City Council - Regular Meeting

To order this regular session of the Atascadero City Council, and we're going to welcome everybody who's either here in the chambers or listening through one of the avenues in which you can watch or listen to our meeting. So welcome to everybody. We're going to begin with the Pledge of Allegiance led tonight by Councilmember Newsom.

Thank you. Please join. Stand if you're able.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Now proceed to roll call, please.

Mayor Borbo? Here. Mayor Pro Tenderis? Here. Council Member Funk? Here. Council Member Newsom? Here. Council Member Peek? Here. All present.

All right, thank you. We're going to proceed now to the consent calendar. Consent calendar consists of items that are considered routine and non-controversial by city staff and will be acted upon in a single motion by the council unless a council member requests otherwise. And we will allow public comment on consent calendar. I will ask if any member of the council has any questions of staff or would like to pull an item. Did you have a question?

Just want to make sure we'll have a chance after this to make some congratulatory remarks on item numbers.

And the consent calendar is our confirmation of the selection of new fire chief. And we will have an opportunity to comment on that after we complete the action. So ask my colleagues to hold off till then. And so let's see. Anything else? Nope. Seeing none, I'd like to open up, see if any member of the public would like to comment on any item on consent calendar. Those are the items on the agenda under D. That's D1 through D7. If you'd like to speak on a consent calendar, please approach the podium. If anybody else would like to speak, please approach the podium as well so we don't have to transit the room. So please state your name for the record, and you have three minutes.

That'll help. Okay, you go. Now it's on. Okay, it's red. Good evening. Mike Jackson, resident here since July of 77. Before you were a city, we were a city. Business owner and everything at times. I've come to talk to you about your, on the consent calendar, you have the funds for the Podell communal nights, the road closures. I've been to every one of, The cruises, last year I drove it two laps. The way you have it laid out now will not work. It just flat won't work. Last year, cruising through town, and I did it too, because we have the new downtown and town's mine, so that's why I'm part of it. Pedestrians downtown had, they didn't care. They stood in the street in front of the cars and it was a mess the way getting through. It took almost an hour each time I made a lap and it was all mostly down there watching out for the people who were just stepping out in front of you, okay? Now, the way it's been, the track from Morrill Road to Kerberrill, you've got a half mile there with, on each side, you've got people that go out and set their chairs up and they watch and they enjoy it. Many of these people get there early and they're, And they can't walk that far. They get out and they're watching what's going on. The way you have it now, there's no place for spectators to park, too far for them to walk. And I believe that you're doing a travesty to the city and the crews by this, your decision. So I would like to have you rethink that. And because, like I said, I'm a car guy. have been, and have any of you ever driven the cruise night? So I was here, you know, for the first car shows and the first cruise night, and I knew of people that started it, and so there's a long history there, and it's, the car culture is huge. People come A lot of them probably stay at the coast. They come over here for the cruise night, and then they come to the car show, and they spend a lot of money around here. And I'm really afraid with the present way it's done, you're going to kill that because they won't come back. You'll get some of them the first time. I won't participate in it because it doesn't make any sense. Now I'll go down to the businesses, probably a town diner or one of them, get something to eat and support them because those businesses have all these years been a great part of this cruise.

All right, thank you for your time. Thank you. Did anybody else like to speak? And I'm going to address your comments in a sec, but we got to go through all the speakers for consent to calendar.

I didn't understand.

Well, I'm going now. My name is Ted Miles. I've owned Miles Motors for the last 50 years. We've supported Cruise Night since the beginning. We do a benefit barbecue with American Legion supporting the local veterans and events. with your decision to change the route of our location for our barbecue and cruise night, we'll no longer be able to do that. So by canceling it, other business along El Camino, such as Davis Auto Body, next door Rizzoli's, hundreds of people that down in that area and cars, you're going to move them down to downtown, which is a beautiful, area you guys put together and most of the city people love it and town people love it, but it's not going to work. There's going to be hundreds of people pushed down there and cars and it's going to be a big cluster. I just don't believe it's going to work and I think you should reconsider your route. Thank you.

All right. Thank you for your comments. Would anybody else like to speak on this, on any item on the consent calendar? Okay, seeing none, we're gonna bring it back here to council. No, go ahead.

Would this be the correct place to ask about the drones?

About what?

The police drones, is that tonight?

The police drones? No, that's gonna be a separate agenda item later.

But it is tonight.

Yes, it is tonight, yes. It's just not on the consent calendar. It has its own agenda item. So, all right, thank you. Anyway, I'll bring it back. I would comment, and then I'm gonna turn it over to the city manager. that last year there were definitely problems with the route, not because the route was new, but we did the beautiful job of downtown, but narrowing it to one lane did create problems for the crews. And so our staff, you know, the city manager, the police chief, fire chief, public works folks, all, and our tourism and promotions manager, all analyze this, you know, eight ways, you know, different ways on what is the best way to try to accommodate this and not have cars overheating to get throughput, et cetera. So I would say that, you know, you don't know how something's really gonna work until you do it. You don't know the human behavior element. but they have given great consideration to the route and what they think will work best. So I'm going to ask the city manager to address that for you.

Yes, thank you. And Mr. Jackson, I too have been in the cruise for 20 years. I drive a 1957 Thunderbird and last year was the first year I overheated and I was very frustrated as I saw many others of us in Mechanics Bank. So I think last year, despite our best efforts to try and plan a cruise around the new Things that didn't do great. And so one of the things I appreciate about this staff and I appreciate it at the council is they give us the freedom to try new things. And so I was frustrated. I was frustrated on behalf of many of you. At the same time, for years, we've been getting concerns from... and some of the other businesses along El Camino. And with your dealership changing and Rizzoli's, and there's been a couple changes, we thought this might be the year to try something different. Downtown restaurants entertainment is growing north. The street is more controlled. It's single lane. We are reducing cars too. That's gonna be something I think people, if they wait till the last minute, and I'm gonna announce it soon, we're down to 200 cars because we want a quality show. We're also reducing cars to either being classic or exotic. Because we've gotten a lot of cars that cram this thing up that aren't, frankly, worthy of the car show. And so I think we're really trying some new things this year. And staff, we met immediately after the show for several hours. And I think we gamed it, and we'll see. I think we feel very optimistic about including new businesses, new routes, freeing up businesses. I will also add that Ms. Banish talked to a lot of people in preparing for this. I also appreciate that Miss Banish is talking to Davis Auto Body, talking with A-Town Diner and Blast & Brew about how we can include them before and after the show as an official partner so they can still have some pre or post event. And so we are trying to be as thoughtful as we can, and we'll see if it works. And we believe it will. And if it doesn't, then we'll be right back to it.

Thank you, Mr. Lewis. Yeah, and I would just stress that, I mean, last year didn't work. Doing the same thing this year wouldn't have worked. And so, you know, changes needed to be made. There's going to be a lot more viewing area north of Rosario, you know, where people have plenty of opportunity to set up chairs and stuff there. And like I said, no guarantees. We'll see how the human behavior element plays into this, how pedestrian behavior plays into it. But we will, you know, we've got to give it a try. Before we can say well that didn't work either I think our staff is pretty confident that it will be much improved over last year in terms of the flow. And we will see how it goes, but I do appreciate that you and I know you're not the only ones concerned about this, so I thank you for showing up and speaking at the Council meeting. But it is a you know, certainly a legitimate item of concern. Um, but I think our staff has done the best they can do and we're going to see how it plays out. So, okay. We're with that and bringing it back to council and like, see if we have a motion for approval of the consent calendar. Move approval of the consent calendar.

I'll second.

We have a motion by council member funk and a second by mayor pro tem dares roll call, please.

Council member funk. Yes. Council member Newsome. Yes. Council member peak. Mayor Pro Tem Darius.

Yes.

Mayor Barbeau.

Yes.

Motion passes.

Okay. All right. Thank you. And we will move on to updates from the city manager, Mr. Lewis.

Well, I would like to explain, share why I appointed Chief Benzon.

Did you have a comment? Did you have a comment?

Yes, on item six. And I thought you were going to let the city manager comment briefly on Chief Van Zoon's appointment.

Thank you for reminding me. As part of item number six was the confirmation of the fire chief. And as I mentioned, we will have a chance to, I wanted to give the city manager to comment on his thought process in recommending or selecting battalion chief and fire marshal von Zahn for the fire chief position. and then give a chance for my colleagues to weigh in if they would like to make a comment. So Mr. Lewis, if you could start.

Thank you, Mayor. Yes. And I think all you know that our community has the best fire department in the country. And the culture, the hearts of our firefighters, the commitment is, I would put it up to anyone. And I think that we also have the best fire chief in the country. And when Chief Bryson approached me several months ago that he was ready to retire, I used every bit of charm, city manager tricks I had. It wasn't enough to get him to not retire. So he has had a 32-year career that is marvelous. And he will address his accomplishments in the future when he leaves. But needless to say, when he said he was retiring, it was a huge hole. And I was like, wow, who's going to step up? And I knew that our department, having an external leader would be difficult with the culture and the success we have. And so in talking with firefighters, and it seemed that internal recruitment was the right thing to do. and Chief Venzon stepped up. And I just wanna share a bit about him and some other accolades, which I know that he is a very humble man, so this is, sitting there is probably hard for him, but I salute you, Chief Venzon. He has had an amazing career. He was from this area, Santa Barbara County, and was a wildland fire hot shot. Those were the tough guys that get out there into the forest and start doing crazy stuff. He was hot shot of the year, which is earned for hard work. And then he went on, moved with his beautiful wife, Jill, to Montana to serve in the United States Air Force as a firefighter and had his distinguished career in the Air Force, earned several recognitions, and then moved to the Great Falls, Montana Fire Department where he had a full career there. We haven't gotten to see as much the operational side of Chief Enzon, but he was a very successful operator in Montana on fires and ran his own battalion of 16 and was there for over 20 years. And so he's an exceptional operator and a leader of firefighters. He also was a significant leader in the union, and not just locally, but at the state level, and really learned to understand the needs of employees, understand and appreciate management, that balance, how to communicate, just really strong leadership skills. It was fun learning more about him. He came to us when he and his wife really wanted to get closer to this area to get home and closer to their grandchildren in Las Vegas. And what a relief that was for Chief Bryson to have Chief Ensign come into our community reduction and fire marshal. Since then, he has championed our weed abatement, created the fire safe communities program. Obtained millions of dollars for weed abatement grants on our properties and really made our community safer when I was talking to the firefighters to a one every single member of the fire department endorsed chief ends on to be our next fire chief which I is remarkable. The department head spent a lot of time with Chief Vinson. Every single department head is looking forward to Chief Vinson joining our team. So it is with great, great confidence I was able to appoint Chief Vinson as our next fire chief. And I salute you, sir. I'm looking forward to working with you. And I'm very pleased the council approved my appointment. Council, I turn it to you. You have a great new fire chief coming in.

