City Council - Regular Meeting

Good afternoon. It's Tuesday, July 7th, 2026. We're at Carmel-by-the-Sea City Hall, and I'd like to call this regular meeting of the Carmel-by-the-Sea City Council to order at 4.32 p.m. Before we call the roll, I'll note that Mayor Pro Tem Delves is attending today's meeting by teleconference from San Francisco, California, pursuant to government code section 54953B, as noted in the addendum to today's agenda. City Clerk, would you please call the roll? Sure.

Council Member Barron?

Here.

Council Member Booter?

Here.

Council Member Dramaw?

Here. Mayor Pro Tem Delves, I'm not sure. If he's joined yet. Okay, Mayor Pro Tem Delves.

I'm here.

Okay, Council Member Jaramoff. Still here. Okay. Mayor Byrne.

Yes, you're starting off where I left off last night. All our president. Thank you. Would everyone please rise for the Pledge of Allegiance.

of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Thank you. I'd like to add before we get started that council will be taking a 30-minute break somewhere around 6.30. We'll see how the agenda works out. We're starting with extraordinary business items tonight. I'd like to invite the representative from the Point Lobos Foundation to join us for tonight's volunteer and nonprofit spotlight.

Thank you and good afternoon. Mayor Byrne, members of the Carmel City Council. for the invitation to spend a few minutes with you to talk about the Point Lobos Foundation. My name is Don Blachowiak. I serve as the vice president of the Point Lobos Foundation board. I'm also in my seventh year as a volunteer docent at the Point Lobos State Natural Reserve. Betty Maruto, PLF's president, is sitting behind me. She's a Carmel resident and We'll correct anything that I say that's incorrect this afternoon, I'm hoping. In my brief remarks, I'm going to make three, cover three topics. First, what the Point Levels Foundation is, what PLF does for our community, and the major initiatives that we currently have underway, including the Park It Foundation. reservation, and shuttle system. You'll notice I do not have PowerPoint this afternoon. I figure this is 10 minutes. People have been doing face-to-face conversations for several thousand years before PowerPoint was developed, so we're probably going to be just fine. Before my formal review, I'd like to ask a quick question of you all. How many of you have been to Point Lobos? Great, everyone. So that is a good frame of reference so that you know that it is quite literally one of the most beautiful places on Earth. And because of that, Point Lobos draws visitors to Carmel from all over the planet. In my seven years of volunteering at Point Lobos, I have met people not only from every corner of California, but from all 50 states and from 57 other countries. Those visitors from France, Brazil, Vietnam, Kenya, Texas, and so on, sleep in Carmel hotels, they eat in Carmel restaurants, and they shop in Carmel stores. So what does the Point Lobos Foundation have to do with any of that? Well, quite a bit actually. Here's a quick orientation to the foundation. PLF is a nonprofit with a special charge. That special charge means that it's a 501 and it is what the state of California calls a cooperating association. That's a special kind of nonprofit that the California legislature established in 1978. Why? Well, to be honest, lawmakers created cooperating associations because they were providing state parks with only minimal subsistence levels of funding, a condition that continues to today. Now, if the parks were to thrive or maybe even just survive, they needed outside funding help. Enter cooperating associations. The Point Lobos Foundation is one of about 90 such nonprofits in California. You may be familiar with some others, such as the Friends of Santa Cruz State Parks and the new Friends of Fort Ord Dunes in Marina. Our mission at PLF is threefold. First, to protect and nurture Point Lobos. That means to keep the place intact, healthy for native plants and animals, and a desirable place to visit. Two, educate and inspire visitors so that they help to preserve the unique natural and cultural treasures of Point Lopos. And three, to work with California State Parks to strengthen all of the Carmel Area State Parks. And to that end, in addition to Point Lobos, PLF also supports the new Ashinta State Park across the highway from Point Lobos, as well as the Carmel River State Beach, which includes Carmel Meadows Beach and Monastery Beach. So with that as our charge, what exactly does the Point Lobos Foundation do for the parks in our community? I'll highlight just a few concrete contributions. Notably, we provide educational opportunities for children. We pay for kids to visit Point Lobos, especially kids attending schools nearby in the Salinas Valley who receive Title I funding. Our support includes paying the expense of transporting those children to the reserve. It can cost $1,000 for a bus to take children to the reserve. We pay for more than 2,500 children to visit Point Lobos every year. And we encourage the young people who are there to be good stewards of nature, not only at Point Lobos, but also in their own backyards at home. We also encourage community access to Point Lobos. We do that through partnerships and organizations providing services to underserved families and youth. And those partnerships include Chispa, Community Partners for Youth, and others. PLF also fully funds the 250 docents and other volunteers at Point Lobos who interpret for visitors of all ages, from all walks of life, from all over the planet. We pay for their training, their uniforms, their interpretive materials, and their continuing education. Beyond supporting education and interpretation, PLF partners with state parks to invest in park operations. PLF funds trail maintenance so our ADA trails are accessible for all. We pay for trail crews to trim poison oak so that no one goes home with an unwelcome souvenir. We pay for improvements for park facilities such as restrooms and crosswalks so visitors have a safe and enjoyable experience. We invest in habitat stewardship to provide the pristine habitat and the natural beauty of our gorgeous parks. and we replace invasive species with healthy native plants. We support physical improvements that enhance the visitor experience. Some recent examples of that, the beautiful scenic overlook at Sea Lion Point, the fenced entry that safely guides walk-in visitors coming in off the highway into Point Lobos, and the redesigned greeting area at the main entrance where volunteers orient visitors to a personalized park experience. So that's some of what we're up to, what we've been doing, what we're going to continue to do on an ongoing basis. Now I'd like to briefly bring you up to date on some of the current and vitally important new initiatives that we're working on. If you visited or even just tried to drive by one of our Carmel Area State Parks lately, you know these park lands are under increasing pressure from aging infrastructure, the impact of changing climate, and of course the stresses from greatly increasing numbers of visitors. PLF is neck deep supporting state parks with two major initiatives related to all that. First, our long-term conservation and stewardship program. That is a mouthful, but that's what we call it, long-term conservation and stewardship program, a major planning and development effort. help the parks sustain so that they remain pristine, functional, and accessible so people can enjoy these special places for decades from now. A foundational goal of ours dramatically improved the infrastructure of the parks. Many of the park's utility systems were installed between the 1930s and the 1960s. Not only have those systems been pushed beyond their reasonable lifespan, they were never designed to accommodate the very large numbers of visitors that are in the parks today. And that number goes up just about every weekend. The plan is for state parks to re-engineer and replace plumbing, sewer, and electricity. At the same time, we're working to improve the park's climate resilience. We need to deal with an eroding coastline and rising sea levels. We're supporting protection of the historic and cultural treasures at Ashenta State Park, which is a historic settlement where native peoples lived for thousands of years, and also at Carmel River State Beach. We're planning improvements to roads and hiking trails to enhance public access to these parks. Our goal, ensure that the extraordinary public resources remain protected, resilient, and accessible to all for generations to come. This takes us to the other major initiative we're working on now, the park it reservation and shuttle system. As locals, you know, we have thousands and thousands and thousands of visitors to Point Lobos every weekend. Since the late 1970s, locals have proposed shuttling visitors to Point Lobos rather than having all of those people try to drive in and park in the reserve's 150 parking spots. The Point Lobos Foundation, along with the Big Sur Land Trust, the Big Sur Marathon Foundation, and the Monterey Peninsula Regional Park District are all partnering with state parks to bring a shuttle service to Point Lobos. That effort is headed by state parks, and it is known as Park It. The group is working with Monterey County, the California Coastal Commission, and community partners to bring the shuttle system online as soon as possible. To that end, State Parks submitted its application for the reservation and shuttle system to Monterey County in November of 2024, almost two years ago now. With visitation to Point Lobos setting new records all the time, We are eager for the permit to be approved. So if you have a friend at the County or the Coastal Commission, we'd appreciate your putting in a good word. Well, I want to thank you for your time this afternoon. We appreciate your interest in our work. We are grateful to the many Carmel residents who volunteer, donate, and advocate for these very special places. I hope that you'll stay engaged with us as these important initiatives move forward. And if you have any questions, I would be delighted to entertain them.

I had a quick question. The Ashenta Park, that's the one across the, on the east side of the highway, is that right? Correct. Are there any plans to open that to the public at some point?

So this is a matter of definition. At the moment, it is open to the public. You just need to make a reservation and take a guided walk through there. And there's two reasons for that. One is it is, in some parts of that, what is now publicly accessible, there is a natural preserve, which is a level above the reserve. That means it is restricted to unfettered access by people just walking through. And there's also cultural preserves there that go back to the Rumson Ohlone peoples who had that as one of their settlements in this area. So we do have access. You just need to sign up for it. That's number one. And number two, there are plans to connect some of the MPRPD, Corona, Appello Corona Park to that part of the that will be more readily accessible. So yes and yes, it is accessible and it will become more accessible as all of this work goes on so that we can protect those cultural heritage sites and also protect the sensitive natural environment there as well.

Good. Thank you, Don. Thank you. We share your pain with parking and we're going to be anxiously watching your success. We could use your help. Thank you. Thank you. Next, we'll have something I've been looking forward to for a couple months, and I think all of us have. We missed the celebration of city clerks because of our busy council schedule, but we are now going to receive a presentation on the role of the city clerk by our extraordinary city clerk, Nova Romero. Most residents know City Hall through the people who show up in the news, the council, the planning commission, the occasionally heated public comment about a tree. We have a Forest and Beach Commissioner here too. But there's an entire operation that quietly runs behind the scenes, keep us legally, operationally functioning, and it all runs through the city clerk's office. and this presentation I think is gonna show us the important role that NOVA plays every single day. NOVA, you're up.

