to deal with the

crisis that we have at hand. And I think we really do need to accept the leadership that can come in from county. Now, how can we include some of the people that are already in our Antioch shelter to include them in this new process going forward, this new leadership? I would want the good people to stay, you know, and I would want definitely there to be code enforcement or there would be um people to come out and protect. I also don't believe the police should be overseeing our rescue. I think that they are crucial to some cases if they're called on. Thank you very much. Thank you.

Can we have Miguel followed by Queen? Hi, I'm Miguel Mendoza. I'm a community member, business owner, and content creator with about 100,000 followers on my social media platforms. I see Bessie's not here. I wonder why. I have been dealing with code enforcement issues and the city in general for a few years now, which is insane the level of horrible leadership, accountability, and communication the city has. Ron, you have answered once in almost a year that that there has been copious emails sent to you or you have been mentioned. Bessie, who is no longer here, um, also almost the same exact track record. I've attempted to resolve this diplomatically through communication with code enforcement, the city manager, and members of this council. Council member Tamisha acknowledged to me directly that I'm not the only resident who has complained about the disproportionate code enforcement in Annioch. That alone should concern every person sitting in here. Assembly member Anna Marie Farius has also been contacted and contacted you guys on my behalf, yet still has not received answers to my questions or any transparency regarding the enforcement decisions that are made um or the results of the so-called investigation. Mind you, second investigation that Bessie conducted, she conducted one last year in the summer, conducted another one when I presented a 45 slide PowerPoint with evidence, videos, etc. So, I want answers. And if you're wondering what the questions are, Ron and the other city leaders, they've been sent to you several times. I can also forward them to you and Cortez. So, I have given you all until the end of this month before I start posting publicly on my social media platforms exactly all the screenshots, emails, and everything. Um, and I'll be hearing every single council meeting until this gets resolved quickly. And by the way, you guys should probably talk to the lady that found all that money to resolve the shelter and animal problem. Thank you.

Queen followed by Crystal. Good evening um council members and community at large. I am Queen Adupoku, owner of Royal Emotional Care, a group mental health therapy practice and founder of Util Case Management and Clinical Services, a nonprofit organization located at 2018 Lone Tree. Could you bring the mic so we can hear you? Oh, sorry.

Okay. Um, I am Queen Adupoku, owner of Royal Emotional Care, a group mental health therapy practice and founder of UTIL Case Management and Clinical Services nonprofit organization located at 2810 Lone Treeway, sweet number nine in Antioch, right up the street. Thank you for your continued leadership and service and commitment to supporting health and well-being of Antioch community and the community at large. We are excited to share the following community wellness initiative that we hope will bring positive that will hope will positively contribute to the lives of individuals and families throughout our city and surrounding communities. The 2026 Antioch Community Mental Health Fair is a community wellness event organized by Royal Emotional Care and Util Case Management and Clinical Services and will be held at the Empire Empire Business Parking Lot. The event is scheduled for September 19, 2026 in Antioch. designed to promote mental health awareness, wellness, education, prevention resources, and access to culturally responsive support services. It will bring together health provide health care providers, hospitals, nonprofits, schools, faith communities, wellness professionals, public agencies, and community leaders around the important topic of mental health. Event offerings are anticipated to include mental health education materials and wellness resources, community resource booths and referrals, youth and family support services, grief, trauma and stress management information, domestic violence awareness and prevention resources, health care and wellness screenings, financial wellness and supportive community services, activities focused on reducing

stigma around mental health care, faith-based community services and spiritual wellness, mental health case management and support for employment, housing, education, nutrition, physical activity, emotional support and assistance with activities of daily living. As this is our inaugural community event, the primary focus will be on education, outreach, networking, and connecting community members with supportive services and resources. Anticipated attendance is approximately 300 to 700 community members. Events will it the event will also serve as a soft community launch for UTIL case management and clinical services and emergence emerging nonprofit organization focused on expanding equitable access to mental health support and community-based wellness services. Our goal is to strengthen community connection, increase awareness and avo and and available resources and promote healthier, more resilient communities throughout Antioch, Contracasta County, and the communities at large. We respectfully seek community partnership and support in helping advance mental health and wellness prevention and access to care for residents and the broader community. Thank you very much, Crystal, followed by Tiffany.

Hello, city council. So, I just want to give you guys a little bit of a background. According to Google, Ron Bernell spent more than 25 years dedicated to this community of Antioch where he lived, worked, and raised his family. You then became the city manager in 2017 to 2021. You then worked closely as city manager with the police department from 2017 to 2021 where then you decided to retire which was probably due to the text messaging scandal and some other issues that you were having working closely with the police department. How did you not know about all the racism and texting that was going on? I also want to know why a m about two months ago you then put in place a police commissioner Emanuel Ciz Jr. who used to be on the city council and planning commission who sat up in front of all of you guys and stated that he was surprised that this texting scandal happened and then asked why didn't people just come forward. I have been to four meetings, two commission meetings and two city council meetings. I have yet to get a response or answer as to why he was placed in this role. The police oversight is the external review of law enforcement agencies by nonsworn individuals to increase the accountability and transparency and public trust. These independent bodies are to monitor and con like to monitor and conduct complaints and investigate complaints

all while trying to gain the trust back with the public. After I spoke at the commission board with to and asked Mr. Ciz Jr. why should he be trusted to be on that police commission. After he stated what he stated, he went on in his three minutes to then talk about the fact that he went to the the district 2 meeting and that we missed out on an opportunity to have public works there because of speeding and speed bumps. Sir, that is not his job. He needs to be redirected as to what his job is on the police commission. He clearly doesn't understand his role on the police commission. And I really seriously need to understand why we're still having him up here and why we haven't redirected it to somebody else who knows and understands the role and so that we can get the trust back with the public and the police department. I work on Sycamore. We need the trust back. Tiffany Hi, good evening mayor and council. Um, my name is Tiffany Middleman and I'm an Antioch resident with 20 years of experience working in animal welfare and running shelter veterinary medicine services including but not limited to spayneuter lowcost clinics and I'm directly working with both contraosta and animal services in Annioch. Um, I wanted to speak kind of frankly about my experience and I really appreciate you guys hearing me out again because I want to talk to you about my perspective um, more from like a veterinary and animal welfare side. Um, I just want to say that I feel like our animal services is so

important. We really need our ACOs fully staffed and I think it's something that we take for granted until it's not around. um as somebody who has dealt with the other side of things working with um disease control and some scary stuff. So, uh our animal control regularly responds to sick, injured, deceased wildlife throughout the city. Uh they're a frontline for disease surveillance and public safety. Animals with potential rabies, distemper, leptosperosis, and other diseases do pose a serious risk to people and pets. and dealing with wildlife can involve high-risisk pathogens that can be fatal if not handled correctly. Um this is why it's really important that we have properly trained staffed and and prompt responses. Um these are essential public safety services. Another thing animal Antioch animal services helps residents with that I think is really important as one of the hardest moments of pet ownership which is providing lowcost euthanasia services. Uh we're unique in that way that we have, you know, that kind of support. Um also affordable cremation services and our community has a serious need for this. We see it a lot in animal welfare when people can't afford it. Uh without this, we're going to see even more animal neglect, abandonment, and suffering. uh through partnerships with Antioch, Friends of Animal Services, Joybound, Bad Rap, local trainers, rescues, donors, um animal services here provides a pet food pantry, vaccine microchip clinics, training, adoption support, and lowerc cost spayneuter services. Joybound, previously ARF, helped with major renovations to our shelter and including the clinic. there's a lot of programs that we started that, you know, we really need to continue supporting them so we can get a lot of these services more out there. Um, and you know, these are all things that help keep family

pets healthy and in their homes. So, what's concerning a lot of us in veterinary veterinary medicine and animal welfare is the idea that Contraosta Animal Services would somehow improve these services. And that's not my experience. Um, I've personally pulled dogs from Contra Costa that did not receive the care they were supposed to receive through their clinics. And it's not because the staff doesn't care. They're overwhelmed. And I'll stop there. Thank you for your time,

Mr. Becker. Thank you. So to touch briefly on the animal services topic tonight, you know, I will say that um I can't speak to the operational deficits for the city of Antioch or Contraosta County, but I can say as policymakers and as a community that sets standards and then stewards taxpayer dollars, what's frustrating is hearing I think frustrating is probably my word of the year um is hearing that we we might be having conversations with Contraosta Animal Services to come in and take over Antioch Animal Services. And the first thing that pops into my head is, well, Antioch Animal Services is tied to the Antioch Police Department and the Antioch Police Department facilities where animal services is is currently owned by the Antioch Public Financing Authority because we kept levying that debt that we used to build that building. And so that building won't even be paid off into the 2030s, but we could potentially be handing the keys over to Contraosta County while we still pay the debt as a city. It's like saying we're going to go and buy a car and then we're going to go let somebody else park it in their car and drive it, but we'll still pay the maintenance on it. It doesn't make any sense to me. I mean, did anybody think about this when they originally levied that debt? Did anybody think about this in the 1970s when they said we want to have our own animal services? Everybody, I think, looks at a problem

and says, "Let's go backwards to try to fix it." And I don't think backwards is the solution. And I think if you continue to try to go around something, you're just turning circles. It's probably going right through it, approaching it head-on and saying, "How do we stick to our standards? How do we steward those dollars that were committed decades ago and still provide a service and grow a service? I think we should be ashamed as a community that we're sitting here talking about a failure that we have paid for for almost 50 years. I don't think that sets a proper standard for our city and the fact that we're talking about giving it over to somebody else doesn't show opportunity lives here for our Antioch residents. So, how do we move forward? Well, I don't know. Through opportunities like the governor's office for a state of California today announcing $111 million in homekey awards for six new projects throughout the state of California. In Antioch being the one that was awarded the most dollars in this round at $34.9 million. $35 million that we do not pay back. Why don't we pay it back? Because we're state residents and it was our money to begin with. So, let's go get more money.

We have no further speaker cards. All right. Thank you. We will move on now to uh proclamations. Uh do I have a motion to approve proclamations? Move approval of three proclamations. Second. Motion from Mayor Prom Freya. Second from Council Member Roach. Please cast your votes. Motion passes 300.

All right. So, we have three proclamations tonight. Um, I'm going to go ahead and read the first one, ask the recipient to come down or recipients and say a few words, read the second one, same thing. Third one, and then the council will come down and take pictures with uh with you all afterwards. So, the first one is uh National Police Week, May 10th to 16th, 2026. Whereas in 1962, President Kennedy proclaimed May 15 as National Peace Officers Memorial Day and the calendar week in which May 15th falls as National Police Week to pay special recognition to those law enforcement officers who have lost their lives in the line of duty for the safety and protection of others. Whereas it is well known and accepted that law enforcement is an inherently dangerous and demanding profession in which dedicated professionals knowingly place their lives in harm's way to protect others who are unable to protect themselves. Whereas the dedicate dedicated men and women of the Antioch Police Department play an essential role in safeguarding the rights and freedoms of the citizens of Antioch. Whereas over 60,000 assaults against law enforcement officers off officers are reported each year, resulting in approximately 17,000 injuries within the United States. Whereas since the first recorded death in 1791, more than 23,000 law enforcement officers in the United States have made the ultimate sacrifice and been killed in the line of duty. Whereas it is important that all citizens know and understand the challenges, duties, and responsibilities of their police department, and that members of our department recognize their duty to serve the people by safeguarding life and property, protecting them against violence and disorder, and protecting the innocent against deception and the weak against oppression or intimidation. And whereas the city of an the city of Antioch city council wishes to honor all peace officers who through their courageous deeds have lost their lives or have become disabled in the performance of their duties. Now therefore, I, Ron

Bernell, mayor of the city of Antioch, do hereby proclaim May the 10th through 16, 2026 as National Police Week in the city of Antioch and encourage all citizens to recognize the members of the Antioch Police Department for their faithful and loyal devotion to their responsibilities and their dedication to our community. So, I'd like to um ask Sergeant Fashioner if he would come up along with anybody else he'd like to have join him. Thank you. Good evening. Uh, thank you for giving us the opportunity to show up tonight. Just going to say a couple words. Uh, National Police Week is a time to honor the courage, commitment, and sacrifice of law enforcement officers across the nation. It reminds us that behind every badge is a person who shows up daily to protect their community, supported by families who share the burdens of the job. We also pause to remember officers who made the ultimate sacrifice who legacy challenges us to uphold integrity, courage, and compassion. This week reaffirms our dedication to serving our communities with a professionalism and building trust through our actions. To all the officers, thank you for your service, your your presence, and your unwavering commitment to keeping others safe. Thank you.

