City Council - Special Meeting

So did you get Rudy out today for a walk?

I did not.

Good afternoon. It's Monday, July 6th, 2026, and we are at Carmel-by-the-Sea City Hall. I'd like to call this special meeting of the Carmel-by-the-Sea City Council to order at 3 p.m. City Clerk, would you please call the roll?

Councilmember Barron?

Here.

Councilmember Buder.

Here.

Mayor Pro Tem Delves.

Here.

Councilmember Jamal. Here. Mayor Byrne.

Here.

All are present.

All right, before we begin, a reminder to the public that this is a hybrid meeting. You may attend in person via Zoom or watch the live stream on the city's YouTube page, which allows you to fast forward through the slow bits. So Nova, could you please read the public comment guidelines for special meetings?

During special city council meetings, public comments are permitted on items listed on the agenda. After each item on the agenda is introduced, the mayor will invite public comment on that item. Each speaker has three minutes to speak unless otherwise adjusted. While stating your name is optional, it helps to identify speakers in the meeting minutes. Remote or in-person participants who do not comply with the requirements of the Brown Act will be muted.

Thank you, Nova. Nova, could you put the consent agenda items up on the screen, please? The consent agenda items contain routine things that do not require discussion or independent action. If any council member or member of the public would like an item pulled for separate discussion, please let us know now. Otherwise, I'll entertain one motion to adopt the consent agenda as a whole. So they're up there. I'm going to quickly go through them just so everybody gets a heads up. June 1st and 12th, 2026 Special Meeting Minutes, and June 2nd, Regular Meeting Minutes. Number two, May 2026 Monthly Reports, which consists of a lot of different things. May 2026 Check Register Summary. Number four is Resolution 2026046, designating me as a voting delegate and Councilmember Hans Buder as the alternate voting delegate at the 2026 League of California Cities Annual Conference and Expo. Number five, Resolution 2026047, approving a list of street projects and actually sidewalk projects, for those of you who want to make a comment about sidewalks, for fiscal year 2026-27 capital improvement plan, partially funded by SB1. Six, Resolution 2026048, approving the revised Monterey Regional Stormwater Management Program Memorandum of Agreement. And number seven, resolution 2026049, approving change orders number two and three for the city's on-call landscaping service contractors. Number eight, resolution 2026050, authorizing the city administrator to execute an agreement with the Church of the Wayfarer to lease a portion of the church building for use as a temporary library location. Number nine, resolution 2026051, authorizing a refund of preliminary site assessment application fees of $1,571 to Molly Branch. Is there a motion to pull any items for separate discussion by the council?

I'll pull item five.

I'd like to pull item two and item five for short comments.

I'll pull five as well.

Okay, let me mark that down. So we got item two and five. Anybody from the public like to pull an item? Shirley. Item seven. Item seven. Okay, anyone else? All right. So I'd like a motion from the council to approve all the rest of the items. Items 1, 3, 4, 6, 8, and 9.

I make that motion.

Second. Roll call, please.

Council Member Barron.

Yes.

Council Member Booter.

Yes.

Mayor Pro Tem Delves. Yes. Council Member Jamoff. Yes. Mayor Byrne.

Yes.

Motion carries.

Thank you. All right. I've got number two. It's very quick. I had a chat with the chief about our performance for the public safety report, which we had a 98% record for code three calls. The goal is 95%. I don't know who read it, but it actually said we didn't achieve our 95% for this month. So it was a typo. I want to recommend them that they did a great job again. And it's really exciting that we continue to post really outstanding performances in our public safety reports. So that's all I wanted to say about that one. How about number five? Hon, do you want to start?

Yeah, so I saw that there are several sidewalk segments in here that are slated to be designed this year. And I also know that in our deferred maintenance list, we've got And we've got $6 million in there for sidewalk work over the next 10 years. And so there's something that's been kind of bothering me about the money that we put in the CIP for design for the sidewalk specifically. And I'm just concerned that without kind of a broader vision that we're gonna wind up with kind of a mishmash of sidewalk segments that are done as one-offs that aren't tied to any kind of broader vision. or any kind of broader plan even. And so I recently had the opportunity to look at the original plans for Scenic Pathway that were put together in the late 1980s. These big sheets, three, four feet wide. And they hired, back then, they hired a bonafide landscape architect. And I think you'll agree that the result was pretty fabulous. And it just looks seamless and natural, but it's all part of a design And so I think there are some questions that need to be answered before we go charging off to do random sidewalk segments. What kind of pavers do we want to use and where? Cohesive, to Jeff's point in a prior meeting, I don't think that cohesive, it doesn't have to mean uniform, but how do we maintain that sense of idiosyncrasy that we love while elevating the overall feeling? Our tree wells really have no consistency in terms of shape, size, materials. What's the plan for handling those? What best practices are out there? There's some new technology that can prevent tree root upwelling under sidewalks. And I think it would be interesting to see if there's a way to incorporate that into the design. And then finally, sidewalks and the hardscape are really more than just pavers. What other elements could we incorporate to beautify the streetscape downtown, like planters or outdoor seating? And so I think that if we're going to be investing this kind of money in redoing $6 million worth of sidewalks, think we need a plan not just segment by segment but kind of an overarching plan and one of the things that kind of makes my skin crawl in any context is waste and missed opportunities due to poor planning or lack of planning and I worry that if we don't sort of just take a breath and plan this out that we're gonna wind up with both of those things And then if we're going to be asking voters for new revenue this fall, I think we just need to give them the confidence that we have a solid plan to spend that money well. And so I spoke to Brandon earlier about this, and maybe Brandon could speak to this. This item here is specifically about the gas tax and identifying money. It doesn't sound like we necessarily need to change anything on this item, but it certainly triggered my thinking. I want to come back to it in the strategic priorities and think about if there's a way that we can maybe add an item just to make sure we have a broader plan.

Perfect. Alessandra?

I really echo a lot of what Hans just said. We've been hearing from quite a few people. We've received some emails over the past few days, and I completely agree with their concerns that We really shouldn't do this piecemeal. We should have a professional landscape architect help us out with a comprehensive downtown landscape plan just so things are more consistent and more in character. The little piecemeal items that we're talking about, you know, pavers, too many different pavers on a street, it gets past, you know, eccentricity to it just doesn't look quite right. Same with some of the plantings downtown, the outdoor street furniture. We could just put this all together into the big picture before we move forward. Also the tree wells as Hans mentioned. We heard from Cindy Lloyd who said it so well about cohesive and consistency. And I think we need a little bit more of that. And I think that we can discuss this perhaps a bit further when we get to our strategic priorities under the village character, preserve the village character. item, but I certainly would be supportive of looking at that big overall picture.

Good. You're parroting what I was going to say. Ian Martin also had a nice comment in there. So thank you for the comments, by the way. I think it got all of us thinking that way. And I'd like to add to that as we go forward. to extend maybe into a bigger master plan for downtown. I know Karen Ferlito used to talk about that all the time, but this is maybe a good place to start and have those discussions. So you've got that for our discussion about strategic priorities, Brandon? Good, because that's where it belongs. Okay, we had item seven. Unless anybody had anything else to say about number five, it may be. Anybody that had a comment? Good. Might as well.

Hello. Nancy Toomey, thank you for everything. Just my two cents, and clearly I look forward to having whatever is that go forward to be tasteful, but I like a lot of variety. Consistency is not what this town is all about. So it just needs to go into the mix of how that happens successfully and seamlessly and with a look and feel that works given our circumstances. variation in look and feel of our buildings and the like. So just two cents for the future. Thank you.

All right. And I've got another public comment to make for MST who sent a very nice and thoughtful letter this afternoon. I'm going to summarize what Michelle Overmeyer, the Director of Planning and Innovation had to say. basically four main points. MST encourages our efforts to improve our roads and sidewalks. Number two, ADA improvement, should it be included in our plan to improve the sidewalks? And that's a really good point. Every time we have a chance to fix that, we should. MST would also like to advance notice of work, have advanced notice of work so they could impact their service or not impact their service. And finally, the design should include their designing for transit guidelines. I haven't looked at a copy of that, but I bet somebody does in public works. So that's what she had. And I'd like to thank MST for reaching out to us. It's really nice to see that these other public agencies are watching our agenda closely and keeping us abreast of their thoughts. All right. So now we had number seven. I think that was Shirley. You want to come up, Shirley, and tell us your thoughts?

I think we might have a hand raised. I'm not sure if it's for this item. Five.

Well, let's check. Professor Beach.

Hi, it is for this item. I just wanted to support all of you who have made these very wise comments both in the public but also on the dais about just being careful with this. I'm excited that there's this allocation possibly coming up later on the agenda. or maybe right now too. And I just want to commend you for being careful with it and making sure that it's well spent. And I'll probably speak further on it then during when you get to that point, but just really enjoying the comments that you all are making on this right now. Thank you.

Thank you, Victoria. Anybody else? All right, Shirley, I think we've got one. I'll keep it open as long as we need to.

Thank you, Mayor, members of the Council, and city staff, Cindy Lloyd. I just want to thank you, Alessandra and Hans, for bringing this up, the idea of looking at overall Carmel. And I appreciate Nancy Toomey's remark as well, because we don't want to look overly planned. We don't want to have a pretty place. But there's lots of room when you anchor it with foundation plans. There's lots of room for variation throughout town. So thank you very much.

Thank you. All right, I'm going to close off item five. Shirley, you want to come up and talk about item seven?

I just want, I was curious about how Town and Country is supervised and if the city is pleased with their work and if Town and Country coordinates with Carmel Cares because I know that Carmel Cares is taking care of the post office and the center medians. So I'm wondering why we are paying both or paying them when Carmel Cares is taking care of two of the 24 projects. So I'm just curious how they're being supervised and evaluated. Thank you.

Thank you. We'll get back to you on that. Anybody else? All right. So I think that closes off the comments on those three items. I'm looking for a motion on items number two, five, and seven.

I move to approve items two, five, and seven in the consent agenda.

I'll second it.

Roll call, please.

Council Member Barron. Yes. Council Member Booter. Yes. Mayor Pro Tem Delves. Yes. Council Member Dramaw. Yes. Mayor Byrne.

Yes.

Motion carries.

All right. I'd like to thank staff, by the way. If you looked at all those nine items, a lot of work went into that behind the scenes. Sometimes we just take it for granted that we just vote on it and it happens, but our staff does a wonderful job getting us ready for that. All right. So, uh, Now we're going to have a public hearing. It's the item 10. It's the appeal APP 26134. It's the... John and Patricia Dilk's Planning Commission approval. Oh, they had a design, I'm sorry, let me start over again. It's a little confusing. It's the Diamond ADU, but it was John and Patricia Dilk's appeal of the Planning Commission's approval of Design, Study, and Coastal Development Permit Application DS-25206. It's the Diamond ADU located at Seeding Road 5, northwest of 8th Avenue. Staff has recommended a continuance of this item to August 3rd, 2026. But we have other options that we can do now, which I found out about this afternoon. So I'm going to tell you what those options are before we go to the staff report. Or would you like to do staff report first? Because it really just suggests that we have a continuance.

My suggestion is you go through the motions.

All right. So we have four motions and bear with me. These are fairly recent. The first one is a motion to set a future agenda item on a date to be determined for a discussion regarding ADU policy as it relates to local coastal plan as discussed in the last month's hearing. I believe this should happen separate from the following options. So that's the first option sort of stands apart from the other three. Option two is a motion to continue the hearing on the DILCs appeal to the future council meeting, which can be either a special meeting in July at the first available date or at the August 3rd or August 4th city council meetings or some other date. Option three is the alternate to motion in motion option, I'm sorry, in option two, a motion not to continue the hearing on the diamond appeal and to proceed with the hearing on diamond appeal today or four as such other action as the council determines appropriate related to this agenda item. First, I'd like to make a motion to set a future agenda item on a date to be determined to discuss ADU policy. That was option one, as it relates to our local coastal plan. I'd like to get a second on that.

Before I second it, can I just, because this somewhat changed, that I was hoping we could decouple these things and move forward. but it was under the impression we did. Did I miss a memo?

We made the decision last month. We had 15 minutes of discussion about this last month, this exact item. Can I just go?

Can I get my question answered? Let Bob finish.

Sorry, I'm asking Brian.

We are going to have a discussion. I made a motion. So if you want to second it, or if you want to just have a discussion before we go to a second.

Could I just ask a question from our city attorney? And Bob, I don't mean to interrupt. But it is legal for us today to vote to decouple, meaning to separate the policy discussion on the ADUs from the discussion on the appeal. Is that correct?

Yes, you can always schedule an item for a future agenda. So that's true here as well. If you want to schedule the ADU policy at a future, setting it as a future agenda item, you can do that today.

So could we just go ahead and make that the first motion to decouple the two items?

That's effectively what it will do.

Okay.

Thank you. Thank you for clarifying that.

So I'm sorry, Dale, that's the motion. So the first motion is, say it again.

Is to set a future agenda item on a date to be determined for a discussion regarding ADU policy as it relates to our local coastal plan as discussed in last month's hearing.

Which is essentially saying we're not ready to talk about it. And we're not. Tonight, which we're not. So we don't want to lose that. We're still going to talk about it in the future. But by doing so, we're setting up an option for a second motion that would either act on the appeal tonight or move the appeal to a date certain or something else. I know you just said that. As soon as possible. I will second your motion.

Okay. For option one, which is to set the date for the discussion on EDU policy. Can I make an alternate motion? You can.

My alternate motion would be to hear the appeal today, as you said, but to place the policy discussion on the agenda for a date certain of our August meeting.

I mean, I have to ask Brandon because that is highly dependent on staff being prepared to do that.

Well, you can make that motion to put it as a date certain in August. If for some reason we're not able to pull a policy conversation, we would just come to you and say, we're not ready. You'd have to continue it. We will do our absolute best to have a policy conversation ready for you in August.

Yes. The intent with that motion is to have it happen. COMMITTING TO HAVING IT HAPPEN AS OPPOSED TO US HAVING AN AGENDA SETTING MEETING BEHIND THE SCENES AND DECIDING TO OR NOT DO IT.

YEAH, I MEAN, I THINK THE REASON THAT JEFF LOOKS UNHAPPY RIGHT NOW IS BECAUSE THE COUNCIL, A MAJORITY OF THE COUNCIL MADE A MOTION TO... IT WAS FIVE TO NOTHING. THE VOTE WAS FIVE TO NOTHING. YEAH, AND SO I DO HAVE A PROBLEM. I AGREE WITH YOU. I DO HAVE A PROBLEM WITH... how this got onto the agenda. And I don't know if it's just at the staff level or what, but that's not something that I'd like to see again. But I'm happy if we can go with August and it's a date certain, then fine.

Okay, so the motion is changed only to say a date certain to be the August 3rd or August 4th council meeting. Are you changing your motion? He's got a motion on the table. I think that's the motion that you're making.

Well, Council Member Buder, sorry, Council Member Buder said he wanted to make an alternate motion, but one other thing that could happen is he could suggest that you change your motion. So you guys need to figure that out. So either if he makes an alternate motion, then he needs a second and they have to vote on that, or you can just change your motion to include what Council Member Buder would like. I'm okay with either.

Yeah, I'll make an alternate motion to that effect. I think it would be helpful, given the discussion, it would be called a substitute motion that you're making, for you to just state what that substitute motion is now that there's been this discussion, so it's clear for the record.

Yeah, it would be to hear the appeal today and to modify the mayor's motion to hear the policy at a date certain in one of our August meetings. Need a second? I'll second.

You can have discussion. Any further discussion?

Yeah. I'll just say I'm pretty disturbed. The motion from last month could not have been clearer about what the council's direction was. It was to bring back this item, and we had 10 minutes of discussion about whether we were going to do it with a date certain or a date uncertain. to bring back this item and the policy discussion at the same time. It could not have been clearer. And I don't understand. I'm looking at you and you. Like, since you guys set the agenda, I do not understand how this happened. And I appreciate, you know, I heard some of the story about the noticing, but, you know, the noticing, you know, Brandon, you told me that the noticing had been done legally. So we have satisfied the legal requirement to notice this project, which is to simply put an ad in the newspaper. But we have not satisfied the Carmel. We have not satisfied our own internal processes for noticing, which involve mailing things to nearby properties and posting notices. maybe we have posted a notice on the street, mailing things, mailing notices to properties within 300 feet, and hand-delivering notices to within 100 feet of the property. So that has not happened. So while we have satisfied the, again, while we have satisfied the legal requirements for noticing, we have not satisfied our own internal processes for noticing.

Could I back up a little bit, Jeff? Sure. The motion, let's clarify the motion on the table or simplify it. I think that might solve your problem for now. Is what we were trying to do with option one is to solidify a date or to actually have an agenda item to have the discussion that you brought up. Because it's a serious discussion and it needs to be had. but separate it from the hearing with the Diamond-Dilk situation, because there are time frames associated with that which we have exceeded. And that creates a whole other set of problems that we could end up running. So we're not saying we don't want to do that discussion, we just want to do it at a time, and we're agreeing to do it at the next council meeting right now. So I don't think it's a problem to have that discussion, it's just tied to this particular situation which creates some complexity for the city and for the diamonds.

Again, you know, as Mr. Pierrick tells us all the time, this city is free to violate its own law, its own laws. Are you concerned about option one? What I'm concerned about is the precedent of not doing what the council asked to have done last month. Like we specifically asked, the vote was five to nothing. We had a lot of discussion about how exactly we were going to handle all this. The vote was 5 to nothing. It was a compromise. I'll refrain from all that, but you can go back and watch the tape and see how this compromise evolved on the dais. It was a compromise between three of us and two of us to have these two items heard at the same time. There was an organic 15 or 20 minute conversation about how that was going to happen. And now, you know, on this agenda, we're being presented with something that is not that. It is something completely different. And what I object to is however this has happened, you know, it is not the will of the council that was expressed last month. So my objection is to that. And I think there are hills to die on and hills to not die on. And the supremacy of what the council says is, for me, a hill to die on. We are the arbiters of how the city works. The buck stops with us. We made a decision. And now, however it has happened, that decision is being reversed somehow. I don't know how it happened. But I would really prefer that we stick to the plan that we had last month and we move forward with the rest of the agenda.

We've given options here, four options, Jeff. So that is an option. So I need some input from the rest of the council. This wasn't an attempt to try to subvert having that discussion. It was just a way to separate it. so we can move forward with a more expeditious manner with the DILCS diamond situation, because there's a whole other clock ticking behind the scenes.

Yeah, could I just add to that is that it feels that we're not only not being there to the diamonds, but also there's a 60-day window where you have to make a decision on ADU, and it looks like we're exceeding that, so we're in a whole new set of problems if we continue on. So that's part of the concern about doing it today.

And we have options to handle any options that are out there. We're not trying to just force something on the council. We proposed an option and that's what's up for discussion right now. So we've got a motion on the table.

I'll just say before we vote, you know, I'm likely to vote to hear it today, but I really do not.

We don't need to have that discussion. I just want to make sure that we're putting down... No, hold on a second.

Let me talk. I don't want to see it. I just don't want to see it happen again. I agree with Jeff. I think it's a terrible precedent, and it's just not something I want to see happen again.

I agree with you, and it was not my idea to end up here, but we all sort of tried to be... responsive to the hearing that we have delayed, which has some extenuating circumstances with it.

Okay. So were you trying to decouple?

I'm not happy that we're having this discussion. I would have just assumed that we just, that staff was ready and we had the discussion for both things tonight. That just couldn't happen. If staff had been ready for the policy discussion, we'd be having it.