Thanks. Good evening, Mayor, Council, members of the public. For those who don't know me, I'm NOVA Romero, and I have had the privilege of serving as the city clerk for Carmel-by-the-Sea for the past four years. Tonight I'm gonna share a little bit about what the city clerk does, why the role matters, and how the city clerk's office supports council, staff, and public. I also want to highlight a very timely part of my role as the city's elections official, especially as we prepare for the upcoming candidate nomination period, which starts next week. All right, the city clerk is one of those roles in local government that people may recognize but not always fully understand. You might see me at council meetings, hear me call roll, notice my name on agendas, or receive a response from me to a Public Records Act request, but there's a lot more happening behind the scenes. So today my goal is to make the role a little less mysterious and show how the clerk's office helps the public follow what their local government is doing. Okay, so before we get into agendas and all that, I wanna start with the basic question, what is a city clerk? At its simplest, the city clerk is the official record keeper for the city. It's actually one of the oldest roles in government and it continues to be an important part of the public process today. The city clerk supports city council by preparing agendas, recording official actions, maintaining records, administering elections, coordinating legal notices, and helping the public access information about city government. So while most people just see me over here taking minutes, the role actually helps connect many parts of city government together. All right, so now that we have the definition, let's talk about what that looks like before, during, and after decisions are made. One way to understand the city clerk's role is to look at what happens before, during, and after decisions that are made by elected officials. Before a decision is made, the public needs to know what's coming. That's why agendas, public notices, and meeting access are so important. When decisions are made, the clerk creates the official record. It includes recording motions, votes, minutes, executing ordinances, and resolutions. After the decisions are made, the clerk helps preserve and provide access to those records. That includes record storage, archives, research, contracts, city policies, and updating the municipal code. So city clerk helps to make sure that the decision does not just happen in the moment, it becomes part of the city's official record and can be found, understood, and relied on later. And it's not just about records, although that is a big part of it. It's also about protecting public trust. For meetings, that means helping ensure that the process is fair, open, and accessible. The Brown Act may not sound very exciting, but it's incredibly important because it protects the public's right to participate in local government. Another big part of my role is processing Public Records Act requests. Some requests are simple and can be handled quickly. Others are more like a records treasure hunt, except with legal deadlines, redactions, and multiple departments involved. But the purpose of the PRA is important. Records are one of the ways the public can see how government operates. And because the city clerk's office touches so many parts of city government, we are often the starting point for residents, staff, council members, candidates, board members, anyone who's trying to figure out where to begin, where to go. And that way, the city clerk helps connect people to the process. All right. Elections are one of my favorite parts of being the city clerk, which may officially qualify me as an election nerd. But the reason why I love elections so much is because it's where so many pieces of the role come together. Public service, transparency, processes, legal requirements, and helping people participate in local democracy. So I serve as the elections official for the city. And for candidates, that means helping to make sure the process is clear, consistent, and legally compliant. For ballot measures, it means coordinating the required notices, deadlines, arguments, and voter information materials. I also serve as the local filing officer for campaign statements such as form 700s and ethics training. These filings help provide transparency around campaign activity and potential financial interests. Since the city of Carmel consolidates the election with Monterey County, I work closely with the county to make sure that the city's local election materials, deadlines, and legal requirements are handled properly. So it is a lot of deadlines, forms, signatures, and checklists, which is probably not everyone's idea of fun, but for me, this is where I shine. Okay, so this brings me to the very timely part, and part of the reason why I'm giving this presentation is to talk about the upcoming election. So this year on November 3rd, the city will hold a general municipal election to elect one mayor and two members of city council. For anyone interested in running for office, the candidate filing period begins on Monday, July 13th, and it ends on Friday, August 7th. nomination papers are only issued and filed with me and an appointment is required so please contact me and make an appointment early if you're thinking about running the best gift you can give your city clerk is not waiting to the last minute and maybe staff can remember that too The city's elections webpage is the main place where I'll be posting updated information. It's all the public notices, key dates, ballot measure information, the 2026 candidate guidebook, campaign filing statements, resources for candidates and voters, and eventually the list of qualified people for the ballot. And because I know there's a lot to know before becoming a candidate, I also wanted to highlight a candidate workshop I'm hosting this week. It's not a lot of notice, but I'm going to be hosting the city's first annual candidate information workshop this Friday, July 10th at 10 a.m. It's going to be in the council chambers in person only. The topics are going to include you know, requirements for running for office, overview of the nomination process and candidate filing forms, important filing dates, and FPPC forms. This is just for anyone who wants to better understand what the candidate process looks like or if you're thinking about running this year or in the future. The goal is to make the process as clear and approachable as possible because running for office comes with a lot of forms. It can be kind of confusing and nobody should have to figure that out alone. If you can't attend this Friday, an online version of the presentation will be uploaded by Friday afternoon in case you can't make it in person. Okay, so as I close, I hope this presentation has helped show what the city clerk's role is. It's much more than paperwork, although to be fair, there is a lot of paperwork. If you've seen my office, then you know it's filled with records. Behind every agenda, set of minutes, public notice, election filing, and PRA request is a bigger purpose, which is public trust. I've spent more than a decade working in the city clerk profession and my background training and experience have shaped how I approach this work. It requires neutrality, organization, attention to detail, legal awareness, and a deep respect for the public's right to participate in government. And for me, the best compliment I can receive is knowing that I helped someone find the information they needed or understand the process or help them participate in their local government. So city clerks are not usually the loudest people in the room, and public speaking is not my favorite part of the job. But I will always care deeply about making sure that the meeting room doors are open, the agenda is posted, the action is recorded, the records can be found, and the public knows how to participate. It's also not a very glamorous job. I have yet to receive a standing ovation for a perfectly formatted agenda or staff report. But that matters. It does. Local democracy works the best when people can see it, understand it, question it, participate in it, and trust that there's a record of what happened. So while city clerks often work behind the scenes, our work helps keep democracy visible. Thank you. That's it. Wow. I did get a standing ovation.

So Nova, I want to solve the problem that you described earlier. I really want to take this opportunity, and I speak for the council here, to recognize the work you do for the city. The role you described isn't really an abstraction to us. It's real, and it's every day, and it never stops. I don't know how you make it look easy, but you do. But there's really something else that you do for the council, the commissions, really everybody in the office here. It's that you're such a positive, uplifting person in the office. It's hard to describe because every day you just brighten our day. And I created an award. Could you come up? I want to present you with a special award. It has your name, and it's the Shining Star Award for Mayor Byrne for 2026.

Believe me, she deserves it.

Thank you, Nova. That was a great presentation. Well done. All right, we're now gonna move on to public appearances. We're gonna open the floor. And Nova, could you read the public appearance notice? That's one other thing she does.

Members of the public are entitled to speak on matters of municipal concern not on the agenda during public appearances. Each person's comments shall be limited to three minutes or as otherwise established by the mayor. While stating your name is optional, it helps to identify speakers in the meeting minutes.

Thank you. How many people would like to present today? Looks like about six. All right. We're going to close it off at six. And at this point, we have no one on. If somebody online wants to speak, could you please put up your hand so we know how many there are? Who wants to go first? You're going to get three minutes. Come on up. Karen, hi.

Good evening. First of all, I'd like to thank people at the city, Marissa and Brandon and Leslie, for all their help on the 50 plus year celebration for Mission Trail Nature Preserve. It was a terrific event. We had at least 50 people and I'd like to especially also thank Mayor Dale Byrne who created a special song for the day and it was really quite fun and it was a terrific event. That said, I would like to repeat, and I probably will be here every meeting until this happens, I hope, an audit on short-term rentals and an audit on progress on Mills Act applications and the work that they're supposed to be doing. I think this is only fair that we know what's going on with that. And I would also suggest that we have some sort of public record of how many ADUs are actually rented. I know that comes later, but I'll say it now because I think they're all kind of audits. I think the public needs to know these things. And I know there are many more short-term rentals in town operating than need be. And I don't think it's fair to our hotels who prepare for the visitors that we want to have in town and also ensure for them, have safety features for them, have sprinkler systems, et cetera. So we have an ordinance, and I think it should be enforced to the hilt. Thank you. Thank you, Karen.

Got that, Brandon?

Mr. Mayor, City Council, my name's William Kargis. I have a fine art gallery here in Carmel. I've lived here for 47 years, and my business is 39 years. I was sorry to hear about the passing of the Visit Carmel and the C. Monterey yesterday. I think our city is being overrun. I call it Disneyland by the sea on weekends. I think it's serious. I really do. You've got people that are... It's being driven by social media. And I've done a deep dive into this. And on... On weekends, you'll have people, they call it parking hunting. That's what they call it, where they go drive around and around and around and around. And I'm glad to hear that we now have two meter people. What do you call that? It's such a problem, though, the parking problem. And I've done some research on comparing what we charge for a parking ticket. And I'll just go through this really quickly. San Francisco's 79 bucks. Laguna Beach is 70 to $90 for a parking ticket. Del Mar 60 to 90. I won't go through all of them, but the average is 60 to 90 bucks for a parking ticket. And I think we're way, like, 40 bucks or something like that. You know, my gallery, what happened on the 4th of July, we had a customer come down from Palo Alto. And they wanted to come in the gallery. They couldn't find a parking place. Palo Alto took to Carmel. And so they... They double parked in front of the gallery. They came in because they were coming to see a specific painting. They took a quick look at it because they were double parked and took off. We didn't have any chance to interact with them. It's a critical thing. And it's social media, though, is driving this amount of people that are coming to Carmel. And I just don't see it. It's not good for the city. I've lived here for a long time, and I've seen a lot of changes, and not for the good. I see my time's expired. Thanks for the chance.

Thank you, Lloyd, for your honest appraisal of the situation. Appreciate it. Next.

I would like to say that so often when you only have three minutes, all you're doing is talking. And it sure would be nice if we could have some interaction with the council, like maybe of our three minutes, we could have one minute to ask a question or two or get the council to ask us questions. But I know that isn't the way it is, but I just thought I would say it. Let's refer to the parking since I have two minutes and 30 seconds left. The city over, over, over, over again doesn't want to seem to do anything to actually fix the parking. They have plenty of room to build parking garages. They don't have to do it. They're leaving on the table every single day over $25,000 that they could make with a parking garage. And on street, you could have free parking for residents. You could put a sticker. It's very easy to do. We could completely solve the parking problem and at the same time solve our financial problems. And we could still have the same areas where the parking lot is at Sunset Center just go down, where the parking lot is at Vista Lobos just go down. And it would also give us the money to finance our police station. Housing, new city hall, all kinds of things. Because that kind of money coming in every day would make a difference. And when I heard the police chief last week or the week after saying they're going to charge $1.50 an hour, that's ridiculous. Go anywhere. Heck, I'd just park an RV on the street. I could live there for $1.50 an hour. Giving out tickets all does is upset people. If you focused on charging for parking, make the visitors pay, it's like an admission fee. And residents shouldn't pay anything. They've already paid. They pay in their taxes. They pay in their rents. sales tax, in the property tax, and everything else. This could very easily be done by request for proposals from developers. Be more than happy to do it. Agree. I live on San Carlos and 8th. And it's just ridiculously packed every single day. And he's right. People run around. I've seen fights in the streets over a parking space. I've seen people stand and block. This parking space is mine. Somebody trying to park. It's ridiculous. And it's easy to fix. And I've talked to Hans. I've talked to everybody. And it doesn't seem to be of any importance. But if you live downtown, there's never any parking spaces. Thank you. THANK YOU.

MY NAME IS MARIA RUSS, AND TODAY I'M TALKING TO YOU ABOUT THE COMMUNITY ACTIVITIES COMMISSION. which is what I call the party group. So I just want to celebrate really what we did on July 4th. I thought the Monterey Pops did a fantastic job. I thought it was a wonderful event, wonderful attendance. Ken White did a great job as emceeing and inviting our mayor to speak and say beautiful words, as well as Congressman Panetta, who we all like to have around our town because he supports us very nicely. and even had a terrific speaker talk about his experience being a fighter, a bomber jet fighter, and then sharing all his experience as a prisoner of war. What a day. I would have loved to everybody behind me to attend it because it was fantastic. In the meantime, I just want you to get your mind set, because we only have another thing in July, which is the third Friday of the farmers market, so we'll have some live music, like always. But just wanted to bring forward to you that we're going to get ready for Car Week. And Car Week starts really on Friday, August 7th. That's where the Monterey Peninsula Car Week is announced until Sunday, August 16th. So get prepared. We have an event planned on August 11th, another one in August 12th, and another one in August 13th. So we will have, back to the comments made earlier about parking issues, we'll probably have a significant attendance, a lot of social media attendance, and I know Chief Traer is really much prepared, his team and everybody else, to support us during that event. But I would like everybody to be welcoming of all the visitors and enjoy Car Week because for those of us who like cars, it's a fantastic event. And then one last item. We also have, if you think about August, we're also looking at what's called the Wednesday, August 26. We have the 55th Home Commerce Jury Decision. So we're going to look at the Home Crafters event and we're going to jury some of the attendants. So if anybody wants to join, please let us know. We'll get members of the council in the past that have helped us in this regard, but I just wanted to put it forward. And one last item, and I know I'm gonna run out of time, but I know if I ask the question, Council Member Dromoff may have brought forward before our requirement to explain more carefully what the roles of the commissioners were We were going to do a workshop and we're going to have that discussion. I was so hopeful that it was going to be on the agenda this month, but of course, no, it's not. But as we prepare to probably bring another commissioner to the committee to this commission, I would like to have a clear understanding what our role is and how we can make decisions going forward. Thank you.