All right. Thank you, Sergeant Fashion.

All right. Our second proclamation this evening is for National Public Works Week May 17 through 23rd uh 2026. Whereas public works services provided in our community are an integral part of our citizens everyday lives. Whereas the support of an informed citizenry is vital to the efficient administration and operation of the city's public works systems and programs which include water production, water treatment, water distribution, sewer, storm water or NPDS, environmental resources, streets, parks, medians and open spaces, the capital improvement program, public buildings, the marina and fleet. Whereas the health, safety, and comfort of this community greatly depends on these facilities and services. Whereas the quality and effectiveness of the operation and maintenance of these facilities as well as their planning, design, and construction is vitally dependent upon the efforts and skills of public works professionals. And whereas the efficiency of the qualified and dedicated personnel who staff public works departments is materially influenced by the people's attitude and understanding of the importance of the work they perform. Now therefore, I, Ron Bernell, mayor of the city of Antioch, do hereby proclaim May 17 through 23rd, 2026 is National Public Works Week in the city of Antioch. And I call upon all citizens and civic organizations to acquaint themselves with the issues involved in providing our public works, and to recognize the contributions which public works professionals make every day to our health, safety, comfort, and quality of life. Thank you. I'd like to ask uh Brian Valadez uh with his staff to come on up, please.

Thanks, Brian. You're welcome to introduce the folks with you as well.

So, uh my name's not Brian, my name's Justin, but behind me I have Raphael, Kyle, Roman, Brian, and Brian. Uh so good evening mayor and council and the community members. My name is Justin Bar. I am a water distribution operator for the city of Annioch. On behalf of the public works department, thank you for the proclamation recognizing public works week. We're proud to serve this community every day by maintaining the essential services that keep the city safe, clean, and running smoothly. This rec recognition means a great deal to our entire team. We appreciate the support from our city leaders and community members. Thank you. All right. Thank you.

All right. And our third uh proclamation, we're going to have three recipients for this is for mental health awareness month May 2026. Whereas mental health is essential to the overall health and well-being of all people and emotional wellness plays a critical role in individual stability, healthy relationships, and thriving communities. Whereas one in five adults and one in six youth experience a mental health condition each year, yet many individuals do not receive the support they need due to stigma, limited access to care, and systemic barriers. Whereas the city of Antioch recognizes that mental health challenges impact individuals and families across all backgrounds and are often compounded by experiences such as trauma, violence, housing instability, and economic hardship. Whereas promoting mental wellness, early intervention, and access to culturally responsive and trauma-informed care is critical to strengthening community safety, resilience, and overall quality of life. Whereas the city of Antioch is committed to advancing community- centered approaches to mental health, including prevention, outreach, crisis response, and connections to care that support healing and long-term stability. Whereas families, educators, healthc care providers, community- based organizations, faith leaders, and advocates play a vital role in raising awareness, reducing stigma, and expanding access to supportive services. Whereas recognizing mental health awareness month provides an opportunity to elevate the importance of mental wellness, encourage helpseeking behaviors, and reaffirm that seeking support is a sign of strength. And whereas during mental health awareness month, the city of Annioch joins communities across the nation in promoting awareness, fostering compassion, and supporting efforts to ensure all residents have access to care and resources they need. Now therefore, I, Ron Bernell, mayor of the city of Antioch, do hereby proclaim the month of May 2026 and each following May to be mental health awareness month in the

city of Antioch. And I would like to ask if uh Alicia Wesley Clark, who is the director of the Angel Kinto um crisis response team, could come on up, please, as one of our recipients. Hi, good evening Mayor, council, city manager, attorney, and community. On behalf of Felton Institute, Angelo Kinto, community response team. We thank you for this proclamation. It truly means a lot. Mental health is something that touches all of us, whether we talk about it or not. I've seen firsthand how important it is to create spaces where people feel safe, heard, and supported without judgment. This recognition isn't just about awareness. It's about action, compassion, and making sure people know they're not alone. I accept this on behalf of everyone that's doing the work, those in the field, those on their healing journeys, and those who show up every day choosing growth over silence. We have all we all have a role in breaking stigma and building stronger, healthier communities. Thank you for seeing the importance of this and for standing with us. And this is my team. Um this is Selena Arvin, um Gina, Heath, and Rashad.

All right. Thank you. I'd also like to ask if um Debbie Thomas, who's the program manager for A3 Contraosta Health, could come on up, please.

Good evening. I am not Debbie Thomas, uh as you probably could guess. Um, but my name is Chad Pierce and I'm chief of operations for A3, um, which stands for anyone, anywhere, anytime in Contra Costa County can receive, um, mental health crisis care, um, 247 hours um, every day of the week. And so we are um, we are pleased to accept this proclamation and it is the honor to serve the community. We work well with um the KTO project as well as um law enforcement agencies. So, we're really a part partnership with all of the first responders and trying to get the right and appropriate care to the families that we serve.

All right. Thank you, Chad. And our third recipient is Gigi Crowder. She's CEO of NAMI Contraosta.

Thank you. We're also very appreciative of being acknowledged this year from the city of Antioch, my home city, for the work that we do to make sure that individuals from all faiths, backgrounds, ethnicities are represented. Um, I would boast that NAMI has the most culturally respect respective team of individuals, highlighting lived experience and how important it is for individuals to understand that mental illness is a medical condition and therefore should be responded to with compassion and care. Our role is to reduce stigma. We do trainings that are specific to educating family members so that we can reduce the harms that take place when people don't understand mental illness. Tomorrow in conquered, Antioch's second largest city in the county. Conquered is the first. We'd like to expand further out into Antioch because many of our calls are coming from the second largest city. That's why we have an African-American holistic wellness hub not far from here. pretty much walking distance from here because we know that African-Americans so often when they live with a mental illness is criminalized for the illness. And so the work that we're going to be doing, thank you to a grant, the civic engagement grant from the city of Antioch, we will be able to offer crisis intervention training to your law enforcement and hopefully that will produce Antioch has been one of the leading cities to more appropriately respond to individuals having a psychiatric emergency. So, thank you for the proclamation and I'm looking forward to building a stronger relationship with all of you and going beyond gym partners to really working together. So, thank you, Mayor.

Thank you, DJ. So, we're going to council's going to come on down and we'll take pictures uh with folks. We'll start with uh PD, then public works, and then our mental health uh folks.

I'm not sure. Do you want to come this way?

Okay, hold on. Wait. Look at me now. One, two, three. Thank you. Thank you. All right. Do we have any public comment on Oh, we don't have our sloer city clerk. Is there anybody has public comment on that last item for the proclamations? All right. Seeing none, uh, moving on to uh, announcements of civic and community events. Uh, farmers market up first.

All right. Let's keep it short and sweet. Farmers market kicked off Mother's Day weekend. It was fabulous. Uh we are going to be open every Sunday from 900 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. Uh that's on I Street uh in Third Right in the I Street parking lot. Come and get your fresh fruits and vegetables and also enjoy uh Kids Corner and also local uh vendors such as Smashburger, Kettle Corn, and uh a lot of other local folks. So come and enjoy. Thank you.

All right. Thank you, Director Wright. And I'll also mention that I'm going to be having uh doing a mayor at the market. Uh that's an idea they said that some of the mayors come down and do from 10 to noon on May the 24th if anybody wants to swing by and say hi and get some fresh fruit and vegetables down there. So, uh any other um any other public announcements, meetings? No, sir. All right. Uh announcements of board and commission openings. Um,

thank you. The city of Antioch encourages it res residents to become involved in their local community. Any interested resident is invited to apply for the following vacancies. The deadline is 5:00 p.m. Friday, May 29th. The sales tax citizens oversight committee has three full-term vacancies expiring March of 2030 and two full-term vacancies expiring March of 2028. To be considered for the position, please complete an application and submit it to the city clerk's office by the deadline date listed above. Applications are located at the city's website and may be picked up in person here at city hall. Please email your completed application to the city clerk and you can also drop off the application in the water billing dropoff box located in the parking lot just outside of Antioch City Hall. Thank you.

All right. Thank you very much. Uh moving on to our presentations. We have two presentations tonight. Uh the first one is the Antioch Accessory Dwelling Unit Community and a Workforce Partnership presentation. And I believe uh Dylan Howell is going to be uh leading us off with some of the students that he works with on this program. Very impressive. The three council members up here. We were able to to check it out. So yeah, presentation. Yeah. Thank you.

Grateful when you guys came down. Uh this is a program through uh Big Skills and Rebuilding Together. They uh they developed an ADU program. They're on the Antioch High School campus. Will is a student of mine from last year who graduated and is now one of the learning leaders for this program. So Will comes in at 8:00 every morning, uh, comes up with a plan for the day, and then at 8:30 when my students show up, like Galani, Will comes in and grabs a couple of them and teaches them what's going on with this ADU build. So Will's getting experience in building and being a leader. My seniors are getting experience in actually constructing an ADU. Um, and as I understand the program, there's two of them and they're available to citizens of Antioch potentially for free depending on your income um to be placed into your backyard as an ADU.

All right. Awesome. Do we have some slides or something? No. Yeah, I think there's a Okay. Yeah, I was going to say I know you sent me a a PowerPoint, so I wanted to make sure we got it up there for you. Yeah, this is this is 12 quick pictures of of the students working on the program. Um, I don't know if you just want to flip through them real quick. Oh, where do I point?

There we go. Here's here's here is uh towards the beginning the framing process. Tatiana and a nail gun almost as big as her. Uh, and incidentally, there's a number of students in these pictures that meant to be here tonight. Adrienne sends his regards. Tonight is um uh scholarship night at Antioch High School and they're also receiving scholarships and I told them money is more important than showing up to this. So uh Adrian nailing down some some wall framing. Uh there's Jaden actually wearing proper PPE. He's got the the headphones and the eyeglasses on for once. Uh this was they they set up the classroom. They brought in a bunch of switch boxes and switches and outlets. the the big skills teams makes the kids demonstrate they can do it properly before they let them actually do it in the ADU. We don't want any electrical fires going on. There's there's Jaden right up front in the in the black uh the black puffy jacket there. Joel, sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Here's Will actually installing an exterior light on our scaffolding. They did uh they decided to do concrete countertops and so you know pour the pour the concrete. There's Keith beginning to unmold it. Here's Will installing tile backsplash. That was

just today. Yeah. Yeah. Or yesterday. Yeah. You guys were doing the grouting today. Yeah. Yeah. Bathroom tile backsplash. Uh there's the interior still being worked on but mostly completed. And then there's the exterior of the two buildings actually completed. So yeah, there it is. So So I'm curious, how many students do you have?

There's four learning leaders, the 18 to 20 year olds, and then my class is a class of 25 students um that I this is the second year I've had them. I had them all as juniors in my beginning class and now seniors in the advanced class. And so they get to participate in this build and we're hoping to continue this program for the next, you know, foreseeable future, for the next few years. So how long does it take to build an eight ADU? ADU.

Because it's a learning process, it takes the entire school year. They're decently small. They're 8 by 20. um you know a professional company could probably get it done in a couple of months but because you know the learning leaders are learning and then teaching the high schoolers it is an entire nine-month process.

So for the past several years ADUs have become very very popular. Can you explain why and why it's important in the city of Antioch? Um, so this, you know, infill I it's an opportunity to to provide more housing, which is why the state of California has pushed for it. Um, this program specifically, they're they're designed decently tiny, but it is a complete unit. It's got a bedroom, a bathroom, and a and a cooking area. Um, the idea being that it could be put into a backyard. uh hopefully a low income um so that a low-income homeowner can you know have a way to produce revenue and provide housing within the city. So

so if someone if a homeowner in Antioch is interested what do they do? I have a flyer. I'll leave it here with the uh but it's rebuilding together and big skills. If you want to look them up online you know there's a they they've got information on how to apply for it. It was going to be a low cost and then they received grants where again if you can prove you're low income they're they're giving it away for free. So that's pretty amazing. I if you were not low income I think the purchase price is somewhere around a h 100,000. So

so here we have in the city of Anniac and Antioch High School with our students building housing to basically house people in the city of Annioch. It's incredible program. I there's a actually a teacher on our campus that is very interested. She has an adult son. I won't name names. I think it's okay to share this. She has an adult son that's got bipolar who needs to live with her but also needs his own space. And so she's very excited by potentially a situation like this where he can have his own place and yet still be under her care. So, you know, that would be a perfect situation. So, is it Jaden? No. No. No. Oh. uh Will and Galani.