Yes, I want to open up to my colleagues if they wish to comment anything and then chief word or chief designate we would like to come have you and your family come up and we'd like to take a picture of you down in the well here so comes from frank I know you wanted to make a comment.

Yes, I just wanted to congratulate Chief Van Zoon and our community, and I'm really excited that we have a chief coming in who, among other things, has been Hotshot of the Year or Firefighter of the Year in three different jurisdictions. And I'm also excited about him bringing experience as a union president and leader because I know that that means he knows how to develop firefighters' careers and make the experience of being a firefighter in this community good for every single individual who serves and keeps us safe. So welcome aboard.

Thank you. And yes, I mean, we certainly want to welcome, we think, well-deserved promotion and compliment city manager for the process he ran in making this selection. And we have every confidence that you're going to fill those big shoes that Chief Bryson is leaving behind. Anybody else wish to make a comment? Mark?

Yeah, I just want to congratulate Dave on your promotion. I know you think you just passed your 10-year mark with the department here. You have an impressive background. And I think we're lucky to have such a pool in the department to be able to choose the next leader. And I think you've proven yourself as somebody that's gonna keep the department doing all the great things that it does. So congratulations and look forward to seeing you around for a lot longer.

Yes, Council Member Newsom.

Congratulations.

Succinct, I like it.

Yeah, Dave, I appreciate your candor and just congratulations, looking forward to working with you.

All right, with that, we're going to step down to the well. I'd like you to come up and take a picture with the council. We're gonna invite incoming Chief Vonson to say a few remarks at the podium. And I wanna thank the firefighters for coming out in support of the incoming chief. I appreciate you guys all making time to come out and be here. Chief.

Thank you, Mayor and Council and City Manager Lewis for this incredible opportunity. and having your faith and trust in me to fill these huge shoes that Chief Bryson has put in front of us. He's done such a fantastic job setting our fire department up for success. And I'm honored to be able to continue with his legacy and keep moving our fire department and our city forward. I want to give a thanks to my wife, Jill. She's been with me from the very beginning as a hotshot and seeing me all the way through to this point right now. And my kids have been supportive and my grandchildren. Thank you guys so much for being here. And then all my brothers and sisters out there for supporting me 100%. I thank you for this opportunity and I'm ready to give it all in. Thank you.

Very cool. Okay. We are going to go ahead and move on then now to updates from the city manager, Mr. Lewis.

Thank you, Mayor and members of Council. It's appropriate to start out with a beautiful picture of our new fire engine that we have. As you know, there you are commemorating the new engine about six to eight weeks ago, and she's just about ready for service. I thought we'd advertise that when you see this beauty with the red and gray, I think that was kind of neat. That was something our fire department wanted to come up with something a little different, make our engine unique, and I like that it was kind of greyhounds, you know, so... There it is, and she will be in service by the end of the month. So just wanted to share that we'll look forward to having this new state of the art engine funded largely in part by D20 and others. So again, appreciate the community support and the council's investment. And to remind you, you've ordered another engine. They take about two and a half years to produce, but I think it's remarkable the investment you make in our fire department. And I appreciate that. And I know our firefighters do as well. So it will be placed in service very shortly. We'll respond from Station 1 as well. So we have another good news. We're working feverishly at Paloma Park, if you have been down there. There's a lot of work happening here, and this is our resurfacing and restriping of the parking lot. And Deputy City Manager Knight is also the Commissioner of Soccer that is starting very shortly, and so... I feel the pressure of trying to get this done before soccer season. But you can see we'll be resurfacing and restriping the entire parking lot, full depth pavement repairs, concrete improvements for drainage and ADA compliance, and resulting in more than 30 new parking spaces. So this is a terrific project at Paloma. There's two phases of work with concrete currently underway. It'll be finished by the end of this week, followed by resurfacing and restriping. So Paloma Park is so heavily used, as you know, And it's a neat thing to see on weekends just how many families are enjoying it in multiple sports. We've also been working at Lake Park. We have installed new picnic tables. And so visitors to Atascadero Lake Park will see a fresh upgrade in our new picnic tables. I do want to thank the Kiwanis Club of Atascadero for making our former picnic tables and continuing to do the work that they do, not to be outdone by Rotary. They do great work too, but these tables were originally built by Kiwanis and appreciate those tables worked for years, but they were concrete and cracking. And so these are beautiful. We replaced eight of the aging picnic tables. These are more comfortable, and there'll be a couple more tables, so it's great to make sure people enjoy Lake Park. Ms. Banish and I next had the privilege to go out and see the aquatics program. If you haven't been out there, it's pretty neat to see our lifeguards, these new young people. We train many of them. It's their first job, so we're employing people, and they're getting out there and learning skills. There were several people out there doing swim lessons and free swim when we were out there, and it's still open. It'll continue Monday through Wednesday, lap and rec swims, so lap swims from 12 to 4, rec swims from 2 to 4.15. Thursday, Friday, lap swim is from 12 to 545, and rec swim from 2 to 415. Group and private lessons are available. And I know the council is concerned about heat, and it is nice that D20 and your leadership fund a cool pool for our community for those who don't have access to other pools. So passes must be purchased in person at the Recreation Center, and registration for lessons may be done online via the ActiveNet portal at atascadero.org. Also, the recreation, we have several classes open. Youth Pickleball is open right now. Cost is $80. Class grades are 5th and 6th and 7th and 8th. It'll be at the Colony Park Community Center on Mondays and Wednesdays through October from 5 to 6 for 5th to 6th and 6 to 7 for 7th to 8th. So this is something we're trying. It looks like it'll be a lot of fun. Adult basketball deadline is August 7th. So that will be on us before you know it. And so August 7th.

And adult social kickball is also open until August 7th.

Regarding our concerts in the park, there are no concerts for the next two weeks. And so I want to make sure if you go to the lake, you'll get to enjoy our beautiful lake, but there'll be no music. It's difficult to compete with the Mid-State Fair. So I think it's very smart of Ms. Banish and her team to not have concerts. But we will return, no fear, on July 25th with Push. And so this should be a 70s, 80s, 90s music. Should be a lot of fun. And it's good rock dance music. So it should be great. This next item is one of our best outreaches, I think, from a public safety standpoint. This is tremendous. Law enforcement puts on the public safety night out. This is August 4th from 5 to 7 at the Sunken Gardens in downtown. This really allows people to connect with law enforcement. There's games, there's activities, some really cool giveaways. And this year, Scouting America is putting on a full bike rodeo. And so you'll be learning bike safety, you'll be inspecting your bikes, and they'll also be talking about law and bike safety as you get ready for school. So getting the kids' bikes tuned up and ready for school, and there'll be a little competition as well. So that's at the National Night Out. Cruising weekend, we just talked about that a little bit. We are trying a lot of new things, so I won't get into that. I hope, I'm sure they'll be great. Friday night is the 33rd annual cruise from 630 to 830. That said, people will want to plan as to where they park and where they, you should kind of decide where you want to sit and strategize your parking since the route's a bit different. I think it'll also be good for the community. As much as Mr. Jackson and I and others are cruise lovers, many people in our community can be frustrated by the 41 closures and not being able to get to their grocery store and not being able to get to business. And so it's going to be really interesting for the whole community to see how this works out. On Saturday, the 35th Mid-State Cruisers Car Show is again at the lake from 10 to 3 p.m. And then Dancing in the Streets is our big street party on Saturday from 5 to 10. So great weekend. Registration is open. I want to share, because we have 200 cars, and they're either classic, which is 90 or before, or exotic, limited production cars, less than 100 tickets remain. So you do want to get down to the community center and get your ticket or mail in your pre-registration. Mail registration goes through Friday, August 1st. But I do believe we could be sold out by the end of this month. So if you are going to put your car on the show, please do not wait. We will not be selling tickets the night of the cruise. So that's a bit about cruise and weekend. Finally, we have the annual Brew at the Zoo is gearing up, the 13th annual. This will be September 12th from 5 to 8 p.m. And it's a great way to raise money and enjoy some of our local beverages. So it's 21 over. And so it's really enjoyable. The zoo looks great. Several new animals and exhibits. So please get your ticket early. If you have any questions, you can always check us out at visitatascadero.com or atascadero.org. Thank you, Mayor and members of council.

Right Thank you, Mr Lewis i'm going to ask, Mr night if hopefully we're not gonna have to crane our necks all evening to look at whatever is on the slide it's not appearing on our screens so if. If that's if you have a can figure out a way to fix that that would be appreciated all right does any member of the Council have any questions for the city manager. City Manager, you mentioned the fire engines, and I want to talk about that's part of the big shoes that Chief Bryson has left to fill, but between him and you and the rest of staff, setting up the fire department for success with new equipment and also the fire station, and I notice if anybody, pretty obvious if you drive by that the old fire station is torn down to the ground, they're out there grading, and so work is progressing. It seems right on track.

Yeah, as a matter of fact, the station to the rebar is going in for the concrete so all the utilities are in the drains the water and so they are on track and moving quick.

Excellent. And again, thank you to the voters that made that possible by passing measure D 20 made all those things possible. Okay, does any member of the council have any questions for the city manager on his report. Okay, seeing none, we will move on to community forum and community forum is for individuals wishing to speak to the Council on a matter not on the agenda and. City Council Chambers, Community forum is limited to three minutes per person and 30 minutes total because we. City Council Chambers, Brown act precludes us from discussing items that are not on the agenda, we may we will not be able to enter into a discussion on item raised by individual we may ask staff to answer a quick question or to get in touch with a speaker. City Council Chambers, With that I invite anybody up who wishes to speak on an item not on the agenda, but over which the Council has jurisdiction. Mayor Mrakas, Okay, seeing no one approach, then we will close public comment and move on to the next item on the agenda, which is item G one a public hearing regarding a tree removal at the senior Center on East mall and I think we're going to turn this over to Mr duns more our Community development director.

Mayor Mrakas, Thank you mayor and Council and i'm going to have Sam mountain our planner give you a brief presentation on the tree removal and sunken gardens park or adjacent to sunken garden spark.

But ma'am, I'm going to just caution you if you're standing there already to speak on this item. After he presents, council will have some questions. So you might want to take a seat and take a seat right handy near the podium. That would be great. Thank you. So go ahead. Go ahead.