Well, we, you know, we addressed that issue again to, Beat the Dead Horse. We addressed that issue last month. And we had a whole discussion about whether we were going to continue this to a date certain or a date uncertain. And I think it was Brandon that asked for the date uncertain in case the staff was not ready for a policy discussion. So this is, again, I talk about this every once in a while, this is an emergency of our own doing. Like, we have created this, we have, you know, we got on a bus, you know, we got on the path, we got on the process. As imperfect as it is, our processes are always a little bit imperfect. We got on the bus, and now we have decided now to, however it is that this ended up on the agenda, we are going to get off that bus and get on this other bus over here. And I think that is a, I think that is, again, I will say that I think it's a terrible precedent to set. I think that's... part of our dysfunction here.

I appreciate that, Jeff. We have a motion on the table. Hans, you made the motion. Anybody want to second it?

I thought you did, Mayor.

Well, are we on the first motion? Why don't we just start with a clean motion?

We're on the substitute motion. Council Member Buder restated it about five minutes ago, so I'm comfortable with the fact that it's clear on the record as to what the motion is. I thought I heard the mayor second. Yeah, the mayor seconded it, which is fine. So now if there's no further discussion, you can vote.

I'll just weigh in. I'm not troubled by this, Jeff. I understand what you're saying. I just think events continue to unfold over the last month. I thought we were coming here today to do what was asked and was told that staff wasn't ready on the substance content. I feel it's incredibly unfair to... the appellant and the applicant to make them go another month or two because we're not ready to have the substance conversation we want. I'm fine moving that substance conversation to a month from now, but I don't think we should drag along a group of citizens who came here a month ago for an entirely different purpose with us. So that's why I'm will be supporting the motion that was just made. All right. Roll call, please.

Council Member Barron?

No.

Council Member Booter?

Yes.

Mayor Pro Tem Delves?

Yes.

Council Member Jamal? Yes. Mayor Byrne?

Yes.

Motion carries 4-1.

Okay. So does that take care of continuing having the hearing tonight?

The way I understood the motion was that the Policy decision will come back at one of your meetings in August and that the council is to proceed to hear the appeal tonight, today, this afternoon. And I would mention, Mayor, that the resolution that was presented to you at the last meeting, copies have been made and are at the dais. There's also for the public, anyone from the public that would like to see the resolution that was presented to the council at the previous meeting there on the city clerk's desk right in the corner there by that by the Kleenex box. And so now the appropriate procedure would be if you want to hear from staff briefly perhaps or however long you want to hear from them that I understand they're available.

Yes, so Evan are you here? You want to get a stand up and just bring us up to speed on the hearing itself?

Thank you, Mayor. No new information to present, but the item was considered at the June 1st, 2026 hearing. The item being considered is the appeal of the Planning Commission's decision to approve a design study and coastal development permit for non-excluded development for a accessory dwelling unit, as well as landscaping, or such as landscaping, drainage improvements, and associated site work. The Council continued the item with the direction to staff. Based on the following motions, we are considering the item tonight. As Mr. Peerick noted, we have a resolution for denial of the appeal before you, which would uphold the Planning Commission's decision to approve the project. And I'm available for any questions.

All right, thank you. Any questions? Yes. From the Council, go ahead. So we had a conversation earlier today about the Coastal Commission and the policy that the Coastal Commission released with respect to ADUs in the coastal zone. And that led to another conversation, which was about section 17.08.050.G, which is specifically titled accessory dwelling units. So this stuff in 17850G, this is part of the Carmelo Municipal Code? Yes, that's correct. And this is part of the local coastal plan, so it has gone through, it has been vetted by the Coastal Commission. So we have sort of, yeah.

Yes, Title 17 is our implementation plan of our LCP, our local coastal program. The ordinance you're referring to was certified by the Coastal Commission in, I believe, 2017.

So can you talk a little bit about that policy? And I understand I'm sort of putting on the spot here. Apologies for that. Can you talk a little bit about the policy that the Coastal Commission released and what it states we should do if we have an ADU ordinance, which is what 17.08.050.G is?

Sure. So the policy that the Coastal Commission just recently released, it refers to Senate Bill SB 1077, and they worked in coordination with HCD, Housing and Community Development, and as part of that guidance they provide direction to local governments who have ADU ordinances which may not be updated. And part of that guidance says that if you have an ordinance that may be out of date, the Coastal Commission still does recommend upholding programs and policies that are necessary to protect coastal resources. So what does out of date mean? Perhaps there's been updates to state law that may conflict or that our ordinance, for example, is as out of date. Our last update was 2017. There's been a number of changes to state law since 2017. So we have not brought our ordinance up to date since. but following those additional changes to state law, for example. So this Section G was codified in 2017? Correct, but there were changes in 2019, 2020, 2021. To our code or to the... To the ADU statute.

To the state law. State law, state law. So do we know if Section G conflicts with any elements of state law that have passed since...

It does currently conflict. However, it still contains the coastal savings clause. which is that nothing in this article shall be construed to lessen or supersede the Coastal Act. So coastal protections still apply. So coastal protections still apply.

Correct. So when we established our LCP in 2003, floor area ratios were a big part of what It was a big part of the sort of conflict or discussion between the city, the city, the city council at that time and the coastal commission and the 1600, 1800 square foot on a 4,000 foot lot was a part of that discussion.

Yes, that's correct.

Okay. And so section, section B, um, Section C here says, except as modified by this subsection, the ADU shall conform to all requirements of the underlying residential zoning district, any applicable overlay district, and all other applicable provisions of this chapter, including but not limited to height setback, lot coverage, floor area ratio, landscape, and historic preservation. So this seems to imply that our floor area ratios are still in effect. You know, the 1,600, 1,800 square foot floor area ratios are still in effect. And that the ADU, it seems to imply that we have maybe forgotten about this in our processing of ADUs over the years, or we have chosen to sort of... Look the other way. Is that, would that be sort of accurate?

Yes, we have allowed for an exception to that section of the ordinance.

So we have been processing applications that maybe we shouldn't have been processing. Correct. Like that would be one way to look at sort of what we have been doing in that these applications that we file, these applications that we have seen violate this section of our own municipal code. That has been certified by the Coastal Commission. I'm sorry, it's been what by the Coastal Commission? That has been certified by the Coastal Commission as part of our LCB. This clause right here. Yes. G.2.C.

Okay, so we, and around 2019, I believe, there was one of those updates to the state statute said that you can't preclude the creation of an ADU that is at least 800 square feet. And I believe part of that same piece of legislation stated that if you If you have an ordinance that is not consistent with this section, then your ordinance is null and void. And this has been previously explained to the Planning Commission as well. At that time, we were under the impression that our ordinance, the one that you decided, was no longer void. However, the mistake that was made was the Coastal Savings Clause was still in there. And we didn't quite understand what that meant. and the implications of that. But as we dove into writing an ordinance at council's direction and doing all this research we- Recently, the ordinance is underway now. Correct, correct. But it was like three years ago, three and a half years ago we started on that. Yeah, probably 2023. We really started to understand what that meant and that we actually did have some power to enforce our LCP in these provisions. So we did bring forward a version one to the Planning Commission that said, hey, let's enforce the LCP as written. That version did not gain support. The direction was look for additional ways to allow for exceptions, and that's the direction we've continued on effectively.

But in the meantime, we're still, we're still, this is still part of our municipal code.

Correct.

Okay, thank you.

Any other questions? Okay, thank you. Any comments from the public? Anybody online?

There's no hands raised on Zoom.

All right. You'll have three minutes. I guess what I'm asking you guys is to be an advocate of our community and be an advocate of the public beach. This property adjoins a public asset that is very, very dear to this community and arguably all of California. And we can't take a risk during what is called global warming and probably the most devastating El Nino we've ever seen is what they're predicting since they started keeping records in 1950. How can we take a risk on that dune that adjoins the public beach and is diagonally supported back towards Diamond's property. And the only other support is the acacia that has been there for decades. But we all know where the water level is. The closer you get to the ocean, the water level comes up, up, up. So that's not a great support. It really depends on that diagonal support from the back. And when you've got five adjoining large lots that run beach to street, You think you're going to approve one? That's going to be the precedent for all the others, for four other 800-square-foot ADUs, which comes to 4,000 square feet, and I happen to be one of them, and I'm lobbying against me building it, building one. Pay attention here, because if it wasn't critical, if I didn't think it merited an argument, I wouldn't be doing it. Because the feeling is the more density, the more value, right? That's the old real estate theory. But I'm telling you, I lived through it with my house in Hawaii. You can't chase erosion. All you have is the benefit of hindsight. And it's too late when there's hindsight. Now, just this morning, I took a swim again out front. And I walked the dune, which you guys, the city, pardon me for saying you guys, the city very carefully re-spread the beach the better part of all last week, which is the first time I believe I've seen it done in summer months. I've seen it done in February before AT&T. I've seen it done after a catastrophic winter. I've never seen it done in July. Now, maybe I'm wrong, but I've never seen it done in July. But... It needed it. It needed it. I've never seen the summer beach as small as it is today. In fact, if you have photography records, it competes with some of the worst winter beaches. And I can't help but notice, and I'm sure everybody else has noticed, you've got 8th Street cabled off, keeping pedestrian traffic, because there's a big escarpment there, and it's dangerous. And it just seems to me... that that dune is kind of like this pulpit here. It's in a big circle and it goes further ocean, towards the ocean at my house in Diamonds. Mr.

Ducks, if you could bring this to a close.

It's going to come in from 8th Street and the parking lot. And once those are gone, you're begging for seawalls because you can't chase it from behind. All right, thank you. Don't make this mistake to approve this to please one couple. and not advocate for the community, because it's going to be a nightmare. Thank you for being here. Those nightmares can be expensive economically and politically, if you call it wrong.

All right. Appreciate your comment. Thank you. Any other comments?

City Council, Mayor, and voting citizens. I'm familiar with the property I spoke last month and if any applicant has met all the rules and passed all the tests and has not tried to do anything unusual, unlawful, it's unfair and the appeal is based on his view. I looked at the view last week. that this ADU or anything built on that property does not impede his view. You've seen the property. You've seen it doesn't bother the view. And then to bring up geological that he's not qualified, I'm not qualified, what he perceives may happen in the future or may not happen. unfair to the project. The project meets all the standards. Every ADU that's gone through it and the Planning Commission, you hired these people to check it all out. To check it all out and God knows they do. We've been to Planning Commission meetings. So I see no reason, no lawful reason to deny them the right to build. The appeal was for his view, not for anything else. And go there. He's got a great view. He shouldn't be complaining about his neighbors. And if everybody wants to build an AGU on my street or your street and they meet the rules, that's up to them. You can't deny them one because you're worried about what everybody else might do. So I say deny the appeal and give them the right to do what's lawful. Thank you.

Thank you. Anyone else? Come on up.

Yes, I'm Patricia Doakes. I live next door to the Diamonds. I feel that the Diamonds have five bedrooms. Four of the bedrooms have downstairs outdoor entrances. and bathrooms downstairs as well. So I propose that they would do a junior ADU unit, which I understand is quite popular now, and that would solve all of the issues as far as them needing an ADU unit, but not impeding on the beachfront. Thank you.

Earl Myers. I lived in Carmel-by-the-Sea for the last 20-some years. I've been on this peninsula and lived in the highlands for a while.

Just lift the microphone up a bit.

Hello?

We can hear you.

Okay. Yeah. My name's Earl Myers. I've lived in Carmel-by-the-Sea on South Casanova Street for the last 23 years or so. And before that, I lived in other areas of Carmel. I've also been a real estate broker for the last 35 years and been to a lot of council meetings. And it's my opinion that the council should now today approve of the application for the ADU. I've been to the Diamond's home and I've seen the view and I've seen where the beach is. At the last meeting, which I attended, it was proven that there was no view problem from any of the properties nearby. And it was also spoken by a professional expert that the beach erosion was not a problem at this time at the beach. And no one can know what's going to happen in the future. I think it was good that we separated the future Carmel decisions based on ADUs from the property today and decided that we'd make a decision today. I also think the city in the past, if I'm not correct, has voted to add ADUs as a possibility for adding the 380 possible homes that we have to have in Carmel. And we're supposed to have some 80 ADUs, I think. I'm not sure if my numbers are exactly correct. Now on a 40 foot lot, with a 1600 square foot house, nothing's going to meet that square footage and we'll never get those ADUs built with what the city has proposed for that property. I mean, for that, for our city. So it's my impression that the appeal should be denied based on no view and the professional experts information that the beach wasn't a problem and that we approve of the Diamonds ADU today. Thank you.

Thank you. Anyone else? Steve, were you getting up?

So a couple of things. I'll be a lot less than three minutes, I guarantee. According to what Mr. Dilks has said, I think you all have reports of the engineers the geologic engineers that actually are qualified to speak to the dunes and what's going on. And it's Gary Griggs, Harold Kosunich, and Grice engineers. And they all very much disagree with what Mr. Dilks has just said. As a matter of fact, in the report of Gary Griggs, you can see that actually over the past 50 or 70 years, the dunes have actually been growing, and the distance between the house and the water has actually been increasing. So that's just not valid. It might sound like somebody on a soapbox saying the world is going to come to an end, but according to the engineers, it's not going to come to an end. So that's kind of really all I wanted to say. I mean, we thought this project of doing the ADU, we've done everything within all the rules that there are, that this would be quite a fun, might be the wrong word, but a fun project for Marty and myself. And it's kind of turned into the opposite of that. And that's unfortunate for us, because we're dealing with a loss in our life. I'm just saying I would like for this one way or another to come to an end today. I'm just not sure we want to go on with this kind of process. Anyway, that's all I got to say.

Thank you, Steve. How many others are going to speak? Okay, so that's it. You're the last one. There's nobody online at this point. If you're online and you want to make a comment, please put your hand up. Okay.

Good afternoon, Mayor Byrne and members of the council. I'm Cody Phillips on behalf of the Diamonds. And thank you for moving forward with the appeal hearing. First of all, we appreciate it. Obviously the Diamonds have been very patient through this process and are thankful for you moving forward tonight. Just a couple of things quickly based on the comments that were received or were made by the council and some of the members of the public. Mr. Diamond just referenced the reports that we had obtained from Harry Kucinich and Gary Griggs. Those said that there are no issues with erosion, that the beach is really more or less accreting rather than eroding. And those are well-respected professionals, both locally and, in Mr. Griggs' case, internationally. But then the other point I wanted to make is regarding the discussion that was happening with Mr. Court and the discussion about the FAR rules, the ADU law, and the existing ADU ordinance. I think that relevant to the discussion is AB 462, which comes into effect or came into effect January 1st of this year. And what AB 462 said was, and I didn't have it in front of me, so if you forgive me, I'd like to just read from AB 462, which modified government code section 66329, subdivision A, which says that, paraphrasing a little bit here to cut out internal references, but The local government must approve or deny a coastal development permit application for an accessory dwelling unit within 60 days of receiving a completed application and shall not be required to hold public hearings for coastal development permit applications for ADUs. And that is in reference to coastal projects. Now, this had always been the law for ADUs generally. But with AB 462, because there had been some confusion about which portions of the broader ADU law applied in the coastal zone, the legislature made this clarification and extended it specifically to coastal permits. After this, well, recently, last week, we received an email from Katie Butler, Coastal Commission staff, which referenced this law and clarified that regarding FAR, it has been the Coastal Commission's understanding that absent updated ADU rules, the state laws, or state law applies. To Council Member Barron's point, the, and this goes back to a letter that I know the council's familiar with from state HCD, which was issued in October of 2025, last year, which again, I didn't have it in front of me, but if you'll forgive me, that letter was issued on October 8th, 2025, and said, it listed a four-page letter all of the issues and deficiencies with the city's ADU ordinance and concluded by saying if an existing ADU ordinance fails to meet the requirements of state ADU law the ordinance is quote null and void and the local jurisdiction must apply the standard set forth in state ADU law until it adopts an ordinance that complies with state law. The relevance here is that the Coast Commission is saying absent updated laws, the state law applies. And so we go to the local rules. The local rules are deemed null and void, which means we have to refer or revert, I should say, to the state law, which says you cannot use FAR in approving and denying an ADU. That's all. Thank you very much.

Can you summarize the net of what you just said to us as decision makers? Yes.

Yeah, sorry, that's a lot of lawyers speak for basically the state law says all the rules and regulations that we have before us in the city of Carmel here, you cannot deny an ADU for FAR, exceeding FAR on-site. You have to approve an ADU which complies as presented with state ADU law, which this ADU does. Even in the coastal zone? Even in the coastal zone.

All right, thank you. We had one other one in house here. And none online, so this will be the last speaker.

Hi, my name's Jeff Fulton. I was a part of the construction team of the original remodel edition of the house back in 2000. And I just wanted to state that be very little any impact to the surrounding area from the construction. No access will be needed from the beach and everything's been built through that gate in the courtyard wall. So just wanted to let you know that. All right. Thank you.

That was a question that came up last month. Thank you. Yeah. All right. Let's bring it back for discussion. Do you like to start? I will.

Yeah, so I guess I would say, You know, we're gonna have this policy discussion about square footage, which I'm pleased is gonna happen next month. But I do think that the ideal direction here is to exempt folks that are already in the process to get an ADU. If we create some kind of policy, I think it's a question of fairness. You know, they were operating under a set of standards admittedly established by the staff, you know, and it's been going on for a number of years. I think it's probably not the right interpretation, but it was the set of rules that they were provided with and they relied on that representation and spent, I don't know, tens of thousands of dollars to design this ADU and Going back to the last meeting, for those that weren't here, aside from the fact that it exceeds the square footage limitations of what's allowed on the lot, it's not in the bluff setback. There's no real concerns about erosion here based on the reports and the testimony. It's built on what is now an existing patio, so I don't really have concerns about the flora and the fauna. It's sunk down. I think it really was designed with a certain degree of humility in a way that I think is sensitive to the views of the neighbors. So again, I think the only issue is that it exceeds our square footage limits. And we're about to take that up next month. But I just don't think that it's fair to... to hold these folks accountable given the representations that were made to them. So my vote would be to deny the appeal. All right, thank you. Alessandra?

Thank you, Mayor. Just to echo what Hans said, the applicants, the Diamonds, did do everything that they were asked to do and followed the rules as they were explained by staff. And as it's already been something that's in the process, we need to... base it on that, not any future policy changes that we may do. While I certainly strongly share concerns about protection of our beach and our bluffs, I feel that the appellant, Mr. Dilks, did not provide a factual counter case with an expert engineer or geologist about the bluff erosion. So therefore, all we have are the reports that were brought up by the applicant, the Diamonds, and those seem to indicate that there is no concern that it is going to harm the bluff. And number three, as the contractor just stated, and as Mr. Suliano, the applicant architect, answered my questions and explained to me that they would do the construction very carefully. It would not harm the bluff. It would be done by hand. They would not be bringing in heavy equipment so that allayed some of my concerns and fears for the bluff. And then furthermore, number four is that the comments that we heard from Mr. Cody Phillips, the attorney regarding state law. So I will go ahead and deny the appeal and grant the approval of the project upholding the Planning Commission and allowing the diamonds to build the ADU.

All right. Thank you. Bob? I agree with my colleagues. I have nothing to add other than I would support denying the appeal.