So Will, let me just ask you um through this experience, what are you thinking about in your future? Um well, I've been uh the microphone.

Yeah. I've been granted an opportunity to continue with the rebuilding together and big skills um program to relo well not relocate but to continue working for a four-month program in Oakland at the new uh facility they have there. So, it's already setting me up for another career opportunity. And I'm not quite sure where it's going to go from there, but um they are setting me up with a lot of help to further connections to be able to get new opportunities. And I also at the end of the program not only will receive uh 10 grand for a stipen, uh I also will receive a diploma uh to be able to use for future reference for jobs. So, you're going to be a future developer in the city of Vania?

Yeah. Just curious. Just curious. I I want to that 10 grand stipen that sounds nice, but that's $1,000 a month and the will's putting in way more. Like it's like $2 an hour. So, but the experience is invaluable. So, yeah. Your comment. Uh being a high school student in Antioch, um it's kind of been one of the best experiences. Uh going to Antioch. Um, physically learning has been the the best thing for me personally. Um, and uh, it's been great. Uh, I'm now pursuing uh, my career in uh, electrical and at Lincoln Tech in Colorado which I plan on attending this year. Great. Congratulations. Awesome.

Thank you very very much. Yeah. Yeah. I guess

I just wanted to give a shout out to Mr. Hal. uh when I was principal maniac high school and we were starting to look at was what was called link learning where you linked a tog college curriculum with career development and students having the opportunity to choose what career pathway whether it was Doure Libby medical whether it was Deer Valley Law Antioch High School um one of them was our engineering academy uh Mr. How was an English teacher and trying to find someone to teach wood shop, which is what it was in those days, was a bit of a challenge. But because of his hands-on experience, he was able to develop a portfolio, go back to school and switch from the classroom and to the work to the wood shop. And I just want to give a shout out to Mr. How because what started out as a wood shop that we may have known in high school, I took wood shop in high school to what it's become where we have young people learning skills that will be able to advance to potential careers um to be able to work in the trades where they're learning how to work with electrical, you know, framing, all the things that I saw on the slides. Um, so you're not only helping young people uh graduate uh with a high school diploma, Mr. How, but you're also preparing them for what we talk call, you know, college career future. And it's nice to see it in real time. And you know, you're the person who was before you, um, Kevin Jones, his his dream, his vision back as a wood shop teacher was to one day have the ability for students to do like community for habitat, developing, building, constructing homes that would benefit the community and that's what this has evolved into.

So, I just want to say to Mr. Hal and to the students. I used to be a principal there for a long time and I'm just really proud of all of you for what you're doing and the things you'll be doing as you move forward. But I just want to put a shout out to Mr. L especially for his leadership and taking the program from like I said a entry level wood shop to an advanced construction building ADUs that'll benefit our community. So thank you. Kudos to all of you.

Thank you. I I very much appreciate that. I'd be remiss if I if I didn't uh you know I stand on the shoulders of others and and one of them is my long-suffering and beautiful wife who constantly pushes me to do projects which then provided me the skills to transfer into so thank you to her. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you guys so much. Very impressive. All right. Does anybody Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Go ahead. You guys can you guys can bail out. Does anybody have any public comment on this? I do. Okay. Please,

being a mom of Galani, if there is a way or if they need help with this program to stay at Antiochai, I feel you guys need to make sure that that happens because this is giving kids a way into the future and into different kind of careers. Before this, my son didn't know what he was going to do. Now, my son's going to Lincoln Tech in Colorado. This is something that you guys need to make sure that all of you guys are paying attention to because the kids are our future. They're going to be the ones sitting in your guys' seats. So, make sure you guys can do what you guys can do to make sure that they get what they need. Right. Thank you, Mr. Like, oh, mom. All right. Thank you. Thank you guys so much. That was great. All right. Our our next

another speaker. Oh, is there another public comment?

Public comment. Sorry. Yeah, I you know I think that this is a phenomenal program and you know for me I think what what is really um amazing is that the school district is creating this opportunity on the school site while at the same time the city of Antioch created an inclusionary housing ordinance that allows units like this to be placed on religious sites throughout the city. And so for me, the opportunity here, aside from, you know, ADU opportunities and single family homes, which is phenomenal, is engaging with all of these church properties that have this ministerial approval process on it and saying, "How can you collaborate with this organization and this school district to actually create a small housing development site where you can build 10 to 15 of these units on site or taking one of the city of Antioch's surplus properties. Claudia Court, right? Looking at properties that are within the school district, Bidwell, which also has an R six residential designation on it. How can you use some of these surplus sites and open up that job training to take it from just at the school site to a larger job site that's not just a single family but is something that models a subdivision or a master plan community partnering with conservation corps and so understanding that the city of Antioch is going through a lot right now and I'm not recommending that the city of Antioch go and find a property and start another project at all but also understanding that the city of Antioch is made up of individuals like you all

that have resources and connections and are that link right that bridge that bring those organizations together and so I think getting people like Mr. scadero together with these organizations and these different properties that had this overlay placed on them and say, "Hey, how is a city can we support these kinds of developments so that we aren't doing more projects? We aren't taxing city staff, but we're doing what we intended in creating this overlay, bringing these ADU sites out to the community." So, you know, I I'm incredibly impressed by the by the community as well and the students and um you know, enthusiastic to see you all so receptive and so I hope that we can see some of these communities continue to build in our city. Thank you.

Right. All right. Any other public comment? We have no further public comments. All right. Thank you. Uh our next presentation is um by the uh BART um board director Mark Foley. Uh this is a the BART board adopts an alternative Oh, time's up. Sorry. Hopefully not. Good evening. Yeah. And goodbye. Alternative service plan um outlining a budget balancing strategy for fiscal year 2728. Mr. Foley or Director Foley, welcome. You can call me Mark. Okay, Mark.

Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, gentlemen of the city council. Uh good evening. Um I wanted to give you a brief update about the the status of BART, if you will. Um, and for those that don't know me, I am a 23 23-y year Antioch homeowner and resident. Uh, and I represent district 2 on the BART board, which is essentially from the conquered Martinez area all the way out to the end of eastern Contraost County. So, with that, I want to talk to you a little bit about the new BART and then give you an update on our budget. So, um, if you haven't been on BART recently, I would encourage you to jump on board. I wrote it again today as always. I love it. Uh we have some lost souls occasionally in there, but generally it is a great place to commute within the Bay Area and I'm not waiting for traffic on Highway 4. Um but if you haven't been on there recently, I just want to talk about and highlight some improvements we've made over the last couple of years. Uh the new fair gates, so they have been installed at all 50 stations, 700 plus fairgates. Um, not only have we generating we're generating around another $10 million in revenue that we did not generate previously with fair evasion, um, our corrective maintenance in our stations has gone down. I think it was close to a thousand hours since we put in these fair gates. So, repairs, graffiti, things of that sort have really diminished because of this change. Uh, additionally, that sort of kind of rolls into our drop in crime. uh 24 to 25 we saw a 41% drop in crime within the system. Um and lastly, customer satisfaction is sitting at almost nine out of 10 folks really enjoy riding BART. Um we've doubled our cleaning crews and we're really trying to do everything that we can to make it a welcoming and uh you know environment for folks to come ride. But that's not all. Uh technology also plays a part. So, those who haven't ridden recently, tap and ride. Um, you

don't need your Clipper card anymore. You don't need to be tethered to a single system. Uh, especially for folks that are coming in at SFO or Oakland that are tourists, they don't need to pre- purchase anything in order to ride the system. They can use their ATM card, their credit card, their mobile device to get into and out of the system. Um, we were the first public agency in the in the Bay Area to embrace us and now all the agencies are using it. That's also going to lead us to with Clipper 2, which is the next version, if you will, of the Clipper system. That'll allow for tighter fair integration. So, if I ride Tri Delta Transit and jump on BART, I could receive a discount. So, that's the sort of the evolution that we're looking for in with that technology. Improved lighting. Safety is always a critical issue at our stations. So, we've actually undergone a number of lighting projects throughout the system uh to make those areas that maybe previously weren't as well lit as they could be as lit as possible so that people do feel safe when they're traveling alone, traveling in the evening. And lastly, uh escalator repair and replacement. Uh that is a big deal and very costly. Uh we replaced 23 of the more than 40 escalators in downtown San Francisco already. Um we're going through this process of replacing them as needed. You might also see some of our stations in the city that have exposed escalators now have canopies uh that are sort of a little artistic. We have some artwork on them as well, but you can lock them in the evening so that when we shut down service, unhoused individuals aren't using them for housing, which is a great segue to your ADU folks. That's exactly what we need those for. Uh, everyone needs housing. All right. And then lastly, talking a bit about the love of BART in the community. Um, you've probably heard about Sweater Fest and all those great things that we do. Uh we had a

sketchfest where we had folks on the train giving their comedy routines on a moving train. We are we are over a thousand tickets sold for our under the sea prom next month. We're holding at Rockidge. Uh under the sea being the sea line. Uh and so basically we're having folks the opportunity to come out. But people love their Bay Area transit and they love BART. So discounts. Um, you put in fairgates, folks that might need to use transit, maybe aren't able to. Historically, we've just given discounts to students, to uh folks that are older, mobility challenged. We now offer the Clipper Start program, which is a 50% discount on your fair, and that's for anyone whose income is less than 200% of the poverty level. So, an opportunity for folks to get into the system and utilize that and not own a vehicle. Um, and then lastly, uh, and I will say Clipper Start, last month we had over 200,000 trips taken with Clipper Start and Bay Pass, which is a program where an employer or a educational institution can purchase a ticket for each of their students. In fact, UC Berkeley just voted to have all of their folks, their student union, now get the Bay Pass. And that allows you to ride any transit system throughout the Bay Area for free. any day of the week, any time of day. So, it's sort of an all you can eat transit pass, if you will. Uh, and we had over 300,000 rides um for Bay Pass over the last month. So, it's really an emerging product for us, emerging product for us that folks really do enjoy using and it gets folks on a transit. And then lastly, twice a year we go in and we look at our schedule changes to make tweaks based on um ridership patterns. And so we work with the Rashidi Barnes of the world and the Bill Churchills of the world at Tri Delta and County Connection to coordinate schedules so that folks that

are arriving on the bus aren't arriving a minute after the train left and folks that are leaving the BART train aren't arriving a minute after the bus leaves because their passengers are our passengers and vice versa. But it isn't all as rosy as I would like it to be. Um, as you have probably heard, uh, you know, BART depended on fair revenue directly from our fair gates. The writers paying their fair share, if you will. 71% of our operating budget came directly from fairs and that worked great for 50 years. Then COVID came along and then remote work and folks just don't go into the offices often as they used to. Still have more than 70% of our ridership is back. they're just not riding five days a week, only one or two. And so that's really what's reflective in our challenge that we face with an operating budget. So starting in about 50 days, we are going to begin a 300 to400 million annual operating deficit. We've exhausted all of the federal relief funding that we received, all of the state relief funding, um, and trying to improve service and welcome folks back. Um but without additional operating revenue and build a new fair model um it just isn't sustainable. So with that um you know what have we been doing as an agency? Um we do have one of the lowest operating costs of any fixed rail system. If you look at the chart we are near the bottom. Um very proud of the fact that we are very efficient in the operations that we run. We do raise our fairs annually because that's the fiscal thing to do, the right thing to do. Um but we do it at a slightly below um the cost of living. So we try to not impact folks as greatly as possible. Um during the pandemic, we cut services