All right, good evening, Mr. Mayor, members of council. As Mr. Dunsmore mentioned, my name is Sam. I'm with the Planning Department, and today we'll be discussing a heritage tree removal at the Atascadero Senior Center at 5905 East Mall. So just a brief summary before we get into a little bit more detail. The tree in question is a 60-inch diameter Coast Live Oak that's on the Senior Center property over on East Mall, right outside over there. Um, this tree did unfortunately pass away naturally. Um, the arborists best kind of assessment of the cause of death of the tree is through a scale bug infestation. While our native tree ordinance does generally require city council approval for native tree removals, or I apologize for heritage tree removals in this case, in the interest of public safety, city staff did approve an earlier removal, um, due to the arborists assessment that the tree was dead and potentially hazardous in a structural manner. The tree was removed on July 10th, just late last week. And then as mentioned, this tree is designated as a heritage tree, thereby requires city council approval and review prior to removal. So just a little bit of history. We don't do heritage tree removals too often, so I figure it would be good to get a little bit of a refresher. This tree is one of several that were originally planted as part of the city's historic civic center. And this was kind of the original development of downtown Atascadero back in the 1910s. You can see these two photos on the left that were taken around that period. I believe one is 1915, the other is 1919 to my understanding. And the tree-lined streets around the sunken gardens are both part of the historic character and also kind of the visual character of downtown. And that's one of the main reasons why these trees are designated as heritage trees. They just required a little bit of extra protection on top of our native tree ordinance in order to make sure that we maintain that historic character downtown. little bit of analysis as to how this relates to city code. As reference, the native tree ordinance does require mitigation for the removal of any native trees and the removal of any heritage trees. And so that would generally involve payment of fees into the city's native tree fund, which is used to plant and maintain native trees in public land, or it would involve replacing the removed trees by replanting other native trees on site. In this case, the site is constrained by quite a few existing improvements. The location of where the tree was originally is surrounded by flat work. There's already existing landscaping, and there is also some foundation elements of the adjacent building that are in really close proximity to the tree. And so as a result, we are going with a slightly smaller replanting than we often have around East Mall and locations that have a little bit more space. In this case, what staff is recommending is a 15 gallon replacement in or close to the same location. In addition to grinding out the stump, irrigating this replacement in order to hopefully make it survival a bit more likely. And then also have staff monitoring for a period of four years. And this is essentially to make sure that this new replanting survives. and that it is able to thrive. And if it does end up dying, that we're able to have an opportunity to replant again. And we are requiring a Coast Live Oak for the replanting as well, essentially with the intent of over a period of time, kind of regrowing the downtown tree canopy. Coast Live Oaks in urban areas typically have a lifespan of around 100 to 150 years. And so staff does kind of predict that as we go through the next decade or two, we are going to see more trees fail downtown that are those original Coast Live Oaks. And we want to be able to stagger our replanting and kind of ensure that we have a large amount of tree coverage downtown even as these trees begin to kind of go that were originally developed with the downtown. And as a result, we are recommending that council adopt the draft resolution to approve the removal of one hazardous 60 inch DBH Coast Live Oak at 5905 East Mall, subject to the conditions of approval and mitigation, including replanting on site. You'll note that there is a slight modification here. The original condition language did not provide a period of time by which the senior center would need to replant this tree. As a result, we're requesting that council modify condition number four to add that this replacement tree must be planted within one year of approval of the tree removal permit to the end of the first paragraph of that condition. For some alternatives, council may approve the project with additional or revised conditions or mitigation requirements, or council may continue the hearing and refer the item back to staff and the applicant for additional information or analysis. And with that, we'll open it up for discussion and questions.

Okay, well, I have several questions, but I'm going to defer to first to my colleagues, and they may ask them as well, the same questions. So I'm going to start on my left, Council Member Peek, the questions you have, staff.

Was the senior center charged a removal fee? Yes, there was a permit fee for applying for the removal. Is that the same dollar amount for dead or alive trees? It is, yes. And is the replanting, I'm assuming it falls on the responsibility of the property owner too? Yes. And is that determined by the city as to where the tree is purchased and who installs it? That portion is not determined.

The fee, by the way, was charged according to the ordinance. So all the staff has heard many of the pleas and we are sympathetic to them. And I'm sure the council will have some thoughts. It was $1,787.84. And those funds were received.

The tree was removed already. Yes, based on its emergency removal status, we did allow them to remove the tree several days ago. So what if we voted no to remove the tree? The tree was already dead. So in this particular scenario, once an arborist declares a tree dead and an emergency status, it has to come out. So really our hearing tonight is about the appropriate mitigation, the appropriate replacement, rather than the actual permission to remove or not. But technically the council could have said, don't remove it because we value this dead tree as habitat. That potential is there. But if we don't remove a tree that's been deemed hazardous, obviously there's some legal. I was just clarifying. Yeah. Sure. It's already removed. It's a bit of an interesting question. That's it for now.

Hard not to ratify something that already occurred. Okay. Council Member Derris.

I don't really have any questions, but just a comment on, you know, in a situation like this, this tree is dead and there's nothing we can do about it. Like you said, it's going to have to be removed. That's not cheap. And I feel like it's kind of rubbing salt in the wound to have to pay a mitigation fee or plant a whole bunch of trees either on site or somewhere else. Replanting the tree, I'm totally okay with. I think it's a good idea to put another oak tree and let it grow because it's beautiful downtown. But I just want to put my two cents in that when something happens like this that you really don't have any control over, you're not doing it voluntarily, You're not doing it to develop or because you just don't want it there anymore. It's something that has to be done. You're kind of already being penalized having to pay to have that thing taken down. And I would like to not see additional fees incurred by the senior center for something that they didn't have any control over. I think replanting a tree is, I think would be adequate.

I think we're going to probably go into that in those ideas in greater detail when we get to our comments. Because I think a lot of us probably up here probably feel similarly. But so if we could keep it to questions at this point, and then we'll get into the commentary. So I'll go ahead and defer to you. Hold my...

First of all, since this is an action that we are retrospectively approving the removal that obviously was necessary because the tree was dead, can we retrospectively approve the waiving of the permit fee for dead trees and therefore have the city refund the money?

So I have consulted with the city attorney about this. Waiving the fee, that's difficult, and there's some precedential issues that we discussed. But if it's the will of the council, what I can do is enter into contract with the senior senator under my authority and transfer the funds to them that way. So we could do the same thing, there'll be a different method. But if that's something the council wants to do, we've discussed how I best could do that under my contract authority to return the money to them.

Okay, so there's a mechanism to achieve that result. Okay, as we look forward to the application, forward in this to, as Mr. Mountain mentioned, that this is a tree that was planted over 125 years or 110 years ago or whatever, and that we're going to have more of these trees hit the end of their life cycle. That was really, I believe, not what the council was contemplating many, many, many years ago when this heritage thing was done. In order to make sure that our ordinance distinguishes between situations where a developer wants to chop down one of these cherished trees to make a bunch of money or situations in which the tree died, do we need to change the ordinance or can we give staff guidance about how to interpret the existing ordinance that it doesn't apply to, these parts don't apply to dead trees?

I think at this point, it'd be good to give staff guidance. I think if we are to modify the ordinance, I think we would owe it to ourselves to do some additional public outreach on this matter. There was a lot that went into creating the ordinance and there's a lot behind the reasoning of requiring a permit for a dead tree. Essentially, they are considered habitat. In a lot of cases, somebody may maliciously kill a tree to remove the mitigation or the tree removal permit requirement. The other factor here is the actual The area in which permits are required for tree removals alone is extremely small. It's a very little known fact that most properties in the city, you don't have to get a permit to remove a tree if you're on a single family property and you're not pending development. You can remove trees without a permit. So it's really only in these commercial zones or a multifamily zone or on a property where it's pending development where permits are required. So that category is pretty small already. So I think it is a good idea to look at a situation. Are there criteria that we can establish where mitigation or permit fees are appropriate? And we've tried to narrow this down in the past. Several years ago, we modified the regulations to make them a lot simpler. We established the heritage tree protection and only listed those few heritage trees or the trees that need permits. And it's only a handful. There's several around Sunken Gardens Park. There's a few sycamores on Atascadero Avenue. And there's several trees along El Camino Real. It's probably a dozen, feels like just a dozen trees really that are on that list. So when you start looking at that, it's a pretty small area where you're going to fall into this. Unfortunately, this particular tree did fall into that narrow category and we do have a nonprofit involved and the tree died due to natural causes. So if we can narrow down a situation whereby we can modify ordinance or create a policy that where we can do something different, I think that is achievable.

Would it be possible through guidance to staff to allow staff to waive the requirement that somebody provide an arborist report to confirm what we could all see and your average fifth graders say that that's a dead tree? Do we need, could we get, let staff waive that requirement when it's obvious?

I would say based off of the language of the city's current tree ordinance, a code amendment would be required in order to have clear direction on what trees would and would not be subject to any exemptions from the tree ordinance or different mitigation measures or fees.

Yeah, so it's an exemption to the requirement that an arborist certify that this is a dead tree, if we can all see it's a dead tree.

That's correct. That would be something you would want to change by ordinance.

Okay. Good to know. And then I know that you mentioned public outreach. Have we talked with arborists about that? how well our coast live oaks are likely to hold up in the weather conditions and climate situation that are likely, as best anybody can guess, to prevail over the next 100, 150 years, which will be the life cycle of the trees that are being planted now. Or do we need to consider whether some varieties whether we should stay with close live oaks or consider some variety in order to make sure that we don't lose all of those beautiful trees at once due to some climactic condition or bug infestation or fungus or whatever. I know that we've had a tree right near this one that has been replanted twice and failed twice. Am I correct on that?

That's right, the property adjacent to this property, and that was due to a fungus in the soil, so very unusual circumstance. But what I will add, just for my own personal knowledge, on the Coast Live Oak, the Quercus agrifolia, it is amazingly tolerant to our conditions here, and very, very long-lived. The ones we've planted in sunken gardens in the past 35 years have actually done extremely well. It's these older ones that get over 100 years that seem to decline, but Back to your previous comment, diversity in trees is excellent as well. And there are other oak varieties that do really well that are very similar that are evergreen and deciduous both that could do just as well. It's the street tree types like Chinese pistache and these other things, these sycamores and London plains that have an incredibly short life spans. We have to be careful that we choose because the oaks actually do have, even the planted ones have an incredibly long lifespan. And while I have the microphone, I just want to touch on one other topic, and that was what you alluded to before about the Arbus report. Now, the way our ordinance reads today, and I'll read this out of the section that's in the code here, it says, an Arbus report shall be provided when determined necessary by the community development director or designee. So we actually do already have latitude in our ordinance to determine whether that's needed.

Okay. Thank you for clarifying that. That'll do me for now.