Thank you.

Mayor, Council, Brennan.

My name is Lance Anderson. My wife and I own and operate Vin by the Sea, a new restaurant on Dolores Subasino Court. Here to talk about the quite often street closures on Dolores right now between 5th and 6th. Mayor and Brandon, you guys have been very responsive and helpful to this, but the mayor suggested I come here to make a public comment. So first of all, this is not an Esperanza wish hunt. We are very much in support of the project. We like what they're doing. Our issue is that the constant and multiplying closures of that street have a massive effect on all the businesses on the street. Just in our business, we go down, when those streets are closed, 80%, if not more. The galleries... they might as well close. There's nothing going on, right? So it's a huge effect. I know the sidewalks are open, but when the streets close and all the machinery and all that is operating, no one's walking down those streets. So we've been through a couple of things. I was just looking for compromise. I want to have solutions. I'm not here to just complain. But one of the questions I want to ask, and please don't take any personal offense, but This is an encroachment. I believe it's an encroachment permit for the Svensson Construction Company. Does the building department have the authority to authorize an ad hoc street closure for a public entity at any point in time? This kind of falls somewhere between the planning department and the council. But it's an encroachment permit that seems to have no limit on it. Because that construction company just emails us ad hoc. They were supposed to close today. They didn't. They're going to close tomorrow. So now I have to adjust my staff and all that stuff. It's too ad hoc. There's no rules. We're looking for some guidelines on it. So first of all, does the building department have the legal right to let a public entity close the street at will? That's a pretty big question. The other thing, we really didn't get any public notice about this that we could even have a discussion on it. We'd love a little financial restitution. That would be nice because we're all really feeling a pinch. It's the middle of the high season. We're getting crushed. So I don't know if there's some way for this to be an agenda on a council meeting or where it needs to go within the city government. That's another one of my questions. But really, if it can't be stopped, we're looking to put some guardrails on it. Like absolutely full stop, no Saturdays or Sundays. Especially in high season. It's ridiculous. We just talked about parking. Everybody's talking about parking. Let's take a whole street with parking and block the street and have everybody blocked. It's just insane. It just shouldn't happen. Partial closures, flaggers. We'd really love to see the city get involved in why the street is being closed. and look to minimize those closures and also can the street be open for part of the time, you know, whatever it might be. Brandon, you had a great compromise of maybe starting early at 6.30 in the morning, a little bit of a compromise for the residents. For the businesses, we're closed down until maybe 12.30, 1 o'clock. We lose a couple of hours and Spenson maybe only has six hours to work a day. That's compromise, right? No one's happy, everybody loses a little bit, but we can move forward. So I'm just asking for some consideration, potentially somewhere to go other than just me and everybody on our street just sending emails and making phone calls. So if there's anything more we can do officially, we'd love to hear about that. Appreciate your time.

Appreciate you being here, Lance, and we'll have some discussions. I saw some council people taking notes, and I'm sure we'll be talking about it. Next, anybody else? Yeah, come on up. Looks like you're the last one. Nobody's online.

Good evening, Mayor, City Council. My name is Leah Beetz. I've met you before. I'm the Executive Director of the Carmel Heritage Society, and I'm just stepping forward to tell you about the event that's happening. Our house tour weekend is July 18th coming up this weekend. And we have three events that is a collaboration with a lot of community members. We are going to have a Friday evening lecture with your very own council member, Drama, talking about the women in architecture and the women who helped shape Carmel's charm. So that's going to be happening on Friday the 17th at 6 p.m. at the Carmel Foundation. The house tour is on Saturday the 18th, and luckily we have partnered with the Church of Christ next door to us to allow for parking for ticket pickup. So hopefully we'll alleviate some of the parking issues when people are coming to pick up their tickets for the walking tour. That happens on Saturday the 18th from 12 to 4. We'll have a reception. at the first Murphy House afterwards. And then following up Sunday the 19th at the Carmel Foundation again, we're going to be hosting a documentary screening about Julia Morgan and her role in architecture in the state of California and in our area specifically. So I wanted to extend a personal invitation to the city council. I wanted to also thank the the Carmel Foundation and the American Institute of Architects for collaborating for this. And hopefully this will be the beginning of a lot more events in our area that will commemorate and preserve the heritage and the history of Carmel. So I do have some flyers. I don't know if we can put them anywhere around. Just right over there.

Right where the other ones are.

I know her. She's wonderful. Thank you.

Okay.

So that's all I wanted to say. Thank you so much for your time.

Thank you. I can vouch for the fact that the house tours every year is a wonderful event. It's a great event. Do it. Okay. Nobody else? All right. That'll come next. That's going to come next. We have a couple things in between, but then you're going to come next. Thank you. All right. We'll wrap up public appearances. And we'll go to announcements. City Administrator, do you have any announcements?

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I do have a few, so if you'll indulge me. I want to start with, as you probably all know, Anna Jeanette's going to be her last day with the city Wednesday. So I wanted to take a minute to thank Anna for all the work she's done here, positivity that she's brought to the city. I'm personally going to miss being able to talk CEQA nerd talk with her all the time. It's just been a joy working with you, and I wish you all the best. Thank you for everything you've done for the city. On the other side of that coin, I am excited to introduce, you can put a face to the name, Brad Evanson, if you want to just stand up or raise your hand. Brad's coming to the city. He's going to be helping us as our interim director, as we have currently already the recruitment open for a new planning and building director. Brad will be helping us sitting in the chair. Brad comes with 30 years of experience. He's been a director at cities like South Pasadena, Los Altos Hills, Tracy. He also did something that I didn't know was possible in planning. He did master planning on battlefields in Afghanistan from a Black Hawk helicopter, which I didn't realize could be done. I would have gone down that road in planning if I had known you could do something that cool. So we're happy to have Brad here. So when you see him around town, make sure you say hi to Brad. Brad, everybody. Everybody, Brad. There you go. Thank you. Thank you so much. Yeah. So I just want to make a couple of goodbye and an introduction. And then the last announcement I want to make is, although there was no reportable actions taken last night during a closed session, the city council did authorize me to report on the discussion regarding the Sunset Center lease negotiations. So following its review and discussion of the current lease agreement, the City Council did express enthusiasm for beginning conversations with its longtime partner, the Sunset Cultural Center, regarding the future of the lease. While the current lease doesn't expire for approximately five years, the Council believes that this is an ideal opportunity to begin working together on a framework that could extend and strengthen this important partnership for many years to come. The council recognizes that the Sunset Center is a valued community partner who plays a role in Carmel's cultural vitality. By beginning discussions well in advance of the current lease expiration, both parties will have the opportunity to thoughtfully plan for the future and continue building on a successful partnership that benefits the entire community. And that's what I have, Mr. Mayor. Thank you.

Thank you. City Attorney, do you have any report outs? No, there are no announcements. Okay. And council members, you want to start, Alessandra?

Thank you, Mayor. Just a very quick but big thank you to the Public Works crew. Recently, I'm sure many of you saw them out on Carmel Beach pushing up the sand as part of the annual routine maintenance that we as a city actually should be doing every year as per our general plan. We haven't done it for quite some time, so I'm very happy and pleased that we have done it. It's very much needed and appreciated. And we also will be doing it again later on this summer in preparation for a possible large El Nino storm season that's being predicted. So thank you to everyone who was involved in actually making that happen.

Hans? Nothing. Jeff? Bob, do you have anything?

I don't have anything, Mr. Mayor. Thanks.

Okay, thank you. I'd just like to thank the Monterey Pops again for their tremendous concert that they put on. They really do a great job. And just so you know, I did some research, and it cost them $12,000 to do that show. They use union folks that are musicians, and it's expensive. So any of you who could chip in a little bit, MontereyPops.org, I know they'd really appreciate it. And every little bit helps. because they do a lot of work around the community, as I said in my speech on Saturday.

It's Monterey County Pops.

Monterey County Pops. Is that their website? MontereyCountyPops.org. Sorry about that. I'm sure they'd find it if they got online. So I'd also like to thank the community for your kind words and thoughts and prayers for my wife, Margaret. She broke her arm. It's been a lot. The worst thing about it, actually, the pain was bad. but our little white dog is so confused because Margaret can't sleep in the bed yet, and he doesn't know what's going on, so he just wakes up about six times a night. It's like we have a baby again. So bear with me. I've been a little tired up here, but it's a lot. But I think in a couple weeks, Margaret's doing better every day. We'll probably start going out to lunch by this weekend. So she's been a trooper, and it's going to all be over in about two months. So thank you for all your thoughts, by the way. Everybody's always so kind. Appreciate that. All right. That wraps up announcements, and we're gonna go on to public hearings. We've got a lot on the agenda tonight, so we're gonna keep moving. Item one is Resolution 2026053, Adopting an Addendum to the Adopted Mitigated Negative Declaration. That's an interesting one. And Resolution 2026054, Amending the General Plan by Adopting the Sixth Cycle 2023-2031 Housing Element Amendment. This item concerns adoption of an addendum to the mitigated negative declaration and associated mitigation monitoring and reporting program and adoption of the sixth cycle 2023-2031 housing element amendment in compliance with state housing element law. That's a mouthful.

Just a few words.

Did you have to write that?

I did write that.

Okay, good. Good job. All right, we've got Marnie up here and she's going to give us a staff report.