40%. Right off the bat, that 40% drop in service only saved us about 12% on the budget. So fixed rail is very expensive to run and it isn't scalable in the way you might be able to reduce service with other transit agencies. So you may have also heard about some ballot collecting that's going on in a state loan. So let me just talk a little bit about that. So last year, Senate Bill 63 was signed by the governor authorized a fivecount. BART is an Alama Contraosta and San Francisco County board, but we operate in Santa Clara and Sonteo. So they've joined us in this measure and that's going to be a half a cent sales tax for 12 years. Um, and essentially will help fund operations. will receive about 200 I'm sorry $310 million which still leaves us a gap of around 60 $70 million a year that we're going to need to figure out how to resolve that if this ballot measure is successful or if additional revenue is identified beyond a ballot measure. Um so we're working hard to make sure we close those gaps. Um some people might say, "Hey Mark, well the governor just put a loan in the budget. Why don't you just take that? Well, that $560 million, I believe it is, loan, um, we won't be able to accept it because we couldn't pay it back without additional operating revenue. So, that loan is really intended to be a bridge between some successful operating revenue being identified and the time that it would take for that revenue to actually start arriving at the public agency. So, we are looking at a potential to to fill that gap of who knows 3 months, 6 months. Um, but we

wouldn't take the loan unless the measure was passed at the ballot box. So, when this discussion started a couple of years ago, I asked staff to look at what's our plan B if we don't have a successful ballot measure. What do we do? How do we balance the budget? how do we operate BART? Um, so really we've been trying to focus on providing the best possible service and really the wrership experience, but we talked to the to the staff and said, "Hey, this last February, bring us two budgets. Bring us a measure passes and a measure fails because we need to know what that looks like." and you've probably heard a lot about it, but essentially starting in January, if no additional revenue is identified, we need to find a way to cut 370 odd million dollars from the budget. Um, that would potentially mean a 70% reduction in service, which would mean 9:00 closures like we did during the pandemic, threeline service. Um, normally you could take a train from Richmond and get to SFO. You'd have to transfer now. So other than say the yellow line our line out here folks will need to transfer the frequencies during the workday they're every 10 minutes they're going to shift to every 30 minutes. Um and staff had identified station closures that they had thought made sense based on wrership numbers not really looking at the impact to the communities. So, I had pushed back at the board meeting and said, "I'll approve an alternative, but the board needs the authority because we are the board to make the decision. We don't want the general manager. We don't want staff to make it. We want to have to make that decision. And if that's necessary, that'll fall on us." And that's what happened. So, we adopted a measure where if there are need for closures, it's going to come back to the

full board. Um, it would be in early 27 if that was the case. um we'd have to increase fair and parking up potentially to 50%. 1,200 layoffs, so about a third of our staff would have to be laid off. Um and then obviously that would result in laying off folks that um are sort of customerf facing like police, like cleaning um and obviously train operators, potentially station agents um as part of this group. So with that, I am happy to answer any questions you might have. All right. Thank you very much. Um, Director Foley, do we have any public comment? We have no public comments.

All right. Thank you. Any questions or comments from No, no questions. No, just so everybody knows, so this will be on the November ballot coming up during the presidential election, correct? No, actually it's a so right now um Connect Bay Area clarif Yeah. So it'll be it would connect Bay Area is currently collecting signatures. If they get enough signatures, which I think is around 200,000 um then uh once it's approved by the Secretary of State, it would appear on the November ballot of this year. So that's a non-presidential but a govern government govern. Yeah.

The reason why I brought that up is because uh Mayor Bernal and I were at the um at the farmers market this weekend and I saw um some volunteers registering people. Yes. Uh for the BART uh uh getting signatures to put it on the ballot. Yes. So I wanted to I wanted to clarify what what that what they were doing and why that was important

and I and that's exactly what they're doing. they're collecting signatures to qualify for the ballot. I I will also let you know that there were changes that we asked for in Senate Bill 63 that it isn't just BART, it's AC Transit, Cal Trains, MUN. Um and additionally, we added language that specifically called out the small bus operators like Trid Delta Transit, County Connection, Westcat, LAFA, so that they simply aren't The way it was originally worded was if there's any remaining funds that they'd be eligible. Well, let's be honest, there'll be no remaining funds. So, we needed to make sure that they were called out and actually identified as a recipient of some of those funds. So, this is certainly not just a BART initiative. This really is all of Bay Area Transit. I want one want just to clarify one of the things I think I heard you say was about the loan. Um and and my understanding I believe correct me on it um or clarify for me is if the if if the if it was to go on to the November ballot and if it were to pass the transition would there be a loan to help that transition? That's kind of my understanding how that would work. And when you made the statement that if it didn't pass then of course you wouldn't pursue that because you wouldn't have the resources to do to pay back.

That is correct. Okay. I just wanted to clarify. Yeah. No, that is completely correct. You're welcome. So Mark, do you want to maybe touch a little bit on what what the what if it doesn't pass what you know you mentioned that 70% reduction in headways or 30 minutes of 10 things like that. What about East Contraosta County? How is it going to impact us? So, it's it's really to be determined. Again, staff recommended 10 stations in the initial wave of closures. Looking at the 10 lowest ridership stations

in our county, that would have represented North Conquered and the Pittsburgh Center stations. Those are two of the lowest 10 in BART's 50 stations. um when they looked at if that doesn't work, if if we don't achieve savings by closing 10 stations in January, do we need to close additional stations at fiscal year 29? Um and so or 50 28 um July of next year. Um and they had potentially identified the entire Ebard extension. In fact, um, it essentially would close everything out from conquered out to East County, going back to what was considered sort of the core original model of BART. Um, and so none of really the extensions, nothing out to Dublin and Pleasanton will remain open, nothing out to East County. Um, and that was the reason why I pushed back and said that's not acceptable. We need to find an alternative. Um the challenge becomes if you close a Pittsburgh center there's savings from that station electricity cleaning services. Um but if you close the entire Ebart segment you actually have a lot greater savings. It isn't just one or two stations. You don't have to do any sort of trackway maintenance or inspections. There's a lot of additional work that could be saved if you did that. Um, that's not the reason I ran for office. I I I became a public servant for BART because I was unhappy with the Antioch extension and felt like we paid in and didn't get what we paid for. Um, I don't want to sit on the disabion. So, uh, my my dedication here is to to do everything we can to keep East County connected to BART and to keep folks off Highway 4. Yeah, thank you. Thank you

for doing that. I know you advocate for us. um when I was at a BART um board meeting and was speaking on behalf of Antioch. And I know that you're out there fighting for not just Antioch, but this whole this whole area, you know, and the fact that the Antioch has a a decommissioned Amtrak um station that we're fighting hard to get recommissioned, but you know, cumulatively this can just be catastrophic to East Contraosta County if if this measure doesn't pass and if we don't find ways of really continuing to build up our transportation system out here. So, um, so thank you for coming in today and giving us this presentation and for all the improvements that, you know, you're still staying after it and trying to make make BART better and and the statistics. Um, kind of like our city here in Antioch, we see we see progress. Uh, it's just lots of times people don't think it's fast enough, right? So, that's um but but I'll check it out, get on the get on the system, ride it.

I appreciate it. Thank you. All right. Thank you, Mark. All right. Um, do we have any public comment on this one? Already asked. No, we're already good. We have no public comments. Thank you, Mark. Appreciate it. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I'd like to suspend the rules and bring item seven forward for consideration. All right, we have a motion to bring item seven forward. Do we have a second? Yes, I'll second that. Okay, motion from Mayor Prom Freda, second from council member Rocha. Please cast your votes. Motion passes 30.

All right. Uh, moving on to item number seven. This is a parks and recreation commission appointment to one partial term vacancy expiring March of 28 and three fullterm vacancies expiring April of 2030. So uh um I was able to uh conduct some interviews along with um parks and recreation director Shahad Wright and with Dorothy Ellis who is the chair of the um parks and recreation commission. And uh we had actually a lot of really good candidates that applied for for these positions. A lot of them were folks that were new to wanting to be on a commission, wanting to be involved, live here in the community, wanting to do some some different things. And so uh so it was great. We had we had a lot of options here. And so um I am nominating uh four people um for for the positions. And what I'll do is I'll ask if you you could each come up one at a time uh to the to the microphone and explain why you want to be a parks and recreation commissioner and why you're the uh best person uh for that for that role to convince the council to vote along with me for you as our next uh commissioner. So the first one I would like to ask to come up is Nicole Gardner uh who is uh being nominated to fill one partial term vacancy expiring in March of 2028. Uh I've known Nicole for a long time and uh Nicole was uh really excited about this opportunity to maybe shift um some of her emphasis on things that she works on and maybe spread them out in other parts of the community and parks and recreation. And so Nicole, why don't you tell us a little bit?

I was not I was not prepared for this. Okay, that's a first time. Yeah.

No, I was not I was not. I was like, "Okay, come on, sons. Let's go take some pictures and let's see what they say." Uh but uh yeah, so you know, just like I said in my interview, you you guys know me. I've been doing my advocacy work and my um outreach work with the unhoused for for a long time, like 10 years. So um I wanted to do something different though. So, I think what kind of got me interested um in doing moving this direction was I I think I told you guys before when I did the basketball game a couple years ago with um Antioch Police Department and our youth when our city was really struggling and the city was really divided at the time and doing that um and having that event and having people that were in the same room that never would agree or get along or anything and um having a good time and both, you know, screaming for the kids and the and the uh and the police, it was a really amazing event. And so, I just was like, when I saw that there was an opportunity and there was this opening and I was like, you know what, I really want to do something different. Um, I really believe that God put me here to be of service to the community. And I've been really good at that. Um, uh, with the unhoused. So, I kind of wanted to move in another direction. I was kind of explaining how um my grandma, my mom is here and she took my grandma and my uncle to the senior center for many many years and I saw how that just uplifted her and you know she went from always being in the house into going into um the senior center and being around her peers and it just uplifted her. Also spoke a little bit about my sons. Both of my sons are here, 15 and 22, and um how you know just raising them up and being having every single year we we basically had events at parks or birthday parties at parks and things like that. And it's it was so good now, but it was so different way back then when I was growing up in the areas that I went to and the parks were

just bad, weren't they, Mom? Like right around the corner from Yeah, it was bad. So um and then you know just seeing how you got how the mahogany the park that's over there that you guys kind of updated and I have a lot of friends that are in that area that their kids were not able to experience you know going to a park and playing basketball and things like that but now they are. So, I do see how, you know, uh, recreation and parks are really important, and I just want to make sure that more of our seniors, we spread the word more for more of our seniors and our youth that are here in the city. Um, so they have an opportunity to um to have, you know, state parks and access to all these different amazing programs that we do have here in the city that I've taken advantage of like with my kids and my mom has done with my grandma and my uncle. So, that's kind why I want to move into this direction. And can you imagine if she would have prepared a speech tonight?

I was not, but I mean that's basically what I said in the interview. So if and those were the two things that um but yeah. No, but thank you. I really do appreciate the nomination and um you having faith in in me um to be on the commission. So thank you. So Mr. Mayor, I know she may be shocked by this, but I will move for your nomination for approval. All right. We have a motion from Mayor Prom Freighus. I'll second. Have a second from council member Roia. Please cast your votes. Oh, I'm sorry. Do we have any public comment? Oh, okay. Okay. Public comment before we vote. Yeah.

I just want to thank you for this nomination. Um, Nicole and I have bonded over being moms of sons and the commission is not ready for her and I'm excited about that because I expect great things from her. I expect her to be making memories for our community members, our kids, our senior citizens and I just think she's going to come up with a lot of great ideas that will really enhance this community. And I love Antioch to have nice things and I think Nicole Gardner is one of them. Thank you. Any other uh public comment on this item? No further public comments. All right. So, uh will you please cast your votes?

Motion passes 300. All right. Thank you so much. Congratulations. We'll we'll get you sworn in after we get the rest of the folks. Um second person here um that I'm nominating is Jim Thor. Uh Jim uh applied for parks and recreation commissioner um as well as uh another commission. I think it was the the GPAC and and so uh any event uh Jim's another person who wants to be involved in the community uh get more engaged and thought this would be a good place to get started and u think you'd be a great asset. So Jim, why don't you introduce yourself please?

Great. Thank you Ron. Um first off thanks to everybody here. Um I'm new to this unlike Nicole. I don't have a big background in doing public service. I've been working with public sector entities from the state level down to smaller communities, uh, cities, counties, individual departments selling IT security. My goal with all the departments historically has been to make them better than they are today. We all have heard many subjects here that they don't have the money, they don't have the staff, they don't have the training. You know, this goes it's prevalent throughout public sector, right? So my goal was always to make them better tomorrow than they were today. But I've left that part of my life. New stage in my career is to help the community around me. This is my first step in this direction. You guys will hear more about me and from me um in days, weeks, months, and years to come. But uh my dad was a planning commission planning commissioner Southern California for a long time. He eventually was president of the planning commission. And I knew throughout my whole life while I was building my family, my career, etc. that that day would come for me. That day is here today. Hopefully, uh, between my operations experience early in my career, problem solving at a moment's notice, having things like delivery trucks stolen on the street, you have deliveries to be made that day, you still have to get them done, things like that. That was early career. And then teaching and training people in IT security later on. So hopefully uh you like what you see and I'm looking forward to helping and learning from Nicole and others about how I can help uh in the parks and wreck for my granddaughters. Uh my family I've got two boys, a girl and two grandchildren that are widely spread apart. My youngest is four years old. Yazzy. Hi. And my oldest granddaughter is uh 23. Just had a birthday. Better get that

right or I'm in trouble. Um, but a big span of time between them. So, gota been in Antioch for 26 years now. So, happy to participate and help go f to the future. All right. Thank you, Jim. Any any questions or comments from council? Any public comment? Any public comments before we move? No public comments. All right. Do we have a motion? I'll go ahead and move to approvement. Second. Motion from council member Roach, second from Mayor Pro Tim Fredus. Please cast your votes. Motion passes 300. Thank you. We'll see.