All right, thank you. Council Member Newsom.

I think my colleagues have answered all my questions. Thank you.

Thank you. Yes, Council Member Funk, you and other Council Members addressed some of my questions. Regarding that, I did read that. Given that, as Council Member Funk noted, any of us could stand in front of the tree as I did last week and see that it's dead, did we require an arborist report? And if so, why did we require an arborist report?

Sorry.

Yeah, so we generally have that as kind of our standard, the default, I guess, course of action, standard policy. If there are exceptional situations, there have been instances where that has been waived. But broadly speaking, if we want to have an accurate assessment of size and species and age kind of for the record, that is where we usually look to an arborist to get involved with the project.

Okay, because I mean I go back to council member funks comments or question that you know it seems to me that, given that item see. You know, whatever this paragraph, but i'm received for you know, an arbors for being provided when determined necessary, why we couldn't. convey that the default position should be you look you guys look at it first then if you have any question you know then maybe you ask for an arborist report in other words because what my question is and you may not know the answer maybe if there's a representative from the senior center here tonight is how much did they have to pay for an arborist report and or do you know what the typical amount is that a property owner is having to pay for an arborist report

I couldn't tell you the typical amount right now. It's changed a lot over the last few years. But what I will tell you is the council does have the ability to say, you know, to staff, hey, can we use the default as not having an arborist report? And I think our city attorney wants to speak on this as well.

Yeah, I was just going to co-sign on that. You can give direction that the default may be for no arborist report. When you're looking at whether certain situations just by the fact that of the, sorry, when you're looking at certain situations that you want per se to be exempted from the requirement to get a permit or even go through this process, that's what will require a code amendment. Or if you're looking to memorialize specific exceptions to your mitigation measures, that is what I would also encourage to be done through an ordinance amendment.

Okay, thank you and I apologize to the representatives from the senior Center because we're we're having this discussion, because I think I certainly have a lot of problems. With the tree ordinance so that's why this is turning into more of a discussion about the ordinance and about your tree so I apologize, you have to wait, but I think this is a very important discussion we put in the conditions here. that they shall grind out the existing stump to provide adequate area for planting a new tree, why don't we just let them plant it on the other side of the yard? Because grounding out a stump of that magnitude is not a cheap proposition either.

There simply isn't a lot of room on this property And those trees, when they were originally planted, had sort of a specific spacing to them. But it's certainly possible that you could move 10 feet away and do that. It's certainly an option. In this particular case, it doesn't seem like the tree died from a fungus. If it did truly die from a scale, which would have been an insect on the leaves, then that root base may not have a fungus. In other cases, we required the root. and the tree to be removed because there was an actual disease that would remain in the soil for a long time that ultimately could contaminate new trees in the future. And that was the reasoning behind that as default to doing that.

And when we're talking about heritage trees like these, obviously these were planted, you know, and they already looked pretty good size in 1915 when they were only a few years old. You mentioned the sycamores along Atascadero Avenue. Were they planted as part of E.G. Lewis's vision? How old are they? Do we know?

I don't have exact dates of when they were planted or their age, but from what we can look at in the city records, they have been there for a substantial amount of time and were recognized as a significant feature prior to Highway 101 being built along a very prominent avenue to Atascadero Mall.

Okay. And some of them are in front of... or on the property of single-family residences, but some of them are in front of multi-family residences, if I'm mistaken, correct? So the single-family homeowner could go out and cut them down tomorrow, or is that not true because they're a heritage?

No, not if it's designated as a heritage tree and mapped as such. Those are the only trees not exempt. If it's a standard native tree, any other native tree would be exempt from permitting on a single-family zoned property as long as they're not pending development.

I'm wondering what the lifespan is or some disease come along and wipes wipes all them out. Okay, I have a lot more commentary, but I that might also include some questions, but I believe Councilmember Peek had another question and then we're going to go out to the public.

Does the ordinance die with the heritage trees or does it does a replacement tree become a new protected heritage tree?

The replacement does not become a new protected heritage tree.

The ordinance is John Potter, it's it's it's done whenever all the trees are gone basically all the heritage, yes.

John Potter, With that we're going to go out to the public, and in particular if there's any Member from the senior Center representative like to hear from them, but also any Member of the public is invited to speak on this item, please state your name, for the record, and you have three minutes.

Good evening, Mayor and members of the City Council. I'm Carrie Rogers, and I am the Vice President of Senior Citizens United, which is the nonprofit 501c3 that owns the Senior Center and has been operating it since 1974. We've been around a long time. Interesting enough, we're talking about the arborist. The first person to tell me that tree was dead was someone from the city when they were cutting down a tree in the second gardens, the 4G tree company. This was last year. And I was walking into the senior center and there was a man standing there from I didn't get his name, but he said he was from the city, and he said, this tree is dying, and you need to take care of it. So that's what started this. The reason I'm here today is to ask you if you would please consider returning the fees that you charged us for this tree, the $1,787 that we paid for it. Because... And to make you aware that it cost us over $6,000 to remove that tree. And that doesn't include the mitigation fee that I'm being told we're going to have to pay another $850 to plant a new tree just for the privilege of doing that. At first, we didn't think we wanted to replace the tree because we thought it would give our building more visual look if we didn't. But Saturday afternoon, after it was cut down on Friday, when I was in a vent at the senior center, it was so hot in our front room that we realized we missed that tree. And we do need that shade that it provided. But I just wanted to let you know, we now have over 150 members in our community. senior center, and we only charge them a $20 fee a year to be a member. And yet we're providing activities every day of the week except for Sunday. No, on Sunday we have an activity then too. And we've been doing everything we can to improve the life of senior citizens in our community. And so this expense, the only other income we have is from donations and from fundraising. And we We're kind of limited in our fundraising because, again, we're all seniors. The average age of our membership is 75. And this is obviously not a group that's going to go out and throw a ball. We did have a fundraiser this year. We had a dance through the decades that we held at the Kiwanis Center. And after months of work and lots of effort, we made $3,000. But everybody, in fact, we had standing room only. Everybody that showed up had a great time and had a lot of fun. So again, my main purpose of being here tonight is to ask you to please return those fees to us because we need the money. And please don't charge us the additional $800 for mitigation. We are gonna replace the tree now. we've realized that we do need another tree there. And it can be a coastal oak. I don't have a problem with that. And I guess the scale that it died from doesn't penetrate the ground, so it isn't gonna hurt the new tree.

Okay, thank you very much. Any other member of the public wishing to speak on this item? Please approach. Okay, seeing none, would you like to speak? Yes, please approach the podium. And while you do that, Mr. Dunsmore, can you address whether or not we were charging? I thought, you know, if somebody plants a replacement tree, we don't charge a mitigation fee.

So what's the... We are not charging that $800 mitigation fee.

Okay, got it. Thank you. I'm just going to go ahead.

That's all right. I'm Judy Hemingway. I am a much more recent member of the Senior Center, but it is an extremely valuable resource for our senior citizens. It's become a much more vital organization since We started rebounding from the COVID era. And I think probably almost all of us love the Oaks. The main reason my husband and I moved here was because of the Oaks. We have a lot on our property. And we would like to see this tradition continued. So we are definitely committed to planting a new oak. Just for information, if you actually look at the property, there's only one place where we can plant a new oak, and that's where the old one was. We have a very tiny property there. and there's nowhere else that we could. The other side of the property already has another giant oak. So, and we cherish it. We hope it will never die, at least not in our lifetimes. So I definitely want to thank you all for giving time and attention to this issue. It's really, it's important to us. It's extremely trying in terms of our finances, because as has already been pointed out. We are a nonprofit, we're very small. Most of our members don't have any money and we're all volunteers and we're doing the best that we can to keep our community united. So thank you for attending to this and I'm very encouraged by what I'm hearing in terms of how you view the situation and what you think can be done about it. Thank you.

Okay. Thank you. Any other member of the public wishing to speak, please? Okay. But seeing none, we will bring it back to the council for discussion and a motion. I would like to weigh in that I don't understand, to be brutally frank, the purpose of our tree ordinance. We live in a community that has thousands upon tens of thousands of more trees in it than when I moved here 40 years ago. It has hundreds of thousands of more trees than it did 100 years ago when we had ongoing agricultural operations and much land had been cleared for orchards, et cetera. Where I live was pears. And I know other people where they lived, it was apples or whatever. Their land was cleared. There were no trees on my lot when we bought it 28 years ago. We now have hundreds of trees on our lot. And many of them would fall under this ordinance if it was applicable to single family properties. Same with my neighbors. They had no trees. They have hundreds of trees. I don't understand what it is we're trying to protect against. The vast majority of people, businesses, and organizations value trees. That's why they plant them. That's why homeowners plant them. That's why there's more now than there used to be. And frankly, I was on the city council when we first passed a tree ordinance and I voted against it because I didn't understand what the problem was we were proposing this solution for. what i see here is and i was you know a very much of an advocate of changing the ordinance back in 2018 and we did streamline it not completely to my satisfaction but it was a significant step forward to lessen the number of items that would come forward take up staff time stake up planning commission time cost property owners a lot of money we did streamline it but now we end up with a situation like this where a non-profit organization had to pay a professional arborist to go yeah that's dead um you know and then a a substantial fee to the city to process this and end up with a report before the city council and i don't understand what it is we're accomplishing with the tree ordinance at all I don't know how many tree removals have we ever declined, either you at the staff level or at planning commission or council. Do you know of any we've ever said, no, you can't do that too? Because you've been here like 15 years, Mr. Dunsmore or so, right?

I do not recall ever declining a tree removal.

Right. And I mean we do when we have a significant development we have a, we require a landscape plan correct for people to like if somebody's building a shopping center we make them have a landscape plan for planting trees and other things. I mean I'm more concerned that we're, we don't want to do anything and so you know, wait till trees big trees die and then we have a big hole. i'd be more concerned that we have a tree replacement plan and that some of the big sycamores on atascadero avenue it would be good to maybe some of them come down and be replaced so that when they when they fall there's not a big hole when they die there's not a big hole and and i don't i just don't see the benefit of placing this burden on property owners this case illustrates it where you have a A you know, a Community nonprofit doing great things for the Community and then we're just you know sucking a lot of money out of their small wallet. For this purpose, but I the same logic applies to to other property owners commercial commercial property owners, I remember on the when I was on the planning Commission visiting rancho del bordo you know mobile home park to look at a tree that was you know about six inches around. obviously dead could have been cut down, you know, with a chainsaw in a few minutes and hauled away in 30 and we require them to pay an arborist paid them to pay for a report to the planning Commission we change some of that in 2018 but. I you know we're imposing a solution on a non problem in my eyes, and so I would certainly look to make some of the changes that Council member funk alluded to. But for me, I would look at revamping the whole thing and why do we even do this? I'm not sure what, if anything, we're accomplishing for the community. I don't see that we're accomplishing anything in real protection in terms of what isn't already happening. So those are my thoughts. I would like us to relook the whole dang thing at some point in the near future. But in the near term, to at least provide some guidance that we'd like to see the default being you don't need an arborist report unless you determine an arborist report is needed. And your default is you guys look at it first. Because I just hate to impose this expense and time on property owners for what I just don't see as a problem. We don't have people running around cutting down trees willingly. We don't have people asking to cut down trees willy-nilly because most people value trees. Almost all people value trees, all businesses and all organizations. They almost all value trees. They enhance their property values. They enhance the functionality of their property. And we don't need to make a big, you know, have a 17-page ordinance about it. So sorry, I'm rambling, but I'll start on my left, see if any other comments, and then we'll discuss a motion.