Well, thank you, Mayor, and good evening council members. I just wanna begin by introducing Veronica Tam, who is joining us this evening via Zoom. She is our consulting partner on this amendment effort. I also wanna recognize the Affordable Housing Alternatives Group, which is our resident partners who led the charge on this amendment effort. The core team members include council member Hans Buder, Victoria Beach, Tim and Nancy Toomey, architect Adam Jeselnik, who also provided valuable input as well as design services, and architect Eric Dyer, who also provided design services. And a special thanks to Beth Bowman and her staff at the Sunset Cultural Center for providing meeting space for our weekly meetings. There were countless additional volunteers who participated in this effort in some capacity over the last two years, and their efforts are also appreciated. So with that, I will get started presenting the Sixth Cycle Housing Element Amendment. So the council is being asked this evening, afternoon, evening, to consider the Planning Commission's recommendation on both the environmental document as well as the housing element amendment. You have two resolutions before you, one to adopt an addendum to the mitigated negative declaration that was adopted with the original housing element adoption, and then a resolution to approve the housing element amendment. So a very abbreviated timeline, the housing element was adopted in April of 2024. Staff was directed to begin exploring the amendment in July of 2024. And then in May of 2026, WE RECEIVED A LETTER FROM THE STATE DEPARTMENT OF HOUSING AND COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT THAT THE AMENDMENT WAS IN SUBSTANTIAL COMPLIANCE WITH STATE LAW AND WE COULD PROCEED WITH ADOPTION HEARINGS. THAT'S WHAT BRINGS US HERE THIS EVENING. SO THE AMENDMENT FOCUSES ON FIVE PRIMARY STRATEGIES TO ENCOURAGE THE CREATION OF AFFORDABLE HOUSING THAT IS AFFORDABLE TO HOUSEHOLDS AT ALL INCOME LEVELS. And these strategies include the hotel to residential conversion program. We also refer to this as the hotel key transfer program, the downtown mixed income incentive program, the downtown live work program, accessory dwelling units, and housing on religious facility owned property. So the adopted housing element identified opportunities for 410 housing units, which includes 25 sites, 31 units for hospitality employees, 34 accessory dwelling units, and 57 pipeline projects. Under the proposed amendment, there are 434 housing units, which includes 23 housing sites, 70 accessory dwelling units, and 68 pipeline projects. And this slide compares the adopted housing element on the left and the proposed on the right. So you can see the distribution of the opportunity sites between the two. So this table provides a comparison of what our regional housing needs allocation is, which is sort of that reddish line. So what was assigned to us that came down through the state, how the 349 housing units is broken down by income level. what is reflected in the adopted housing element, and how many units that reflects above what our RHNA is, and then what is contained in the housing element amendment. So you can see that there's some additional units in the housing element amendment than what was shown in the adopted housing element. And this is actually a good thing because it provides an additional buffer, which I'll talk about a little bit more kind of going forward. All this to say that we continue to meet our regional housing needs obligation under the amendment, and we actually have an additional buffer to kind of work with throughout the planning period. So I do want to touch on a little bit about what is considered affordable, because this does come up quite a bit. The new income limits just recently came out at the very end of May. And the area median income for Monterey County is now reported at $110,500 for a family of four. So household qualifying as low income makes between 51% and 80% of the area median income. So that means a family of four making more than 78,200, but not exceeding 125,100 qualifies as low income in our county. For a family of two, the maximum income is 1,100. HOW THIS THEN TRANSLATES TO MONTHLY RENT IS BY USING THE 30% STANDARD OF HOUSEHOLD MONTHLY INCOME. SO FOR THE LOW INCOME FAMILY OF FOUR MAKING THE UPPER LIMIT OF $125,100 A YEAR, THEIR MONTHLY RENT WOULD BE $3,127. The US Department of Housing and Urban Development also publishes fair market rents for small areas within larger metropolitan statistical areas. So to compare what the fair market rent is to what the rent is, monthly rent for an affordable unit IS WHAT THAT LOWER TABLE REFLECTS. SO FOR A TWO-BEDROOM UNIT, FAIR MARKET RENT IS $37.90, ACCORDING TO HUD. AND A THREE-BEDROOM UNIT IS $49.80. SO JUST TO PROVIDE SOME CONTEXT REGARDING AFFORDABILITY. OKAY, SO MOVING ON TO THE FIVE STRATEGIES, STARTING WITH THE HOTEL TO RESIDENTIAL CONVERSION PROGRAM. Yeah, so out of the universe of 940 hotel rooms, which is the cap that we have here in Carmel, so that's the upper limit of hotel rooms that our code allows, 379 rooms, which is 40% of our inventory, were identified as operating below the market average and therefore considered underperforming relative to the broader market. We assumed an 85% conversion ratio of hotel room to apartment, resulting in an estimated 322 potential housing units. To remain conservative, that number was cut in half and 161 housing units are included in the housing element amendment. The affordability breakdown reflects a mix of income levels, which you'll see is a consistent theme throughout this housing element amendment. It was really important that there be a mix of income levels throughout each program. Okay. So the Downtown Mixed Income Incentive Program is actually based on the Trevette Court model. And for those who may not be familiar with that, Trevette Court is a 100% affordable housing senior project that is owned and operated by the Carmel Foundation. It is located on an 8,000 square foot lot, and it has a density of 76 dwelling units per acre. THROUGHOUT THIS PROCESS, 20 PROPERTIES DOWNTOWN WERE IDENTIFIED THAT WERE 8,000 SQUARE FEET IN SIZE WITH THE POTENTIAL OF 320 HOUSING UNITS. TWO SITES WITH PROPERTY OWNER INTEREST WERE INCLUDED IN THE HOUSING ELEMENT FOR A TOTAL OF 12 UNITS. SO INCREDIBLY CONSERVATIVE APPROACH, BUT IT GOES TO SHOW THE UNIVERSE OF POTENTIAL IS MUCH GREATER. So this program is available throughout all properties in the commercial district. We chose not to identify every single one, but any property owner interested in the program could take advantage of it. But for the purposes of counting units towards our arena, we chose two properties, both of which have property owner interests. The next program is the Downtown Live Work Program. And this is a new housing type that would be added to the municipal code. It's an opportunity to turn existing vacant and underutilized commercial spaces into usable areas for artisans and small business owners. So this program is estimated to provide 78 housing units across eight sites, six of which do have property owner interest. And again, similar to the mixed income incentive program, the live work program is available throughout the commercial district should any property owner be interested in implementing it. The accessory dwelling unit program is not a new program. It's an existing program in the adopted housing element. However, it was reevaluated for its potential. So the ADU projections were based on more recent trends and reflect an average of 10 units per year. We have already exceeded this projection in the first two full years of the planning period, so 2024 and 2025. And this will provide us with some reserves should ADU construction slow later in the planning period. As of the end of 2025, we have achieved, if my math is correct, 58% of our ADU projection. And then moving on to the next program, which is the religious facilities, we've identified three churches in the housing element who have expressed interest in adding housing to their properties. Two are located in the R1 single family district, and the third is located in the RC district, which is residential and limited commercial. The estimated number of units is based on the allowed density, but does not include any additional units that would be permitted under density bonus law, which all three sites would qualify for. So in summary, this table shows OUR REGIONAL HOUSING NEEDS ALLOCATION, THE NUMBER OF UNITS BY PROGRAM, ULTIMATELY TOTALING THE 434 UNITS, AND THAT THE HOUSING ELEMENT AMENDMENT STILL ACHIEVES OUR REGIONAL HOUSING NEEDS ALLOCATION. YOU CAN ALSO SEE THE BREAKDOWN BY COLUMN BY INCOME LEVEL THAT WE STILL HAVE A BUFFER TO MEET EACH INCOME CATEGORY. I INCLUDED THE NO NET LOSS HERE ON THIS SLIDE BECAUSE THIS IS IMPORTANT AND IT KIND OF TIES IN WITH THE BUFFER. HCD RECOMMENDS A BUFFER OF 15 TO 30% GREATER CAPACITY THAN WHAT IS REQUIRED TO ENSURE THAT CITIES AND COUNTIES HAVE SUFFICIENT CAPACITY THROUGHOUT THEIR PLANNING PERIOD. IN THE EVENT THAT ONE OR MORE OF THESE PROPERTIES WERE TO REDEVELOP IN A MANNER THAT WAS NOT PLANNED FOR IN THE HOUSING ELEMENT BECAUSE THAT DOES HAPPEN, YOU HAVE SOME RESERVES TO FALL BACK ON AND STILL REMAIN IN COMPLIANCE. The no net loss law says that once you've depleted your reserves, if another development project comes forward and you dip below your available sites for RHNA, then you have to identify another site to make up for it. So the buffer really does come in handy to protect ourselves against the no net loss. So I'm just gonna leave it at that. Regarding the environmental review, the housing element update, as well as the amendment, they're both general plan amendments and general plan amendments are projects under CEQA. As I mentioned at the beginning of the presentation, a mitigated negative declaration was adopted by the city council when the original housing element was adopted. For the amendment, we did prepare an initial study followed by an addendum. The analysis and the conclusions remain unchanged from the original environmental document and the mitigation measures were found to remain adequate. So staff is recommending that you adopt the first resolution approving the addendum to the environmental document and the second resolution adopting the housing element amendment. And that concludes my presentation.

Thank you, Marnie. Good job. Questions?

Jeff, go ahead. I have a couple of questions on slide 13. It's the downtown live, work, projected housing units. So I'm going to use, like, let's talk about two of these, L2 and L6, the Dowd Arcade and the Stonehouse Terrace. We're all familiar with the Stonehouse Terrace. So in the case of the Dowd Arcade, these 12 units are going to go above the projection. The hope is that these units would go above the commercial space on the Dowd Arcade. So the Dowd Arcade is one floor. So these 12 units, and it's built out, except for the patio in the front. Where are these 12 units going to go?

So for the Live Work program, this identifies existing tenant spaces that are underutilized, that are ripe for a conversion. So this would be the second floor spaces within the arcade.

So that are up that little staircase on the side.

The additional housing potential is above the, the one story building, which could be part of the MIPS, the mixed income program.

Are those differentiated on this chart?

So this is just the live work chart.

Okay. I got it. And then the stone house terrace, I see Christie in the back when we're all obviously very familiar with that building. So where are those 12 units going to be?

I can't say specifically other than when the Safari team did the walk around town, they looked at each individual tenant space within buildings. And if it looked vacant or underutilized, those were targeted as potential live work units. So there must be some tenant spaces within the stone house terrace that were identified as being underutilized.

Okay. So I remember that there's like a hair salon in there. I think, I think there's an accountant. One of the upstairs apartments is being used for mattress storage, stuff like that.

Exactly.

Okay. Okay. Thanks. Alessandra?

Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Marty, for your presentation. That was excellent. Along the same vein of what Jeff was asking, I have some questions about the religious facilities, the churches. It's on slide 15, just over two more. Has there been any more progress other than the initial interest? And then my second question is also, where would it go on those three properties that you gave? as an example?

So we've had multiple meetings with church representatives for all three sites. They're all very, very interested. We've looked at for like Church of the Wayfarer, Turns out that their original master plan included an additional building on the corner. So we've talked to them about carrying out the master plan, but we've also talked about repurposing some of the existing building space that they're not using. First Church of Christ, the full nine years that I've been here, we've been in conversations with them about doing a housing project on their properties. And those conversations continue. So they have a new vision for their parking lots. And so those conversations are ongoing. And then for All Saints, kind of the same conversation, kind of looking at their parking lot. We haven't, really nailed down specific space within the existing buildings for conversion. But there's certainly some potential there.

Okay, excellent. And so those are still ongoing conversations that the city is having on a regular basis?

Absolutely.

Okay, thank you so much.

I can't imagine you have any questions. No questions from Hans. So this is a lot. Did you ask any of the property owners that you have listed here to come and tell us that they really are interested? Just popped into my head.

I did not invite anyone to attend.

All right, because you're asking us to trust some numbers that are general interest. Have you had any stronger interest And again, I don't know how to judge this. We're not sitting in meetings and having discussions that you're having, and that puts us at a disadvantage in making decisions. Have you had anybody say, typically it's like they had general interest, and I participated in a meeting with Esperanza, so I know what we ask and what they said, and it was pretty basic, like, would you be interested? Yeah, maybe. Have you had anybody actually, it's been years now, Have you had anybody that actually said, I really want to sit down that live work unit. I've got an art gallery and I really would love to see it. Can we start looking at the numbers to see if it pencils? Have you had any conversations like that? I hate to do this to you too, Marnie. I'm sorry. I have nobody else to ask.

You know, I haven't done follow up recently. There was one particular property owner that I was in regular communication with last year, but most of my time has been spent on the amendment, so admittedly I haven't invested a lot of time with the follow-up. There certainly will be a lot of follow-up with those property owners once the amendment goes through and we start working on developing these programs into ordinances, we will be inviting all of the property owners to the table and continuing these conversations. So the conversation's not done. I just haven't talked to anyone recently.

Haven't got to that part of the process. Other than the churches, though.

Oh, definitely the churches. Yeah. I was thinking downtown. Yeah.

So in essence, it just popped in my head. What you're describing, is that your role? Are you going to do that?

I plan to.

So you sort of become a land developer. You sort of start making, you have all these programs you're selling and you have to go make sales calls to convince people that this is really worth doing and we'll help you do it. Is that the idea? It's going to be a city effort.