All right. Thank you. Jeff? Thank you. Two parts of my comments. First, I do agree with my colleagues about the fairness of what the Diamonds are facing. That said, I did obviously lobby to have the policy discussion first, and I was hoping that the policy discussion would provide an avenue for the council and the planning commission to interpret the varying interpretations of the varying ADU laws that are coming out of Sacramento, and I appreciate that this is complicated, and obviously we heard from council that He believes that AB 462 nullifies what I believe, and that's all fine. But I'm going to choose to go with staff since that's what we have staff for. Section 17.08.050.G.2.C specifically says that ADUs are subject to our floor area ratios. And it specifically says that. And I hear the comments that, I heard the comment, the statement that AB 462 sort of negates that. But I also heard the comments from staff that the floor area ratio in this community, as I set up my comments earlier, floor area ratio in this community is intrinsic to the the look and feel of Carmel. This is not an inland community where houses are half an acre or a quarter of an acre or a whole acre. You know, we have houses on 4,000, 6,000 foot lots, and the floor area ratio is really important to what the community looks like. And so I do share staff's, I do share that opinion that floor area ratios are a coastal resource and that we should be, that they are exempt from the strictures of AB 462. So I do believe that this, I do believe that this ADU violates our own municipal code and I will vote to grant the appeal. All right, thank you, Jeff.

I agree with everything that was just said, and I think it was well said. I don't see any reason to add to it. So my vote will be to grant the appeal as well. Not grant the appeal, to deny the appeal. Sorry about that. And it looks like we're ready for a roll call.

Well, before you go there,

Oh, we have to motion first.

I'm sorry. But I would say that it would be a motion to adopt a resolution 2026-033. Yeah.

All right. So I'm looking for a motion for resolution number 2026-033, and we each have a copy of it. It's a lengthy one, and it's available for the public if they want to get a copy tonight.

I'll move to approve resolution number 2026-033. Second. Now roll call. Okay.

Council Member Barron?

No.

Council Member Booter?

Yes.

Mayor Pro Tem Delves? Yes. Council Member Dramaw? Yes. Mayor Byrne?

Yes.

Motion carries 4-1.

Yes. We're looking forward to an interesting discussion next month at the council meeting if staff's going to be ready for it. I think we had a little bit of it tonight. All right. Thank you for getting through that tonight. I apologize for some of the confusion that happened, but there were some... Last minute changes. All right, we're gonna have another interesting one next. Orders of business. Could somebody open the windows? I think we need some air in here. There's a lot of people in here. I am getting a little late. There's no error here.

Not yet.

I'm just getting lightheaded. I think if we get some air in here. Should we open the front door maybe? Brian? Maybe we could open the front door too. All right, thank you for doing that. Hopefully everybody's here for the order of business, if we can get settled. All right, next up is item 11, discussion and direction regarding funding for C. Monterey Marketing Services. Consider adoption of resolution 2026052, amending the fiscal year 2026-27 adopted operating budget. And we have Jamie for the staff report.

Good afternoon, honorable mayor and city council. Per the council's request, we bring back an agenda item today to discuss the city's contribution to see Monterey for the 26-27 fiscal year. At the last meeting, the City Council approved the fiscal year 26-27 budget after removing from it the funding for C. Monterey of $293,000. The Council requested at that time that this be brought back so they could consider a potential budget adjustment to put some or all of that back into funding. Sea Monterey Organization works to market Monterey County as a destination. It assesses a room tax on all the hotels in the city. In addition, the city pays amounts from its own funds towards Sea Monterey. Other cities in Monterey County similarly participate to varying degrees. Per review of the C-Monterey financials, some cities pay a flat amount and that amount is similar but slightly smaller amount compared to the amount of hotel assessments. This is most likely due to the composition of the different rooms and room rates in the various cities. This schedule is a schedule of all the districts and fees. And it's interesting to note that in the next 10 years, the TID assessed on rooms on the hotels themselves is budgeted to increase by 10% to 12% every two years. In summary, if the city chooses to fund See Monterey for the fiscal year 26-27, that funding would come from the fund balance, as the city has already spent more than it will be receiving in revenue. Where we're at tonight is this, the decision tree here to help guide us. Should the city contribute to See Monterey? If no, then we don't need a budget adjustment. If yes, then we need to decide how much of a budget adjustment we'd like to make. That's it.

Thank you. Any questions? Hans? Alessandra? I have a question. I was surprised about the 650,000 from the hotels. Can you explain that a little bit?

Yeah, and I think that's important for us. We've been talking a lot about TOT, but what Sea Monterey has is a county-wide ability to assess hotels in the various areas. So they pay, the hotels pay, collect and pay, a small per-room charge. based on what type of hotel they are, whether they're kind of standard or luxury, the prices vary a little bit. So, Sea Monterey already gets funding from all of our hotels and that adds up to that number that we're putting out at about $650,000. The city collects that and then sends it on in a check.

Just like Visit Carmel.

Just like Visit Carmel.

Okay, and the CRID, the restaurant tax, same thing?

And the restaurant.

Okay, so also the issue of the fund revenue, it's a little odd. Is that only because we delayed it 30 days that now they're getting penalized for coming from fund balance? Because-

Well, no, it's just important to note that the budget this year, we spent more than we brought in in revenues. And so now we're a month away. We don't want to forget the fact that we have already budgeted to spend more than we collect in revenues. So that's the same question here today that we would have had if we'd done this a month ago.

So it really, it would have been that same thing, and it applied to many things, not just this.

You're exactly right. And that's why this came up, because the city was trying to look at how to best focus its resources, its limited resources. And this is one of the things that was on the table.

But it was mostly triggered by increasing CIP, really, in the first place. Is that true? If we had decided to not expand CIP, we would not be digging $2.5 million into reserves.

City policy is 10%, 90% split. Yeah. Or did we change that?

That's good. Yeah. I want to know how important that is in this discussion.

The decision, I'm sorry, Jamie, excuse me, but the decision of what stayed in, what came out, what the council wanted to focus on with respect to CIP and a $100 million deferred maintenance program, that was all the council's discretion. So that wasn't Jamie's decision. That wasn't the staff's decision. So I think that's more of the five of you up here on the dais. Okay.

Yeah. All right. Thank you. Any other questions before I go to the public? All right, public comments, please. How many people are going to speak? Rob, you want to go up now? Go ahead. Okay, we're going to consider Rob sort of a staff report. I'm going to give him a little extra time. Go ahead.

To be clear, Rob's not on our staff.

I'm going to be, it's an extension of this because he's going to get a few extra minutes.

Okay, and a presentation? Yes.

I think it was 10 slides, 10 or 11 slides.

We've been at 140.

While she looks for that, I can just address a couple of quick things on the financial aspect of it. And I understand completely how the words contribution, contribute to see Monterey, fund see Monterey are important ways to consider how you look at your budget and consider various parts of your budget. I just want to point out that it's an investment. with a specific ROI in a number of different ways, which I can talk about and elaborate on further with questions from you. The other point to make is that the TID, the hotel assessment, This is a public-private partnership with all the cities and the county, and the TID portion of our budget's about 65%, the hotel assessment. 35% is from the jurisdiction partnerships. In 2023, the TID was set in a 10-year plan, And the agreement, the tacit agreement, because you have to vote to allow your jurisdiction to be in the TID, was to hold flat what the jurisdictions were investing. But we needed to be more competitive because we still, even with the TID, are outspent by many of our competitors. So the hotels took on the greater burden and increased the TID. So that's the explanation and the background between the public-private partnership that makes all of this work. So what I wanted to share, and I'll try to keep this as brief as possible, is sort of a restatement of how it's worked for 20 years with Carmel-by-the-Sea, as well as our other jurisdiction partners. Eight others contribute 3%. Two of the partners are at 6%. And that has been static over those 20 years. It's never gone up. It's based on an investment projection of 3%. And for this coming year, it's roughly $290,000. And with that, that investment gets you global destination marketing. You're included in our responsible travel and stewardship collaboration and marketing. You have over 140 business members that are allowed free membership in T-Monterey. So they're included in all the things that we do in PR and advertising and social media for free because of the jurisdiction investment that you make. We make available to you the data, the research, and the analytics that you may need, anything from understanding the travelers better to financial analytics, because we've got a lot of tools there that can help on forecasts. You have board representation. So you have a seat at the table, which I'm going to talk about. And then, of course, we have current programs developing air service and events. So that's all the stuff that you've been getting for 20 years. Could we go to the next slide, please? I have a clicker? It worked. That's rare. I've had a couple questions when I was last before your council. A couple things came up that you all talked about that I wanted to address with a little bit more detail, and I've had some subsequent conversations when asked by some of you. Explain a little bit more behind this. How are you investing these dollars? And if you go back a number of years, if you go back to when I first started here at C. Monterey, 2013, July 1. It's just my anniversary, as a matter of fact. We were about a 50-50 drive market or rather 50-50 in terms of our spending. We're spending drive. We're kind of a glorified drive market. And we decided back then that we could do better than that. Dry market's still important. It will continue to be important. It's where most of the business comes from. But how could we do better than that in terms of bringing in flying guests? And what we've been doing, largely, now we're at, instead of 50-50, we're at 80-20. And I can go into more details about that. But about 80% of what we do as an organization is focused on getting people from flying markets, long-haul markets, international markets. And you can see there, we did a visitor profile study in 2016 and that found that 14.4% of the people coming to County of Monterey were coming by plane. We did another one coming out of COVID and found that that had grown to about 20%. We're going to do another one this coming year, another visitor profile study, which I expect to see that as grown by a few percentage points. That's 80% of our budget. When the community invests in new air service, like we just got the new flight from Chicago, Visit Carmela stepped up. The aquarium stepped up. The airport stepped up. And together, we went after that market to pre-promote it in order to make it successful. Because as I think you all know, the airlines are very fickle. They'll pull out very quickly if they don't see the demand. So we want to make sure there's demand right up front. And we started marketing in March to support that United flight out of Chicago. We got it off the ground. A lot of times the others go away. We have to stay, and we're constantly marking, and InvisiCriminal does as well, to support these flights, to keep them going. The bigger story is that the demand was such that the airlines made decisions for flights coming out of Denver, Dallas last year, LA this year. They upped gauge, which means they went from a little regional to a big 737, and that's adding 3,000 new seats per week this summer. It's working. If you put all aside the rest of the research, the things that we do, the reports, the airlines' empirical data shows you they're making these decisions and they don't make them lightly. They want to see the demand today and they want to see the demand coming up tomorrow. And they largely depend on us, as well as Visit Carmel, to drive that demand. Why is that demand so important? Because people who come from further away do more, they stay more nights, and they spend more. The people who come in from domestic fly markets, you can see the spend there is more than twice as much as the domestic drive markets. We have a saying, we actually have a song, it's called One More Night. We're aiming to get one more night. It's about more visitation, more so than it is about more visitors. One more night for the entire county. If we had one more night and not a single additional visitor, that's $877 million in visitor spending. One more night. The people coming in from the overseas markets, that's two or three times the spend. And as a result of that, you're going to see higher occupancy, greater TOT contributions, greater sales tax, and greater visitor spend, greater support for the businesses that we have here. You also have, as I mentioned, a seat at the regional table. We are a county full of individual jurisdictions. No two of them are the same, and yet all of them need each other to be successful. You are as affected by things that happen in Marina as Marina is affected by things that take place in Carmel, and it extends into Salinas Valley and beyond. We are an entity that is dependent on each other and affected by each other, and your seat at the table on our board gives you a voice and where that direction of this destination goes. It stopped working. Okay, thank you. Okay. I'M CALLING THIS AN INFLECTION POINT. YOU HAD ASKED US THROUGH BRANDON, BRANDON WAS VERY CLEAR A FEW MONTHS AGO, BOTH WITH AMY AND I, DON'T COME TO THE TABLE ASKING FOR THE SAME THING YOU'VE ALWAYS ASKED FOR. COME BEARING SOMETHING DIFFERENT, A DIFFERENT REQUEST. ULTIMATELY, THAT TURNED IN VISIT CARMEL WITHDRAWING THEIR REQUEST COMPLETELY, AND US COMING BACK WITH SOMETHING VERY, VERY DIFFERENT THAN WE HAD DONE BEFORE. BUT IT WASN'T THE FIRST TIME WE'VE DONE WHAT I'M ABOUT TO PROPOSE TO YOU ALL. BUT RIGHT NOW, DISINFLECTION POINT, I'M GLAD WE'RE HAVING THIS CONVERSATION. I'M GLAD THAT WE TOOK SOME TIME AND THAT YOU TOOK SOME TIME TO CONSIDER IT. YOU HAVE SITUATIONAL OVERCROWDING, THAT'S A PROBLEM. IT'S NOT GOOD FOR BUSINESS. IT HAS AN IMPACT ON OCCUPANCY AND REVENUE. IF PEOPLE THINK IT'S GOING TO BE CROWDED, THEY'RE GOING TO GO SOMEWHERE ELSE. IT HAS AN IMPACT ON RESIDENCE, NOT JUST QUALITY OF LIFE, QUALITY OF PLACE, QUALITY OF CHARACTER OF THE VILLAGE. VISITOR EXPERIENCE. IT'S NOT GOOD FOR BUSINESS. IT'S NOT GOOD FOR ANY OF US. SO WE NEED TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT. AND WHAT WE CAME BACK WITH IS A PROPOSAL TO INVEST A THIRD BACK OF THE INVESTMENT YOU MAKE IN US OF THAT 3% INTO A VISITOR MANAGEMENT ANALYSIS STUDY. SOMETHING THAT WE ALL NEED. WE ALL WANT THE BUSINESS. WE ALL WANT THE QUALITY OF LIFE AND THE QUALITY OF PLACE. WHAT WE ALL NEED IS A WAY TO MANAGE THAT BETTER. IT'S ALMOST LIKE YOU'VE GOT A LOT OF TOURISM WINDS IN YOUR SALES but you need a bigger and better rudder to drive it. So, it's a lot more dramatic if I just click right after that, but we'll go with it. It's okay. Okay. Visitor management analysis. So we've identified an organization called Better Destinations. These are the people that make the big destination stewardship plans. As a matter of fact, Kathy Ritter with Better Destinations, who I've been talking to now. As a matter of fact, I should make the point that the task force of the chamber and CRA and Visit Carmel and others and individuals have all been gathering for weeks. The month that you've taken to lead up to this inflection point, we've not been sitting on our hands. We've been doing things to gain some momentum. And again, of course, that momentum depends on what you decide here. But we've identified better destinations. They've done major plans, and it's supposed to be going to press at some point. They just led the stewardship plan for Hawaii Tourism Authority, where they're focusing on value over volume. That's kind of their tagline, and there's a lot more to it. It's an 80-page report, I believe. But what you get in something like that And what we're proposing with this analysis, it doesn't scale the same as Hawaii, of course, but what we want to look at are what are the congestion spots and improve on visitors flow. Collaboration on what you're already doing, what the chief's already doing, looking at upgrading enforcement, you're looking at paid parking, things like that. We'd like to work with you on that. How can we grow overnight stays and the visitor value? IMPROVED UNDERSTANDING BETWEEN DAY TRIPPERS AND THE PEOPLE THAT ARE GOING TO ACTUALLY SPEND THE NIGHT. WE'RE GOING TO LOOK AT A LOT OF OTHER DESTINATIONS TO BRING YOU BACK IDEAS THAT YOU MAY NOT HAVE THOUGHT OF. AND ULTIMATELY WE WANT TO DO THIS IN A FAIRLY CONDENSED TIME FRAME. IT WILL GIVE US A LIMITED AMOUNT OF TIME BUT WILL GIVE US, I'M ALMOST CALLING THIS PHASE ONE BECAUSE I THINK THERE'S, I'M CERTAIN IT'S GOING TO BE WORK TO FOLLOW. BUT HAVING A TIMELINE READY TO KICK OFF THIS MONTH and a report, let's call it the preliminary report phase one due in November, 2026. It would be community focused and community led. This is you, this is the CRA, this is the chamber. We'll be there to fund it with the investment that we said that we would make, but it would be an open and transparent process. There would be residents asked to talk to, resident sentiment, very, very important to all this. We want all the voices, residents, businesses and visitors And it's going to be a very collaborative focus driven by your priorities. In addition to that, what we're going to be doing for the entire county is the visitor profile study that I mentioned earlier. We'll take data from this profile study that takes more time, but we gain insight. What does the fall visitor look like versus the winter visitor versus the spring visitor and so on? What are the differences? How can we manage that? How can we better manage that? So that type of data would help sharpen what we get out of the visitor management. And the visitor management is not something you just do and you're done with. It's a process. And again, it keeps going because you've got to stay on top of it. You have to tend to it. I will leave you with this. This is the vision statement for the Big Sur Destination Stewardship Plan. THIS IS A PLAN THAT WAS DONE RIGHT WHEN COVID HIT. AND SO IT KIND OF SAT ON A SHELF FOR A FEW YEARS AND THEN WAS FOLLOWED BY THE HIGHWAY ONE BEING CLOSED FOR THREE YEARS. I BRING THIS UP FOR A COUPLE OF REASONS. ONE, BECAUSE THIS IS HOW IT COULD BE DONE AND IT'S IN OUR OWN BACKYARD. TWO, BECAUSE SEA MONTEREY WAS VERY INTEGRAL TO THAT. WE PAID FOR MOST OF IT. WE WERE VERY INVOLVED THROUGHOUT THE WHOLE PROCESS. AND I ALSO BRING IT UP BECAUSE YOU'RE SEEING SOME OF THE RESULTS OF THAT. THE MORATORIUM THAT'S BEING TALKED ABOUT AND WILL SOON BE IN PLACE AT THE END OF THIS MONTH, THAT CAME OUT OF THIS PLAN. The increased legal fines for illegal campfires went from a few hundred bucks to over a thousand. There's ideas like that that come out of things like this, and it's out of planning like this that I think we can, for residents, businesses, and visitors, make it a better experience for all of us. And the last slide was thank you. Thank you. So I can answer questions or I can go sit down.

Why don't you sit down? We'll get public comment. We'll come back and ask. We reserve the right to ask questions. All right.

Thank you very much, council members. I appreciate you taking the time. Thank you.

All right. Now, public comments. How many people want to speak? One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. All right. Let's go.

Andy Carr, Carmel-by-the-Sea resident. So I look at Carmel-by-the-Sea as Taylor Swift. Everybody wants a part of her. When I first moved to Carmel 50 years ago, I was on a ferry going to Victoria. And I was young, and I thought this place was for the nearly-wed and the nearly-dead. I don't mean to offend anybody. Somebody was in the next car over, and we started talking. He said, where are you from? I said, Carmel.

Oh, Carmel. We love Carmel.

Everybody in the world knows Carmel-by-the-Sea. I have a hard time understanding why we as a city need to spend so much money promoting ourselves. I can understand hiring smaller groups to promote a certain type of tourism, a certain type of function. Whatever somebody in the community wants, you can hire somebody to do it. You don't have to have a full-time employee making a lot of money off of Carmel by the Sea by marketing it. We can market ourselves. We just need to hire the right people to do it. We have not only one marketing, we have several marketing people. I don't understand that either. Why can't we use our Chamber of Commerce, then have other groups working with them? And I don't understand all the money that they're getting. So what I just heard them say is, are they getting part of the 2% tax that the hotels are self assessing them for. And then they're getting 3% of the projected TOT collections. And then they're getting some state money. That's a lot of money. I can't even count that high. So in addition to all that, from what I've seen, there's no accountability. There's no control. They spend money. We don't know how it's benefiting us. And the bottom line that the residents are saying is, it's too crowded, we can't find a place to park, we're not being respected, our property's not being respected. I think we need to think a lot more about this before we give any more money away.

Thank you, Andy. Next, if you could all be prepared to come up to cut the time down a little bit. Come on up, Ashley. The next speaker could get prepared.

Hi, good afternoon.

Good to see you here.