Yeah, at the very least, I think that we shouldn't charge to have somebody remove a dead tree, at the very least. I think charging somebody to be evaluated, then they got to hire the person to cut it down. That's the very least that I mean, I just don't understand why we have that. I remember before I was on council, I had a friend who had to pay a fee to get a tree removed, and he was going on about it. And it didn't make sense to me then. It wasn't something I was going to, the hill I was going to die on right when I came into the office. But I do think it's time to do some sort of change there. We have a, I mean, I'm not going to go on and on. I agree with most of what Mayor Barbeau said. We do have many, many, many, many trees, and nobody wants to cut down their trees. I think in the 15 years I've lived here, the biggest tree scandal was Justin cutting down their trees for their vineyard. I haven't heard of anything like that anywhere around here or Tree City USA designation. They're beautiful, but I think that... Um, it's a public perception that you're not allowed to cut your trees down too. I mean, as a realtor, I sell houses and people don't want to live here. Cause like, I can't cut a tree down in a Tascadero. It's very, it's a rumor that people believe. And I think it's for a good reason. You know, you don't want to cut down a bunch of trees, but I think it's, um, it's one of those things where even in certain areas, since I lived here, the trees are double, triple the size in 15 years and ones that weren't there are there. And I just think it's, uh, It's a lot to do about nothing, in my opinion. And I also just had one follow-up question. When was the last time we had to do a heritage tree replacement?

Probably Sylvester's?

Last time was about three years ago, right next door to this property.

Okay, so it's not an ongoing issue where everybody's trying to cut down their heritage trees. Very rare. Very rare. Yeah, I just think it's time to revamp it. And at the very least, I do see the... Because I was asking that question because if you forgive a fee to one organization that paid it, you have someone in the past, recent past that says, well, what about me? It was only two years ago I paid the same amount of money. So I do see that as being a problematic if we're going to go back and... reimburse individuals and organizations where just recently somebody else had paid it. Who's to say they're not gonna come and now there's precedent that they're gonna get their money back. So I think we should be careful with how that is done if that's decided upon. But bottom line is I'd like to do away with make this thing one paragraph.

Do you want to just add a point of clarification? As I've looked at the ordinance a little bit more closely before you tonight, while the arborist report shall be provided as deemed necessary by the community development director, the way the ordinance is currently written Is that a required finding for a tree removal when the tree is dead, deceased, or injured beyond reclamation? Is that the tree is dead, diseased, or injured beyond reclamation as certified by a tree condition report from an arborist? So those two provisions read together for the specific purposes of removing a dead tree would still require an arborist report. So if you are interested in removing that requirement, I would recommend directing staff to do so with an amendment to the code.

Would I recommend if I can jump in because we could get into this all night and we're not prepared to do that. So I think if there's the will of the council to tell the staff, yeah, we're not feeling great about the tree ordinance as it is, it's heavy handed. Staff, can you come back quickly with thoughts? We generally hear you, but if each of you could share with me general themes, I could have a staff report brought back to you that addresses some of those themes and maybe the unintended consequences that you can just see. And then things you could consider, you could direct us then on the way you want to improve the tree ordinance, we could bring it back, you know, a meeting or two later. I think that'd be more efficient than us trying to do something without it in front of us.

Right, yeah, we don't want to make the sausage. I think our intention is clear, at least regarding that specific question regarding arborist reports, but I think at without burdening you too much in the short term, I think we do want to have a further, more lengthy discussion about the ordinance itself. But in the short term, yeah, you know, address the specific language that you don't need an arborist to tell you the tree is dead.

Would you be okay with that coming back in October? We could probably, we don't have much on the meetings then. Is that something you'd be interested in discussing then?

I think that would be fine. I think that'd be fine. I don't foresee any other heritage trees, you know. Okay. Dying before then and needing to be removed. Okay. So Mayor Pro Temderis.

Just a couple of comments. Well, on the need for an arborist report, I think it is going to be important at times for one to be presented, because it could be one side says it's dying, the other side says it's not. I think it needs to be certified whether it is or not. But requiring it. And every situation may be a little excessive. But I wanted to also say that I agree with what the mayor was saying earlier. And on the tree removal permit, if there was an abuse of the right to remove a tree and it was constantly ongoing and we needed to feel like we needed to regulate that, I can see where a tree removal permit would be necessary. But as we've already, I think we all kind of agree that people aren't, aren't rushing to cut down trees on their property because it provides shade. I mean, were you outside today? It was nice and hot. And the shade was very welcoming. So it's not a problem with tree removal. So I think it does need to be looked into. And I appreciate the discussion that's happening here this evening. That's all I got. Thank you.

Council Member Funk.

Yes, I think we have an ordinance now that was aimed at making sure that unscrupulous developers don't go whacking down the largest, most beautiful trees that are a heritage of the entire community. And maybe it's worked and maybe it's already served its purpose and we don't need it anymore at all. We need to evaluate that. In the meantime, it's not meant, it shouldn't be meant for dead trees. This doesn't make any sense to me at all that we would charge somebody because their tree died. Okay, so we need to, and since we are retrospectively approving this situation because the tree was a hazard, that is what prevented this council from having the opportunity to waive this prospectively. Not because, I mean, we love the Senior Center, it's doing great work, but the issue here is it was a dead tree. and that's why we need to get them their money back in a fashion that will satisfy the needs of the city attorney. However that needs to happen, the money needs to be handled in that way as far as I'm concerned. I also think, join my colleagues in saying the default position should be of this, we need a change so that the default situation is that no arborist report is necessary unless staff deems it important. If we're gonna do this, if your average fifth grader can tell it's a dead tree, you ought to be able to roll with that. unless there's some reason that we have to know why it died or what it does. And then I would like to see us have that larger discussion about the tree ordinance and in general, the strategy for how we're dealing with the, We've got a small, a handful, maybe a dozen really special trees that are sort of a treasure of the whole community and that we need to think about the generational replacement of those trees, much as this council has had to address that with those treasured trees that are in the sunken gardens. We've had to deal with that with the Deodor cedars and with one of the magnolias already in my time on the council. Stuff gets old. We have to work with that. We should be looking for these long-lived trees when we have that further discussion. I do want to have a discussion with the community that where we look at the kinds of trees that will hold up best over the next 100, 150 years that we're hoping that those trees will last so that our grandchildren can enjoy the same kind of beauty that we have and a beauty that will work for their situation. So that's my piece. So I'm looking at a quick fix piece on this and then a larger discussion that would happen later part of you know this do we need this and what's the strategy um we should probably consider that in terms of all the sunken garden trees as well so that we're looking generationally okay thank you uh councilmember newson any comments

I just want us to address that financial aspects of the tree ordinance as it pertains to the tree that's dying. So I think all of us are in agreeance.

Okay, I'm going to suggest that and I'll go ahead and make the motion and we adopt the draft resolution to approve the retroactively approve the removal.

Mayor, can you please, if you are going to move towards a motion, I would recommend closing the public hearing prior to doing so.

Well, I thought we already closed the public comment portion.

It's a public comment, but this is a public hearing item, so we would close the public hearing.

Okay, so we've closed the public hearing then, and we'll move on to council. Well, now we've had discussion, we'll move into motion. I would move that we adopt the draft resolution to retroactively allow the removal of the

of the oak, of course.

I think we have a consensus as part of that motion to encourage the staff to determine if there is a legal way to refund the fee paid by the senior center. And however it is you find necessary to word that, characterize that, whatever that the council wishes to see that happen as part of the motion. We want you to address the specific issue regarding the requirement of an arborist report, but we want to have a further discussion substantive discussion about the tree ordinance itself so and i want to clarify whether your motion includes the modification to condition number four um as recommended by staff to replace uh the tree within one year yes we do want to see them replace the tree and to do so within one year and staff allowed in this recommended allowing this particular case a smaller replacement that would normally be required for a heritage tree and we understand we understand that and endorse that as part of the resolution. It's in the resolution or in the conditions. And so, yes, the motion includes the modification of this condition.

Okay.

I'd be happy to second that motion. Okay.

I just want to point a clarification. If we're going to refund the fee, I don't want to charge anybody ever again. We're not going to refund a fee and then two months from now charge somebody else a fee. So I don't know if we can wrap that up in there. Does that not sound like it would be kind of sticky if we did that?

Yes, we don't see these very often. So I'm very hopeful I can get work with staff with the capacity we have to get an ordinance back to you, making that very clear. So it's clear in the law what I'm doing. And so this will be a priority to us to try and turn it around. And hopefully we don't have one of these. If we do, I'll talk with the city attorney about ways we can do it, but the council has made it very clear.

And so- If it does come up, we'd have the opportunity to keep it from being charged.

I think you are making your legislative intent clear. Okay. Leave it to me to figure out how we do that. Perfect. That's what I would be comfortable with. So I think what you've said is, one, you're approving the staff recommendation. Two, you want us to bring back a review of the ordinance that focuses on getting rid of the arborist, dead trees, the fees, and kind of the concept of the ordinance at all. And three, that I'm working with the authority I have to reimburse the monies paid. That's what I think this motion is, right?

Correct. That you find a way to do that. And our intention is to not charge it again. But certainly that in this specific case, you find a legal avenue to reimburse the fee.

Yeah. And that's specific to dead trees. We don't charge anything for dead trees.

Right. Yeah. We shouldn't charge anybody a fee to take down a dead tree.

Yes, that's clear. And we do have a motion and second on that.

Okay, if that's clear to staff, then we'll go ahead and proceed to roll call.

Council Member Funk? Yes. Council Member Newsom? Yes. Council Member Peek?

Yes.

Mayor Pro Tem Darius?

Yes.

Mayor Barbeau?

Yes.

Motion passes.