I mean, we're not going to make Marnie do it all by herself. We have, you know, admin analysts and I'll be involved. Our planning director will be involved. This is, you know, this is a city document. This is a city goal. So we'll put city resources behind it.

So it's sort of like when I keep talking about business development and what Chip used to say is we're all business development. It's sort of you're all going to become land developers and selling these programs. I'm not trying to be facetious. I really want to understand how it's going to work. We're all going to become housing advocates. I have concerns about that. So everybody in the planning department starts putting on a hat and goes out and makes sales calls, basically.

I mean, I don't really, I guess, consider it a sales call. In the planning world, it's community engagement. So I want to invite them to the table to have conversations and allow them to have input in the programs. What do they need? to make these programs successful? How can I write an ordinance that, you know, is a win-win?

You have superpowers to say, if they say, I need this, you can come to us and get that done. That's part of this.

I'm hoping.

Yeah. Okay. So going back to the, you don't have to put it up, but the Stonehouse and Sue Vacino Courtyard and all those that have a number of live work units. I don't see that any of them have parking. So Stonehouse has maybe four parking spaces and they're taken. So you're talking about putting 10 live work units or 12, what was it, 10 or 12, 10 or 12? 12. And each of those could have two cars. So you're talking about- Hopefully they don't. Hopefully they just don't have a car and they're walking around all day long. But that's 20 more cars. If you multiply that times all these things, we're talking 200 cars if we're successful.

So the beautiful thing, I think, about the LiveWork program is that we're converting existing square footage. So there are already parking spaces associated with that square footage. And based on our parking standards, it's usually a one-to-one conversion. Plus, I'm almost certain that Stonehouse Terrace paid into the parking in lieu fund. So they've already satisfied the parking requirements for that property. Now, practically speaking, I understand what you're saying, like residents moving into those units are going to bring cars. From a regulatory standpoint, like we would be able to approve a project there.

but it's based on regulatory, not the fact that it's going to put 200 more cars on the street.

Not practicality.

And Mayor, one thing to keep in mind, Maureen, correct me if I get this citation wrong, but I believe our current municipal code, regardless of the housing element, says that if you build an apartment unit downtown, the downtown commercial core area, you don't actually have to create a parking space. It's true.

Yeah.

So our code already factors for that. Dovetailing off of that, how many mixed-use projects have taken place in the town that have completed in the last 10 years?

Mixed use?

I mean, we've had a number of second- Think the old John DeLuce building, and I have some experience with that.

Like new construction or conversions?

I don't know what you'd call that. It's pretty new to me.

So that is a new construction. We had the Fink Condominium.

David Fink, maybe?

Mm-hmm. I mean, we had some office conversions that converted to residential.

Above the- the shoe store that's taking place still. Maybe two or three?

The ones that I was able to identify are actually listed in the housing element. There's a little description of them. I don't have them memorized, but all the ones I could find, I did do a little write-up of them in Appendix C.

The John DeLuce one is still not finished after, what, six years. So it's not easy to do those kinds of projects in our town for whatever reason. But the idea is that you're going to have incentives that you can continue to enhance over time to make it good enough that people will want to do some, because they haven't been doing them recently, the last 10 years or so. Is that the case? Is that why this might work when it hasn't worked in the last 10 years?

I think that's hard for me to say, but I do hope that incentives will spur more development and also the more available water, free water will also help.

I think it's fair to say that that's why those incentives and the expediting processes, that's why they're put in there. That's why they exist. I think Marnie's just trying to be conservative and not make promises for the future. You know, we don't have crystal ball, but that is why those incentives exist is to try to smooth out the process.

Okay, let's go off on that. So what you're saying is we're going to tell you that you're going to go to the front of the line and we're going to really work faster than we do now, which sometimes is not fast. You're saying, I really want to believe these numbers, but you're saying you're going to do 39 low deed restricted live work units a year for two years in a row, which means those have to be processed at the top of the list and treated quickly to make them happen. And they have to go through all the hoops for change of use, which anybody that hasn't watched the Mad Dogs hearing from a week ago Thursday should watch it. It's pretty interesting. Anytime you have change of use, what I've learned lately is it triggers fire sprinklers in the entire complex, every single building. The VIN, Lance was here earlier, that's what's happened there. And we got a letter from the owner saying, It's ruined their life. They're up $500,000. They're still not finished. So it's a lot. It is a lot when you change one unit and it triggers fire sprinklers and other potential building code restrictions and ADA requirements in the entire complex, not just the one that you changed. That's what was said a week ago Thursday in a public meeting. Have you, and I know we've talked about this a little bit, but have you really, really considered that and factored it into what you're asking us to vote on? When you're saying you're going to do 39 a year, that could trigger, our building official will tell us, all of those things that I just described in the entire complex. Have you really built that into this? I know you have some fudge factor and the buffer units to maybe account for that, but you're talking 39 of them and all of them could trigger that. Hopefully they would all be, like 20 of them would be in the same building, so you just do it once. But I'm really concerned about that, as you know.

I'm hopeful that some of the buildings will have sprinklers already. I mean, that's possible too. I'm not naive to think that all of them will, but some may.

Did you survey that?

I have certainly not surveyed all the buildings.

Okay, because you sent people out to do surveys. No. So two years in a row, 39 per year. I'll stop there.

Yeah.

No, absolutely not. No, we're asking questions. This is serious. All right.

pick up on Dale's train of thought here, and I'm sorry for not, sorry for doing this to you. It's okay. You know, we, you know, one of the things I'm going to talk about in a couple minutes is the hotel conversion program. And I think, you know, we got an email earlier today about the $100,000 number attached to the unit cost, whatever that is. But to Dale's point, you know, are the hotels sprinkled? So I know that the housing element assumes half of the hotels, half of the sort of underperforming hotels are going to go through this program and be converted into housing. And those keys are going to end up somewhere else. So I'll talk about that in a minute. But are those 161 hotel units, are those sprinkled? You know, are they sprinkled? Are they earthquakes? Like, I don't know what the building requirements are, you know, since a lot of them are obviously pretty old, which is why they're on the list. But if those hotels were converted to housing units, they would have to be sprinkled and earthquake retrofitted, correct? Like, I'm pretty sure they'd have to be sprinkled. I don't know. For a change of use, yeah. For a change of use.

But we don't, I think the same answer as Marnie had before, like we don't know, we didn't survey all of them to see if they have sprinklers and if they're up to code on ADA. So we'll have to address them as they come in because we also don't know specifically which ones will come in.

So when Carrie Tice obviously went through her ordeal with the, sort of ordeal, with the Hoffs' House Hotel, like one of her concerns was, A big part of her decision making, as far as I can remember, was her inability to economically both convert the hotel to current ADA standards, which I assume someone would have to do, and to sprinkle the building. Those were two. And I think the earthquake was the third one. But I think that those were two of the three big concerns. So those items are TBD and the hotel conversion or in the hotel conversion aspect. And I'm only talking in regards to sort of the estimated cost. per unit cost. That's right.

And one thing to consider is that it's cheaper to go from commercial to residential. So in a commercial setting, so like stick with the Hoffs' house example, they have to make the entire property ADA accessible. There's a lot more work that has to be done versus an apartment complex where, yes, you still have to make it ADA accessible, but you don't have to make every floor accessible. You don't have to have elevators everywhere. You don't have to have the same level of fire suppression. So there's a cost difference.

So let's use, so I'm a little lost, so I'm sure you can help me out here. So let's use the Hoffs' house as an example. So let's say that that hotel came up for this program, and Carrie sold the 30 however many license keys that there are to someone else, and that hotel was going to be converted into housing. What would she have to do? What would the requirements be in terms of ADA and earthquake and maybe not earthquake, but ADA and Springer requirements for that project to undergo? To undergo that conversion. Well, I don't know what the new project would be, but the example I was trying to use. I'm talking about just converting Carrie's hotel from hotel to apartments.

Again, I can't speak specifically to that because I don't know what the apartment project would look like. Okay. But like some of the examples I'm using that's different between a hotel and a residential is like, you know. A hotel might have a pool. We have to have accessibility and fences for pools, whereas an apartment complex, you're probably not going to have that. So that's an example of the difference between a residential and a commercial property.

But if we leave Carrie's pool out of it, that little over-shaped thing, the apartments... the hotel rooms in the various buildings that Carrie has, they would all have to be made ADA accessible and they would all have to be like, no, no. Okay. That's, that's the, thank you. Okay. Sorry. Sorry. So what would the ADA requirements be for Carrie's hotel? I don't know the numbers.

I don't know the numbers of how many would have to be ADA accessible and how many would not.

Some of them.

So the ADA is a percentage of the value of the improvements, and then they get to pick from a menu of options. And I think maybe one room or a certain ratio, depending on the total number of apartments, would need to be ADA accessible.

We don't know the exact number. But it's a different calculation than commercial.

Yeah. And when we looked at this program, a lot of our smaller hotels used to actually be apartment buildings. And so we were kind of looking at the possibility that these could convert back to residential use, which would make it more cost effective. Now, again, whether they do or don't, right, it's going to be up to them. We don't know which ones are actually going to participate in the program. But there's a lot of them that were apartments originally.

But those units that were apartments originally, they would, even though they were apartments 50 years ago, they would still have to satisfy the current zone. That's right. That's right. Thank you. Thank you, Dale.

So one last question, which Jeff triggered. Was Jermall on the project team? Jermall is our building official. on the- Did he go through, was he with you when you were developing all these programs? No. And so he hasn't actually taken a look at this in detail and said, here's the problems you're gonna run into. And I'm only saying this because I watched the hearing last Thursday, and all these questions were asked. And I'm not gonna testify on what was said, but it wasn't good.

So he was not in the weekly AHA meetings? Sorry. but I did meet with him throughout this process so that I had a decent understanding when we were talking about live work, because that would be a new housing type for us, so that I had a basic understanding of what the building code says and how that might work. So no, he was not part of the weekly AHA meetings, but he did provide input to me as we went through this amendment process.

So he's gone through all these programs and told you what's going to trigger fire sprinklers?

No.

He hasn't done that? No. All right. That's good for now. Let's go out to the public. They've been anxiously waiting. How many people are going to speak? A lot, maybe eight.

Oh, Dale, you did not open for Bob for questions.

Bob, do you have any questions? I'm sorry. I think this is the first time we've done this, right?

I think it is, actually. So, no, I don't have any questions. I'll have comments, but no questions. Thank you.

Thank you.

Nancy Toomey, thanks for the hard decisions coming up. I wanted to suggest a couple of four points, and I'll be brief. Just to reinforce some of what Marnie had said, this is a plan for housing that will, in its finished form, as we come back to you with ordinances and policies, you'll get another lens on all of this work at an incremental level of detail. And I think that that is essential to kind of knowing where we are in this iteration because we've been through this for a couple of years with briefings with you all. It will of course include best estimates on incentives and again the details of processes, policies, and the detail of ordinances where you go more into the weeds on all of them. And all of this, again, the city is not obligated to build buildings. We are just in the wear the hat of providing a plan and programs that enable that outcome. Because indeed, second point, property owners can opt to participate in these programs or not. They are the owners of such properties and no one is forcing them to do anything. So I did want to reinforce that as a point. Fourth point, I actually included it in my first one, so I'm gonna go to three points. The third point is specific to the ADU category. I know that there has been, I mean, reinforced by Karen earlier, that she's looking to, as Jeff and others have mentioned, they're looking to have ADUs be occupied with renters, and that clearly is a goal of ADUs just generically on behalf of the state and the regional and local, et cetera. But ADUs, as they become available, again, can be used based upon the preferences of the property owner, again. And they are not required to have them rented. They are not required to have them at low income. But indeed, we look to optimize that through any new ADUs that would be coming to the table once the ADU ordinance and the like are put into place, that there are incentives to end up requiring, and in what form is to be determined, but requiring with the incentives to then go to making sure that those ADUs are at a low income category as Marnie had referenced. And the information with regard to the new applicants is asking for the use of what their planned intent is for use of those properties, whether it's giving it no charge or a very low charge to a caregiver. or a family member, that, again, is the property owner's choice. So it all comes back to, again, providing an environment where we can raise the bar on allowing and enabling more folks to live in our wonderful village and enjoy all of its benefits. So those are my couple comments. I'm done.