Nice to see you, Mayor. Mayor Burns and Council, while I personally know a couple of you, let me introduce myself to the rest. My name is Ashley Wolfe. I am the owner of Jeju Kitchen in Carmel Plaza. I come to you today in support of C. Monterey. Not only do I speak as a business hospitality local of our village, but as a Carmel residential local of 38 years. I live three blocks from Hans, six blocks from Dale, and nine blocks from Bob. In addition, my family has owned restaurants here in Carmel for over 30 years. I can confidently say that I speak from a sweet spot as a liaison between residential and business. During COVID, businesses weren't able to even survive at 50% occupancy, which parallels to businesses today not being able to survive solely on a local economic support. And we should feel so fortunate that we live in a beautiful community that has bounced back. Unlike other coastal cities, such as Santa Barbara, who are only now, after six years, just getting their feet on the ground. After speaking with a handful of my local customers over the last few weeks about C-Monterey, I have come to realize that they were not made aware that C-Monterey focuses on thoughtful marketing and targeted tourism. Our town sells luxury goods alongside Michelin restaurants and one-of-a-kind galleries who all depend on tourism and foot traffic. And this is the customer C-Monterey beelines for. People who are going to fly in, rent a hotel room, and spend money for a few days. Not day trippers who are here for a single afternoon. See Monterey has brought influential and national journalists from the New York Times and Forbes magazine. who published pieces featuring my restaurant who targeted the exact customer Carmel wants. I kindly would like to remind our council that you are here to not only support local residents, but the businesses as well who drive our local economy. We have to base our decisions on analysis and facts, not feelings, and do what is best for our community as a whole and not a vocal minority. Thank you.

Thank you, next.

GOOD AFTERNOON, MR. MAYOR AND MEMBERS OF THE COUNCIL. I WAS LAST IN THIS ROOM 50 YEARS AGO FOR MY SOPHOMORE CIVICS CLASS AT CARMEL HIGH, SO IT'S NICE TO BE BACK. MY NAME IS KIRK GAFFEL. I'M THE C. MONTEREY BOARD MEMBER AND I'M ALSO THE PRESIDENT OF THE BIG STREET CHAMBER OF COMMERCE. I'VE BEEN INVOLVED WITH BOTH ORGANIZATIONS FOR OVER TWO DECADES AND With the challenges of visitation volumes and changed visitor behavior in this period, particularly with the advent of social media, we've all had to find ways to adapt and look for tools and resources to do so. See Monterey has proven to have a strong record of engagement as well as a very high level of capability in both its management of visitor destination marketing as well as visitor destination management. in terms of its outreach to the travel media, social media and social influencers, local jurisdictions such as the City of Carmel, and community stakeholders, residents and businesses. To leverage and enhance those local efforts, such as Visit Carmel's, to address challenges with visitation and impacts on residents and businesses. We face in Big Sur many of the challenges that residents in Carmel have experienced and have found that Sea Monterey is and has been committed to and demonstrating that visitor management is a top priority, not just simply increasing visitation. And I believe it can and will be an important and constructive partner with the City of Carmel, as well as other jurisdictions, including our area of the unincorporated county of Monterey County, to address these new and ongoing impacts on visitation. I urge your continued support for the long-term partnership with Sea Monterey to further this important work of destination management and to improve the economy and quality of life for our residents. Thank you very much. Thank you. Good to see you.

Good afternoon. Mayor Byrd and other members of the council, I want to thank you for the opportunity to speak today. My name is April Montgomery, and I have the pleasure to serve as the chairman of the Carmel Restaurant Improvement District right now, involved in the marketing of our city by their restaurants. I'm here to urge you to continue funding this collaboration with C. Monterey. This partnership is really not a line item. It's an investment. an investment that directly supports our local businesses, our hospitality workers, and the character of Carmel-by-the-Sea as part of the Monterey Peninsula. My business, the Lynx Club, benefits every day from the conventions, corporate groups, weddings, family reunions, and international travelers that Sea Monterey brings to our region. These markets would not fully be reached by Visit Carmel alone, by my business alone. When we pool our resources together through C. Monterey, the modest amount that we contribute is magnified tenfold by the regional promotion and the coordinated sales efforts. This inclusion in shared calendars and booking channels that it lays another, you all understand Visit Carmel, it's another layer of that. Losing that connection would mean being cut out of the trade shows, of the convention leads, and the event listings. literally erased from calendars where meeting planners and tour operators look first. This isn't the day tripper loading up their cooler and coming to stay on our beach today. These are true money spending, good stewards of tourism. If we don't participate, it will be more than disappointing. It would send a message that we aren't supporting community partnerships that have a proven result. Proven. This is not money we're just throwing away and we're not going to see it come back. Visit Carmel has already agreed to set aside their funding so that this collaboration would continue. That sacrifice shows how important and how fragile this arrangement is. Removing our support now would undermine that goodwill and put at risk the revenue that sustains many local businesses' employees. Supporting Sea Monterey is supporting Carmel's small businesses, safeguarding jobs, and ensuring our town remains viable and competitive for the events and travelers that sustain all of us. Thank you.

Thank you, April. Next speaker. Come on up. Bashar. Bashar.

Good afternoon, Mayor and Council. My name is Scott Caraccioli. I manage my family's winery, Caraccioli Cellars. Our tasting room on Dolores has been operating for over 15 years. In the past decade, I've been the board president for the Monterey County Vintners and Growers Association or the Santa Lucia Highlands Wine Association. In my time with both those organizations, we extensively partnered with Sea Monterey in a variety of ways to promote tourism and the like focused on wine as well as restaurants. Targeting a visitor that brings value to our village has always been top priority. Attracting those that will stay longer and spend more allows for a sustainable visitation model. I want to sell them wine. My wine's not inexpensive, much like a lot of the jewelry and the art that you see along our streets. Our village is built upon tourism. and without it, your favorite restaurants and stores will disappear one by one. I don't believe the issues associated with overtourism are solved by simply turning off the spigot. Rather, Carmel should be more invested in the analysis and the continual refinement of the visitors we choose to attract. This economy can't survive on seven Wednesdays a week or 12 Januaries a year. It is in the best interest of Carmel to participate in the discussions and subsequent planning that will shape strategy for the years to come. I urge you to fund Monterey, see Monterey, and keep Monterey, keep Carmel's seat at the table. Don't undo the progress and momentum the 20 councils that came before you have achieved. Thank you for your time.

Thank you for coming in tonight, Scott. Appreciate it.

Good afternoon, Mayor, good afternoon, Council. First of all, thank you so much for everything you do. We really appreciate your heart in the city. My name is Bashar, for people who don't know me. I want to speak as a resident of Carmel-by-Sea and as a business owner. As a resident, two things I care about. I feel with the residents when they talk about being crowded. I think we have to clarify what's crowded means. I'm as a resident, my problem is parking only. So during the whole year, we know how the flow month after month. We have a summer time, which is we get a little busy, but today you walk and you see all the streets half empty. Weekends busy, but the rest of the months, we don't have much crowd. We have a problem with parking. That's my problem, and that's the elephant in the room that I think if we fix it, you're not going to hear any complaint. The other thing as a residence, what I care about is The city has enough revenue and enough budget to take care of the city. So enough revenue and enough budget to take care of the city. My question, do you have enough budget and money to take care of the city? If you do, We're great. You don't have to market. You don't have to do anything. I think the answer is you don't have enough money in the city. I think always we don't have enough to take care of everything we need in the city. So that means we need revenue. How do we bring this revenue? So that's as a resident. As a business owner, I have five businesses in downtown Carmel. I spend, I think, respectfully, more than a lot of people being every day, all day, seven days in downtown, and I think most of you see me all the time there. So I know exactly what's going on downtown. Downtown, the problem is parking only. That's the only problem we have. Locals come to my restaurants all the time. We speak and we share complaints, ideas. Their concern is parking only. They don't have any concern that we have so many people coming to town. So that's what I think. As a restaurant owner, I think there's a small simple thing that might give you a lot of data. Look at the sales taxes this year and see if it's increasing or decreasing. I think the flow of traffic of people to our restaurants are decreasing this year. And so you might see day visitors coming a lot, but they're not the people that are spending. CMON-RA, when they target and manage their program, is to bring people stay more than a day, not just somebody come day and they leave. If you stop supporting CMON-RA, you're not going to stop day people coming to spend all day long, hang out in downtown and leave. So this is not going to solve the issue. I think I totally support C. Monterrey to continue with that, unless if you have enough budget and you don't need any revenue. Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Good afternoon, Mayor Byrne, City Council. I should have waited until I got here, sorry. I'm Susan Dompier. I'm the Area Managing Director at La Playa Hotel and Hotel Carmel. I am also a resident of Carmel-by-the-Sea, a proud parent of a Carmel High student, and I'm full disclosure on the board of Visit Carmel and the Carmel Chamber. La Playa is also in the luxury collection with Sea Monterey. I'm not going to stand here and repeat everything that everyone just said. I am in full support of Sea Monterey. For those of us who live in the boutique independent hotel world, it's very important to get our message out. There are a lot of hotels that have been introduced to the peninsula that are middle grade, big box brands, and they can siphon off business from us. They don't have the challenges that a 120-year-old building in Carmel-by-the-Sea has. And they have big marketing budgets because they are backed by the big brands. Sea Monterey makes sure that we stay relevant and that we're out there. We work directly with them, hosting fans, hosting journalists, and bringing high-quality visitors here who understand the village and who are responsible stewards. And I'd like to see that continue.

Thank you.

Good afternoon, Carrie Tice, owner of Hofstra's House Hotel and resident. I understand how the residents feel, because I'm one of them, about things seeming to be overcrowded. I invite them to come to our Visit Carmel meetings to be educated about the type of marketing we do, the targeted marketing we do. want them to reach out to us so they understand that we're doing it in a positive manner. And it's just not a wide net that we throw out there hoping to get what we want. We want the overnight stay. We want them to come stay in our hotels so they walk everywhere and they stay for several days. Right now we're getting a lot of soccer people coming. They spend several days here. They walk, they eat, they shop, and they're thrilled to be here. I also want to, so I invite them to come to our Visit Carmel meetings. I invite them to reach out to me personally. I'm happy to meet with anyone that wants to understand the intricacies of our marketing and how many layers it is. Your decision today involves the livelihood of businesses in our village. And I really need you to understand that. We've worked very hard to have a great partnership with Sea Monterey. and see Monterey is listening to you by offering to analyze our visitor. That's something that Visit Carmel cannot do and it's something that they have the expertise and with our help, the funding to do. So we wanna answer those questions that a lot of you have posed. Please do not disrupt partnership, our 20-year partnership with CMonterey and I hope you will support full funding. Thank you. Thank you.

Joe DiNucci, resident Carmel, not business owner. I have a business but it does not operate in Carmel. And I I am most interested in the experience of living here. But I'm very, very respectful of the challenge of running a business here. And since I don't do that, I listen to the people that do, the hoteliers and the restaurateurs and the retailers. And I'm seriously in awe of them, that they have the courage to do what they do, invest their wherewithal to build businesses and make them successful. And I also can share my own reaction to the experience of living here, that there are the cloudy, chilly Tuesdays and Wednesdays and Thursdays of most weeks of the year, where the city's pretty quiet. There's plenty of parking. As Bashir said, the real problem most days, even on the hottest days of the year, is parking. That's a problem that we really have to tackle. In my own opinion, spending less than 1% of the city budget on C Carmel, when it's so strongly endorsed by the people whose businesses depend on it, seems like a good investment, especially since it's been working well for 20 years. So shutting it down seems like a short-sighted choice. So I would hope that you would decide to continue it. Thank you.

Thank you.

Good afternoon, Mayor and Council. I'm Amy Herzog, and I'm coming to you here today wearing three hats. One as Executive Director for Visit Carmel, the other as a C-Monterey board member, and then lastly as someone who has made this area their home for the past 30 years. For the past five years, I've been your representative on the C-Monterey Board of Directors. And while I've sat around that board table, I've come to have a real appreciation that goes way beyond the marketing that we've received as part of our collaboration and our partnership with Sea Monterey. Because I've realized that these are the major leaders from around the county that come around the table and share ideas, solve problems, discuss our issues, and then make some real decisions that affect all of our communities, including this one. And when I think about this past five years, we came out of a pandemic. We've dealt with wildfires, road closures, floods, winter storms, extended power outages. And we've had a big evolution in Car Week, and we've learned a lot about how to manage major events such as that one. And that only comes from having a regional organization that helps guide these strategic communications. We've talked about marketing, but this is about our duty as marketers to also be communicating, not just with our visitors, but with our business owners, our employees, and our residents. And as I've been thinking this last month about the implications of if this city were to decide to not fund See Monterey, I am genuinely and deeply concerned about what that means for us as a community. Car Week is next month. See Monterey over the last five years has developed this incredible hub of information that everyone now uses as a resource. The media, the event planners, and everyone else I just named. I'm what kind of chaos are we going to unintentionally create by just dropping off off and this is just for car week and then who knows what else comes down the line when we have a super El Nino and other problems coming up it's because we have developed a concise and clear communications plan with trusted regional partners and because we have the insights from people like Kirk Gaffel who are in Big Sur and who live through various things that we benefit. So I just really want to emphasize that other perspective. I'm just genuinely concerned about how we are to do this if you were to make this decision and we are just not a part of these bigger peninsula-wide communications. You know, Visit Carmel, we care very much about quality of life here and we care about the visitor experience and we care about the character of Carmel. We all want the same things, but we strongly believe that that shared goal is going to be accomplished by working together, not standing apart. Thank you.

Thank you. Anybody else here? Cindy?

Mayor, council, and city staff, my name is Cindy Lloyd. I had not planned to speak today, but hearing the testimony before me, I feel compelled to say something. Like Kirk, I was on this city dais when I was a senior in high school, but that was a long time before Kirk, and it was Youth in Government Day, and I was elected as city council. But I was born almost 85 years ago, and my family and the Fassett-Gaffel family were friends, and things have evolved since then. But I have a deal for you. I don't know what we can do about the number of tourists coming to Carmel and they don't wear tags to say they came because of visit Carmel or seek Monterey or any of or because the chamber or just because of social media. They just come and we are overrun with tourists. So I got a deal. You are going to have to decide tonight how you're going to deal with funding for any marketing organizations, but I will support you in whatever you decide if you will support me in taking the stanchions down out of the median so that we can take the banners down that are not advertising anything that were originally put there to advertise the Bach Festival before we had the kind of electronic advertising that we have now. And it's turned into something not local, not just local, not just cultural. And I will leave it at that. So Brandon knows what I'm talking about because he's always said if he comes to Carmel on Monday morning and he sees metal filings in the medians, he knows that I will have been out there with a hacksaw the night before. So thank you. I think the medians need to return back to what they were originally designed for, which is to bring the natural environment into this median city of Carmel to beautify Carmel, not to advertise stuff. Thank you.

Thank you. Is that the last one? Anybody else? Nancy? All right, after Nancy. Good evening, Mayor and Council.

I was not planning to talk about this, but as a marketing professional who is not at all involved with any of these organizations and a resident who has experienced the inundation recently, I really liked the idea that was proposed by C. Monterrey to do an assessment, a proper management assessment. Marketing, when it's scattershot, can not be what's needed, but targeted marketing, which is clearly what they're focused on, with a proper assessment. I mean, reduce congestion and improve visitor flow, collaboration on current parking. I agree that parking is the elephant in the room here. It is the stumbling block. for all of what we as residents and tourists experience. I think that is money well spent. And over the previous evenings that I've heard about budget stuff, the main concern I've had is do we have critical key performance indicators. Every marketing organization I have ever worked with or every client I have provided marketing services to, we have a standard agreed upon set of measurements that then you guys can use to say this is working, this isn't working, and it's worth every dollar. We know we need revenue, so I would encourage you to support this, but especially to support that assessment that they proposed thoughtfully this evening. Thank you. Thank you.

And Nancy's the last speaker. in the room here, then we'll go online.

Yes, Nancy Toomey, and I am speaking on behalf of the CRA board in this role, and we do strongly support the proposal as made by Rob O'Keefe, and looking forward to getting more facts that back up our perceptions throughout the visitor activities and surrounding impacts on our city. and we look forward to having that be a stronger basis for the decisions that you will need to be making, the hard ones, the difficult ones, in the years to come. So please indeed support this funding activity so we can get to that greater level of transparency and put more facts in front of all of us to understand that aspect of our community and that we are indeed not an anti-tourism community. We are not an anti-business community. And we are very much in partnership with one another to help preserve and protect what this village brings to us as residents and more. Thank you very much.

Thank you. All right, Nova, you want to get the online?

B Jones, go ahead.

My name is B Jones.

We can hear you.

Okay, great. This is actually Lance Anderson on Roslyn's account here. So been by the sea. Thank you for giving me a few minutes here. I won't repeat a lot of what I heard. My point is this. We're absolutely in favor of Sea Monterey and what they do. Any business, any city that wants to have enduring tourism, which is what we all need, has to make an investment in it. We all need to do that. This town is built on it. There's a fine balance in our economy here between tourism, local residents, and unfortunately, as we become a little bit more of a bedroom community, there's less and less full-time residents here. We kind of joke, if every single resident, all 2,000 that are local, went out for dinner every night, it would not keep all 60 restaurants open. If all 2,000 residents went out and bought a piece of artwork once a year, it wouldn't keep all our galleries open. So we need that balance in order for us to have this vibrant downtown that we do. So I'm 100% in favor. Parking is 100% our issue. That can has been kicked down the road, as we all know. So one needs to pick that can up and solve that problem. But the one thing I'll say, although I am in support of C Monterey, I really do think that If we make this much of an investment in C Monterey as Carmel, 600 some odd thousand from the tax and another 290 investment here, almost a million dollars, we need to see metrics of success. We need to agree on what those metrics of success are before we invest that money every year. And I'd like to see reports mid-year and end of year of what that is so that we can actually see what's happening. Not just this, I think the report's a good idea, the study's a good idea, but every year, what are we trying to achieve? Are we achieving it? What are the demographics that we're reaching? How are we proving those demographics? What's coming to town? And how are we getting our money, a return on our investment? So that's all. I'm just looking for a little bit more metrics on this, but I do believe that the investment is warranted. And thank you for your time. Thank you, Lance.

Victoria Beach, go ahead.

I wanted to echo what the last speaker just said. I thought that was very clear. I agree with everybody probably in the room that thinks that there's a very strong partnership that goes back to the very founding of the town between the residential uh... areas and that downtown businesses that are were originally meant to serve them i'd also agree i think there's a consensus in the room that we need to study uh... the metrics are very important i think there's a little bit of a contradiction though that's been expressed that uh... many many people obviously showed up to talk about the success of the program so far And also seems to be accepted that we don't actually know in what way it's successful or not. And of course we should know. That's what the last speaker said. So my question is, why are we getting offers of metrics right now? Why didn't we have them all along? And why, as the last speaker just said, why would we pay into the system before knowing exactly the answers to these questions. So I would hope that you all would take them up on their offer to study. I would have hoped they would have been studying it up to this point in the same rigorous way that they're proposing doing it. And I would recommend just holding off until we know the results of those so we know exactly how we're spending our money and hopefully we'll spend it exactly the way it will optimize the downtown business, the health of the downtown businesses. Thanks so much.

Thank you.

Stacey Steele, go ahead.

Sorry. There?

We can hear you. We can hear you, Stacey.