Yeah. And stick around. We're gonna we're going to get you sworn in in a second. All right. The uh my third nomination is for Ellen um Ellen Gregs. uh she came in with a lot of energy and excitement and uh uh she's part of a jump rope group which really impressed me because I think we need more jump roping in Antioch. So that's something that I think she'll bring. But no, she is uh she had a lot of great energy and excited about being a part of this commission and so Ellen, why don't you go ahead and tell us a little bit about yourself?

Yes. And I'm not prepared as well. Um I am a part of a um a 40 plus double dutch jump roping group and we currently jump rope and the Walmart parking lot and we're interested in open spaces where any what Antioch may have available. Um and I am and me and my husband were longtime residents of Antioch since 2003. And for many years we've had to always go out of the area for entertainment, festivals and and things like that. And it would be great to be a part of the festivals and entertainment and the festivities, the seniors, the youth, and you know, see see what we can give back to the community. Um, and again, I'm not prepared for this, but um I I'm hoping to bring a lot to the table. Like I talked when I was talking with Ron, I do work with a company that's really generous on sponsoring and um helping in these uh kind of areas, Habitat um just stepping up when it comes to the community and hopefully I will be able to help support and some of these uh sponsorships with along with the community and I don't want to go into so much detail on what they do but Um, yes. Um, I'm I'm just looking forward to this excitement.

All right. Awesome. Thank you, Ellen. Do we have any public comment before we We have no public comments. I I do have a question. Does your husband join you on this this event? No. Oh, he does not. Mr. Mayor, Mr. Mayor, I move your nomination for approval. But he does drive by every now and then, check us out. All right. I'll second that. A motion from Mayor Prom Freda, second from council member Roachcha. Please cast your votes. Motion passes 300. All right. Congratulations.

All right. All right. I told you guys they'd be good ones, right? I mean, um and then our our fourth person is our current chair, Dorothy Ellis. Uh she's been doing an amazing job in in her role. Uh her term expired. she reapplied and uh is really excited about continuing to serve. So Dorothy, why don't you go ahead and say a few words, please?

Good evening. So I am Dorothy Ellis. Um and currently I am the chair of the parks and recreation commission and I just love serving the city of Antioch. Um, I love to see our families and how they're excited about the programming that our parks and recreation department has been providing to the community. One specifically was our Easter egg hunt where we because of the remodeling of our water park, we had to go out into different parks within the community and the families showed up and they were excited and they enjoyed theelves. So, I love being able to be out there in the community uh with our families looking for new and innovative programming that we can do within the parks and wreck. And we have an amazing staff. Shahad, our director, he's been doing an amazing job um with limited staff, but we're still out here producing wonderful and unique programs within the park and recreation department. So, I just would like to continue the work um working with our city. I am a retired uh juvenile probation officer. Uh and being a part of the parks and recreation department is really deeply meaningful to me because that was what changed my life when I was a youth. And it's also where you can find transparency. You can find um the intersection for all families, no matter what you look like, race, creed, or anything. It's always through the park. And once I left my law enforcement background, I wanted to do something fun and I wanted to give back to my community and I said, "What can I do?" And it was parks and recreation. And one um I've been an Antioch resident now for almost 24 years. And parks and wreck was the the department that gave my child who grew up in Antioch and graduated all my kids. I got four

children who graduated from Deer Valley High School, but it was the first place my child found employment. And so I said, I I really want to continue that and I want to continue giving back. And so I'm happy with the new appointments because now that gives me a full commission. U we've had some challenges because we hadn't been able to make quorum because people's lives had changed and they had to move on. But now with all of these wonderful and exciting appointments, we can really do some good in the city of Antioch. So, thank you for entrusting in me to continue to work with the city.

All right. Thank you, Dorothy, very much. Um, do we have any public comments? No public comments. All right. So, we have a motion. I'll move to approve nomination. Motion from Council Member Roachcha. I will second. Uh, but I also want to say I had occasion to working with Dorothy and I will say that she is a tough tough advocate and so I think with this group we're expecting some major major new things happening in our community. So thank you very much. Yes, thank you for your trust in me and um I'm excited to continue to work.

All right, so we have a a motion and a second from Mayor Bromus. Please cast your votes. Motion passes 300. All right. Thank you. So, city clerk Mandy will swear you swear you all in and then we'll come on down and take some pictures with you and your families, whoever you'd like to. Uh, council will Yeah, you guys need to come up.

Come on down. All right. Hi everybody.

This way everyone gets the microphone. All right. Can you all raise your right hands, please? got the first part of the test right. I state your name. Iard do solemnly swear do solemnly swear that I will support that I will support and defend and defend the Constitution the Constitution of the United States of the United States and the Constitution and the Constitution of the State of California and of the State of California against all enemies against all enemies foreign and domestic. foreign and domestic. that I will bear that I will bear true faith and allegiance true true faith and allegiance

to the Constitution to the Constitution of the United States of the United States and the Constitution and the Constitution of the State of California of the State of California that I take this that I take this obligation freely obligation freely without any mental reservations without any mental reservations or purpose of evasion or purpose of evasion. And that I will And that I will well and faithfully well and faithfully discharge the duties discharge the duties upon which upon which I am about to enter. I'm about to enter. Congratulations. Thank you. Congratulations. Congratulations. Thank you.

Thank you. So now which one is the partial? Me. Okay. Melissa, can you take a picture of me on my phone?

Congratulations. Congratulations.

Congratulations. Where's the babies? One, two, three. Yes. Here we go. One, two, three. One more. I don't remember what phone belongs to.

Yes, I saw it. I'll be there. I will have your paperwork and everything at the meeting next week. Okay, sounds great. Thank you so much. Congratulations. I'll be calling you tomorrow. Okay, sounds great.

I'm tired from I'll be with you. Yes, Yes.

All right. Thank you everybody. That was that was wonderful seeing our new commissioners starting to get our commissions filled up. So that's that's good news. We're going to move on to uh city council committee reports and communications. We'll start with council member Roachcha. No report. All right. Mayor BM Freighus.

Well, this doesn't happen too often, but I do have a report from Tri Delta Transit. Um we have a very successful program that the local transit agencies use and this year it's the 2026 youth ride free. It deals with Tri Delta County Connection and Westcat. And for anyone below the age of 18 and below, they are allowed free fair on our buses. And uh it's becomes very important particularly for students who need to uh use transportation to get to Diablo Valley College or LMC or they have uh summer work programs and things of that sort. It's uh from June 1st to July 31st and you simply need to get to a bus stop and get the right route and just get on the bus and you do not have to pay anything. And last year uh Tri Delta did 40,000 trips for these uh young men and women under the age of 18. I want to specifically uh recognize two county supervisors Chanel Preston Chanel Scales Preston and Diane Burgess because they used their own money out of their own allocations. Uh I think the uh measure X money to actually fund this. It would not have happened without both of them contributing to this and I think they should be publicly recognized. So it's a great program. I would like to ask staff uh to um send this information out on our social media uh platforms and I'll give you the information of the um Tri Delta staff uh to connect with and get this out as much as we possibly can. Thank you.

All right, Mayor Pro, I just want to ask when is the timeline for that? June 1st to July 31st for a two-month period. Yeah, because I remember when they um did it last summer, it was unbelievable how many um youth took advantage of it. 40,000 and that was only for I think it was only for like 30 days. So expanding that through the whole summer or close to that it sounds like that's going to be a lot of users. It'll benefit a lot of young. It is excellent. I'm just very appreciative to the two county supervisors for providing this.

That's great. All right. Um I've had a couple of meetings. Uh I'm on the CCTA um administration and projects committee and so we met last week um approved some uh projects. One was a um a complete streets project in the Moraga Lafayette area and uh and then we're also working towards the uh transportation expenditure plan uh for CCTA. Also went to the mayor's conference. Uh we had a GPAC meeting last night which we you forgot to mention mayor prom which was uh our our kickoff for the general plan advisory committee. It's two um two members of the city council mayor prom and myself two planning commissioners and then five at large and then two alternates at large. And so we were all here. It was a really positive uh kickoff. uh it followed up on our joint um our joint meeting between the city council and the planning commission we had probably a month and a half ago and so we took off from there and it's going to it's a very diverse group that's going to be I think uh bring some good value to that whole discussion so that was a that was a good you want you want to add

I just want to recognize this the staff member here Kevin Scadero who actually is um the glue that will hold everybody together on this endeavor it's going to be a two-year engagement and we really do appreciate his guidance and his leadership.

Yeah, thank you, Kevin. It's uh it's it's good to have a staff member who's been here for a long time now, 20 plus years, and uh and understands our general plan really well because he uses it every day. And so, he's going to be able to help shepherd us through the process along with the consultant team that uh the city's hired. So, super excited about that process. Uh um there's a CCTA board workshop um I'm going to be attending this Thursday and Friday out in Ninda and that's going to be going over uh planning for our um for the um transportation expenditure plan uh in the upcoming um sales tax measure that uh it's an extension of measure J that they're looking to put on the ballot potentially in 2028. So that's uh that's looking forward to the future. Uh this last weekend it was as was mentioned by director Wright. The farmers market was uh really positive. You know the they've come back again this year from May through October and they're really excited about Antioch. Um the Antioch wine festival was very successful downtown on Saturday along with the uh blues and jazz festival out at Williamson Ranch Park. So there was a a lot of really positive activities happening in Antioch. It was a beautiful weekend and so I just uh excited about those things and seeing more of those coming in the future. Um next week um Council Member Roachcha, Council Member Wilson and myself along with Chief Vhill will be back in Washington DC with uh uh meeting with um the legislators back there and so Congress members. So that's going to be an exciting trip for us to continue uh moving towards seeing funding come. Uh we've we've heard about some good progress on our real-time crime or intelligence center and so we just have a lot of things we're working on and and uh we're going to hit it hard and and uh continue to make those relationships uh back there in Washington DC. And just for mayor's comments, just going to keep them really short, but I just, you know, I think

tonight's a great example of of the types of things that we're seeing happening in the community when we see our boards filled up with with new folks that are super excited about getting involved in in our commissions and bringing new energy and excitement to something as important as parks and recreation. That to me is always encouraging to see and uh just giving people different opportunities to be be a part of Antioch. Uh, also, you know, I can't say enough about um Mr. Howell and and that program that he has out at Antioch High School. Just phenomenal to see. I mean, these are real these are real tiny houses. These are not some something like I would build in my backyard. I mean, they and and the young people that worked on it, they did everything from the foundation all the way to electrical, the plumbing, the roof, everything. So, they got a full experience of building a real house. And uh and so I just see programs like that that sometimes just fly under the radar and we don't hear about them, but they're super positive. I I think it's the first one in the Bay Area that a school is doing something like this. And uh I see it as something that can build momentum and you know um Council Member Roachcha actually was part of starting the program when it was engineering and seeing it morph into something different and and um maybe even more practical for the needs of our community right now is just really nice to see. So, I'm just encouraged about what's happening in our community and uh yeah, looking forward to to the weeks and the summer ahead. So, thank you for that. Um, moving on to the consent calendar. Uh, do we have any items that uh council or the public community would like to pull off the agenda?

We have no items pulled by the public public. All right. Do we have a motion to approve the consent calendar? Move approval of move approval of consent calendar. Motion from Mayor Produs. Second. Second from Council Member Roacha. Please cast your votes.

Motion passes 300. All right. Excellent. Moving on to public hearing. We have a public hearing for the fiscal year 2627 annual action plan uh which is part of the CDBG program um comm community development block grant for mayor promis. He's very good about keeping me keeping the acronyms to a minimum. So, uh I'm going to open the public hearing on this uh now and uh ask if uh we could have a motion to continue this item to the next city council meeting on May the 26th. I'll move to approve moving it to um May 26th.