Thank you. Thank you, Nancy. Nova, why don't you turn off Bob so he doesn't have to. It's sort of... Annoying. I feel sorry for Bob that we're having to look at him in a hotel room or something. Bye, Bob. I don't really need to see him on there. There you go. There, he's there. Okay.

Can you make it a little bigger? Thank you. Jeff, just so you know, I was the project manager on Carrie's project. For her to switch over would have been over $3 million. That's why she decided to do something, and that's why I ran that project, so I could give you the numbers. I want everyone to look at this. If you look at these numbers right here, They're saying that someone could buy a hotel that has 19 keys and land and buildings. The most recent hotel that it sold was the fireplace at the corner of 4th and San Carlos. It sold for $9.2 million and only had 16 units. Now, the way they show this is, if you look at it, you think you're just buying keys. No, you're buying the land, the building, everything. So they're at $9.2 million. That's $578,000 per key. And then you go right down, real quick down here. They say that you can sell those units. for $438,566 apiece. Just flip them. But you get to keep the land and the buildings. What's really valuable in a deal like that is the land. So if you go to the fireplace, the land was worth $7 million plus, and the rooms are only worth about $109,000. Anyone who owned a hotel is going to say, well, I'm going to sell my hotel for $578 a key because you're selling the land. And if someone bought it, a developer bought it, he would love a deal like that. He gets the land pretty much for free. And then this number is really interesting, $100,000. That would be $200 a square foot. I haven't built anything in 20 years for $200 square foot. And I have plenty of numbers, but I only have seconds here to tell you. But that number should be at least $250,000. So when you're saying you're going to sell it, and you're going to sell the apartments for $5 million, and you're going to get $7 million for the keys, and your conversion costs, those are the most fabricated numbers I've ever seen in a real estate deal. And I've been in hundreds of them. And again, Carrie is doing a new hotel because you can't do it. It's impossible. You go bankrupt. Thank you. Thanks, Fred.

Next.

Mayor, City Council, Tim Toomey here. So I'm going to talk a little bit about the hotel to our residential conversion program and what we did was we talked to probably about five developers. Fred was one of them back in the day and we put that pro forma together and And things maybe have changed. Maybe it's not $100,000 to refurbish a unit. Maybe it's $300,000, $400,000, whatever. But the people that we're talking to, some private equity firms, developers that have worked here in Carmel-by-the-Sea. Dan Silveri is one who is really interested in this project. These are assumptions, and we need to work through them. So I just, you know, there's a lot more work to do with, you know, these programs. And like Nancy was saying, you know, the policies around these, the new ordinances that are going to require, you know, some of the major incentives that we want to do, like the condo, part of the hotel program. Those are going to be really interesting and probably difficult decisions because there are a lot of incentives that we really need to make these programs work. But I just want to say that the people that we've talked to, Dan is one of them. I invited him here tonight, but it was kind of late notice and he couldn't make it. But he participated early on. He wants to continue to participate as we work through this process. And he's a local individual. He did work with Trevec Court, which is an affordable senior housing unit. I think there's going to be interest. Everybody was telling us, you tell us when you have a program, and we'll come and talk to you. Until you have a program, we're not going to make any commitments. parking came up. I think the good thing about this program is that, you know, we're taking hotels that currently have parking and when we convert them that parking will, you know, support the residential side of it and we're again on the incentives. It's got to be a streamlined permitting process and you know, fee reductions, things like that. I just you know, it's, I think these things will develop as we, you know, talk more about them and flush them out. We're going to have these issues, you know, whether, you know, we stayed with the original housing element or we go with this amendment. And things like you're saying, Dale, you know, sprinkler systems and, you know, infrastructure improvements, I mean, that's going to come up and, you know, there might be issues there. But I think there's opportunities to work through these. There's There's a lot of interest, at least in that program, that I see. So I would appreciate your support. Thank you.

Thank you.

How many more? Four more.

Hello, my name is Maria Roos, and I did send some comments, but I would like to summarize them in a certain way. Dear Mayor Byrne, council members, and staff, the 6,000 element amendment offers some innovative changes to the adopted housing element of April 2024. However, I am not in support of the current amendment due to the elimination of the city-owned sites the Sunset Center parking lots and the Vista Lobos, and the fact that it does not represent a solid case of housing solutions that are implementable by the city in a timely, expected manner. The documentation provided to support private interests and participation from hotel owners, business owners, or residents is totally insufficient, being neither substantial or fully demonstrated. Additionally, the amendment misses the opportunity to identify key elements to make it implementable like specific owners with the real interest, with funding required, with people needed, with details of a time schedule. In my observation, also, you have five strategies out of a total of 47 listed. And out of those five strategies, I assume you're going to have a dedicated staff from a city standpoint to manage and implement those. In the meantime, what are you doing for the other 42 programs? You have a responsibility to decide how to go about implementation of those. And is it clear that resources will be needed to allocate to sufficiently meet the requirements of this amendment? So, is this housing amendment implementable? The answer is probably no, because you need to evaluate timetables, validate assumptions, confirm what the priorities are, and see if the intent is really to implement housing solutions, or are we just trying to delay the requirement that we have in place? You need resources, personnel and financial resources, so do you have them? And then you need to evaluate the results on an ongoing basis. If no results have been achieved within a year, we need to re-evaluate the priorities. I do not agree with the wording added to the housing element. It says, If development trends do not meet the objectives of this program by that date, the city will modify the program and or utilize alternative strategies. What does that really mean? The wording creates accountability and offers no specific plan forward. So in my opinion, finally, the three city-owned sites need to be added again to the housing element. Having them on the list permits the city to use them at any time we require to reach our housing goals and obtain feedback from possible development ideas that afford us not only housing, but parking. If this cannot be put back in, I would consider adding them at your own time, but your time should be a year. Assess them so like the buffer that Marty mentioned so this is not an acceptable housing element with the additional information Maintaining of the city on sites and knowing that the adopted housing element has almost all of the same programs Let's go ahead and put the stuff to work in the existed and already approved housing element. Thank you so much Thank You Maria

Thank you, Maria. Well done, and I agree with all of her suggestions. I had a couple of comments about the hotel rooms. Who decided the hotel rooms were underutilized? And then who decided how much a room is worth? Are they in the hotel business or the development business? That's a, I mean, I don't know where these figures came up. And I agree with Maria on the site, and particularly the Scout House. That should have been number one on the city property list for redevelopment. There's underground parking available on that hill. I don't know how much a developer would make on it, but it would be a city partnership with many communities doing it. And the churches, there's five churches. And my assumption is Carmel Presbyterian, who we would not allow years ago to sell, so they got rid of their campus on Rio Road and stayed in this small space. And Carmel Mission would probably not even have a meeting with the city. And the three other churches, are there any effort to get a commitment, a memorandum? Because the three churches, particularly one or two, have, as I've been told, no money for development. So they need a developer to pencil it in. So, so much of this amendment is pie in the sky, and they're figures that are made up. And I think the committee did a great job trying to create an alternative, and then it says, as Maria says at the end, if none of these work, we'll come up with another strategy. And I don't know of any of the people that own shops would be happy to de-restrict their upstairs units for $100, not $100, $1,000 a month for a little apartment when they can get three or four. I mean they're commercial and they're in the business when they bought them to pencil in those amounts. So I can't see, I strongly would oppose the amendment and I would add the Scout House which is deteriorating and isn't worth saving and we don't need another white elephant. We've got them all over the city that we're supporting. at this time as our budget shows us. And again, thanks staff for all they've done because they have tried.

Thank you. Thank you.

Good evening, Karen Ferlito. You know, I was reluctant to come and say anything tonight. But I would be remiss if I didn't. I was a co-chair for the first housing element. And I think my co-chairman, Bobby Richards, and I had a sincere, absolutely sincere effort to create real housing. And we did it with the only things that the city can actually control, and that was our parking lots. It should not have come as a surprise. Bobby and I were on a photo in the Coast Weekly, or Weekly now, whatever it is now, standing over the parking lot saying this is a possibility for parking. So when people were surprised it was surprised to me because it was in the newspaper. We chose those parking lots specifically because they could do two things. They could create very much needed parking and housing. Another thing that gets lost in this equation to me is We're cutting down on the open space on our 4,000 square foot lots and our 6,000 square foot lots when we actually accommodate so many ADUs. That's space for our forest. That's space for just open living. And that's an extra car on the street usually because if somebody lives at 13th and Santa Lucia, they're not going to walk to work downtown probably. They're going to drive a car. So it is going to add car space. I happen to have an ADU and it is rented, but I have a 29,000 square foot lot and I have plenty of parking on it. So, you know, I think this ADU thing is a little overwrought. I think the committee did an honest really hard job trying to come up with other things than the parking lots, but when it comes down to it, the parking lot is what we as a city control. And yes, we can look at that, well, we just have to plan for it, we don't really have to build it. That's pretty cynical. I viewed this, I truly viewed this as an opportunity to give opportunity to people. Our workers, our staff, we have less than five employees that live in this town. The people that are spending an hour driving to work and an hour going home, why shouldn't they have an opportunity to live here and be part of our community? We're dying as a community. We're old. We need some younger people that don't make as much money. You know, Marnie of all people has worked and worked and worked, but she was put in a difficult position. When we voted to let the AHA group go ahead, they said, we will do all the work. Yet Marnie was so busy, we did not release that RFP. the RFP for the parking lots. We got evidently a time extension from HCD, but I truly believe we ought to be trying to produce housing, not come up with reasons not to. Thank you.

Thank you, Karen.

GOOD EVENING, I'M CAROLYN BARDSLEY.

DID YOU SAY IT AGAIN ONCE YOU GET UP TO THE MICROPHONE?