All right, thank you. And thank you for attending and providing your input on this item. We're going to proceed on to Item G2, Annual Military Equipment Report. I'm going to turn this over to the Police Chief, Chief Suttles.

Mayor, City Council, thank you very much. Let me get this up and running here real quick.

Let's see, is there a way to turn it on? Okay.

All right, I'll start off by giving a little bit of background. In September of 2021, the state of California passed Assembly Bill 481, which essentially required law enforcement agencies to adopt a military equipment list. And then in September 2022, City Council here also passed an ordinance that required staff to return annually to give a report on such things as the...

Thank you very much, Ed.

So the report will include things such as the quantity of items possessed, the initial cost of those items, and the results of an internal audit. So tonight, staff is here and recommends that one, we approve the 2026 annual military equipment report, we adopt the updated military equipment policy, three, we approve the drone program, and four, we add a drone to the military list. And by doing so, if we were to do those same things tonight's request will would fulfill this attached the statutory requirement, while seeking approval also to establish departments drone Program. So i'll get right into the report, this is a summary of the report that we. That we did, and essentially the police department did an internal audit in which we determined there were no pilot policy violations, and this is specific to policy 708, which is the actual military equipment policy. There was also no complaints in this last year regarding our military equipment and then also the equipment use was within policy and that's pertaining regarding all policy. Additionally, one of the things that the report requires is that we go over what we currently have on our military list. That is 43 patrol rifles. We have two precision rifles and four and nine 40 millimeter less than lethal launchers. I think it's important to note that none of this military equipment was actually utilized in the field. The only time any of our equipment were used during this last year was during training. So in addition to the report, that basically wraps up the report side of it. And in addition to the report, we're also recommending that we update policy 708, which is our military equipment policy. Specifically, policy section 708.6. The way it currently reads is that any law enforcement agency that were coming to our area to help us, to give us assistance, would not be able to use any of their own military equipment unless it was on our equipment list. And I don't think that was the initial intent. So we've clarified the language there to clean that up so that it'll indicate that it allows assisting agencies to operate their own approved military equipment within their own policies. This does not expand the Atascadero Police Department's authority to acquire or use military equipment. This just gives those other agencies the opportunity to use the equipment that they have approved through their own policies. And the reason why this is important, because if you can imagine that we're calling in another agency because there's something that we need their assistance with, sometimes that's because an incident was too large for us to be able to handle and we're calling them to come in to help us and they're going to bring equipment to do that. And we don't want to have to turn them away just because we didn't clarify this one section. So that concludes the first part of the presentation. The second part is the drone itself and our request to add it to the program. So why would we want to have a drone in the first place? Well, quite simply, it increases officer safety and it also increases our capabilities. As you can imagine, on the officer safety side of it, it's always safer to put a machine into a place of danger other than a person. And then as far as capabilities, there's clearly things that a flying machine can do that a person cannot do. We can get better observation. We can do to help us with search and rescue, fire response, and even special events. So the drone that we are recommending is the DJI Matris 4T. And the reason why we're specifically looking at this one is that it has thermal camera capabilities. It has zoom camera capabilities. It has a laser range finder, which becomes important because if you're using that zoom or that thermal, it becomes very difficult to judge distance. And that will give us an idea to actually help us find missing persons, for example. It has obstacle avoidance, which would be ideal because we're going to be using these. We can potentially use these types of drones in tight quarters. So you want to have a mechanism that can protect itself. And it's designed specifically for public safety. And then also the cost, the entry cost to this particular drone is much more favorable than some of the other options out there. One of the things that was a major concern for the city council and also a major concern for our community was privacy. So this is something that we heard and we took very seriously and we wrote into our policies and we wrote into our manuals and I'm here to tell you that we will not be using the drone for surveillance. We don't use the drone for random patrol. We will not weaponize the drone. What we will do is we will be constitutionally responsible with the drone and respect people's zone of privacy. So we respect this so much so that, again, we put it into our policies, we're following FAA regulations, and we put all this into our department, our operations manual as well. I think it's another point that I wanted to make is that our program includes more than 40 pages of policies procedures emergency protocols train requirements and operational safeguards again, I say I want to point out how serious we take this. officer for pilot and for observer requirements. all pilots and observers will be required to have training. The pilots specifically will have external training and then recurring internal training. As far as the program costs, there are four major areas. We have the cost of the drone and the accessories itself. the cost of storing the data, and then, of course, the cost of training and overtime. Together, those things, I estimate at $60,416. And the estimated funding sources would be the city council approved back in January 2026, that $26,000 General Fund adjustment so we use that $26,000 there and then any other funds over that would come out of the existing supplemental law enforcement service fund. So again, to recap, we are asking City Council to approve the 2026 annual military equipment report to adopt the updated military equipment policy to approve the drone program and to add a drone to the military list with that I will answer any questions.

Mayor Mrakas, Thank you chief i'm going to start on my right this time Council member news and any questions.

City Council Chambers, Can you clarify what technology we're going to use for the drone program.

City Council Chambers, You do i'm sorry technology mean what drone or.

City Council Chambers, And the data storage, how is that handled.

Well, the reason why there's a cost to it is we have to buy a server that's going to be dedicated to storing this type of information. So the data that we're going to be storing is the actual footage. We store all data for up to 180 days. If we determine that any data is related to a crime or a use of force, we'll mark that and we'll keep it up to date. two years or until it's no longer needed, meaning that case has been adjudicated or something of that nature. So the need to store that data would be a server.

Okay, so to clarify, we're storing the data internally. We're not using a third-party system like FLOC or any of that technology.

We're storing it internally. Thank you.

Okay, thank you, Council Member Funk.

Yes, following up on that comment, there's been a lot of confusion about this in flock systems, and I see out there, am I correct in understanding that this won't have any flock camera, it won't be attached to any flock camera, and we in the City of Texas, Cadero, don't use flock cameras? that correct that's correct all that is correct okay great thank you and since this is going to be part of the military uh equipment manual list um will we be able to this council will get a receiver report uh next year at the same process about the extent to which this is being used and how it's being used that's absolutely yes yes correct okay great um is Is there going to be any facial recognition technology that's part of this system?

We do not have that technology, no.

Okay. I really appreciate the attention in this that we see in the staff report to prohibited uses so that it can't be used for surveillance and other kinds of things, and that seems, or for targeted actions. Do you want to elaborate on that just a little bit?

Yeah, again, you know, One of our primary concerns is that we are constitutional. We understand the zone of privacy and what that means to people. So we wanted to have these safeguards put in place. We wanted to make sure that we codified that into our policies and that we were keeping that in mind.

Okay, so if the drone's flying along and it captures somebody's hot tub, whatever they're doing, is that something that would get stored or acted upon?

No, as a matter of fact, part of what is in our operating manual is to make sure that we're trying with you that you the pilots are trained to make sure that they keep the the cameras trained on the area of operation. So if they're going to be purposely keeping the camera out of people's yards out of the windows, things of that nature.

Okay, so unless the criminal you're trying to arrest is hiding in the hot tub, you're not going to be getting pictures.

That's absolutely correct.

Okay, so if ICE were to ask this department, come with a mutual aid request asking the department to use this to do surveillance of, say, the Tamale Festival or a protest or something, is that something that the department would honor?

No, we wouldn't. There are California law that prohibits us from assisting ICE in any investigation. So in my opinion, that would fall under that. So we would not oblige that.

Okay. And could ICE try to get around that by submitting a public records request for some big swath of things so that they could troll it and look for brown faces?

No, they wouldn't be able to. We would obviously have to address the public request. It would be a little more of a longer answer, but the answer would still be no.

Okay. And if the APD or another partnering agency had an arrest warrant for a violent criminal that you're trying to execute, and that situation might be dangerous to the officers involved, or that might be someone who would flee and be a danger to the community. Is that a situation where the drone might be?

That's a great scenario for exactly why we want to have a drone. So yes, we would absolutely use it in that scenario.

Excellent. Thank you so much for clarifying those differences.

Thank you.

Thank you, Mayor Prochamderas. Thank you.

I think you answered my first question was going to be on the data storage cost that I wasn't sure if that was like an annual fee. Thank God it's not. Correct. It's not annual. So it's a purchase of a device that's going to sort. So my follow-up question to that is, what is the capacity in whatever way that you can answer that? Because I'm thinking, you might not use this thing very often, but there might be a time when for whatever reason, you're using it several times in a week or in the month, and you say you store the data for up to 180 days, what is the possibility that you could run out of storage? And then what do you do?

Well, we did an average of high usage, moderate usage, and low usage. And so it's essentially where we ended up with, and this is talking with our IT manager, and we ended up going with a formula that used 50 gigabytes per flight hour up to 200 flight hours. It gave us the amount of space that we actually need, the amount of terabytes that we needed to be able to purchase. And then we wanted redundancy, so we had to double that. So that's basically the formula that we used to come up with it. Now, we used the monitor to high. So I doubt that we'll hit that ceiling, especially since we have that redundancy backup.

And I imagine at first when we get this, it's probably not going to be used a lot. But as time goes on, you'll find more and more uses for it within the regulations. And there may be a need to purchase another unit. storage device, I would imagine. You know, because it's going to get used more and more over time. That's my question. So what is the lifespan that you're expecting of this storage device? In other words, when do you anticipate needing to purchase another one or a bigger one?

So the storage device itself, I'm anticipating to last through the program's life for one drone, because that's the calculation that we're using. And the reason why is because, again, with our retention schedule, we're going to be dropping things off. 80 to 90% of the footage that's captured will be falling off after the first 180 days and then the other. 10 to 20% are those things that we've tagged that been involved in one of the one of the categories I described earlier. And those will fall off after two years or until you know we don't need it anymore so so so that in that calculation we're considering those percentages. so that that particular data storage device should be able to last through the program, not just the life of that machine.

Okay. Now, there was a list on one of the slides that showed, I think it showed the uses that it's not going to be, no surveillance, all those different things. Now, are those just your policies, our policies, or is there federal regulations, state regulations that say you can't use this thing in certain ways? How are you... How are these policies created?

What are you bound by? The policies are pretty universal. I think that if you went to any agency, you would find policies are similar, simply because we understand that we're going to, based off of the usage of other devices, such as tracking devices that we put on vehicles, we have to get a warrant for those types of things. So we understand that it's very sensitive, and we understand what the consequences of, you know, violating the trust of the community when it comes to privacy. So we don't want to lose this technology, so we're going to be very careful. So these maybe are not required, but we pretty much universally accept these.

And I think the catch-all that was in there was the constitutionally legal or whatever the word was. So I think that probably was answering my question, but in terms of what federal regulations require, are preventing you from using it a certain way. And I think that's the answer.