Okay, great. So, you know, I had... You started out with a slide. The staff member started out with a slide that said, should we not approve the budget or should we adjust the budget? And at first, I was like, don't approve, don't approve, don't approve. But after listening to everyone, I have changed my mind. I've made a lot of notes, but... I do know, you know, what happened at Newport Beach on July the 4th. We know that all it took was one TikTok on social media to get them all there. So, you know, they weren't even overnight beer, ice, you know, they weren't even day trippers. They were, you know, you know what, they were, but... Not good for that community, not good for ours. But my point is the social media, I've heard the phrase 20 years, for the past 20 years, for the past 20 years. I've heard that several times today by several people. And, you know, since COVID, social media has put us in a new world. And so really, I think adjusting the budget, maybe before when we sent out magazines and had all the mailing and the stamps and the postage, of course, all of that. I can see maybe a million dollars, but with social media, it really only takes one reel to get, you know, 100 million views now. And I would really love to see you adjust the budget. I appreciate how every business owner did say that the Monterey Cares has – or Monterey – Sea Monterey, excuse me, has really – have kept their, you know, they've just respected our town. And you can see over 20 years how that has gone. It's stayed the same. But within the past, let's say, five years, things have changed. And I'll be totally on board with whatever you say, just like Cindy Lloyd had the flags in the median, those signs that were put up on the redwood boxes on San Carlos Street, Lincoln Street, Dolores Street, that we've always picked our caramel pine cone from. They have hand-carved, colorful, five different colors, signs that say, Love Carmel Like a Local. That's totally against our sign ordinance. It's not even compliant to put up a sign that says, love like a local. I don't know who approved it. I've been to city. Actually, nobody approved it. It was done during COVID. Nobody's taking ownership. Actually, I did find out at the end. I believe Visit Carmel's, I know they've made up the slogan. It was an ad campaign. But to put that up in the city for the residents to have to look at every single day, every day. sometimes 10 times a day. We have to see love Carmel like a local. That is not Carmel by the sea. It never has been, it never will be. And I just beg you, take those signs down, continue giving money, but just don't let our town change like it has in the past five years and continue to change. Thank you.

Thank you, Stacey. Thanks for speaking. All right. I think we're finished. One last chance if anybody wants to raise up their hand and come on up. All right, thank you. Thank you to everybody who spoke tonight. I was keeping score there. It was 15 to 1 in favor of it in case, because there were so many speakers. Before we bring it back for a discussion, we got a lot of letters this time. And I know that a lot of you don't get online and have access to the agendas and find the letters like we do. And I can almost guarantee you that we read every single one of them almost real time as they come in. And thank you. I just wanted to give you a little bit of a breakdown on where there were 13 letters at the last count. They were really well done. Some of them were extensive. And it was really a cross-section. There were inn managers, hospitality operators, a former council member, restaurant-owning family who were also residents, faculty and students from Cal State Monterey Bay's tourism program, and a number of residents who were simply writing in as residents. There were a few themes and I could go through that, but it was pretty consistent with what we heard here tonight, so I'm not gonna take the time to do it. But if you had those 13, we basically have, and I'm not trying to lobby for this, but there were 28 to one in terms of favor and not being in favor. So it's sort of a unique thing that I haven't seen before on any issue. So now I'm gonna bring it back for discussion. Anybody wanna kick it off? Okay, go ahead.

I'll go. I kind of started this thing. Thank you for not lobbying, Dale. So the punchline for me is I'm supportive of funding see Monterey and at the full amount that was requested. So the question is why didn't I do that a month ago? Nancy Toomey sent us a letter sort of chastising us to not make a decision with a lack of data and a lack of information because doing so could be myopic and that's exactly how I felt a month ago that I was being asked to make a decision with a lack of information. I didn't have enough information to make a decision for or against. We just didn't have a full accounting and a full understanding and a full conversation And I know the proponents of our marketing organizations, you guys think you're always making your point, but you've probably made it so many times that maybe you didn't make it. Or you made it to somebody else and you didn't make it to us at the right time. Or maybe I missed it. Rob, I thought your presentation was very helpful today. After a month ago when I know I led the charge to at least pause this. I actually think it was Jeff's idea to approve the budget and bring this back. I thought it was a good idea. I'm glad we spent the month. I know it's maddening to many of you, but I'm personally a heck of a lot better educated on the topic than I was, and I need to be. That's my job. Before we spend money, I need to understand what we're doing with it. Rob, I And I appreciate, you know, almost the next day after the last meeting, I had a call from Janine and from Rob. And I met with Janine. I met with Rob and Janine. And I was just, I was really kind of encouraged by the tone of the dialogue and really starting out with, yeah, we probably do have a problem. We just don't know what it is or what's causing it. We all have speculation. I mean, I'm speculating that the town is more crowded. I don't know it's more crowded. But, you know, A lot of people tell me that it is, and it sure feels like it is to me. And it's not just summer and a few weekends. It just seems like it's a lot more. But that's anecdotal. And that gets to the need for some more data. I thought all the letters in conversation we've had, especially the letters, and this is typical for a marketing conversation, the conversation is rich with words. but a little lacking in data and metrics. And really that's what I'm hoping we're on the road to here is just a better way to help really a novice, like we're not marketers up here, to connect the dots of what's the return on investment for marketing. And it can't be impressions and click-throughs and marketing talk. It's heads in beds, expansion of our airline capacity, and people sitting in those seats. Those are the things I think, and again, you tell me, but I think that's what I'm most interested in. The data I have is really limited, and on the good side, It's absolutely clear that this is a tourist economy. There's no doubt about that. I'm looking at the business people in the room. Your customers support at least 60% of our budget, and you could easily argue that up to 80. Because I'm your customer, right? So it's not just people that are visiting. And without that economy, We don't have a government anywhere near the capacity that we have today. So I've never doubted that or the importance of it. And I'm certainly not trying to, Kerry, disrupt that. I'm disruptive sometimes because I just want to ask questions and get answers. And I'm just not automatically accepting of the status quo. So that's the good side, but the other piece of data that I have is that, Rob, you're spending $18 million a year on marketing, and Carmel is at $2 million. That's $20 million a year we're spending on marketing, and all of us say the same thing. It's about getting the overnight guest, that that is the guest that has the most economic benefit to your businesses and to the city, but also is the least disruptive to the residents. And so we want more of that. And yet we're spending $20 million a year and our occupancy is unchanged. And so I just have to ask the question, why? So you have If you subsidize something, you get more of it, or at least that's what economics suggests is true, that by spending money on something, you influence behaviors. And so I would like us to be subsidizing a program that is making sure we're getting more heads in beds. So my expectation is that occupancy will be going up. I understand rates are going up, and that's great. But there's a disconnect to me. to the fact that occupancy is not going up in our town. And I don't know if it's going up in the other towns. And if it is and ours isn't, those are some other questions. I thought, Cindy, you actually had the best idea. If we could get name tags for everybody that say why they're here, and if they're here as an overnight guest because they saw one of your ads, that'd be great. And if we can get more of them on the street. I know we can't get there, but we need to start doing the analysis of it. So Rob, thank you for coming forward with what I think is an interesting study. I think we need to have a lot more data. People have talked a lot about metrics. I think we do need more metrics. I would like, I don't know what they are. So that's the hard part. You can ask me and I'll tell you what I think. But like Laura Bowling said, I got to believe there's a standard set of metrics that we would benefit from hearing. So I'll leave it at that. I'm supportive of funding CMONRAE.

Thank you. Well done. Alessandra, you want to go next?

Thank you, Mayor. As you mentioned just a few minutes ago that we did get passionate arguments, lots and lots and lots of letters, so I just want to extract two different just small snippets from two different sides that we got. One of them fairly recently was from a very longtime local resident and business owner, and he titled it, Save Our City. I've seen what has happened and what is happening to our city. Our city is being overrun. Our city has turned into Disneyland by the sea. Social media is ruining our city. I see young people pouring into Carmel mostly on the weekends walking around with their iPhones and coffee. We need less people visiting our city, not more. Please do not spend one more dime on advertising that would bring more traffic to our city. And on the other side of the argument, a longtime member of the hotel community wrote to us, Carmel does not have a marketing problem. It has a tourism management problem. Visitation is driven by social media, influencers, and user-generated content. See Monterey has offered to partner with the city to better understand today's visitor patterns and commission professional tourism management analysis. This is the type of partnership with regional collaboration to develop thoughtful tourism. So two things that I feel I strongly disagree with is the attitude to be more competitive, we need to spend more, and this feeling that we're being outspent by competing markets. So I urge you to actually spend more wisely. And second of all, I also urge you to stop advertising in the San Francisco Bay Area. I hear from second homeowners who live in San Francisco and they see television ads advertising Carmel. According to the 80-20 rule that Rob talked about, if 80% of the budget from Sea Monterey goes to airport markets, 20% still goes to the Bay Area. And Bob said the latest figures were $18 million in the budget. That's $3.6 million to advertise in the San Francisco Bay Area. Number three, social media is hurting us. It's hurting the Monterey Peninsula, the state, the country, and the world. You hear about In Europe, they're experiencing this too. Overtourism is real. There are books and articles on it going years back. This is not just something that's developed over the past year. It is impacting the residents' quality of life, and this is primarily a residential community as we have Ordinance 96 behind us on the dais. However, we are partners with Sea Monterey and the tourism groups, and we must maintain the partnership, but we must adapt. And it's essential that we implement tourism management. So to be fair to our business community, I will support giving C. Monterey the full money. We did get your attention, and I sincerely hope that you follow through on the visitor management, the analysis, the action, what we've heard. We need metrics of success, measurements, so we can see that we're getting a return on our investment.

Thank you. Well said. Hans, you want to go next?

Yeah. You know, I think, as everyone said, we've been receiving a lot of communication from residents about over tourism. And I think what's notable to me is that it's not a coordinated campaign. You can tell when you get a coordinated campaign. but this has been sort of like an organic upwelling of frustration. The emails come in at random times, sometimes not connected to the timing of a council meeting. And I think there's this sense that in the past few years that something has changed and that the volume of visitors and cars has risen to the point where it's degrading the quality of life for the people who live here. And to Bob's point, I don't have the data yet, but I feel it too, and I think it's real. At the same time, hotel occupancy, as has been mentioned, has been flat in recent years. So what does that mean? It means that all of these additional people floating around are, by definition, they're day trippers, because hotel occupancy has been flat. And so there's a lot of things driving that, as has been mentioned, social media, a rising stock market, and yes, some of the additional marketing. But if C. Monterey's funding has held steady for the past 20 years, I just think you're hard pressed to make the argument that the change in recent years is due to C. Monterey. So it's also the case, as has been mentioned, that 80% of this money is going to fly-in visitors. I think Alessandra makes a fantastic point about the fact that that still means a fair amount of money is going to Bay Area marketing, which is worth discussing. But the fly-in visitors, the international visitors, these are the kind of visitors that I think it does make sense to market to. They come and they spend multiple nights. They splurge at restaurants. They buy art. So I understand the urge to cut the funding. I really do. But if the goal is to reduce congestion and overcrowding, A, I don't think that cutting this funding is really going to help with that. And then B, The few people that you will lose are potentially some of our most desirable visitors who contribute the most tax revenue with the smallest footprint. So I share the concerns about over-tourism and over-exposure, and I share the desire to be more restrained with our marketing. But if I was going to cut marketing funding, this isn't the funding that I would... And then I think we've actually had a really interesting discussion here. This is one of those situations where I think the public comment was actually very illuminating. I thought that Laura had some great comments. To piggyback on that, I've been talking a lot about metrics and accountability for city processes and city staff. I think the same thing applies if we're going to make a $300,000 investment as a city, which is almost 1% of our budget. So I think that we should potentially consider making an ad hoc. So I think it would be great to develop a report card with metrics that we as a council care about. Let's not have somebody else make the metrics for us, but let's lean in and say, hey, what are the things that we want to know so that next year when this comes around, we feel confident? And so I... I would love to have some council involvement with this study, not just community groups, but the same level of engagement that we would have if we were commissioning a $100,000 study ourselves, because it's basically what we're doing. And so that's just a thought. I think it's a good thought.

Jeff, you're up.

Thank you. It feels a little bit to me like we're having two different conversations. And I appreciate it, Rob. Thank you for coming and for your comments and for your presentation. You know, Rob talked a lot about the fly market versus the drive market and how they market and what. But I think to me the problem is that You know, we have, let's say without Sea Monterey, the town is making up this number, 85% of capacity. And we don't get any money from those 85% of the people. And then Sea Monterey comes in and they market to the right people. You know, and right, that is not my definition of right. It's everyone else's definition of right. People that bring money in. And the capacity of the town goes from 85% to 95%. And all of a sudden we have a significant problem. You know, so the problem is the marginal person that comes in. The problem is not that the person necessarily flew in or drove in or walked in or took the bus in or however. The problem is that the person arrived. And I realize that that's not C. Monterey's problem. I realize that that is sort of maybe, you know, as Sandra was talking about, maybe it's a social media problem. Maybe it's an influencer problem, however it is. But I don't view the problem as, I don't view the problem that we're having as we're not attracting the right people. The problem is simply that there are too many people, I think. And Lance Anderson got up, Lance, thank you for coming, and talked about the 70 restaurants in town. And when we bought our house here in 2005 and I moved here in 2011, there were probably 50 restaurants in town. when we have this discussion about marketing, now the council or the government is responsible for the health of 70 restaurant businesses versus 50 restaurant businesses. And it feels to me like the restaurant, and it feels to me like the machine, not the individuals that run the restaurants, but that the restaurant machine or the business machine is consuming Carmel. When I hear 70 restaurants, that's what I think of. We all of a sudden have a constituency that we are responsible for that 10 or 15 years ago we did not have. And now it's our responsibility to keep a bigger machine fed So we're having a conversation about feeding a big machine rather than feeding a medium-sized machine. And that seems wrong to me. We should be having a conversation about what we think about the machine and whether the machine is the right size, whether the dog that we bought is too big and we can't afford the dog food. And instead, we're having a conversation about how to feed this gigantic dog. And I have, that to me doesn't feel like, Alessandra spoke about Ordinance 96, and that to me feels like we are betraying Ordinance 96. And I have a pretty significant problem. As a 20-year resident, I have a pretty significant problem with that. The next thing is there's a lot of talk about hotel occupancy and whether the hotel occupancy is the right metric. But I completely disagree with that. If we're going to talk about money, and I don't, and this is other people's inventions, not mine, if we're going to talk about money, then the number we should be talking about is TOT. not hotel occupancy. We could get to 100% hotel occupancy by having all of the hotels slash their room rates by 50%. To be clear, we could easily get to 100% occupancy by having hotels slash their room rates, and yet we would be worse off. So I do not at all buy into the argument that hotel occupancy is a metric, is a valid metric for where we should be. The valid metric, as far as I can tell, is some combination is basically built on TOT maybe with some modifications. It is not related to 100% hotel occupancy. I talked about the machine. We talk a lot about metrics, and I spoke sort of off the cuff last month, and I talked about my metric, how I judge how busy Carmel is, is whether or not I can cross ocean on Camino Real without having four cars parked on either side of the street in both directions? Is it safe for me to cross Camino Real? Is it safe for me to cross Ocean on the street on which I live? And I think that the problem with these metrics, which I'm not sure are measurable at all, is that everyone that lives in Carmel has a different lived experience of Carmel. You know, I see Tasha Witt, who lives near Alessandro, sort of down near the beach. And the experience of being down there and the congestion, the parking congestion down there, is different than how I feel. Like, they don't ever cross ocean. At least, Tasha's never visited my house, so maybe she hasn't crossed ocean. And my fault for not inviting you. Apologies for that. But everyone has a different lived experience. You know, there are people that live near there. There are people that live near the Forest Theater and have a very different lived experience than I do. People that suffer, people that walk down Mountain View and see all the cars, you know, which, you know, all the cars parked on Mountain View, which turns Mountain View into a direct route. to get the preserve from downtown, but maybe a dangerous route to get from the preserve to downtown because there's not very much room to walk. And the problem with metrics or the problem with going down the metric rabbit hole, the metric rat hole, is that everybody has a different view. And it's going to be difficult to establish a set of metrics to decide, like, You know, we're establishing, we're going to try to decide to devise a set of metrics to decide whether our marketing money is working or not when an easier solution is to just have fewer people in town. And I don't, admittedly, I don't know how to get there or to manage the congestion. Those are pretty different, pretty different things. And to, you know, to... to the visitor management experience. I see Amy licking me. Hi, Amy. With respect, I'm not going to trust Amy to manage all the visitors that she brings into town. First, I think that is a conflict of interest. I think that there is a conflict of interest between having the people that bring people into town, having them also manage the people that they come into town. That should be someone else. And I also don't think that that's where Amy's expertise lies. If part of managing the visitor experience in town is managing parking, which has come up, which I've been talking about for years, and if part of managing the visitor experience is managing parking, honestly, I don't want Amy to do that. I want to have a traffic engineer do that, someone who has experience dealing with parking. And so I also reject the notion that that we should give money to see Monterey and have them turn around and help us manage the visitor experience. I think there's a conflict there, and I think that there's a problem. And finally, a little bit of a gripe. I'm a little bit torn, as if that wasn't gripey enough. I'm a little bit torn because we have met significant resistance to the TOT. You know, there's been a lot of resistance from the hotel community to the TOT, and there's a lot of resistance from the hotel community to this, not just for, I don't know, I mean, the business community to this. And it feels a little bit like, you know, we have a problem, and we're trying to address it. You know, raising the TOT is a way to raise money to... to put some money into being able to better manage the tourists in town, sorry, the people in town, better manage the town. And yet we're feeling all this resistance from one part of our community who is playing a significant part in bringing all those people to town. And so that's a little bit of a gripe on my part. You know, it's resistance here, resistance there, resistance everywhere. And that feels bad. We should have a good relationship. I agree. We should have a good relationship with the business community and the hotel community. And everyone on the dais is right when they talk about how we are a tourist town. I get that. And I agree with that. And we should have a good relationship. But the relationship needs to come from both sides. And frankly, I'm not sure that either side is really doing a very good job of sort of being honest and managing the relationship and understanding how we all sort of fit into the sort of what's the Carmel machine. And finally, I'll go back to that machine feeling again. My husband, Kevin, described Carmel 15 years ago as sort of a money machine, where there's a lot of money flowing down the river, and everybody has their hand out, and everybody wants to take a little bit of the money that comes into town. And when we talk about visitors being sources of money, when we talk about all this talk about money reinforces you know, reinforces Kevin's view that, you know, that Carmel is just a river of money. And, and I hate that, you know, Carmel, you know, this is Carmel ordinance 96. Carmel is a community of 3000 people now 3000 people with a business community that, you know, we all like every one of the 3000 of us that lives here knows what we buy into when we, when we buy or when we rent a house here. But, but, you know, The population loss that Hans talks about a lot, the feeling of Ordinance 96 sort of disappearing, the fact that Carmel is sort of this money machine and now we have a responsibility to the people that generate money or our property values or whatever it is, anything that has anything to do with money, really leaves kind of a sad taste in my mouth. And it feels like, and I see Cindy, who's lived here probably longer than any of us, I see Cindy nodding her head. And it's really sad to me that that is the view. That's now how we look at our community, as who can we get to be here that brings in a lot of money, as opposed to the family that lives in Soledad that gets to go to the beach once a year. Those people, and I hate that I said that, people that come to Carmel Beach, probably one of the nicest beaches on the West Coast, they deserve to be here. This is a public beach, and it's open to everybody, day trippers and everybody else. And I hope that we find a way through all of this, through all this marketing stuff and whatever it is that we talk about money, to accommodate people you know, day trippers.

Thank you. Thank you. Wow, that was a lot of good comments. Really amazing. Jeff, you just made a good case for having business development function somehow in our city, and I've been saying that for a year now. It's sort of the other side of the equation. I think my speech at the C. Monterey annual meeting and my speech at the Visit Carmel Annual Meeting sort of spoke to that. You're doing your job. We need to do ours. And we also need to understand what we want. You know, the reason we got 70 restaurants is our planning department can approve them because that's what our ordinances allow us to do. Same thing with ADUs. I mean, we've got the same sort of problem is piling up, but that's not the subject we're here for. I'm very interested in the city's participation in your proposal, should this pass. I think Hans brought up a really good point. I think we need to have a discussion up here about how we're going to be involved in that. There are different ways we can do it. But it's a start. We need to start doing something professionally because we haven't been able to do it ourselves. And it would have been nice if we'd done it five years ago and ten years ago, but we've got to start now. So I think it's pretty clear what's going to happen next when we vote, and I think it's time for a motion. The motion is to... Adopt Resolution 2026052, amending the fiscal year 2026-2027 adopted operating budget. And I think within that, there are blanks in there that we need to fill in. I'm proposing that we fully fund it with the 3% that's proposed because we don't really know what that number is going to be, right? It's going to be what it is, but it's approximately $290,000. Is that, could you tell us exactly what we need to vote on?