OH, THIS? IS THAT BETTER? DID YOU ALL GET THE PACKAGE THAT I BROUGHT TO THE CITY? I JUST WANT TO MAKE SURE THAT YOU HAVE THAT BEFORE I BEGIN. I HAVE TO START WITH SAYING I'M IN FAVOR OF THE HOUSING ELEMENT. HOWEVER, THERE'S A DIFFERENCE BETWEEN INTENT AND IMPLEMENTATION. YOU, THE COUNCIL, ARE BEING ASKED TO APPROVE THE IMPLEMENTATION and I have many legal issues about what's happening. And tonight, I'd like to present my perspective as having been dubbed an ADU against my will. So I just read my... I am here to encourage you not to approve it until the following three concerns have been addressed. One, have the 60 ADU Carmel residents that have been sent to the state been informed and consented to be a landlord of low-cost rentals? And all the requirements, registry, compliance, possible deed restrictions, I believe there are legal issues involved here. Is the city aware of the legal jeopardy of Carmel as a result of the sixth housing element? I have included my legal concerns and suggestions in the package before you. I am not a lawyer, but I retain the right to use my property as a guest house and not take on the job of being a landlord. There are laws about property rights, regulatory overreach, vested rights, and process rights. I don't want our city in a quagmire of legal suits. And I'm here on the third issue is my own situation. And I want to just tell you what happened to me as a person. I do not consent to being a landlord and need to have my name and address removed from the sixth element before the council approves it. The sixth element is sending my name and address to the state as a full-time rental when I have no intention to rent it and have not rented my guest facility in the 24 years it has existed. To send my property to the state is a lie and makes me an accomplice of that lie. I have been informed that the city has no legal right to make me a landlord. Imagine how you would feel if someone took your property. and made you become a landlord. My husband and I went through planning in 2021 to update a simple garage, I mean a garage, which consisted of a small skylight, French doors, and changing single pane windows to a double pane. This should have gone through planning in a short time. However, my husband, who was 82 years old and very ill, who was trying to get it updated before he died, was told by planning that he could go through planning fast by putting ADU in the permit application or to go slow through planning. My husband had no idea what an ADU meant other than fast. He would never have used ADU in our application if he knew it meant a re-rental. The only thing he ever mentioned to me was fast. I also had no idea what ADU meant until Codd in 2025 put a double charge of $952 on my property tax without my knowledge because I was on Carmel ADU list also without my knowledge. I had to spend five months and three presentations before Codd's board, before their lawyer became involved. And Codd realized that they did not have the ordinances to do what they were doing.

Karen, Carolyn, could you summarize? Yes. Your time's up.

Okay. I just want to say that we went through with a simple garage. We did not create an 80-do. We did not touch our existing guest house. We did not add a bath or kitchen to the garage that we were sending in. I need to be off the ADUs and this housing yield. We are a community where we don't want to get involved in legal issues. And I would like the council to look over those legal issues. I'm not a lawyer, but I see that we have a lot of legal exposures. So tonight I'm asking the council, before you give your approval, to have compassion on me and direct the Carmel Planning to take my property off the sixth element so that I don't have to be a landlord. That's my request.

Thank you.

It's I'm a widow. I need this as a guest house for my friends and people who love me, not be forced to be a landlord. I'm 83 years old. Thank you.

Thank you.

Hi, Christy Ramers. I wanted to address the desirability of having the live work spaces within the Stonehouse Terrace. I was on the safari when this was conceptualized, and it came about from seeing so many empty storefronts and offices, especially deep within the block, like off the street. We ourselves have a tough time renting some of our spaces to long-term tenants. So it's very interesting to me to not only support housing but also have long-term tenants in those high turnover spaces. Also, mid-70s, it was a requirement to sprinkle buildings, commercial buildings, so any building that's like ours that's built after the 70s has that built in. I was also asked if I was interested, so I wasn't just put on the list. And then I also wanted to say that as I remember two years ago when this amendment came in front of us, the big group of us came together to make housing more Carmel as Devendorf had wanted it to be instead of having big housing blocks. And that's how we've ended up here today. And I hope that we can support it. I support it. Thanks.

Thank you.

Just before I get started, so much misinformation today and I'm sorry that it's coming at the last minute like this and since I won't have the mic, I only have three minutes, I'm hoping that Brandon and Marnie and And Hans will take the time to clarify all the questions that have come up today. But no matter which way the vote goes today, I just thought that congratulations are in order for this highly lauded effort toward local affordability. and the implementation of local affordability. Indeed, there have been lots of kudos for our approach, whether it's press positivity or our generous developer partners who are marveling at how serious and accurate our effort has been versus elsewhere, or HCD, which has been using Carmel as the California model, or our consultants' frequent encouraging of the staff to apply for a planning prize. I hope you do, please. The Carmel collaboration approach we took may not work elsewhere. It's not the Monterey model, nor is it a PGC side model, but it works here. It has many wise features. There was a wise integration of the higher authorities. In this case, we were dealing with HCD, active outreach to include Sacramento, leverage their knowledge, true collaboration where constraints and ideas flowed freely and honestly. We had a very wise integration of the consultant. She was hired early during initial exploration. She was on call only when she was needed versus on a retainer at a fixed fee. That kept her fees below staff discretionary budget. She was used as an advisor, not as a vendor of a product. There was a very wise integration of staff, which was a true support and partnership, continually infusing their local regulatory expertise. I'm in awe of Marnie and Brandon. The discipline of regular scheduled meetings was always keeping us on the same page. We had a working collaboration platform with writing and counting and research tools. There was a wise integration of citizens. I wish the folks who spoke today would have come out earlier. Of course, the citizens are the interested party with unmatched motivation, curiosity for the much needed speculative research that was done, the energy for the pavement pounding. the local knowledge, the local relationships. And as such, citizens play the perfect role for these special initiatives. Also, there was an overall structural wisdom to the process. It was depoliticized until today. It was research focused. It had a defined goal that was mindful of schedule and speed. It was a continual neighbor outreach for ground truthing. It was friendly, open, transparent, with all voices welcome at all times. to find all good ideas. Even now that's the case, I really encourage folks who are having these misunderstandings to please come out and join as we develop the policies. So it turns out that this Carmel collaboration culture is nothing new. I was recently doing some library microfiche research, as one does, and I saw that 75 years ago the council funded and organized similar citizens groups for another special project to scout, purchase, and renovate our now beloved cultural center. So bravo to you all for reviving a proven and effective tradition in town. Surely these fleeting verbal congratulations are less satisfying, though, than this other type of congratulations that I brought today. These are congratulatory sweets from another one of your founding fellow AHA members, and there are three of you up here, too, Rich Pepe. So enjoy them and enjoy your accomplishment today. Thank you. Thank you.

Anybody else? Anybody else in the room that wants to talk?

It's for everybody. It's for everybody.

Anybody else in the room? Fred, that's enough. Okay, nobody else in the room. We've got two people online.

Peter Prowse, go ahead.

Good evening, council members. Can you hear me?

Yes.

Okay, thank you. My name is Peter Prowse. I'm a land use attorney. I'm speaking in a representative capacity. The council should pause the adoption of this amendment of Carmel's certified housing element to really look at these numbers again. Carmel is proposing to remove Sunset Center and Vista Lobos from the housing element and substitute the housing plan for those city-owned sites with an unproven program of converting existing hotel rooms to affordable housing and transferring those existing hotel keys to create new hotels. The basic problem is that this program does not pencil out. The report that you saw earlier claimed that this program will result in a 44% return on investment, maybe more than $100 million in total profit for this program. That's a huge amount of money. If there really were that kind of money to be made here, you'd have developers coming out of the woodwork, tripping over themselves to speak in support of this amendment. But you don't. Maybe some participated early on, but it's telling that they've all dropped out now that there are numbers on the page. No developers are speaking in favor of this amendment now because these numbers are wrong. If this program fails, that failure will expose Carmel to the builder's remedy and other penalties under state law. It's easy to see why. The pro forma you're being asked to approve, it's page C6, table C39, Fred had it up on the screen earlier, vastly overstates the revenues and vastly understates the expenses of this program. The numbers don't pencil. On the revenue side, the pro forma assumes that a developer could buy an existing hotel, including both its land and its keys for one price, and then turn right around and sell just the keys without the land for a profit for more than both the land and keys were just purchased for. But that's not how markets work. You can't sell less for more. The hotel keys are worth much less if they do not come with the underlying land. Cut that sale number in half to account for the fact that the land is not included in the sale. And when you do that, to reflect reality, this program no longer pencils out. On the costs side, the pro forma estimates that converting these old hotel rooms to new housing will only cost about $100,000 each. We all know that you can't build anything for $100,000. Changing the use of those hotel rooms will require building whole new kitchens in each one, updating each unit to modern codes, and putting in new sprinkler systems. I've submitted a letter from the builder, Hathaway Dimwitty, estimating that this could easily cost $750,000 per unit. Those costs destroy the value proposition of this program. The council should postpone the adoption of this amendment until it can assure itself that it will actually pencil out. If the program won't pencil out, then this new housing won't get built. And if the housing doesn't get built, Carmel will open itself right back up to the builder's remedy. Thank you very much.

Thank you. Good timing.

Stacey, go ahead.

Thank you. I heard you guys. Thank you so much for what you've done. Thanks for the committee. But I did hear the Church of the Wayfarer on 7th and Lincoln, one block from Ocean, one block south of Ocean. And I just wanted you and everyone to know that that land was a gift from Carmel's founder, Frank Devendorf. who specifically established, he gave that land for a community church. It's been there since 1904. It was remodeled in the 40s by Robert Stanton, the new sanctuary. But I don't know where the old blueprint or whatever the architectural plans to build on that property there are. But across from Cypress Inn, I just can't imagine our town's founders generously donated land being turned into this, to being part of this. So I would just ask that you, you know, in All Saints down the street in the middle of the residential neighborhood, two blocks south of, three blocks south of Ocean, You know, I'm just asking you to really think about it. I mean, we're getting street numbers on all the new Comstocks. People used to come to town just to get the map to look for and explore and find the cottages. Now it'll be easy-peasy with street numbers. But, you know, it's the same kind of thing here to happen right there on the block of 7th and Lincoln. I don't think that's a good place for it. Thank you.

Thank you for showing up again, Stacey. All right. I think that's it. Last chance. All right, we're bringing it back for discussion.

Mayor, I have a couple. As we do sometimes, you know, listening to public comments, I think there are some general questions that might be helpful for the public, if it's okay with you. Absolutely. Okay, I took a couple notes. There's a lot of information here. So there was one question about what was the process for determining which hotels were the underutilized hotels. That was a staff effort. We obviously have access to TOT, tax records, all those things. Those are confidential. That was all done in-house, and we sanitized the information, but we were able to tell how many within our cadre of hotels were at an underperforming level, meaning they aren't performing at the same financial level as others. So that's how that came about. It was done by staff. What effort has gone into getting commitment from the churches? I think that was another question. We have either letters or pre-applications from all the churches that are listed on the housing element. There's another question. This is more of a comment. If you have an ADU, you're not required to be a landlord. There's nothing in the city's code or the housing element that requires you with an ADU It doesn't require you to become a landlord. You're not forced to rent to anybody. There's no requirement for that. So I want to be totally clear with that, and I can connect with Ms. Bardsley tomorrow as well to reinforce that. But for certain, she is correct. The city cannot require somebody to be a landlord. So that's not part of the housing element, nor will it ever be. Also, the other thing that's important to note is that names and addresses of people who have ADUs are also not included. in the sixth cycle housing element. They are not in that document that you are approving tonight. So again, I can talk to Ms. Bardsley more tomorrow about that, but I wanted to be clear that the housing element does not have people's names and addresses in it. I think those were the four that I picked up that probably could use a response. Thank you, Mayor.

All right, thank you. No, no, no comments, no comments. Brandon reached out to you. He'll talk to you tomorrow. I'm sure he will. I have, would staff mind if I ask a few more questions that came up? Certainly, it's back to the council now, so we can answer questions or whatever you'd like. Does anybody else have any questions that came up in the process?

I do.

Okay, so I guess Marnie? I guess Marnie, why don't you get up just in case? Why don't you go first, Alessandra?

Thank you, Mayor. I just wanted to thank Brandon for offering to reach out to Ms. Bardsley and helping resolve her issue. So we hear you, Ms. Bardsley, and we are sorry for the situation that you're in. I just have a quick question, Marnie. There's some misinformation that we just heard about the builder's remedy and when it kicks in. Could you please clarify that for people? Because the way we have understood it, as long as we are making a diligent effort under this housing or amended housing element, that the builder's remedy will not kick in. So could you clarify that for us and when it would be something that could happen?