Okay, perfect. And before we second that, do we have any public comment on this? We have one public comment. All right. Thank you. um understanding that this is the action plan for CDBG and it's looking to move this to um the end of the month for a general council meeting, a full council meeting. It I just want to get a full understanding. So there is no intent to take this action plan conversation back before the CDBG full subcommittee at all for conversation and recommendation to bring back to this council body. I'm just curious why if this action plan for CDBG keeps getting pushed out, why wouldn't you just reconvene your CDBG subcommittee and move forward as was first intended to have that conversation? Also, it's very concerning that these CDBG conversations keep getting stalled with no understanding of where our CDBG dollars stand. and we are very close to losing our CDBG dollars from a previous award um because we are not committing those dollars. Those CDBG dollars have to be spent by 2026 and they are not getting spent. And so I'm genuinely confused why we have an affordable housing development that literally cannot move forward on its home key project because there are no dollars there to support the planning process. As you all are aware, a development needs to go through a standard review process. Plans need to

be submitted. Plans need to go to Contraosta Fire. plans need to go to outside agencies. Those plans cannot even be drawn because there are no dollars unlocked. But what the city is not understanding is that when that home key award came out, it started your 12 month clock for that project to open up. So, I don't understand why we continue to sit on these CDBG dollars while we're pushing out an action plan for future CDBG dollars that don't even acknowledge that low PSH AMI need that once again your county representatives came here and said this is your greatest need in the county and this action plan that is getting pushed out says we want to give these dollars to Habitat to humanity for a higher AMI for housing rehabilitation when your county came here and said there are very few dollars for low PSH AMI and that's what we really need and you as a city say we can't afford it out of our general fund where else are you going to get it aside from CDBG you cannot just give dollars to Habitat to Humanity for housing re rehabilitation when you have greater needs and this needs to go back to the subcommittee for a full discussion. Thank you.

All right. Any other public comment? No further public comments. All right. Um could I please get a second on the motion to Okay. Have a a motion by Council Member Roach, a second by Mayor Prompus. Please cast your votes.

Motion passes 30. All right. close the public hearing. Mayor Pel, I just like to say a couple comments. Yes, please.

Um, so one of the things I just wanted to u bring up that our last speaker shared. Uh, the last me the last time we had a scheduled CDBG meeting, we did not have a quorum. So there was no action taken, nothing moved forward. The recommendations from staff is what's being is what you see here. Um my re my request and I think what we'll we're looking to work towards is getting a CDBG subcommittee meeting scheduled before the date we're talking about so we can look at what um our budget one of the holdups for our budget not only was because we didn't have a quorum but we didn't know what our budget's going to be as of May 10th that was when so that was Monday we were supposed to have received an update from the federal government on what funding is moving forward um and for the for the next cycle. Um we also need to take action on what Mr. Becker referred to in regard to previous funding for housing projects that um did not move forward that's still sitting that we need to make some decisions on. So on Homekeep Plus, which was one of the programs that we've discussed, um there is CDBG funding available to potentially purchase the property. That's one thing that can be done with those funds and it's also then looking also at what is our budget going to be for next year. So at this time there's been no action taken to move forward. So the recommendations that we're talking about, I would recommend that our CDBG meeting that we hold a standing committee before the 26th and then we can then move forward and bring recommendations from the staff because when we had our previous meeting, the staff, we couldn't take any action. We didn't have a quorum. the staff provided us because now with Terry House reti retiring, there's a housing committee of three

employees who were to review the federal report on what funding we're going to receive and then they're supposed to provide that feedback to us. So, we are going to be scheduling a CDBG standing committee meeting. Date hasn't been selected yet. I'm hoping we can do that possibly like next week because we're two weeks what we're talking about. But that's why we've been on a real tight timeline because we didn't know our budget and we didn't have the people to to hold the meeting. So my recommendation is that we get a CD meeting scheduled with to council member Torres Walker and I and our housing department so that we can then come back on the 26th with some recommendations.

Yes, I'm going to work on that. All right. Thank you very much for that. Uh, moving on to the council regular agenda. Item number eight, award of a maintenance service agreement with Elite Maintenance and Tree Service for Landscape Maintenance Services in the amount of 7,26,000 and 600 26,643. City manager.

Yes. Uh so it is recommended that the city council adopt a resolution awarding the maintenance service agreement for landscape maintenance services throughout the city's right ofways and medians uh to elite maintenance and tree service for three-year period in the amount of 4,76 983 uh with an op optional two additional years in the amount of 2,849660 for a total contract amount of 7 million. 26643. And I have uh director Bunting here to present the item.

Good evening, mayor, city council. Um yeah, public works provide a higher volume of a more consistent level of landscaping maintenance citywide by utilizing a landscaping maintenance service contractor. City's landscaping areas will receive year-round landscaping maintenance from this service. On March 4th this year, staff published requests for proposals for landscape maintenance services. On April 9th, five proposals were submitted and received by public works staff was evaluated. The we evaluated the proposals on experience and understanding, cost and availability to meet the city's requirements and determined that Elite Maintenance and Tree Service was the most qualified contractor able to provide the services described in our request for proposal. This landscape maintenance service agreement will provide all labor, tools, equipment, and vehicles, traffic control, and safety necessary to perform the work. Department of Public Works personnel will verify work was performed accordingly to the schedule of duties performed by the contractors. I'd be happy to answer any questions regarding this item.

All right. Thank you. Uh, do we have any public comment on this?

Yes, Mr. Becker. So, I was at first I excited when I saw this in all honesty because it wasn't terra and it's my neighborhood. But then I was a little confused because when I was looking through the sections there um it it wasn't very clear to me on on what exactly is being covered in some of these districts and and if there are other services that are coming into these districts that are offsetting the deficits there. you know in section 4.1 under 251-4512 right of way and it shows the courts that are listed the ones that are highlighted are the ones to be used soldier mountain squ but then there are courts like sparrow that are not highlighted and so I'm wondering who who is maintaining sparrow court and I specifically wonder that because that's right behind behind my house. That's the court behind my house. Um, also who is responsible for going out and making sure the work is getting done over the length of these contracts because Terraare who was there on Puit Ranch for genuinely probably God only knows how long. You know, I where I live, I'm right there up against I'm the very back corner of the sound barrier wall on on Puit Ranch, way up at the top of the hill. And we actually had an unhoused resident that had made his way all the way up through that shrubbery and built himself a house back against my back

wall there um about nine years ago. a big fort with tarp and he pulled some rail board, some some fence boards and some shrubs and it looks like a Robinson Caruso kind of experience back there. And that was nine years ago and it's all still there today. And so Terraare was responsible for going up and trimming those canopies and trimming those shrubs, which to be honest with you, once again, my gardener comes four times a month. It's crazy that we're literally paying for the shrubs to be trimmed twice a year. That's insanity. We are literally hiring these mansca these landscaping crews to go pick up the garbage which frankly half the time they don't even do. I mean it's crazy scary if you really look at the the bulk of that contract the tier that we got. I mean we're virtually getting no services and then God knows if they are out there what the traffic control will look like cuz Terare didn't care about that although they did in Liverour. And so I'm wondering once again, why are we throwing millions of dollars at these organizations when they can't even go up and clean in some of these areas? Thank you.

No further public comments. All right. Any questions from council?

Uh, sure. Uh depending on where we're talking about, it could have been within something that Terra Care was taking care of, could have been open space. Um I I' I'd want to know a little bit more about the area that we're talking about. Uh in terms of who's going to watch the work, it is public works staff that takes care of it. We have supervisors and other people that will monitor and they do not only watch the work, make sure the work's done, but also monitor the contract and make sure the contracts is uh is administered properly. Um, as for the contractor, uh, these guys were vetted by our public works staff. We've met with them recently, full confidence in their work. They're currently doing work in Roseville or had a contract with Roville, which which was a rather large contract. They were pleased with their work also. Um, staff is happy with this proposal. Hope we can move forward with this contractor.

So, Mr. Mayor, I've raised this issue before and I'm raising it again. Um, a lot of the contracts that we get from public works are three years with two-year options and this is over a $7 million contract. And it seems as if on a daily basis our world changes and one of the things as being, you know, responsible to have a fiduciary responsibility is to oversee this. I feel very uncomfortable in entering into a five-year potentially fiveyear contract of $7.2 million. I believe it would be more appropriate to have either two or three-year contracts and go out to bid. I think competition is good. Now I do realize it puts a burden on staff and people will roll their eyes and say, "Oh god, you know, Freighus wants, you know, to put more work on staff." Well, we're dealing with the taxpayers money and I believe that we owe it to ourselves to go out less less than five years because work um doesn't owe it. So we can evaluate the work that these companies are doing and yes I understand at the end of three years you you will do that make a recommendation but the tendency is we're familiar with them they're doing the work and we'll just go ahead and do another two years because it is such a pain to put these things packets together and go out and do their bid. So, I'm going to vote for this tonight because there aren't other other vote other council members here. But I would like in June to have an item on the agenda to talk about the advantages and disadvantages of these five or five plus year contracts. I'm really opposed to that because I think competition is good. I think the world is changing rapidly all the time and

that we should not lock oursel into these long-term contracts. So, I just would like to see the mayor and city manager put an item on there for discussion. All right, Council Roach, any comments?

I agree. I think competition's good. I think we need to even though we've worked with one company and if they've done a good job and we compare them to somebody else doesn't mean we're going to go in a different direction but I do think it it I know when I was at the school district with different contracts we would have even if we had a vendor that we were happy with we would open it up just to see what our options were and many times you would work with the same vendor but there were times where we chose to go in a different direction either because of cost or because of the um additional services that would to be rendered. So to me, I think it's a worthy discussion to have.

All right. Yeah. Just uh I noticed that we we only had the numbers from Elite and we didn't get the numbers for the other the other folks. Did Did is there a or did I miss it? Maybe uh if it wasn't within the staff report, I can let you know. So how I guess my question is how much how much lower was elite than the number two and three? So, including the the package, which would be a six five-year contract with the contingency built into it, uh the low bid was received by Elite at approximately 6.5 million. Number two was at 6.8. Number three was at seven 6 point. This one says 7, excuse me, 6.5.

No, without Sorry, I'm looking at the wrong column. Including the contingency. This particular one is at 7 million. Sorry. Number two would be at 7.3. Number four would be at approximately 7.6. So they're all they're all pretty close. Those first three are pretty close, I can say. Yes. Number four and number five would be outliers. Was the existing was the existing contractor a part of that? The existing contractor did put in a bid. How big a difference was there between the existing and the new one? Difference in the bid. The five-year contract for the last five years was $6 million. Um the contract the they bid on the on this contract

this contract they're bidding. So what what was their bid? Approximately $9.4 million n so we're so that under that underscores my reason for having competition. That's a $2.2 million difference between the existing contractor and a new contractor. Okay. Thanks. All right. And then I also noticed that the um elite is going to keep the price level for three years. Yeah. The the way that they've chosen to build their proposal would look good for the next three years. Okay. So that's that's I mean being the low bidder and keeping that the same and then and then the increases on year four and five if if the city were to go that route that don't seem like they're that significant either.

No. And in addition, you know, there was other things taken into consideration other than just price with something like this also. Okay, perfect. Well, I'm hoping, you know, the landscape maintenance, I think it looks pretty good around the city right now. It's looked as probably as good as it has in a while, at least in the parts that I'm driving, but um I hoping this country or this company can up the game. Oh, and staff staff will be staff will be taking care of it. We'll be monitoring not only the work, but the contract to make sure things are in order. Okay. So, do we have a motion to approve approve this? I'll move to approve. Motion from council member Roachcha. Second from mayor promises. Please cast your votes. Thank you.

Motion passes 30. Thank you, Director Bunting. Uh moving on to item number nine, resolution establishing the procedures for responding to technological disruptions during city council meetings in accordance with Senate Bill 707. Um, acting city manager Cortez, please. Yes. In this item, we have uh our uh Derek Cole here presenting this item. Our very own Derek Cole. All right. Hi again. I got out just in time. Welcome. Thank you. It's my pleasure.