We do know exactly what the number would be if we go off the, typically what we have done and other cities don't do, but what we do is we use our projected. Okay. And so we have the number at the beginning of the year. Okay, can you fill the blank in for us? Jamie, do you want to come up and guide us so we adopt the right resolution? Maybe Nova can put it back up on the screen. I believe it was in Jamie's presentation. After that, we'll have a motion to adopt that one.

I rounded everywhere. 293,000 and change was the amount in the budget previously. If you want to be safe, you could do 294,000.

Would we need the actual amount, please? Yeah, if you could.

Okay, we'll have to look for it.

We need to fill in those blanks. Could you bring it up?

The presentation, I believe, has the amount of money, right, Jamie?

No.

It doesn't? Okay, can you get the number for me, please? Thank you. There you go. I do believe it shows up in the staff report.

The number is 292,947. 292 or 93? 292,947. Even. Okay. And were there any other fill in the blanks on that resolution?

That's it.

Okay. So do you want to tell us what you want us to approve, make a motion right now?

Exactly. We would ask that you make the motion. I know we'll make the motion, but tell us how do you want us to word it before we make that motion?

I think we're just looking for someone to make a motion to amend the budget to if what council wants to do is to fully fund it to insert $292,947 back into the approved budget for fiscal year 26-27.

So Mayor, the motion would be to adopt Resolution 2026052 with the dollar amount just mentioned.

292,947. All right. Anybody want to make that motion?

Well, the question I had was, so I would support that part of the motion. As part of the motion, how do we feel about potentially appointing a couple council members to work with C. Monterrey on developing some kind of annual report card with some metrics and leaning in to help shape this $100,000 analysis. Are you talking about an ad hoc committee?

How do you feel about that, Bob? I would sort of like to see how that takes shape before we do that.

That's kind of where I'm at, Hans. I just... I'd rather see I don't know maybe you've got the knowledge I don't and I was the chairman of a tourism board for five years so I mean I've got some sense of what that group tried to measure but and I know we've had this before sometimes I would rather react to what comes at me and I think you like to kind of control what comes at you In this case, I think I would rather react to what comes at us. I mean, I think, Rob, I think what you're hearing is that whatever your process is, to somehow figure out how to engage us, and that might be individually or two at a time, or you get on a city council meeting. Honest to said.

I'm not excited to get another ad hoc committee going right now.

Yeah, I'll connect with you on it, Rob. We can do something informally.

All right, so let's just try to do a clean resolution here, if you want to make that resolution.

Brian, I make the motion that you just suggested be made.

To adopt resolution 2026-052 with a dollar amount of

whether it was 292,947. 292,947. Yes, that's my motion. Do we have a second?

Don't look at me. All right, I'll make a second. Further discussion? No. Roll call, please.

Council Member Barron?

No.

Council Member Booter?

Yes.

Mayor Pro Tem Delves?

Yes.

Council Member Jamoff? Yes. Mayor Byrne?

Yes.

Motion carries 4-1.

All right. Thank you, everybody, for that robust discussion. And we appreciate your presence here tonight. We're now going to be going into closed session. Will the city attorney please read us into closed session?

Mayor, we have one more item. You guys really don't want to do this item.

I've been staying up late taking care of Margaret.

I'm sorry. I think perhaps a short break, though, Mayor.

Is that what it was?

I would love to take a... Okay, 10-minute break, sir. Okay, so 5.50, Nova. Yeah.

Hey, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. We had this appeal. Okay, so we never came up.

NOVA, ARE YOU READY?

YEAH, WE'RE READY.

WE'RE GOING TO GET STARTED WITH OUR ITEM 12. presentation on the updated council strategic priorities list following the January 22nd workshop. It's been a long time since then, but a short five months, sir. I tried to skip it one more time, but I failed. Yeah, you really did. So let's actually do it tonight.

All right. So Nova's going to put the Excel worksheet up on the screen. And while she's doing that, just a really quick refresher. So if you remember a short five months ago in January, we went through an updated version, an updated process, a revised process rather of for our strategic priorities together. And then we came back to you in February, and that was our first conversation about the list as we took it away from that meeting. So we came to you with a list that was marked up. It had yellow highlights that showed where the title of an item had changed. It had green highlights where council had added an item. We had red highlights where things were removed from the list. that's what we went through. So we went line by line and what we were trying to get from you then and we're trying to get from you tonight is what priority level, one, two, or three, does an item carry for you in this list? And as we go along, if there's additional changes we need to make to the language or as Councilmember Booter teed up already earlier in the item, as we're going through the last two sections of this list, if there's something that we feel we want to add to this list or council feels you want to add to your list, then we can certainly do that along the way. The idea is let's get through the whole list tonight. Let's get it completely caught up, these last two sections. And then what we can do as staff is we can start coming to you on a regular basis for the updates. Because as certainly as you're going through this list, as you looked at the previous sections, some of this stuff is already complete. And so this list doesn't show that yet because we haven't even really finished the exercise of going through and putting priority levels next to everything. And you guys signing off on the changes coming out of that January workshop five short months ago. So any questions on that? Everybody's good with what we're doing? And what we did, actually, I watched the video because it had been a little while. What we did at the last workshop that got us going pretty well with some steam is we would open the blue sections. So we're going to start with P-4-1, which is design review, the blue language. And we opened up that section, which has four goals underneath it. We opened up that section for public comment first, and then we went through as a group, the five of you plus myself, and worked through each of four of those. So Mayor, with your permission, I suggest we open up public comment on P-4.1. see if any members of the community have any feedback or thoughts on the level of priority for any of these four goals under that policy.

Go ahead. Okay.

Is anyone from the community? Nova, can you zoom in a little bit on P4.1? So bottom right-hand corner, there's a slider bar. There you go.

You got it. There you go. Perfect.

Okay, so 4.1 is the header of design review. We've got adopt updated design guidelines and zoning code. That's the design traditions project. We've got certifying the LCP amendment for updated design guidelines and the zoning code. That's sort of step two. We've got reinstating the design review board and we've got completing objective design and development standards for affordable units, the odds program. So is there anyone from the public that wants to make any comments or Nancy's making her way up. Thanks, Nancy.

Okay.

There you go.

Very good. Okay, my only comment and as a personal opinion is reinstating the design review board to me should not be on the table or on a timeline until we have had some period of time with the design traditions packet in place and being implemented. Because part of the kind of ancillary objectives from my exposure on design traditions was to achieve a faster approval process for projects coming through the queue. And if that happens, then some of the need, because there has been clarifications in the design traditions document as it gets finalized, will expedite the quantity and quality of projects that come before the planning commission and the planning desk. So that's just my opinion on how that should be queued up. And I noticed that that does not have a date on it yet. And my recommendation is that that stay pushed out to a future fiscal year. Thank you.

Are you only gonna talk about P4.1 and 4.2? I wanted to talk about paving and sidewalks.

We're gonna start with P, so we've already finished that. That was from the last meeting. The idea was we're going forward from P4.1 to get to the end of this document because what we need from council is for them to give us their priority level on these. So we went through those and... what we have from streets and sidewalks was.

Maintenance and village character?

Yeah, so what I believe Council Member Booter will be bringing up in a little bit is an item that sort of dovetails with that under design character, but the streets and sidewalk items, street and sidewalks item, we've already completed and they gave us their priority numbers on that, which was a two for 3.5.1 and a one for 3.5.3.

Okay, I'll just make a one minute general comment then. I just wanted to emphasize, we just heard about pretty much like selling our town, and I am really emphasizing the maintenance of our town. As far as reducing congestion, the only thing I could think of for that is a pedestrian town, but we're way off from that. But it would be beneficial to the residents and the tourists alike and the businesses to spend some time actually planning. We have eight sidewalks to repair. And putting some time into the design so it's cohesive and not this patchwork, asphalt, bricks, and pavers with no plan as well as the landscaping. So it really has a cohesive look. And I don't think we've had any planning on that. So that's all I wanted to say. Thanks.

Anyone else from the public know? Was anyone online?

Yeah, a hand just raised. Victoria Beach, go ahead.

Hi there. All of you are very familiar with the latest developments with design traditions, so I don't want to go into that. But one of the things, as you well know, is the fire mitigation aspect of the design guidelines. And we're working very hard to integrate that into the documents, and so much has changed since we began that project. However, I know you're probably not going backwards below P4 level, but I just want to point out that there have been even further developments since the wildfire mitigation and prevention things have been discussed, and we really need to have, and the group has already assigned folks from the group that's working on the design traditions, to investigate further the exact parameters that apply to Carmel when it comes to wildfire management so that we don't make the mistake of integrating the wrong, potentially unsafe guidelines, or not guidelines, but rules for mitigation into the guidelines. So I don't know how that... deals with priorities, but I thought I just wanted you guys to have that in your desk so that you know that when you're setting priorities that that one is dependent, like the completion of the design tradition is dependent on answering that question and figuring that part out. And so I'm not sure where that puts us in the queue, but I just wanted to raise it for you. Thanks so much.

Thanks, Victoria. Anyone else know about that?

There's no more hands raised.

Okay, great. Well, then let's go ahead and bring it back to you, Council. We've got four items up for discussion. What I'm looking for is the priority level, and if we're missing anything or if the language is incorrect or inaccurate or anything like that. So looking for anyone who wants to start, I can call on somebody. Okay, Council Member Delves.

Call, pick me. 1.1.1. Four years ago, I would have given it a three, but today I give it a one because we've got to get it finished. And progress is good on that. Certify the LCP amendment. I think that's also a one. Reinstate the design review board as a three for me or remove it. I don't think we need one. And complete objective design standards. Again, I think it's a one because it's in process and we just better finish it.

Thank you. Council Member Barron. On the first two, I'm with Bob. On the third one, this is my baby, and I would ask the council's indulgence to leave it on. I don't care if it's a, I realize that it's a long-term project, but my thinking here has always been that the planning commission does design review and they don't do any planning. Hence, we don't have objective design and development standards for affordable units. There's a whole list of things the planning commission could be doing instead of design review. So I would ask, I'm okay with everything as long as, As long as whatever 4.1.3 stays on there with whatever priority level three would be fine. Thank you.

Should it be on there? We need some guidance on this. Sure. Should it be on there if it's like two years from now?

If it's two years, I think so. I mean, these are long-term. It's okay. Yeah, and it stays at a three. Remember, so just to clarify this, one is we're actively working on it. This is like a forefront of our work plan right now. Two is we work on it when we can find time for it. And three is basically, you know, don't touch it unless you have absolutely nothing to do, which as we all know,

as impossible. I agree with Bob in terms of what he said, but I would be more than willing to listen to Jeff and how he thinks that could help make the planning commission do some planning. So if it's three, I just don't see it happening quickly. And it's a lot of resource to do it. Thank you. That's the big concern.

And just to be clear, I mean, we talked about this last time. This is not meant to be a one-way conversation between me and each of the five of you. Feel free to unmute and dive in. This is meant to be the five of you giving direction. So I'll continue to just go around, but don't feel like you're not allowed to.

I will. Just, Jeff, if we could ever get a city council that would relinquish enough control to the Planning Commission to do more planning, that would be a good thing. And to do that, you would need a design review board. So I see a world where that works. I just don't think we're in that world right now, including this council. I don't see us.

I think we could, you know, I think the world is our oyster. I mean, I think we can make the world that we want, you know, and we'll talk about this Councilmember, will you speak a little bit into more of the macro ideas? I think we can make, I think we should have goals above all this to make the world that we want and try to get the city to work better. And sometimes that requires discipline that maybe I don't have, maybe some of us don't have. But I think we should strive for that. We should strive for a better planet. I can't argue with that.

Councilmember Booter?

So I would, yeah, I'd put a one on 4.1.1. I am still a fan of collapsing these Coastal Commission ones into the main. I just think it clutters this thing up. And then on odds, I have half a mind to, break it apart into ADU odds and say that that's a one and maybe the commercial odds would be lower, but I guess we've already signed a contract with them. So it's sort of the train is moving at whatever speed it's going to move out. So I'll retract that. Yeah, the designer review board, it's interesting. I almost wish we could sort of agendize a conversation about it. I'm just a little, I guess if we put something on the priority list, technically, you could start working on it, right? So is it basically a council endorsement to do it?

It's a council endorsement. So the three means that basically we're not, the staff isn't going to spend any time on it unless we really have a need to find more work to do. Two is sort of like getting to it when we can, like when we know we need to be working on it, we need to have some movement forward on it. And number one is like, that's what you're working on. I guess where I'm at on it is like, I would love to have a discussion about it. So I would be totally supportive of that.

I'm not quite there yet that I know that that's the direction that we want to go in or that we want to go in that direction at this point. But so I think I'll go with the flow on this one. Thanks. Council Member Draymov.

For point one, I'm a one. For point two, I'm a two. Point three, I'm with Bob, sort of a no dash one. three level, and for 0.4, a two.

Okay, that was all very helpful. So if I'm just looking at these as an average, I have 4.1.1 as a one, 4.1.2 as a one, four of you had a one, one of you had a two, 4.1.3 as a three, all of you have that basically. And 4.1.4 I have as a one just when I'm taking four ones and a two.

I have a question. Please. If I change my vote on a 4.1.3 to a one, can I up the priority level to a two single-handedly? That's hardly a jest. We've had this discussion before. You could not. Four threes and a two. So I want to make sure that this is not just a strict average sort of mechanism.

The reason I'm throwing that back at all of you, the reason I'm throwing that all back at you is that that's what we're going to put in there. And so we just did it. And if you guys want to then, if the council then, sorry, you guys, if the council would then like to sort of debate how these fell and say, you know, whatever, we don't like it this way, then please tell us right now. But this is what I took away from that conversation before we move on to the next one.

Thank you, Council Member Barron for your thoughtful question.

All right. Hearing nothing, I'm gonna move on to P4.2 then. So just like we did with the last one, we're going to open this up for public comments first. One of the things to note on this one, you'll see that the title, the blue title, is highlighted yellow. What this means is that in the workshop back in January, the original title was Attract New Full-Time Residents. We crafted some language and came up with housing policy and community sustainability for the larger category. And this has five items underneath it, 4.2.1 through 4.2.5. The first one is adopting an ADU ordinance. And then certifying that ordinance, as Councilmember Booter said, he's interested in collapsing items like that where you have a city council and a coastal commission action. Then we have adopting the housing element amendment to move units from the city lots. And then we've got the certification of the housing element by the city, by the state. Again, two items, two steps in the same item. And then we've got researching policy options in response to accelerating population loss and loss of families with children. And then the last one that's green, when it's green, that means that it was added by city council at the workshop, and that was implementing the city's sixth cycle housing element. We just added that as a specific priority. Remember, we have the full list of all the housing element policies to implement later in the document. We're not going to go through those, but the council said for all of our documents, all of our policies, we should have an item on there that very specifically states it is a priority. So that was the addition of this. So with that, I'm going to ask if there's anyone in the audience that would like to come up and comment on any of the title changes, additions, items themselves specifically. Once, twice, three times. I'm not seeing anybody. Nova, anybody online? Okay, no hands. Oh, here we go. We got a customer.

Maria, go ahead. Your customer is Maria Bruce. Hello, everybody. Just a couple of items from this one. I totally agree that maybe the ADU ordinance ought to be collapsed with the certify the LCP amendment as one instead of two. I find it a little interesting to say that we are adopting, my comment here would be the amendments to move the units from the city lots for the housing element amendment. I would say that is depending on the housing element amendment. BEING SORT OF CERTIFIED OR APPROVED TOMORROW. SO I WOULD SAY THAT REMOVING THE CITY LOTS TO BE A PRIORITY ONE TO MAYBE NOT CONSIDERED, LIKE NOT CONSIDERED DOING. SO I'M SURPRISED THAT THAT IS LISTED AS AN INDIVIDUAL ITEM. I DON'T THINK THAT SHOULD BE LISTED. THAT'S MY POINT. And implementing and the G42.6, it says implement the city's six cycle housing element. That should be the housing element amendment, if that's the case, because right now we have already an adopted one, unless I'm reading that wrong. So I would say the first ones, the 2.1 is a one. The 2.2 is a one with the same one because those are critical. The other elements seem confusing. The removal of the housing of the city lots should not have a number, should not be listed. And they implement the city, the 2.6 should be cycle housing element. AMENDMENT, AND THAT IS YOUR ONE. THAT WOULD BE MY TAKE ON THAT. DOES THAT MAKE SENSE TO YOU, BRANDON, AS COMMENTS?

I UNDERSTOOD WHAT YOU SAID, THANKS. WHEN WE'RE DONE WITH PUBLIC COMMENTS, I CAN SHARE SOME FEEDBACK ON THAT FOR YOU AND WITH COUNCIL.

FANTASTIC. THANK YOU. APPRECIATE IT.

ANYBODY ELSE ONLINE, NOVA?

YES. VICTORIA BEACH, GO AHEAD.

I AM STILL HERE. Agree with Maria that there's something confusing about the language in 2.3 and 2.4 the housing element amendment Is certainly much more than moving units or much less or however you want to think about it But it is not about that in any particular way. So I would just strike that verbiage I also I guess adopting and I don't know if certifying, if we're talking about the state doing it, is part of our priorities. I mean, they'll do it or they won't do it. We probably don't have much to say about them. So maybe that's all one thing, 2.3 and 2.4. And then, of course, I agree with Maria that it's the housing amendment that... But again, if it's voted on tomorrow, then it will be the element. So it's a little confusing. But I would definitely be more careful about the units moving aspect of 2.3 and 2.4. Thank you.

Thanks, Victoria. Good points. Anyone else online?

No more hands raised online.

Okay. Quick pause in the room to see if anyone's changed their minds. I don't see anybody making a move. So I'll bring it back. Just a couple of points of clarification. I want to note that the reason the language in 4.2 and 4.3 and .4 mentions moving the units from the city lots is because there was a resolution that the city council adopted instructing staff to work on finding alternatives that would remove units from the city lots and amendments. So that's the reason that language is on there is because that is actually in a resolution from the city council. Certainly we can take that language out if council doesn't want that in there, but that's why that was there. And then as far as precision goes, 4.2.6, I do believe that implementing the city six cycle housing element is precise because regardless of how many amendments you do, it is still the city's housing element. So I would not suggest changing that language, but the language about moving units from city lots is certainly up to this council if you want, but that was put in there because it was just in a resolution that started the amendment process. So with that, I'll look to council. Mainly I'm looking, are you okay with the language change for this category, largely the blue lettering there, and then anything you heard, and then of course, please share your priority levels with me. Let's start with council member Dramoff, please.

Thanks, Brandon. I believe I'm all ones except for .5, I have a two. I see the points certainly that Maria and Victoria made. If we feel it's necessary to change those words, I'm fine with that. I also understand why they are the way they are. And if we leave them in, I'm okay with that too.

Are you okay with the title of that category? Oh, yes. Okay. Thank you. Council Member Booter.