It is. And that goes back to a case law from 1964 that has just grown and grown and grown. You know, it started very simple. It's Connecticut versus Griswold, if anyone's interested. But it was about one particular item. And then over time, it's many different privacy zone issues. And so this is just the newest one so far. Thank you. That's all I got.

Thank you. Council Member Peek.

Uh, so this effectively works like a body cam. So when you're going after a crime, it turns on the cameras, not rolling, streaming on its way somewhere. It's not just live streaming whenever it's on and in the air.

Correct.

Okay. Um, and that goes into evidence. It doesn't go into your computer and then later you can just, it has to have documentation of when it was viewed, correct. Or chain of command, like the data.

There's a procedure for storing the items in our storage. However, there is a difference between items that are stored and evidentiary items. So there will be a different process for storing evidence, but they are all protected and monitored.

The first place my mind goes with one of these is fire spotting. Absolutely. A brush fire starts, you can send it into the Santa Lucia Road and go look at the fire and determine Holy smokes. No pun intended. We need five engines. I don't really think about this another way because I don't feel like we don't have, we have two cameras in town, one in the tunnel and then one behind like Dr. Prambrin's office in the entire city. And I don't really like the idea of being a camera heavy town at all. But I just want to get kind of like an idea of how readily available this will be for the fire agency. If we have two officers that are trained to pilot the drone, then we're not covered on all shifts, correct? So the goal would be to have four pilots, correct? Yeah.

That's correct, and we sent two officers to the school. We have officers who have already, just because they were either, one guy's from the military, he brought an FAA 107 license, and another individual did it by hobby, so he has one, so we have four licensed pilots. Now, they will have to go through our internal training as well, but we have the potential to have four. The idea is that the drone lives with one of the, with the watch commander, so in other words, it'll be in the field at all times, And then upon and that's that'll be our goal is to try to keep one of those pilots on the shift. Now granted, that can sometimes become difficult, but that is our goal to always have a pilot here.

And how much in the most recent past have we contracted a drone to be in town for special circumstances?

I'm sorry, what was the first part of the question?

Have we in the past, recent or distant past, I mean, not too distant, it's pretty new technology, contracted an agency to fly a drone in a Tascator or be ready to fly one if we need one?

Right, we haven't assigned any contracts to MOUs, but we have requested their assistance. We use them on special events. We use them on 4th of July. The special event I'm thinking of is the No Kings Day protest. We utilized a drone for surveillance there. It's a poor choice of words, but we used it to monitor the event as indicated in our slide. And then we also used it for an investigation where we had the county sheriff come up and help with a fatal car traffic collision.

And then when we do have this technology, how... are we going to have a designated area where the public would know if, and when it's just being that we're practicing, like where would we, would we publish that they're practicing flying this drone and this is generally where it happens. And it's kind of like a common knowledge that if you're going to be practicing, it's like colony park over the field. We're not practicing it in neighborhoods. We're not practicing it like chasing a cop car down the road. So I'm concerned with like the, the, the, Like when you're in the actual theater of a crime, people want to know the difference between if the crime's happening or if the cops are just practicing with the drone and when that would be known to the public.

Right, so there's a lot of difference in the use between somebody that's a hobbyist and in the police usage. But when we're training, we're going to stay within a lot of those FAA rules that indicate that you can't fly over personnel and you have to take all the precautions that you can. So exactly what you had mentioned, we're going to end up doing in most of our practicing over areas that are not populated. Whereas, whereas we're during an emergent situation that law enforcement agency, we would be falling over areas that that could be populated. However, as far as publicizing those things we didn't necessarily have a plan to do that, but we could certainly, you know, look at that.

So in terms of a question from Pismo Beach, do they have a similar program down there in Pismo Beach.

I shake the dust out of my head. Which city did you say? Yes, we did.

So when you have photographers that are doing licensed FFA, FFA, FAA licensed drone pilots doing real estate photography, there's a different permitting process. So if somebody wanted to go photograph a property, they have to get a permit, which I don't think people generally do in a Tascadero. Now, when the police agency now has a drone, are we going to be more strict with hobbyists or licensed photographers who are taking pictures of properties for sale? It's very common. Is it going to make it more challenging for someone who's doing it as a professional land surveyor or anything like that?

That hasn't been my experience. Chief, did you?

I was basically going to say the same thing. It hasn't been my experience. We would still be call-based. Today, if somebody called us, we would respond. I don't see anything changing based off of this.

there wouldn't be any sort of more scrutiny on those other professions.

No, we're not involved in that now. We're just more, our scrutiny is on ourselves to make sure there's public confidence in when this is deployed and how it's deployed and that we're very transparent about how we use it.

All right, thank you. I have a couple of questions, but I see members of the audience wanting to speak, checking their watches. So I'm going to open it up to public comment now and then I'll ask my questions. So if anybody would like to speak on this item, please approach the podium. Thank you for your patience.

I got it. Hi, I'm Jess Davis. I didn't expect to show up tonight and I have no idea what I'm doing in case my entrance didn't give that away. Thank goodness for the angel that gave me this thing. So you're all subject to my ADHD ramblings about this, but I don't have any thoughts. I have a ton of questions. You know, like I remember my grandmother saying that like social security numbers were never supposed to be used as identification, but it's like the prime way that we identify people now. And I think about like, you say that... it won't be used for surveillance, but then if it's tagged as part of a crime, then you'll save it. But why would you have footage that wasn't part of a crime if it was only called out when there was a crime? And then I wonder about, It's just such a, it's terrifying to me. And as a software developer, I feel like, you say that it's an AI internal server, but if you can access it on your phone or remotely, then it's not completely, I feel like nothing anymore is completely internal. The dark web has these insane neural networks and large language models, worm GPT and fraud GPT that are specifically are intended to hack into these things. And if the Department of Justice like maybe California has a beef with ice, like I totally get that. But if the Department of Justice were to send a subpoena, they have facial recognition and that would tag everybody in the background of that. And it just has this the implications Once you save data, you lose all control over it. Any autonomy that you had with that data it exists. And once it exists and it's saved, you don't control it. There was that, Eufy, I think, had a robot vacuum that they kept their stuff internal. And this woman found a picture of herself on the toilet on the internet because this little robot vacuum had took it, and it uploaded it to the internal server. And they thought it was funny, and they shared it around. And the next thing she knew, there's her in the bathroom on the internet. And it never should have happened. And so it scares me a bit how much like potential there is to really lose track of this. You know, like if you, gosh, that clock is intimidating. You know, we say that we're not gonna do surveillance, but that's such a slippery slope, you know? And it's, once you open that box, it's nearly impossible to shut. Like you can't go into my yard without a warrant but there's no warrant for airspace. So technically you could kind of like get around that warrant and there's Sonoma County and Costa Mesa and all these other cities that are the ACLU that's suing all of the cities that are using these drones currently. And I just feel like there's so much more investigation, you know, my time is up and now I'm going negative. But, you know, just from like a development standpoint and I look at like, how that is stored and like, okay, so we're not going to have facial recognition, but the federal government has facial recognition. And like, maybe you're focused on this guy, but it automatically tags every single person in the background.

I think we've got, you know, your concern.

Yeah. Okay. Thanks.

All right. Thank you very much. Anybody else wishing to speak on this item? Okay, seeing that I'm going to bring it back, I'm going to ask my questions. Chief, is there an altitude minimum and or maximum for safety purposes, but minimum in the sense that, I mean, if you are at an active crime scene, somebody's holed up in a house, I mean, can you get as low as you need? And you're flying over the neighborhood to get there, can you be at 20 feet? You know...

Yes, that's a good question. There are minimums, there are maximums. However, like we were talking about earlier when it comes to some of the emergent situations, if you kind of hit the nail on the head when, you know, if we have somebody that's hiding in a backyard and perhaps in a shed or something, you know, those elevations are going to be a moot point at that point. However, the maximums, we do want to adhere to that. But to answer your question, yes, there are minimum maximums. However, during emergent situations, we'll have to, especially the lower elevations.

Okay, I was a little confused by your response to Council Member Peek's question regarding if it's streaming or not as you're going somewhere. Because I thought you were saying, you know, wouldn't be streaming, but I assume it's streaming back to the pilot because they got to be able to see where the hell they're going.

The way I interpreted the question is whether or not the camera would have to be on during flight, all flight. Like if it's in the air, then the camera's on. That's not necessarily the case. We're not always, the camera's not always on. The camera's not always recording. The flight path doesn't have to have the camera on. Does that make sense?

Then how does the pilot, I mean, I thought this was like a first-person view where the pilot is flying this based on what he's seeing.

Right. I guess what I'm referring to is the recording mechanism.

Okay.

So he's seeing it, but it's not recording is what you're saying. That's a guess.

And so what happens is you're responding to an incident somewhere and you're flying over this neighborhood and okay, you're going to ignore the people, you know, in the hot tub, but let's say you're flying over and on the way, okay, there, you see illegal activity happening in this person's yard, but that's not where you were going. You know, you were going to that yard that's 10 houses away, but you see, oh my gosh, you know, these guys are, I don't know, they're doing something blatantly illegal in their backyard. Uh, is this a matter of you, you, you ignore that because it wasn't what you were there for?

So I think it's important to remember that we're not introducing a drone as a first responder, so we're going to be deploying a drone on site. It's gonna be, I can't necessarily think of an instance where we're gonna be responding from point A to point B, point B being the area that we're trying to observe. We're going to be basically deploying it from that area. Regarding seeing something, if we see something in flight, we're not necessarily going to ignore it, it'd be extremely rare, but that's the way case law is currently now as well. If I'm in a place that I legally can be and I happen to see something that's illegal, then I can act on it. What I can commit to is that we're not looking for those things. But I certainly can tell you that if obvious illegal activity is taking place, then we'll address that.

And then, you know, this doesn't, these are so common nowadays that they don't strike me as military equipment, but you're including it in this, you know, annual report. Is that because there's a state definition that says they are regardless of that they're just commercially available products?

That's exactly right. It's outlined as being needed to be on the list.

Got it. Um, okay. And then Councilmember Peek asked about, you know, they gave the example of fire. And I think that comes to our mind. Also, you know, Public Works might want to put this up during floods. Is the long term idea that they would have trained pilots? Or is it a function of they would have to ask you guys, you the police department to put it, you know, put this thing up in the air?

So with the fire department, it's easier because we're going to be at that command post anyway. So we're going to be able to respond to a command post. And then in conjunction with what the fire department's needs are, we can deploy and we can have an officer pilot with the guidance and following the needs of the fire department. And then we can look at that program and determine whether or not it needs to be expanded. So in other words, hey, this is such a great thing that maybe we do need to have pilots in the fire department and they can have their own program. But right now it'll be... a pilot program, pun intended.