I'm nice. Nice to see you guys. Might finish up. Well, I don't want to jinx it. So, all right. Well, mayor, council, u this item is before you. Uh we did a presentation on SB77 previously. One of the to-do items we mentioned was the technological disruption policy. So uh there will be two-way communications as the council knows beginning in July. Uh my understanding is you're set up and ready to go with that. You received that briefing at a couple meetings ago and uh I think all of you and and and the city is looking forward to bringing that back. Um the technological disruption policy is as its name implies something that realizes that technology will often fail. And so I think the legislature when they put in place this new legislation realized that there has to be some accommodation, some some indication to the public what's going to happen in in those inevitable situations. And so what you have before you is a draft policy. It's pretty standard. It looks much like what most cities have. Um you know obviously you know I was just next door and we did our technological policy there tonight as well. So this is my second time in uh the same night uh putting forward one of these policies to a council. Um the policy the bas the way it works basically is you can take up to one hour to try to fix a uh disruption. Hopefully you don't go that long. In fact it you may never go that long. May we all pray that you don't or that any city does. But in that situation, what will happen is if you go up to an hour, you have to make a reasonable effort to do the correction when you go out. And so it you could take what'll happen is you'll take a break and then it will try to work out the problem and then when the problem is resolved, you can resume the

meeting. Pretty simple. But if you have a serious situation and you get to that one hour threshold, then um you'll have to make a decision. You'll have to make a finding. Should we continue? Does the public uh necessity require you to continue before you can actually continue? If you have to shut down the 2A, you'll have to make that finding. That's, you know, really going to be up to the council's pleasure. um you know questions I got next door on this question is what happens in that situation if uh what can we do and and I'll just you you know share the discussion over there with with here um you can do a couple of things one if you really need to move items forward and and we know and I as I've sat here this the previous year there were some timesensitive items where we had to get items done and we had to get you know grant applications or project home key or something like that. So, you know, you you can certainly proceed and and find that you need to continue with those items. But another option would be that you continue to your next meeting. Another option would be that you call a special meeting to continue the agenda. And another option that I'll mention is adjournment. So, technically, you can stop a meeting at, you know, you could stop tonight's meeting and say, "We're going to adjourn this meeting to Friday." Not that anybody wants to be here back here on Friday, but um you can adjourn a meeting. So there are a variety of options that you would consider. So I'm just trying to play out what would happen if you got to this one hour point. What would your options be? But it may be that you need to continue certain items and so you would make that finding. Um so that's how that would work. And then again, uh the the requirements there are front end and backend issues. uh you know could be a network outage, could be an internet thing, uh could be some gremlin somewhere. Um we don't know obviously

every situation will will be different but you have options and so this policy is before you. Uh I I did note there was a reference to the city of Banning in the draft that you have. So that would need to be taken out of the resolution and we can make that correction if it's the pleasure of the council to adopt this policy. But otherwise, I'm happy to answer any questions.

So Mr. Cole, um, with technology, we've seen, you know, it goes out, it gets corrected, and then five, seven more minutes pass, and it goes out again. And so when there is this repetition, are the rules still the same? If it was the second time, we have to basically wait an hour.

Yes. Yes. That's how I interpret that. I that level of granularity wasn't in the statute. Um, and so that that's not really a level of granularity that's in the current drafting of this resolution, but my interpretation would be that you start the clock over. So if you let's say you have a technological disruption, you're gone, you're out for 10 minutes, you start again, you go for 10 minutes, and then you have another disruption, then you start the clock running again. The 1 hour clock starts again.

And I I can tell you, you know, in 2020, close sessions were usually held at the end of an agenda, not at the beginning of an agenda. And because of some of these changes, if we got that situation, we could go to close session.

So, I'm just suggesting that that might be something we want to take a look at in the future. So, if this happens, and usually with any new technology, it's bound to happen that we change the the structure of the agenda. So, close session is basically at the end. So if it happens, you have something to do for that hour that is constructive and gets the work done. I just suggest that to the acting city manager and to the mayor. The other and we saw this particularly during the pandemic years when we did have the um I don't know what you call the video. certain members uh started using profanity and basically making very racist comments and things of that sort. I'm assuming that the presiding officer is empowered to cut the individual off at his or her discretion. Is that correct?

Yes. Yes. If you have someone who is engaging in that level of discourse, you can cut them off. Okay. Thank you.

All right. Any other questions? One one thing I heard in Mayor Pro Tim's comments made me think of I can recall in the school district uh during the time in which there was it might have been during 2020 and um there were times when the school district were considering u school policies related to issues that might be a national issue. And there would people who were not members of the city of the school district who belonged to larger organizations outside of uh the anti-upied school district that would use that time to monopolize and speak to whatever their religious or political beliefs may be. So, I'm just curious how you how you manage that because when we have um meetings here in the chambers and we have so many cards that people pull, it's manageable to 30 possibly 40 minutes or whatever we allow. Um but if it's open in this new process of having um live stream people being able to call in or be able to ask their questions or make public comments via the internet. I'm just concerned how we manage time because you're pro what happens if we have a number of people who want to use public comments that maybe aren't even residents of Antioch but it's you know maybe it's animal services and pe animal rights groups come from San Francisco or whatever and they want to monopolize the time I'm not sure how we manage it that's that'll be a new thing for me but I just recall when I was a principal and I would watch some of the school district meetings and I can't remember

the topic but there a couple hot topics during that time in education where it became an issue that was beyond Antioch Unified where was people were calling in from other states to get their three minutes to say what they believe. So I'm not sure how when when you're able to call in and participate from a distance without being in the room. Um, I'm not sure how that works with managing uh your public uh comment time because I'd hate to see that outside um participants from other states or other places don't

happen don't allow don't don't allow our citizens who live in Antioch to have the opportunity

to voice their public comments. I don't so I'm just throwing that out there. Just a concern I have. The one the one thing I'll note and and I'll assistant city attorney can can chime in too. Um the Brown Act says that if it's general public comment, it must relate to something that is within the jurisdiction of the city. So if someone wants to call and just, you know, come in and talk about um animal rights issues in general, I would argue that's not within the jurisdiction of the city. Now, if they want to talk about the Antioch, you know, shelter, that that's different. Uh, and then then that's there's a lot of gray area in that, but I think that would be up to the mayor to or the vice mayor if if he's running the meeting to to police that. That's going to be a case-bycase.

Yeah, that just a concern that I had because I was just thinking how do we manage time? Yeah. when we may potentially have people that aren't who generally don't participate in our city governance um that might see it as a as an opportunity to voice their political beliefs um in a in a form like as I recall um I think it was Walnut Creek it was a local city that was having some major issues I believe got some racial slurs coming

serious the anti-semitic I don't remember what I don't remember what city it was but I remember it was a big hot topic of because you know if you don't you know you can do a lot of things from a keyboard when you don't have to be physically in the room say what you want do what you want and not be identified because I think you can even be anonymous I believe so I'm just curious that's one of those things I think we need to look at as a council moving forward what are the guard rails going to be what's going to be the control mechanisms for anyone who may want to go out of balance

and I I I just want to jump in here and I do think That's a very valid concern. Um, but I just want to also make sure we don't go too far field of what this item is actually is. It's not necessarily technological disruptions. Somebody using technology to disrupt a meeting. It's Zoom goes down. Nobody can watch it using those things. So that's what this policy is meant to address.

Well, I think that is a very it's a it's a very very valid, very important thing to go and to have a policy. That's just kind of outside the realm of what we're discussing with this item. That's all I just want to say. Maybe that's I I don't I don't agree with you. I mean, this is a new way that we are going to be conducting ourselves and there are protocols and so yes, I understand that it is a disruption, but nevertheless, it's how we conduct ourselves. So, I I completely disagree with you. I I don't think you're right. I think it's more valid than for us to talk about it. I will just note that the policy specifically addresses how the city responds to disruptions in telephonic or internet service.

I understand what you're saying. I disagree. I think there are other parts of this that are just as important as a disruption which is a part of it. I So you have your opinion. I have mine. I disagree with you. I understand. I think you're right. I want to just alert the council of a possible possible issues with going too far a field on this particular item. I don't think we are going far a field and that's why I disagree with you. This is how we this is a new era and this is how we how do we function. Okay. I just wanted to raise the issue with the council and I respect the council's decision.

Yeah. And the action we're going to take has to do with what's before us. that the discussion doesn't have to in my opinion stay within those boundaries. So I just think that moving forward we especially the chair whether it be the mayor or the mayor pro Tim have some really clear agreements on how we're going to manage technical breakdowns or any other types of issues that may cause us to want to go to a break recess or to uh adjourn. So I just think those are some things. So this we're talking about technology tonight, but I think this conversation needs to go much broader than that moving forward.

Thank you. Any other comments? We have no other comments. All right. I'll move approval with uh in item two that we delete the city of Banning to put the city of Antioch. Right. Motion from Mayor Prom Freighus. I will second that. Second from council member Roachcha. Please cast your votes. Motion passes 30.

All right. Thank you. Uh this next item is also Mr. Kohl's uh report regarding um AB130 and SB131 2025 bills amending the application of the California Environmental Quality Act to certain housing development and other projects. Is this is this for you? Yes. Good evening again, mayor. So, yes, this item uh will be presented by our special counsel, uh Derek Holder.

Thank you, Mayor uh council. I'm I'm first I want to apologize how long it's taken to get this back to you. This was something I think I think council member Freighus or Vice Vice Mayor Freighus um raised the issue. Um and so I'm happy to bring this back. I provided a staff report that I think is explanatory. Uh in a nutshell, AB130 will carve out a class of projects that will be essentially streamlined where the city cannot do a full SQL review. And I I discussed in the staff report the parameters. So, uh we're looking at projects that are about less than 20 acres. Um there's some density uh requirements. So, we're looking at about 10 units per acre in a suburban jurisdiction and 15 units in metropolitan jurisdictions. And these will basically sail through essentially the SQA process. They'll avoid SQA review as long as they meet certain objective criteria. Uh, you know, conformance with the general plan, there aren't environmental constraints on the property. uh and you know there's other consistency with zoning and so essentially that but the when when the city receives these projects for review it has to quickly move through them and make any SQA determinations or determine that it can't apply SQA and the idea is just to you know I I mean I sat here for about a year and I know we've we've tackled a lot of these new laws from the legislature and uh this one is more process oriented. The ones that we dealt with in some of the applications before you, they were essentially taking away your substantive discretion. This doesn't really do that, but it it does obliquely do that in that it doesn't

allow you to do SQL review if the projects qualify under those parameters that I just mentioned. So, it's going to streamline things um and it's going to move these projects through much more quickly. And again, I'm I'm not I'm you know, I'm not here to justify what's happening at the legislature, but as I think the council knows, there's been a whole series of laws. Uh I'm sure we're going to get more out of this legisl legis legislative session. Uh this is what we got in the last legislative session. I mentioned AB 131 here just because not not that or excuse me, uh SB130 and then AB131. So there were two trailer bills, one in the assembly, one in the Senate. AB131 is very processoriented. It's more geared a little bit. There's a lot of changes to SQL litigation. So I I I didn't know if the council wanted that or not, but I I left it in. I I provided more information. Um but but you know, again, both bills are designed to streamline the process. So as far as where does this apply here, two things. Number one is, you know, that's I I don't know that because I, you know, I'm not, you know, prepared to speak on, you know, specific projects because obviously we don't have those projects. And I also am a little bit concerned, you know, I don't want to get into nitty-gritty discussions about certain areas of the city or certain projects that might come before us. But these two bills are are something we're working with. All cities are working with them. Counties are working with them. And so hopefully what I've given you will give you some food for thought and I'm happy to answer any questions. And I know we have staff here. I'm sorry to put him on the spot, but if you have more specific questions that are tied to, you know, mechanically how this will work in practice, I think he's better a

little better at that than I am to to give you guidance on that. All right. Thank you. Do we have any public comment on this? We have no public comments. All right. Any questions?

So, Mr. Cole, with regards to AB130 on the second page, you know, um requirements may be exempt from SQA if they meet specified criteria. As I went through here, um they are it is a procedure, it is a process, they're trying to speed it up. And so some of the concerns I have, you know, deal with um the negative impacts that we can only get by doing an exhaustive squa, you know, uh review such as transportation.

And as we know, we have approved several projects that have a level F. And so I'm I'm concerned with if there's discretion on the staff to consider some of these and then it's approved and and results people property owners around or property houses or whatever say well heck you know you should have foreseen this you know had you done a more exhaustive report you would have known this is le level F and it's it's negatively impacting me. So the problem is the question of the discretion that is given and the liability that it produces. Is there anything in the legislation that gives you know um some assurance that when we try to comply with the state mandate that cities are not going to be bound by some of these negative impacts?