So I would give a one to the ADU ordinance. I would collapse and get rid of the certification and collapse that into 4.2.1. I think by the end of tomorrow night, 4.2.3 and 4.2.4 are going to be listed as complete and can come off of this. I guess the certification piece, we can keep on there. But we'll eventually come off. And then... I would on population loss and loss of families with children. I think that's quite important. So I would make that a one and then implement the city six cycle housing element. I agree with you. I think that's the right title for it. And yeah, I would make that a one. The only consideration was whether we wanted to somehow break apart the four core programs versus the rest of it, in which case I could give the rest of the implementation a slightly lower priority, but that might be just too fine-grained for what we're trying to do here. Okay, Mayor?

If everything ends up being a one, this is sort of a moot point. that's the whole point of this, right?

Well, I think actually, you know, in all fairness, like, you know, I did, I did the city administrator draft version of this that came out and, you know, some of these, some of these categories, some of these sections, you know, I, I had as all ones as well because we're already deeply working on them. So like these types of things were so deeply along. So for managing, managing my staff, it, it, I'm okay with them all being ones. We have other areas of this document where they're not ones, so it's okay with me.

I guess one view I had of this is a lot of these are tactical things, and it's really your call, not ours, but I'd let you pick what it should be at this point. If you think they're ones, then they're ones. I would put a two on the research policy options, but... that could also be done by other people besides staff. So then it could become a one. I mean, if Hans can find some people to help him do that, you know, it's important. But I don't have strong opinions on it. I'll trust your judgment. Thank you.

Council Member Delves?

Yeah, both of the ADE would be a point one and point two. If you can collapse them, I'm supportive of that. I would give them both a one, again, because we're working on it and it is important. We'll know tomorrow night whether or not we've adopted the housing element. That's a one. If we adopted certification, it becomes a one. And on loss of families with children, it's a two for me, and that's not because I don't think it's a real problem. It's I just don't know what to do about it, which I know that it's an argument for it being a one, but I got to And then implementing the housing element, I'm actually going to be a two because while I think it's very important that we implement the city's housing element, I'm not hair on fire, get five people working on this thing. We have one full-time person in the planning department who's working on it. I think for her, it's a one. And for the rest of the staff, it's not. So I think we got to be real targeted about how much energy we expand on the housing element. So that's why I would say a two.

Thank you. Council Member Barron. Thank you. I'm a one on number one and number two, and I would really press to leave them separate. I think that while the, while the end goal is having this become part of our municipal code, I think that they're really two reasons. First, I think they're really different processes. You know, One is a vote by us. One is a vote by the Coastal Commission. The second one can take forever. And it's entirely possible that it could bounce back to the city. So I would hate to end up in point two and then re-end up in point one and have it sort of bounce back and forth between these two priorities. The second reason is that I think it gives visibility to where we are in the process. So I think that if we collapse them, there's not on this sheet, there's really, I think this is really important. These two things are really, this ADU ordinance is really important. And I think that it's worth having two lines on here for the visibility. And so someone can look at this and see, understand immediately where we are in the ADU ordinance process. So that's why I would lobby to keep them separate. Three and four are fine. Perhaps three is going to disappear tomorrow. And fourth, I don't care about the wording since it's going to disappear. Five, I would give a one. I'm with Hans. I think this is, you know, sort of an existential problem for the city. And, you know... To quote that awful phrase, I think we can do hard things or we need to try to do hard things. Because to not try to do hard things on this is to abdicate, basically to abdicate the city in the long term. I think this will just result in us not having a city at all. And number six, I'm with a one. I completely agree with what Bob said. But I think the fact that we have one person doing it makes it a one. Like I think that, you know, we have one person, we have one staff member assigned to this job. I think that warrants having something on there be a one.

Okay, thank you. So just reading back through really quickly, Nova, we've got how 4.2.1 is a one. That was all ones. Point two is all ones, we'll do a one. Point three is all ones, we'll do a one. Point four, all ones, we'll do a one. Point five, I've got three twos and two ones. So we'll put a two for now, but I'm going to make them talk to each other about that and make sure we're okay with that. And then point six, we have four ones. So the majority is a one on that one. So two things I'd like to just, three things actually I'd like to come back to on this one. One, I'd appreciate a conversation if council, if you'd indulge me and each other about the notion of collapsing. It sounds like council member Barron as a sort of like a general rule doesn't want to collapse and council member Booter is interested in that I'd love more conversation if you guys can land on that, if we want to apply that to the rest of this document. So that's one thing. And then two, if you can give me a little more conversation on how we want to go with the policy options in response to population loss, if we're okay with the two as a majority. And then I believe Council Member Booter, this was the place where you wanted to have a conversation about adding an item to talk about sidewalk design. So before we leave this section of S4, I'd like to have that conversation as well. So we'll take those maybe in reverse order if you want to start the conversation about adding an item.

Yeah, I think it's, you know, going back to three hours ago, I think it's kind of the same conversation. So take the same points that I made there and just insert them here.

Where? Like, are we still on? We're not on 4.2. still excellent question. So where are we? I thought about, where are we in this document?

So I thought about potentially including them in streets and sidewalks under S3, but I kind of feel like maybe it's better to create like a P4.3 and maybe call it beautification. Um, and so the specific goal that, that I was thinking about, um, was hire a landscape architect to create a plan for downtown sidewalks, tree wells, street furniture, plantings, and beautification upgrades. And so I'm kind of indifferent as to where it goes. I kind of feel like it's more under village character and it didn't fit neatly under P4.1 or P4.2. So...

Can I weigh in before we- Please, do you guys chop this up?

Yeah, I totally support this. It goes back to our discussion when we pulled one of the items from the consent agenda. I think it's worth a little bit of expense to hire someone who is a professional landscape architect to be able to unify the downtown more than the mishmash sort of look that we see in a lot of places because i find that that detracts overall from the town and the whole village character so um if we can you know like things hans mentioned the sidewalk papers the street furniture or the plantings and the tree wells if we can just have a little bit of professional guidance in what we're doing with that clearly we're not trying to make it into one big uniform everything looks the same everywhere with keeping our character just a little bit more um of a unified look, I think, would be helpful. And that certainly helps the downtown. It helps with visitors. It helps with residents. And it just enhances the whole look.

Bob and I are trying to decide who's going to go next. I'll go next. A couple of things. First, I'll say up front, I've said this before, and Hans will laugh when I say this, I like the mishmash character. I think it's informal. I like the informality of it. It doesn't have to be perfect for me. It has to be a little quirky. But that said, I'm perfectly willing to, perfectly happy to sort of go down this road and have that discussion. But I think that having the priority say hire a landscape architect is too far down the road. So I think first there needs to be a discussion about what the design, like first we need to decide what we're after. And I don't think we've really decided that yet. So I think the conversation should be phrased in terms of, and I don't know how to phrase it, like, what's the look and feel we want in downtown? Or how do we beautify the sidewalks, or something like that, without having the process work its way without having the sort of path we haven't really taken yet work its way into this priorities list. So I think this is not the place to make those kinds of decisions, but it is a place to put something on the priority list.

How about, I don't know, streetscape planning? Because I... I was actually struck by this. Actually, I was walking down the street with Hans. Our downtown is eclectic. It is a mishmash. And I get you, Jeff. That's part of what it is. But it's also just not very pretty at times. And I think it could be a lot. Our downtown could be a lot prettier. flags and flowers and color. It's kind of gray and brown and green. And we're lucky for the green part. So if it's going to be a sidewalk plan, I think it should blow under sidewalks. But if it's a streetscape plan, maybe that is a little bit more in village character, but I'm supportive of it as a one.

What about the notion of bring a streetscape plan to council for approval? So it doesn't go down with the specificity that council member Barron's talking about of hiring a landscape architect, but like bring the plan to you guys for streetscape improvements to approve.

I think what you'd wanna probably do, and I was very mindful here to not call this a master plan because I don't think we're creating a downtown master plan. I don't even want to call it a master plan for sidewalks, but it's a plan. But I certainly would think, and I don't want to go overboard on it, like we don't want it to be design traditions and go on for three years, right? But I do think that having like a... I think this is probably the part where, so I would love to have like a community workshop where we hear like sort of like what happened with the library. And I don't know who among you was at the library workshops, but it was one of these where you've got the sticky notes and there's like some just ideas flowing about. you air all of these things, right? And Nancy says, hey, we don't want it to be completely uniform. And Jeff says the same thing. And other people say something else. And you sort of hear from the community about what they're looking for. And so potentially what I would propose is like a community workshop like that that's facilitated in-house. And that might give us an idea about what professional we need to bring on. And so maybe the first step is let's just have a community workshop on this topic, and then we could sort of take it from there.

So perhaps that's your G item. It is host a community workshop to solicit feedback from the community on streetscape planning.

Yeah. I think you need to change the title of this P4.2 if you're going to start putting those kinds of things in here.

Well, I think Council Member Booter suggested a new category in this P4.3, which is...

I'm talking about the blue heading.

Yeah, we called it beautification 4.3.

It's a completely new, like a 4.3. Oh, the whole thing is, okay. That's right. Yeah, okay. Okay. I still, yeah. Sorry. It sounds like... what everybody is talking about is like combining Carmel Plaza with downtown Carmel. Some combination of those two.

And that's exactly what I don't want. I'm not saying I want it.

That's what I'm hearing that we want to do. And it wouldn't be that hard to do that. Go to Carmel Plaza and walk downtown and say, what's the compromise?

We'd have Carmel Plaza and Carmel Plaza.

Well, what I heard was actually to get feedback from the community on what the community wants.

Yeah. And I think also like I would, I asked Bob what he thought. I would like to like, like I'm a little bit reticent to put half community workshop in this thing and, and assign, you know, two or three weeks of work to staff just based on this five minute conversation. Like I would like to bring that out. I would like to say, I'd like to hear what the public thinks about our sidewalks and have at least half an hour discussion in this forum before we go down the road of committing a lot of resources to a community workshop.

What if we put it as a request tomorrow night at the close of the meeting for an upcoming agenda item, and during the agenda item we can discuss if we want to go forward with a community workshop?

I think the problem for me, like, this is not a hill I'm going to die on, for sure. The problem is that I would like to hear from the public. And I think that having, you know, talking at future agenda items at the end of a, you know, 930 at night is not when we're going to hear from the public on what they think about sidewalks or whether they think we should put resources here or something like that.

But then they can talk about it when it gets on the agenda. that's what I'm saying, to make that first meeting from the city council to open that up to the public.

Oh, not to have the workshop. So the future agenda item would be to, like, we could just do that here. I mean, you know, yeah. What I would prefer is to not have the next meeting be that workshop.

No, no, no. If the community decides, then we hold the workshop based on.

So perhaps maybe if I could suggest what we do is maybe we put a pin in adding this to your priorities at this moment. Let's have that.

Well, let me just jump in for a second because I actually heard three people say that we should add it.

Okay.

So I think we should just do it. I think we should have a community workshop. We've already sort of made that concession as opposed to hiring a landscape architect who could. post-community workshop, but I'm happy to have it be staff to not go as far down the road as a concession to Jeff. But I think the public thinks that our streetscape downtown is gross.

Well, it's really driven by the fact that we're going to spend a lot of money on sidewalks. We're going to spend a lot of money on sidewalks, so we don't know what they should look like. I mean, that's where they're starting. At the base, we need to do that, and that maybe is an easier thing than how do we landscape all of downtown.

Well, perhaps, Mayor, I could suggest, since this wasn't listed before, wasn't on the screen, you want to open for public comment while you guys think about this a little bit? We have to. I'm strongly suggesting you do that because I'm hearing people from the audience.

You're asking for permission to go to the public? Yeah. I already gave you permission. Oh, okay. Wonderful. Thank you.

You don't need to ask every time. All right. Well, I just didn't want to cut you guys off. Anybody from the public want to comment on this specific item? Come on up.

There's three hands on Zoom.

Great.

Might as well start the process right now.

Thank you. I've been to several workshops with the dots. And even there's one in particular we voted against, and they did it anyway. So and if you open it to this public, you're going to have 10 workshops ahead of you because there'll be disagreement. And my question is, how much money does a workshop cost? I was at a 10-hour one for the planning commission. No decisions were made. Not the planning, excuse me, Forest and Beach. So workshops have a life of their own. Your ad hoc committees, they go on for years, and there's never a real decision. And up here, they go on for years, and you kick it down the road and don't make, well, the public wants this. And I agree, beautification. I was in Los Gatos today, blown away how nice it is there. But they let them paint buildings down. different colors to accent the buildings. And they have the, you can eat on the sidewalk, so many different places. It's beautiful up there. My daughter was, and I were going, God, who knew Los Gatos looked, and they have shops up there that, Lululemon, they have shopping that's allowed up there from these stores. And they wouldn't be there if people weren't shopping. So I think the whole picture and what we want from the sidewalks is that they're fixed. I don't think if they're flagstone or brick or concrete, if the ones we have are fixed so they're safe. The ones in front of the women's clubs are a nightmare. You've seen those. Just fix them. Don't worry about the color. And yes, Carmel Cares and the forestry, we need all those plants. But if you're going to talk about sidewalk beautification, you've got years ahead of you to come to a conclusion. And hiring a master landscaper is even as a consultant. And then half the time, we don't listen to the consultants. They give us a plan. They say, this is great. And we all go, oh, yeah, but Sally down the street doesn't like it. I'm not against community workshops because I'll come to them, but you gotta have a goal and a deadline. And if you're gonna change everything that's decided again and again, that's just my comment on the process. So you better come up with a real refined process before you start that road again. Thank you.

Good evening again, everyone.

Thank you. Of course, I'm Laura Bolling. I'm here to speak on what, this is what I originally wanted to come and talk about. I'm so grateful you want to address the streets and the sidewalks and beautification. But before you do it, before you laid in a single paper, I really do think a professional landscape design team is necessary. Here's why. Our downtown sidewalks weren't designed, they've been accumulated, different materials, different tree wells, different buildings, different drainage solutions, added site by site, building by building over decades. No council has ever put together a plan for these assets, but you can do that. As a branding person, you guys know, I believe that Carmel is a brand. And I really think that we punch above our weight. But it's things like this, just as Donna was saying, that Las Gadas is beautified. You notice these things. To me, this is a small investment on every curb being a brand touchpoint. Get them right. Each product adds to our brand bank. get them wrong, we have to undo your mistakes. I truly believe that having that plan, even if you wanted to do a workshop, would be a better way for us to know the palette of materials we have that feel like Carmel, that have the charm, that have the aesthetic, and then you can go forward. I think it's the right way to save time in order to move it forward. Thank you so much. Of course, the charm and the beauty of Carmel is everything. So I hope you guys will always consider this. Thanks.

Mayor, council and staff, Cindy Lloyd again. This is a kind of a subject that's dear to my heart. When Thomas Church was hired by the city of Carmel to make the medians, that whole plan was opposed by the business owners because we used to have parking. I mean, I wasn't alive when it happened, but there was parking in the center of Ocean Avenue. And the business owners were afraid that by reducing the parking, they were going to lose a lot of business. So Thomas Church came down, and he as I said before, brought the native environment from the surrounding area into the center core of the business district to beautify Carmel. He also designed the wide steps that go up into off of Ocean Avenue into Devendorf Park. And he was the premier landscape designer of San Francisco at the time. So the times have changed and there are a lot of different ideas. Carmel shouldn't be all one color. It should not be vanilla. It should not be the same plants. But as I pointed out in a letter, if you have a foundation planting, you're saying, okay, I like to see Toyons planted throughout town or Manzanita, something that kind of is a foundation plant that unifies it. And then in between it, you have all this individuality. So that's for the planting part. In terms of the sidewalks, They really need to be safe. And growing up here, it was said that one of the nice things about Carmel was that all the sidewalks weren't the same. Some were bricks, and some were concrete, and some were something else. So I think it's a nice idea to bring in somebody who has expertise in planning, but with the caveat that it's not going to look like every other town. We don't really want it to look like Los Gatos or Palo Alto or Los Altos. But anyway, those are just my off-the-cuff ideas. Thank you.

Anyone else in the room? I don't see anyone. Nova, you said you got some hands online.

Yeah. Maria, go ahead.

Hi, Maria Bruce again. I just wanted to comment to say two pieces here. One is I think we need to fix the sidewalks. I think safety for our visitors and our residents is extremely important. I also do agree with Jeff. I like the quirkiness. I don't like standardized looking. I think we ought to leave things to be more diverse in their look, more different approaches, different looks, different colors. I do like bright colors, so I will support any changes in any regard, but I do not... think we need to bring an outsider a person that thinks like we need to beautify like other cities i think if we can do it on our own that would be great um uh reaching out to the community i'm sort of in agreement with donna i believe that sometimes we have workshops and honestly from uh from our standpoint we can offer comments but sometimes those don't seem to make a difference And sometimes a workshop in itself allows us to understand better what's being planned, but not necessarily what is going to be the final outcome. So I would say maybe you come up with a line item that says beautifying sidewalks or something in the same category of community sustainability. and allow it to be something that somebody from the staff presents us an idea of solutions or suggestions, and then we can go forward. But I think, remember, we do not have money. Our budget is constrained. We do not need to be hiring more architects to design our sidewalks. It's my opinion. Thank you.

Victoria Beach, go ahead.

Hi, everybody. So I think back to the mayor's point, we're talking about making sure that we spend $6 million wisely. I think we're also talking about leveraging a must-do into something more. So we have something we must do. We must touch all the sidewalks and we must touch them to make them safe. So while we're touching them, let's not regret what we've done just for looking at one consideration. So I want to just support everyone on the dais who is talking about combining the public safety issue with the preservation of village character. It sounds to me like the best way to do that was Hans' suggestion of adding a 4.3 and possibly pulling some of the 3.5 down into it, because we're talking about just doing more with the same amount of money. And I certainly can't argue with that. Thanks.

Stacey Steele, go ahead.

Hi. When I heard Hans say professional landscaper, I thought, okay. Then I heard sidewalking. And immediately I thought of how we, just what's gone on in the past five years. I mean, we've lost our beach fires. We've added a fence around scenic. We've, I mean, there's so much change. So we got addresses, physical addresses, and now we're going to sidewalk the town. So I get the safety. Let's touch it up and make it all safe. But please don't sidewalk Carmel-by-the-Sea or, thank you, Dale Byrne, it will become Carmel Plaza, the entire historic town. Please do not do that. The mismatch. Jeff Barron, I've been on your page all night tonight, 100%, everything you've said. I wish I had your phone number, your text to say thank you. You've been here 20 years, that's why. People are new to town. Maybe they're not used to it. I don't know. When they visited, didn't they fall in love with it? What did they fall in love with? You don't know until it's gone. And when we sidewalk everything the same with cement or whatever, and when someone said stone, the only stone there is now, really, is Carmel stone that would make it authentic, and that's gone. If you see all the houses now made with all the stone that's supposed to be stone, It's not the same, and that's what's going to happen. It's going to totally change. And you know what? The new generations will never know the difference. Cindy Lloyd, you're here. I bet a lot of people didn't know there was parking in the middle. I hope that didn't give them all the idea to do that tomorrow or the next day because, anyway, you know, I'm so discouraged right with what's going on. Oh, and this. This is not what you asked for, but I'm appalled that you guys are sitting there saying we only have one person doing housing at City Hall. I know for a fact you only have two people working on signage because that's been my issue lately. That's three people in City Hall and that's all you've budgeted for, but yet we're going to pay a million to... see Monterey and more than that to visit Carmel and Chamber and wherever else the money goes, but we only have one person. 70% of the people are second homeowners. They don't get to go to these workshops. They don't get to decide. They purchased property in Carmel-by-the-Sea because it didn't have addresses. People are still finding out, my friends, that second homeowners, they had no idea about the address change because they haven't been here. That's why they bought here, some of them. But the people who are the 30% that's showing up at Carpenter Hall to the workshops, they're all in unison, the 30%. And I'm just, I'm sorry, I'm beside myself. I'm going to sign out here. My husband's right behind me. I get him to talk, but he's a better letter writer, and it sounds like you listen to letters. So, Kelly, will you? Can you start the timer over if another resident speaks?