And then down the road, what if community development wanted to look in somebody's backyard over a case of hoarding?

So I've had the discussion with the director of public works, and this is not a drone that would be utilized for public works simply because it's not the right type of drone. It wouldn't make sense to have an on-duty police officer respond to help with checking allergy levels in the lake or something of that nature.

So, so right now we're not looking at a program that would include this drone and these pilots for that down the road we might look at say if you know if they need to put something up on January 9 2023 to observe flood conditions at multiple places quickly around the city. That could be, we could visualize how to get there. We don't have to discuss that this evening. Okay. All right, thank you. All right, well thank you for answering those questions, and I think any member of the council want to discuss this further or. Or because otherwise we you know we have a recommendation recommendations before us.

i'd like to follow up on something that she asked about. The the potential for basically the server to get hacked away i'm kind of. You know, and you said it's internal. She's worried that stuff can get out, like the example that she gave. And I imagine that this is not going to be something that you can access from your phone or from another computer or, I mean, from the outside the building. Am I correct on that? I imagine it's going to be very secure.

And this is obviously not my area of expertise, but there are, you know, securities set in place. It's evidentiary in nature, if it's marked as evidence, obviously, but there are going to be some very serious security measures put in place. Okay, thank you.

I think the fear is by certainly the speaker and members of the public is anything is hackable nowadays. But I mean, we just do our best with the latest. We rely on our IT folks to do the latest and be cognizant of, and obviously be watchful that, okay, was some other agency hacked with this type of data somewhere else? How do we make it harder to hack ours? Okay, we have two recommendations before us to approve the drone program, the UAS program, and to adopt the military equipment policy changes and to approve the report, the annual report. Any further discussion or do we have a motion?

I do have a further discussion, if you will, since this is a new thing for us. One is I wanted to better understand how this is used. You mentioned it being drawn from another agency being used with one of the No Kings protests, how it is used in monitoring events of that nature where there's not an expectation of criminal activity.

yeah specifically in that one we coordinated with the event organizers and we were in constant contact with them and they would they would call us and they were you know they would let us know what was happening and where they thought they needed. A call for service, we only had so many officers that could respond so if they saw somebody. that was carrying a bag that they thought was suspicious, because this is an event that had a lot of people, they would call us and then we would fly over and that would get eyes on. And our area of operation was here at Sunken Garden. So we were already here. So our response flight path was immediate. And that allowed us to, the amount of time that would have taken a ground officer to get through the crowd, to get to where that person was, to identify whether that bag was suspicious or not, you know, it would have been a lot of time. Whereas we were finding one of the advantages in that particular event was we were able to get eyes on in seconds, not even minutes. I mean, less than a minute.

Okay, thank you. And then I'm a little confused about how this works in emergency management situations. given that where you might be wanting to monitor, say, evacuation traffic or some other sort of thing like that, where does the feed go to? Physically, where would the officer be who's piloting? Where's your visual observer and who gets the feed?

So we're going to set up the program that the officer's most likely going to be at a command post or a forward observing position. In other words, they're going to be in a position of advantage because they might need to be outside of the command post or in the command post themselves. And then they're the ones who are going to be able to see the immediate feed on their device. And then we're going to set up the device to be able to feed back to an emergency operations center so that the people in the emergency operations center can see that live feed as well.

Okay, so in the event of a major wildfire or something, the officer controlling it would be out somewhere in the field in the middle of things. But the command center would get a feed so they could use to determine where's traffic getting held up in areas. you know, on which streets need traffic support, you know, what's the next intersection that really needs somebody.

And I can tell you it's incredibly valuable. You know, it's like saying a picture's worth a thousand words. It truly is. You know, when you're seeing these live feeds and you're in a command post and you're trying to make a determination on what decisions to make, when you get a chance to actually see the impact that things like, you know, traffic or whatever are taking place, it allows your decision-making process to also be cut down in time as well.

Great. From a discussion perspective, one of the concerns that I've had is I've watched how other situations, other agencies have responded in huge wildfire disaster situations. A fast-moving disaster, the information is moving too fast for the person who actually has to make the decisions so that other people have much better information. than the fire chief or whoever it is that's trying to decide how everything is done. And the folks, the police dispatchers or other folks would have better information. This seems to me like this would equalize that and allow our commanders to handle a lot of emergency situations with a lot more safety.

Safety and speed, speed of information.

yeah and then so i'm i'm comfortable with moving ahead with this for now i will be looking at the report that you bring a year from now so that with the expectation that we'll have a really thoughtful discussion about those issues of how has this worked how's it being used um have there been issues where the where Data security seems to be at question, even though this is being starred locally, and make sure we're trying to stay as ahead of this as we can and using what could be a really valuable tool in a number of circumstances. Absolutely. If there is no other discussion, I'm prepared to make a motion that we approve the staff recommendation as the mayor just outlined.

Mayor Mrakas, All right, thank you so that's recommendations, one and two, and I have a sex prior to the motion, I just want to invite the mayor to formally close public hearing.

Mayor Mrakas, Yes, so we'll close the public hearing at this point and we're sitting to emotion, we have a motion, do we have a second. Mayor Mrakas, All second okay any further discussion seeing and we have a motion by Council member phone to second by Mayor per Tim dares roll call, please.

Mayor Mrakas, And some number funk. Yes. Council Member Newsom? Yes. Council Member Peek?

Yes.

Mayor Pro Tem Darius?

Yes.

Mayor Barbeau?

Yes.

Motion passes.

All right. Thank you. With that, we are going to move on to council announcements and committee reports. I'll start on my left with Council Member Peek.

No committees since our last meeting. It's the doldrums of summer. enjoying the summer immensely. We did have a meeting, had a meeting with the ECHO, some ECHO board members this morning with some community concerns and concerns that I share, as well as just talking about some ways forward in the future and looking forward to the next neighborhood meeting with the ECHO.

Okay, thank you, Mayor Perchamderas.

I have not had any meetings since our last meeting, so I have nothing to report, but CAPSLO is meeting, I believe, next Thursday, and that's all I have.

All right, thank you, council. I would comment only that item D7 this evening was approving a letter of support for a qualified opportunity zone designation for a particular Atascadero census tract. And since we approved that, I have a letter here drafted by staff that I am signing to submit to the governor's office requesting that they support that designation. um so there's that and let's see committee-wise most of my committees did not meet this month and so i have nothing else to report councilmember funk

Yes, the Homeless Services Oversight Council will be meeting tomorrow. The agenda includes funding allocation recommendations on over $3 million in state funds from the Homeless Housing Assistance and Prevention Program, HAP. For those who don't know, it's the second half of round five of HAP and the first half of round six of HAP because the state does divide these annual programs into a first part and a second part. So you can't get the second part of your money until the first part is being expended according to the nature of the requirements of the program. and that'll serve a variety of services around the county. The Tascadero Basin Groundwater Sustainability Agency will be meeting on the 5th of August to start a process for annual or a summary report over a period of time for that agency. And I had a meeting recently with assembly member Don Addis' staff to talk about dinosaur bones. You'll recall that a few weeks back we had a situation where we found that in our general plan that we were going to end up having to require developers of a variety of projects to do an investigation of the potential for paleontological resources. otherwise known as dinosaur bones and fossils. And so we had a chance and the council approved that we had consensus on wanting to seek that, hey, over time, this would be a really good one to streamline at the state level. much as this council has been working to streamline things and things like arborist requirements or trees or other things that we have to deal with here. We would like the state to work with us there so that we can focus our energy on the important stuff and not burden our developers with the requirement for extra specialists and extra reports and stuff. when nobody's found anything interesting in the way of dinosaur bones here in any time in human history that we know of. Thank you.

Council Member Newsom.

Thank you. I don't have any committees coming up, but I do have a clarification for the city manager. As the League of California Cities voting delegate, are you the alternate?

No, we'll be recommending Council Member Funk at your meeting in August.

Okay, so that's on the agenda for August. Okay, great.

Okay, thank you. And individual determinations, I believe you had one.

I do. Thank you. So I would like to ask my colleagues to agendize and have for discussion and review something called a health and welfare and retirement benefits for elected officials. There was an ordinance put in place back in August 11th, 2015, ordinance number 591 that kind of talks about what we as council get. And as we go into election season, it's always interesting. The public doesn't seem to know what our salaries are, what benefits we get. and doing some research to try to educate the public and have the city of Atascadero take a look. I think it's important that we bring this forward for transparency. I also think it's important for us to take a look and make sure that our intent clarification and the information that's listed in an 11-year-old document reflects some of those changes that had been done over the years. Some of that being a post retirement health benefit for executive management and Council that has not been included or addressed in any of these prior year ordinances.

Thank you, and I believe from staff perspective, that is something that would require to be discussed in open session okay. clarify that. I would. John Potter, i'm not sure I don't want to have I probably don't want to have staff tennis and a ton of time on that, but I would defer to the wishes of my colleague to at least discuss the item I don't know how the rest you feel.

to discuss it? Do we need to agendize it?

Well, I'd like to know what it is. I think I heard you say you want a review of benefits offered to council members to inform the public so they can see the benefits you get in a review of the resolution. A review would be pretty straightforward. We could put the resolution on an agenda and Rachel could give an update to you on what you receive as council members as benefits. Is that the item?

That is correct. Ordinance 5. 91, which was originally put into PACE as of August 11, 2015, doesn't reflect all of the other items that were possibly brought up in a resolution of 2025-063. It's not included in that. So my question is, do we have to agendize it to have that conversation and make sure it's all in one document? How do we make sure that it doesn't require even more staff time that's already been put into

I think what I'm still trying to understand what you're asking, but it would be very easy for the staff to come back with an item reviewing the two documents. You could share those with me and I could attach those to the staff report and we could share with you how those documents work and the benefits council receives. And then if you wanted to give any direction, if there was consensus or a majority of the council that wanted to give further direction, we could agendize that at a later date. Is that what you're suggesting?

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So we have a discussion of the resolutions, decide if we want to address it further at that. Sure. Okay.

That would probably be in September. Your August meeting is full with the appeal hearing and a couple of general planned items.

Okay. And I understand. Cause yes, we only have to remind the public, this is our only meeting in July and we only have one meeting in August. So I understand the September timing. If we did desire to make changes, then we could do so. in fairly short order.

Yes.

Okay. All right. Very good. Any other commentary? Okay. I guess council's okay. We would bring that back for discussion in September. Great. Thank you. Okay. Any other individual determinations? Okay. Seeing none, we are adjourned. And as I mentioned, no second meeting in July. So we'll see you all in August.