Well, if we're talking about liability, there is already express liabilities. we we are not liable for a failure to um apply our codes or for um any any what are alleged to be mislications of our code. So if it's a matter of we have to, you know, a project goes through and the the traffic worsens and somebody wants to file some type of lawsuit against the city believing that the city was derelictked in not handling the issue, right?

There there already is express immunities in state law. There isn't a claim um in state law that would would allow someone to actually go to court and win. Now, caveat, um, anyone can file a lawsuit, right?

And and and obviously anytime there is a lawsuit filed, the city has carrying costs. Even if it's a frivolous lawsuit or it's a lawsuit that gets dismissed at the outset, there's still attorney fees. There's still, you know, time and resources taken away from from other uh uses of staff time and and the city attorney's office's time. So, I can't I can't absolve, you know, I can't tell you that there wouldn't be a lawsuit. I just I don't see any basis for liability given the robust immunities that state law provides. Um, the only thing I might, you know, in theory someone might try to some sort of federal takings claim, but you know, more traffic is not a taking of someone's property. I

I just use that as an example. There may be some other, you know, accusation. It's a but it I understand the concern and I you know I can remember the the discussions with those projects where you were talking about those and I wish I could give you better news. Um I wish I could, you know, tell you this isn't happening or there is some killshot or there's some loophole or there's some way around this. I don't see anything like that. Well, and my concern frankly is that I think this will be very unsettled and I think there will be lawsuits to try to clarify, you know, the intent of the legislature. But during that period of time, a large burden falls on on staff, you know, to say, well, I've looked at it and I think it's reasonable and we have to speed this up. And yet consequences come down the road. on the third page at the very top. In addition, SB131 expands the the availability of streamline review processes for certain categories of project including housing and mixeduse development. These provisions allow agency to rely more heavily on prior environmental analysis. Well, that's great if there actually were a prior analysis. And so, and even if there were, I mean, how valid are those analysis? There doesn't seem to be any um time limit like saying, well, yes, you did a massive uh SQA compliance on Empire Avenue and five years from now, can you still use those fin there doesn't seem to be I mean, how long can you use these things?

Yeah, it may not. This may not be a saving grace in this city because or this may not be as the same issue in this city because our general plan currently is is old. I mean it's 25 years old and you know you're starting the process now and you're anticipating three or four years. So, um, but there are cities that have adopted more recent general plans and so, you know, they have programmatic analyses that maybe I think those are probably the cities that are going to get hit with this because they have adopted more plans that and and their current general plans, you know, and address many of the new concepts that have come up uh since, you know, 20 years or really 25 years ago when you did your general plan here. So um but the idea of being able to rely on prior environmental analysis really speeds up the process if you can do that and obviously the applicants then developers would always advocate for that. I just I can't and again you know I can't see that necessarily here as a general issue. Now, if there are cases where there was an old map maybe from 10 years ago and that map expired and now the developer is coming in and wants to build a small piece of that and there was an environmental review for that old map, then I do council member Freighers I do think that's where they're going to take advantage of that. Yeah, it just I mean it's a little bit frightening, you know, what may be approved

in the guise of trying to increase, you know, affordability and housing in the state of California. I

I understand it. I and I think there's a lot of reasons for it, but I'm a little bit worried how this is going to be implemented. So, let me just ask you. So being trying to be in compliance uh but also being cautious. Any recommendations as we move forward? I mean with regards to training or I I don't know. I think that's probably a staff and I don't want to put our staff on the spot. I mean that's probably a staff level analysis as far as how do we implement this? How do we, you know, how do we notify maybe the council if there's one of these projects that's going to receive this expedited review? So at least you all have situational awareness that this is going through the pipeline. Uh because I know you'd like to, you know, keep track of those things. So that's probably a departmental level directional item that I think you can give.

Okay. Thank you. All right. Any questions? I regarding the um the 10 units per acre in suburban jurisdictions versus 15 metropolitan. Do you happen to know what the what we are? I think we're suburban. I I I haven't made that granular level, but I think we're suburban. Um, it's probably a population. Yeah, I think we're Yeah, I think it's more heavily in the Bay Area or maybe the Sacramento and the surrounding areas would be the metropolitan. Can you can you get that information for us or let us know? Yes. Because I think that's going to be important related to what people are doing

because obviously that that that changes the the threshold. And then it also mentions uh developments located on sites of limited acre acreage. It says generally sites fewer than 20 acres. So again terms like generally means that there might be exceptions to that. There may be I I I don't know at a granular level what those might be but that's that's usually what it is is about 20 or smaller. Yeah. I just think part of our frustration is the the uncertainty. Yes. You know we're becoming like developers now. we want certainty and all this stuff and now she was on the other foot. Now we don't have certainty and we're trying to figure out what to do. But

I agree with you that I think it's a matter of our staff uh department mostly the community development planning letting us know when things are coming so that we don't get um blindsided at a council meeting when we were unaware that this project qualified for this. Good. And I think the other part of of just this legislation, and I'm glad we're bringing it forward, is cumulatively, I think, is where we see the impacts, right? We have all this all this different housing legislation that's now several years old, and there's more coming. And I think just getting our arms around how it all cumulatively affects us. Well, it's like a snowball. You know, it, you know, every year they add a a statute or two here or there.

And so now the snowball, it's getting bigger as it rolls down the hill. what we're dealing with now, you know, just everything compounds. I think I they think the cumulative observation is an apt one, right? Okay. Thank you. That that was my only questions on this. So, um, thank you for for bringing this forward and this is just forformational purposes. Yeah, there's no receive and file.

Receive and file. Um, I do think, you know, that community development needs to come back, you know, with, you know, how is this going to be handled because I I think with some of the state mandates that have forced local government to accept things that they do not want to accept. Um, we need to be proactive. Mr. Scadero is raising his hand. I mean, I I you know, I think what the mayor said is correct. I don't think we want surprises. We need to know very early.

Yeah. So, you know, the SQA process is obviously any project in California. I will say we haven't had a developer utilize these exemptions. Um, we recently did a housing element EI, our general plan E is old, but our housing element EIR is new. So, typically what we see right now are what are called 15183 exemptions, which is consistency with an adopted comm adopted with a community plan. So that's I believe what the pre some of the previous projects you have seen. Um and typically for the housing developments we're receiving right now, those are the exemptions we're seeing. So so we we have a 2003 general plan that has an a program level EIR attached to it. Yes.

And then we've had these four or five elements that have been updated recently. Correct. The housing element is the most recent one. Yes. So was was there an environmental document updated along with those? Yeah. So, the housing element had its own environmental impact report and that was adopted by the city council in 2023. Okay. So, so this is that's the type of thing that uh a developer could tear off of, right? Or or say that qualifies as my environmental I don't need to do more.

Yeah. So, it's there's still we utilize So, just so you understand, we always utilize SQA consultants when we're doing because SQA is such a complex process that's there's a potential exposure to litigation. So, we're always going to utilize SQUA consultants when um even for our like a 15183 exemption. And just so you understand how the process works, we solicit a scope of work from an on call SQA consultant. The developer pays that full cost. So, we're not bearing that cost. Um the developer pays that cost. And so, they will go through the SQA process um in conjunction with our with our um with the consultant that we have on board. So, there's obviously, you know, when you reach some housing developments, they kind of have a menu of exemptions. Now, um, typically the 15183 though is the one that we see the most often given that most of our development now are on housing element sites that were analyzed in that EIR. Now, if someone I can't really think of any, but there maybe were some older higher density housing sites that maybe weren't analyzed under that E, then they may want to come in under an AB130 or SB131. Um, and obviously there are streamlining provisions. Um I will say more and more I am on calls with land use attorneys trying to understand this more and more. Um but every project that comes forward to a planning commissioner council we will always that's the first thing we talk about is the squa right and it's always listed in the agenda. So a lot of times you know developers I think you know we experienced it a lot with some of those recent projects you saw with the squa and the back and forth. Um there's just so much complic I don't know legal issues with SQA. You know, it can go a lot of different ways, but typically what we are seeing on housing element sites is what's called the 15183 community plan exemption. Similar to how we talked at the general plan committee last night doing that EIR and allowing projects to streamline off of it. That's kind of how this works for that as well.

All right. Thank you. I I I really I just I'm worried about this. I'm worried about you know I understand the concept the implementation is is going to be the challenge and I I want to avoid lawsuits as much as possible and I think it's going to be the nature of some particular developers who are going to push and push far because economically financially it's to their advantage not the cities but it's to their advantage of course and I'm just worried about what what our future looks like. All right. Thank you. Uh, any other comments on that? So, I'll move to receive. We have a motion from Mayor Promis to receive and file.

Second. Second. Council member Roach. Please cast your votes. Motion passes 30. All right. Perfect. We are now um on to public comments. We have no public comments. Staff communications. No staff communications.

All right. Council communications and future agenda items. Uh, I would just like to um ask that um uh acting city manager um Cortez see if potentially because I'm going to I'm looking at the CDBG standing committee and see if we could potentially schedule um by looking at my calendar because I'm going to be going to DC uh as part of our delegation. Um I return on the 21st. Is it possible to look if Friday, May 22nd, which would be the Friday before the council meeting, if we could have the standing committee with and if uh council member Torres Walker and our housing committee could meet on Friday the 22nd, I come back on the 21st, we could get that done, have some recommendations to bring forward for a meeting on the 26th.

Yes, I'll work on that. Do you have a time? Generally, the times that we've scheduled in the past has been like 9:00 in the morning, okay, to about 12 or however much time we need. Um, and I don't know about Monday, the following Monday after the 22nd. That would be the 25th, I guess. But that'd be like 24 hours. I think that'd be kind of hard. Yeah, I think you need 72 hours of notice. So, I'm just thinking that if we we have enough advanced time now, that if we work for the 20 uh Friday the 22nd, that's a Friday, May 22nd, that gives us a week to plan and to get it scheduled and hold it, right?

Yeah. And I just think it's a matter of pulling together a staff report on Friday to get the council to council pack it out. So, that'd be the only challenge including that.

I'm just thinking about the the because the budget just came out. housing committee supposed to look into it to get us that information. We already have the recommendations from the staff for us to review, but we weren't able to uh discuss or take any action, Miss Torres Walker or I. So, that still needs to happen. So, we already have the blueprint of re what the recommendations are. We're not coming up with a whole new proposal. It's really taking a look at the allocation of funds that were previously rewarded and what funds was there. They're going to sunset by a period of time. We need to look at what our options in utilizing those funds. In terms of the new budget from May 10th moving forward that will help us be able to develop a plan for moving forward. But um I just think that we need to look to have a meeting. I'm sorry about the short window of time for the staff, but I do think that if we can take the recommendations that came to us from the city from the city of Antioch's staff and we can review that, discuss in open forum, then we can move forward with recommendations Tuesday night, which is I think what um the community would like to see us do, being transparent, open.

So, it sounds like the nine o'clock sounds like a very good idea. Yes, I will work on that. Do you know if uh council member Torres Walker will be back as well? I have no idea. She's not here tonight, so I don't know what the whole schedule is, but I would imagine she would be back on the 18th. Okay. I will follow up and uh I'll let you know. That was that's my only item that I have.

And is there is there any reason say that didn't work out staff report wise that it couldn't be pushed to the first meeting in June? Is that too late to to hear it or from a timing standpoint? my understanding and again we have a new team housing committee but what Terry House who was our consultant said at our last meeting um and I don't have the notes with me tonight but what she had stated was that the new budget we would not know until May 10th and then um the hope was because what would originally would have happened if we would have had a co we would have had a quorum a quorum at our last meeting we could have approved the recommendations to bring forward to the council

on May 12th. And then we were also waiting to hear what the funding would be moving forward for the 20 uh 627 year,

but we weren't able to do any of that because we didn't have a quorum. So that's still pending for us to get those recommendations that the city brought staff brought to us. Um the budget information would be helpful. So that's why I'm thinking I think it is doable for us to meet on the 22nd. um if we have a quorum, we could then um discuss review the recommendations from our city staff and bring that forward for Tuesday night and then we would also have more information about what the budget looks like moving forward. Um so that would be my my request. Yes, I will work on that. Do you have anything?

All right, I don't have anything as well. Do we have a motion to adjurnn? So move I'll second that. Please cast your votes.

Motion passes 300. Meeting is adjourned. Meeting adjourned. Meeting is adjourned at 10:26 p.m. Thank you all. Good night.