We can, yes.

Okay. My husband, who knows Cindy Lloyd very well and has been here 75 years, he's going to speak.

All right. I hope you can hear me. I'm not usually doing the online thing here. My name is Kelly Steele. I'm a longtime resident of Carmel. Stacey just introduced me. 75-year resident. Graduated of River School. So... I'm definitely on the side of the mishmashers. A lot of the history of Carmel is not what we've done to Carmel, but what we haven't done in Carmel. We didn't build... restaurants and bars down Carmel Beach. And now, Stacey said, a lot has changed in recent years. Things that were quirky and perhaps even dangerous, the crosses on the islands where you could walk across the street through the islands, that just disappeared overnight. Fires on the beach. We have addresses now. And when I've talked to people who come to visit Carmel, of course, I talk to residents I've been talking to my whole life. But I talk almost every day with the people who come to visit Carmel. I really enjoy that. And I was interested in what brings them here and what they find out about Carmel and what fascinates them. And it's the unusual things that we do here, not the things that we neaten up. It's not about our branding. It's about the adventure of coming to Carmel, the things that they find that they don't find other places. I tell them that we have trees in the middle of the street, and when they die, we don't pave it over. We plant a new tree. They just smile, and they go, that's so great. Yes, we do need to keep the sidewalks safe that are in Carmel. When I walk around, I see how we grind them down with the grinder so people don't trip on them. It's like fixing potholes. I like when I'm in the rest of Carmel that we don't have sidewalks. I think that's a signature of the town as well. I just would reiterate and support Jeff Barron's comments in that we don't want to make Carmel so neat. The one woman mentioned branding in Carmel yesterday. It isn't really about a simple brand. It's about all the unusual things about Carmel. So I think we should try and get the business community, which I think I'm part of. I've had family in business. I've been in business. My friends have been in business. We are different than the business people, the residents, and the business people aren't different. So we need to... Join in our vision of the town and try and remember that the thing that brings people here are the things that aren't regular. We don't want all the sidewalks to look exactly the same. We don't want all the plantings to look perfect like a mall. So try and keep the rugged edges on the town. And I'll revisit council meetings over the air, maybe down there, so we can go more into it. Thank you so much for listening.

Thanks, Kelly. Appreciate it. Nova, anybody else online? Okay, great.

Could I just make a slight rebuttal? Because I think I'm worried people are misunderstanding, and that's the last thing. Look, Mr. Steele and Stacey, I've lived here most of my life. The last thing I want to do or would do is change the look of the downtown, and the quirkiness is fine. What I'm referring, when I talk about street furniture, we used to have the squirrel cans, which were something that looked like they fit into Carmel. They were wood. They had the little squirrel on the side. That was a Carmel thing. And we replaced those with something generic that looks like it came from Home Depot or some catalog where every city, where the Del Monte Shopping Center and the Carmel Crossroads have these metal ribbon trash cans. To me, when I see those, I cringe. They don't look like they're Carmel. And we have ordinary benches throughout the downtown that also look like they came from a mass-produced mass catalog. I'm trying to get rid of those so that we get something that's more custom and crafted in the Nori Winter Design Guidelines for the downtown. They suggested that our street furniture should have a handcrafted custom look. We don't have that That's what I want us to bring. And I believe Hans sees things the same way. Regarding the pavers, I don't want uniform sidewalks. But what I'm saying is you walk down some streets and there's five or six different types of pavers and it looks like somebody ran out of enough to finish the project and they put another kind in. That to me looks sloppy. It doesn't look beautiful. So nobody's talking about uniform sidewalks. And maybe we should have been clearer in what we meant and maybe we should have had some visuals. But please, this is, I think, there's been a misunderstanding of what we're trying to accomplish here.

So can I try to bring us back? I'm actually going to, I'm going to jump in on that.

There are, first of all, I appreciated Kelly's comments. I take his comments very seriously because he's a 75 year resident. Um, And also talked to Cindy Lloyd about this and take her her comments seriously Although she was she was more supportive. I think First of all, we're talking about sidewalks downtown. So Kelly, so Stacy, we're not talking about adding sidewalks in residential neighborhoods The thing I think the point that was made was these sidewalks are gonna be replaced anyway So the sidewalks are going to be replaced. Something's going in there. The question is, can we pause for enough time to give it some thought? And I think by doing that, we can achieve what you're talking about, which is make it look truly Carmel. Promote, I think, Kelly, you were right when you talked about that sense of discovery. How do we accentuate that sense of idiosyncrasy It was really helpful for Cindy to talk about Thomas Church. You can't go into downtown Carmel and not think that that median is beautiful and the stonework and the steps going up to Devendorf Park. And those steps are kind of an idiosyncrasy. They're sort of like a unique feature that was created there. And so I think it's actually a way to make it look more Carmel. and to do so in an intentional way. Again, to go back to scenic pathway, we like the look of scenic pathway. It was all intentional. Like I had no idea, but there's a whole landscape plan for the whole thing down to the inch, right? What's the signage going to look like? How is the path going to meander along the bluff? And so I think the critical piece as in any of these projects is getting the right person involved. to work on it, right? If you get the 2026 version of Thomas Church who gets it, I mean, this can go, like any project, it can go wrong if you get the wrong person. But if we're clear, we have this kind of conversation and we're clear on... What we're looking for is somebody that gets Carmel and that look and can accentuate that and protect that as opposed to trying to change it. I think that that's what we're looking for. And again, the sidewalks are all getting ripped out anyway to do the safety piece. So I'm still very much in favor of moving forward on it for no other reason than it's happening anyway.

Thank you. So what I'm looking for is direction from council. Just let me finish. Sorry if that's okay, sir. But if I might, I just what I need to get from you guys is do you want to add a priority item on our list to do something along the lines of what's been discussed? So that's really all we're trying to get through tonight. It sounds like if we go down that road, there's a lot of really great conversations to have with the community, how we do it, all that stuff. But what I'd love to get from you tonight is do we want to put this item on as a priority item? on our list and what level of priority is it? And do we need to add it under a P4.3? So if we could maybe come back to that notion, that would be really helpful for me. I'm out.

Out, okay.

Yeah, every council every year has some issue that acts as an oxygen sink and sucks all the air out of the room. We have had beach fires, we had parklets, we had the housing element, we had cell phones. This sounds like an own goal to me. And I think we should, you know, leave it where it is and not spend time that we could be spending on the ADU ordinance or the housing element or any one of a number of other priorities. This sounds like a complete sound. This is really starting to sound like a time sink to me. Council Member Delves?

I think it is a priority. I think it's a one. I hear you, Jeff, on the time sync. I think it's a matter of timing. I do think, just to get slightly into the how-to part, we need help. And I do not advocate just having a workshop that is hosted by staff. It will just, that is a time sync. I mean, I think you need someone that does this for a living that can bring in photos and say, here's, how about this? How about this? You have to, This is the type of thing you have to react to. And then that we proceed with a plan. And it's exactly what you guys keep saying. This is measured twice, caught once. You know, let's don't just go haphazardly replace our sidewalks. Let's replace our sidewalks with a plan. If that plan can look haphazard when it's done, fine. If that's what you wish, but let's just have a plan. So, yes. Thanks, Mayor.

We're gonna have to have a plan.

We have to have a plan. Yeah, the question is, do you want to add specific a priority here for curating, hosting a workshop to talk about this?

Sure.

Okay.

Council Member Booter, I think you're a yes. Yeah, and I would actually agree with Bob. The more that I've thought about it after some of the public comment, And I think Don has a good point. I think like a staff led workshop where it's just a bunch of residents and staff who aren't in the landscape business. I actually think that that just gets us going in circles, chasing our tail. So I think that. think that we bring somebody in who has this expertise i think it's critical that you get the right group and maybe there's some discussions offline about that but um i'm more in favor of bringing in somebody a design professional yeah we don't necessarily have to say landscape architect but we can say design professional we've got a lot of good people that know this town that live here great cast member jam off

I agree with Bob and Hans. And like I said, please, the last thing I want to do is scare people about this, because I think this is a positive. We just maybe need to explain it better and have people understand, because this will be a wonderful thing that makes us more Carmel and enhances the good things about Carmel. So please do not get scared. We do not have any bad intentions with this plan.

Okay. Then I think what I've heard from you is I'm going to, I've got a majority that wants to add this as an item. I'm going to just say I'm going to add it as a 4.3, unless anyone has an objection to that, just to move forward.

Okay, great.

Then the one other question I just need, so you see we did put a two up there for 4.2.5. That was what the majority was. Any objections to that? Hearing none, okay. And then I think that's good for this item. So, Council, what would you like to do? It's 7 o'clock. There is dinner available for you. We have one section left, 5.1, which has three items in it. Would you like to finish that, or would you like to take your break and go to dinner? Take the break.

I was gonna say, let's finish it. Oh, that's funny. That's a total role reversal.

I knew that it would work. Reverse psychology.

It worked. Council Member Barron. Can we finish this, start the closed session, and so we can send everybody, we can start closed session and then send everybody home. Because I know that Beth is waiting. I know Beth is waiting to talk to us. So let's do that and then send everybody home and then we can eat.

And then we can eat in closed session. Perfect. Okay, so that brings us to section 5.3. One, which is process improvements. It has three goals in it. Implement new permitting software with a focus on integrating artificial intelligence. Implementing technologies to support routine staff tasks and free up time for enhanced customer service. And implementing a citywide customer service program. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to roll the last one in there as well, which is public access to records, which is scanning and digitizing all physical city records to make available online. So just really quickly, I'm going to open it up for public on those two blue titles, process improvements and public access to records. Does anyone from the public want to make a comment on any of these really, really, really exciting topics? No. Anybody online?

There's no hands raised.

No customers. We're happy about that on this one, I guess. Okay, so council, let's bring it back to you and just run down our list here together. Where do you land on these ones? Let's go with, we'll go back again in the reverse order. Council Member Barron.

I guess my question to you, so on 5.1.3, I'm a 1. And on 5.2.1, I'm also a 1. On 5.1 and 5.2, like I would like to see, like I'm a two on those. Like I would like to see a little bit more assurances from staff that the sort of specific words in these two things are going to make the customer experience better. To me, there's a lot baked into all those words. And I'm not on that team yet. 1.3 is implement a citywide customer service program. That sounds great. 1 and 2 are a lot of words to me. So I'm not willing to. go higher than I would prefer to. Okay. Council member Delves.

Yeah. 5.1.1 is really specific to new permitting software, which is really specific. Well, I was going to say it's specific to the planning department, but that's not true. I guess if you're doing a tree permit or it's, it's predominantly the planning department though. I will say the, I think the, We need a lot of things from a process standpoint. And I'm really, really, really interested in improving the process and having more uniform process and understandable process in our departments. And typically, you want to get the process right before you bring in the software, although the software can help you align on better process. I think, I'm not sure the wording is right, but I think the outcome is a one. It's important. I don't know what 1.2 really is. I can come back to that. Customer service program, absolutely a one. We need to be glad to be of service and not grumpy. And 2.1 is also a one. Coming back on 1.2, implement technology to support root We need to get there, right? We don't use technology well in our staff. We haven't figured out how to use AI. But AI is new, and I don't feel the need to be on the bleeding edge of AI. And I would rather focus on improving our processes before we try to apply too much technology to them.

Did you have two? Okay, thank you. Mayor? Yeah, well, you're seeing what Seaside and other places are doing in your city manager meetings. So you could probably coach us more than we can coach you. But, I mean, we need to start doing it. We need to start putting in some AI, and it's not bleeding edge anymore. There are companies that are doing it routinely and have been for the last two years. We'll see it, Hans, when we go to the trade show in Anaheim. But yes, we need to do it. Make it the priority you think we can support. Okay. The customer service program, are we talking about that too? Yep, all of them.

Give me all four of your scores. Absolutely.

I've been pushing you for, you don't need to ask me.

Okay. Council Member Booter?

Yeah, so I'm excited about this section. I'm a little... Kind of like Bob, I'm sort of a little confused about the specificity of some of them, but I'll just talk about one of the things that I've been trying to campaign on is increasing the effectiveness and efficiency of our government and accountability. And I think one of the key ways to do that is... data so that the council actually can see what's happening because right now it's it's we we don't have that visibility down into the organization and outcomes so i'm actually in favor of adding something along the lines of um implement kpis basically metrics and performance standards for key resident facing processes and create council dashboards because i feel like If we, for example, there's a woman who reached out to me recently. She's been trying to get her initial site assessment with the city done. And they told her initially it would take four to six weeks. And now we're on four months or something, right? And I've heard that from a few people. So I actually think the best way to work on the process piece, which is Bob's talking about, is for the council to actually have some data. Hey, the last... you know, 20 of those that have been done, it would be so helpful for me to say, Hey, what's our target? First of all, is it four to six weeks? Maybe it is. I don't know. The last X number that we've done, what has been like the average time that it's taken? What's been like the most time that it's taken? You know, that would, I think, be really helpful. And I think that that accountability, the kind of accountability that we see on when you pull it every month on like the five minutes to get to somebody's house for the ambulance is it's incredibly helpful to see that. And we know exactly how successful we've been right now. I think as a council on the operations, we just don't have that visibility. So I, to me, that's the most important thing that I would like to see on here. The customer service program to me is a, is a one. The thing I just talked about, like an addition with performance standards and data, I would make a one. And then on the customer service program, I think, you're doing this a bit with this app you're talking about, but I personally think that every time that somebody interacts with a, if they go through a city process, like they get a tree permit or they just got a phase, a track one design study, I think they should get a survey. And I think that that's more information that would be helpful for us to see about how people are feeling about the, the, the services that they're getting, um, scan and digitize, um, I'm up for whatever, a three maybe.

Okay. Did you give me a score on the first two? I know you talked about that we needed to check in with other council members to see if they want to add a priority of KPIs, but did you have a score on the first two?

Yeah, you know, I'm sort of with Bob where, you know, I'd look to you a little bit as to whether it's something you're interested in doing right now, but again, I'm sort of like getting the process, you know, fixed before you start to... invest in the technology.

I kind of see number one and number two as somewhat of the same item. Using technology to be more effective. And I think that that's really, we've already started doing some of that. We've been doing some AI upskilling within our ranks already. We've been talking to CSUMB about developing a program. So we're doing some of that already. My suggestion would be to collapse 5.1.1 and 5.1.2 into just utilizing technology to better serve our customers essentially. And that could be new permitting software, could be all those things. I'm okay with that. Okay.

So I'll collapse those. I mean, that's an example where that's your job. Yeah. Council Member Dramov?

Okay. On point one, I'm a two. On point two, I'm a two. On point three, I'm a one. And just to sort of... reiterated what Hans was just saying. For the customer service, I would suggest, it's the same thing when you call customer service online. You immediately get an email afterwards, how was your interaction, that every interaction that a resident has or a business owner has with staff, they get an email afterwards to judge that How did it go? And is there a problem? Does something need to be further advanced? And then we could also do a postcard survey of the entire community when we send everyone a postcard and just their overall general feelings on services. Is there a certain recent bad experience you had or recent good experience you had? Just a little bit of a better feel which areas might be problem areas that we work on. But we definitely need the data so we can understand where those problem areas are.

I'm now a big fan of the scanning and the digitizing of the city records we've done that with our planning records from your research project for your presentation very helpful in doing research so I think that that is a big plus so I'm going to give that a one okay excellent okay I think I have what I need then so no for the first one for 5.1.1 and just just put a one on both of those because I'm going to collapse those into technology those I might have heard from enough of them that We're gonna use technology to better serve our clients. Customer-wide service, I agree, that's a one. And then scanning and digitizing came out as a one as well. All those things are things we're already currently working on, so that tracks for me. The one thing just before we leave this section, Council Member Booter did propose some sort of making a priority about creating KPIs and implementing that. Council, does anybody have any interest in adding a priority in this section? The mayor does. Okay, that's three. Okay. Then let's go through really quickly. For the new priority of KPIs, one, two, or three? Two. Mayor, two. Council Member Booter? One. Council Member Drummond? I'd say one.

If we're really going to focus on it, I'd give it a one then.

Okay. Two, two. One, one. Council Member Barron? Two. Two. Okay, so we'll go with a two on that one, Nova. That's the majority.

Just I'll say it. This is another one of those. My two means... It's a one to come up with a few. like one or two per department. It's a two to come up with five per department. Absolutely.

And the customer service, like I've shared with you guys, the customer service program that we've been developing over the last few months already has baked in, like what are the top services you provide? What are your current metrics? How quickly are you getting them done? So there's some of that baked into it already. It's sort of fundamental to that application. That's right. Okay. Then I think that we have everything we need that gets us to the end of this list. So Mayor, I'm going to turn back control to you. Thank you all. Thank you. those who spoke. I know that was kind of different than how we normally do things, but it was an excellent process. So next month, we will start including this as one of the reports that comes along with your monthly agenda.

Good job, Brandon. Thank you. Yeah, thanks. Always like you to watch you do in those sessions. We're now going to go into closed session. I tried to do it two hours ago, but failed. But here we are. Is it okay now? Is it okay now, everybody? Okay. Did you want me to read those? I'm going to ask you to read us into closed session.

Oh, I'll be glad to do that. We have two closed session items tonight. One is a conference with labor negotiators pursuant to government code section 54957.6. The agency designated representatives are indicated in the agenda, as are the employee organizations. Our second closed session will be a conference with real property negotiators. Pursuant to government code section 54956.8, the property is the Sunset Center. The agency negotiators are listed in the agenda. The negotiating parties are Sunset Cultural Center Inc. and under negotiation are price in terms of lease. So you should now ask for public comment, Mayor.

Yes. Any public comment? We have one who's been waiting a long time.

I'm Beth Bowman, the executive director of the Sunset Cultural Center.

Can you do that again so we hear you?

Yes. My name is Beth Bowman. I'm the executive director of the Sunset Cultural Center. And on behalf of the Board of Trustees and myself, we want you to know before you go into closed session that the Sunset Cultural Center values its long-standing partnership with the city and remains committed to preserving and activating this important community asset. As we look forward to the future, our priority is to ensure the long-term sustainability of the campus, maintain broad public access, and continue providing high-quality cultural and community programming. Under our current operating model, ongoing city support remains essential to achieving these goals. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Beth. Anybody else? Nancy?

With a nudge. Yes, just with regard to the Sunset Center, I believe that it continues to need your support, which I don't believe is unquestioned. We all leverage that facility in various ways, entertainment, education. art and the like. And I think it's, especially since we're kind of right across the street neighbors, I'd like to see that support continue and appreciate that kind of relooking at where we are with Sunset Center is something just like you've been doing with the marketing or the funding of Sea Monterey, revisiting what we're doing and how we're doing it can it be done better or different based upon the guidance that you provide is important and a good idea. I personally understand from past live activities and the like that planning for the type of events and programs that are on the docket for Sunset Center team definitely requires a long-term horizon with how they go about what they do. And building additional donation funds and endowment and the like requires a very stable and committed long-term view. And I hope that you build that into your discussions tonight. So appreciate that very much. Thank you.

Thank you. Anybody else? Anybody online? All right, thank you. Well, that concludes tonight's regular agenda. On behalf of the council, I want to thank our city staff, fellow council members, and members of the public for your preparation, participation, and thoughtful engagement. And it was really engaged today. If you want to see more of that, come back tomorrow, please. 4.30, there's bound to be some interesting discussions then. And that's really good. Thank you so much. We're now going to adjourn into closed session.