Yeah, I mean, we continue to maintain a certified housing element as we've been going through this amendment process. And once the amendment, should it be adopted, again, we maintain that status. We will go into implementing the programs and there's language in the housing element that anticipates should the programs not be performing the way that they are expected to perform, then we will sort of pivot and make adjustments at the midpoint of the cycle. So this is a planning document and the state expects that sometimes things don't always go according to plan. And if that were to be the case, we would make adjustments. We don't automatically get our housing element decertified and then become open to builder's remedy.

Thank you, I appreciate that.

How much have we spent on TAM at this point, the consultant? Do you know roughly?

It's in the staff report.

I just heard a comment from Victoria that it was intentionally kept underneath staff's discretionary budget. Does that mean that's so council didn't have to approve it? Is that the reason why? We did approve it.

It went over. Yeah, we initially, so we've come back to council for a contract amendment. You guys have approved that. Okay, I thought so.

Okay, I wanted to clear that up. I don't understand. I'm not going to ask Victoria to come up here, but she made a comment that this situation was depoliticized until today. I don't understand what that means.

I don't think that's a question for us, sir. I know.

I just, I don't, I guess she's saying that we're politicizing this by asking questions. Can you tell me, I'm always concerned when somebody sends letters saying we're going to sue you if you do this. And HTC sent multiple letters to us over the last six months. And I've been told, like, don't worry about it. They send those letters to everybody. But when I get letters, if I ever got a letter like that, I'd be concerned because it was like 16 pages long and it was very detailed and it was written by attorneys. Can you explain why we shouldn't be concerned about them saying everything we're doing here is illegal, which is sort of what they said, paraphrasing a 16-page letter?

We've received at least three letters from the Housing Defense Fund, and we have reviewed all three of them. We have prepared responses to those letters and they have gone, both the letters and our responses have gone back up to the state with our housing element amendment resubmittals. I think we just respectfully disagree with their assessment of the amendment. HCD has received the letters and they sent us a letter saying that the amendment was in substantial compliance with state law. So I think that, you know, on some level there's a misunderstanding of maybe what some of the programs are. But HCD finds that the amendment does substantially comply. And...

So we're not worried about the Housing Defense Fund or whatever it's called, suing us? No, we're not. Okay, that's a good answer. Yeah. I like that answer. When Nancy was speaking, I think it was Nancy, she did a good job, I think, of explaining what this really is. It's like we spent a couple years developing a proposal for housing developments projects, And obviously there's some questions about the numbers and how that works. But she said, you're gonna get another shot at this. What does that mean? You're gonna keep developing the programs. You're not finished. It's a project that's not finished, I heard what she said.

Implementation.

But we're not gonna get another shot to vote. We have to vote by the incomplete project that you have right now, correct?

So again, this is a planning document, right? It's one chapter of the city's general plan. And what comes next are the ordinances that implement it. So it's the finer grain detail that puts these programs into action, like how this hotel to residential program actually comes to fruition. What are the incentives? How do we make it work? And that process includes ongoing conversations with hoteliers, property owners, developers, the community, and ultimately the council has to adopt those ordinances. The planning commission will review those ordinances. Like there's still more work to be done.

Are we as council people, I really apologize for asking all these questions, but this is serious in my mind. And I've never done this before. I don't think any of us have. And there's a lot of questions. Are we, as council people, supposed to do due diligence and truly believe that these programs are going to work? Or does that even matter? Do we have any responsibility to say, I think the hotel program can work even though I know the numbers aren't going to pencil? Does it really matter when we vote yes that we believe these things can happen.

I mean, I don't think that's a question for Marnie, or probably not even for me. I mean, the reality is that you're five elected officials here to represent your community, and you should vote what you believe.

Okay. I mean, maybe Hans can clear that up later. Because, I mean, I'm at an unfair advantage to all the people that have sat through 100 meetings with detailed agenda, with city council, ACTING CITY MANAGERS AND PLANNING DIRECTORS AND SENIOR PLANNERS AND A COUNCIL PERSON FOR ALMOST FOR OVER A YEAR AND A HALF ANYWAY. AND WE'RE SUPPOSED TO UNDERSTAND ALL OF THIS ALL OF A SUDDEN AND VOTE ON IT. AND IT'S A MOVING TARGET. IT'S STILL BEING DEVELOPED. THE NUMBERS HAVE TO BE REFINED. I'M REALLY TRYING TO UNDERSTAND WHAT I'M VOTING ON. YOU'RE SAYING I'M VOTING ON PURELY A PLANNING DOCUMENT THAT'S SUBJECT TO SEVERE CHANGES. over the next four years?

This is a planning document. I wouldn't use the term severe changes. It's a planning document that has done the same across the entire state in all jurisdictions. And what you do is you adopt the planning document that lays out the path forward. And that path forward includes stops along the way back with your planning commission, with your city council, to adopt the ordinances that implement the plan. That's why you often see housing elements the plan is as much higher level. It doesn't have the level of minutiae detail that you're going to see when we come back with ordinances. So that's, going back to your question, I believe that's probably where Nancy was going with that, but that is how it actually works is we come back along the way over the next multiple years to implement the plan. And that's what's laid out in the housing element is a sequence of coming back with those ordinances that bring more and more detail every time and make it real. And I'm not going to be here, but...

if I was and I didn't like what you brought back. Well, hopefully you're still here. I'll show up in the meeting. But we, as a council, could vote to say we don't want to do that and say that program isn't going to work.

You can help craft the program. Absolutely. Nothing becomes official until an ordinance is adopted.

So there are many, many votes to come. Yes, sir. OK. We didn't sit in a class that told us exactly what we were voting on. OK. All right, that's the end of my questions for now. Bring it back for discussion. Who wants to start?

Before we begin the discussion, I have a suggestion is that the council might want to thank Victoria Beach for the cookies, but you might want to consider returning them.

Yeah, and I think we should take a bio break, too, before we get into this. Anybody have a problem with that? We're also hit our lunch, our dinner time as well. What does everybody want to do? You can put them out there to break if you want. And then we'll do the discussion. Try to stop this before dinner. Okay, we're going to take a five-minute bio break. Back at five to six.

Good point.

Okay, everybody, we're getting started. At seven o'clock. Okay, we're bringing it back for discussion now. Alessandra, would you like to start?

Sure, Mayor. Thank you. My comments are actually going to be quite brief. I agree with Victoria. This has been an incredible Carmel collaborative effort. The community group that came together was just amazing. It was a two-year, quite labor-intensive process, and Marnie was a key role. in that whole group and the process. And I think it's tremendous. I think this is something very positive. It's huge. It's a very big accomplishment and I think we should celebrate it and I certainly support it. As we heard from the Toomeys and others, obviously it's a planning document and it's part of a ongoing effort that's entering a new phase now. I strongly feel that we're gonna need regular updates assuming that's going to happen. And there's certainly more to do. This is actually when we begin crafting the policies, the ordinances, the incentives, and the details to implement it and put it into action. And I think it's very exciting that we've gotten to this point. It's been a tremendous amount of work, and I really sincerely thank everyone who has been part of it. And I look forward to us making it happen and getting into these next stages that we're going to be getting into. So thank you. to everyone involved and I'm strongly a supporter of it.

Thank you. Hans, why don't you go next?

So from the very beginning, we were sort of told that this was mission impossible. You know, amending a housing element, we were told is not allowed and we proved the doubters wrong. Then they told us you'll never find enough units to put in the plan. And we proved the doubters wrong. Then they told us, well, the state will never sign off on it. And we proved the doubters wrong. And now we hear no property owners will participate. So I know where I'm putting my money. I also wanted to say, you have to think about some of the sources here. You know, never listen to the special interests. When you heard that attorney on Zoom, that's a hired gun for a local developer, and they want to build a luxury hotel in the Sunset Center, and they don't care about Carmel. I was not planning to get into the mechanics of this because I feel like we've been down this road for a long time, but I heard so much misinformation that I feel like I need to do a bit of a rebuttal. And so I'm going to start with the hotel program. One of these was, well, where did these figures come from? Because clearly they're nincompoops and they just made it up on the back of a napkin. Well, Mark Watson was embedded with us and working on this with us. And he is the smartest, most data-driven hotel operator in Carmel. And at various points, owned half a dozen hotels with his group. He's currently doing a renovation right now on the wayside in. So where did the renovation numbers come from? They came from somebody who's actively in the market renovating hotels in Carmel-by-the-Sea. I also was intimately involved with the numbers, and I worked in acquisitions at a large real estate private equity firm. Another point is we heard about $100,000, well, if you have a 400-square-foot hotel room, which might be generous, that's $250 a square foot, which isn't nothing, especially because you're not building the hotel room from the ground up. You're just renovating the hotel room. You're converting a hotel room into a one-bedroom apartment or a studio apartment. It's a very different proposition. The other thing that I would point to is there were plenty of points in this pro forma we were exceptionally conservative. So if you look at that pro forma, we assumed that the new hotel, when somebody buys the key and they go to build their new hotel, We assumed that they would be getting $450 in ADR, which is average daily rate. And we could have gone way higher than that. The magnitude of that difference swamps any minor difference in construction cost. I was just out for a walk with Bobby Richards this past week. And we walked into a hotel on Carmel Point. And we met this couple from Houston. They're paying $1,600 a night for this boutique luxury hotel. We put in 450. The Stilwell Hotel is getting 600, 700. So there's so much room in this thing, and we were conservative with it. So if you want to try to turn the dials on this thing, I'm happy to play that game with you. Then we heard that there was insufficient documentation of interest. And I think the thing that I would say is many housing elements don't have any documentation of interest. There's no requirement to have a documentation of interest. Sometimes people send out mailers. We actually went out there and talked to people. And more than that, the churches, the three churches, actually submitted preliminary applications. So the notion that somehow there's not enough documentation of interest, I think, is false. We also heard that the churches don't have any money to fund, you know, pre-development, which in some sense is true, but the housing element includes a million dollars for a housing trust fund, which the council just passed in the budget like a month ago. And the churches are a key potential recipient of that. The housing defense fund, I have personally been on about 15 Zoom calls with HCV over the course of this process. And I've heard more than once where the message was basically, don't worry about it. And the proof is that HCV approved this plan. And then lastly, and the thing that really bothers me is the intentional misinformation that we heard from the attorney on Zoom about the builder's remedy. So you're only subject to the builder's remedy once if you don't have a certified housing element. And this is pure and simple a scare tactic. It's false, it's intentionally misleading, and he's been hired by a developer who, again, just wants to build a luxury hotel on the Sunset Center. It's raw self-interest and they do not care about Carmel. Even if these programs don't produce as many units as are listed here, we will absolutely not be subject to the builder's remedy. So now I'm going to sort of transition to what I had planned to say, which was this has been really an amazing process, a process of a community coming together. A super majority of people in this community support this plan, 80%. This is how self-government at its best is supposed to work. We had over 40 resident volunteers who contributed literally thousands of hours to develop this plan. We had local architects, business leaders, the leadership of the Carmel Residence Association, and past and current council members. We had retirees in their 80s and high school kids as young as 16. And we had folks from across the political spectrum with a wide range of views, but united by the common belief that the best plan and the plan that would be right for this community was one that's tailored to Carmel-by-the-Sea. And that's exactly what we delivered. I also wanted to thank the city staff, in particular Brandon and Marnie. Brandon was a real champion for this project, both in his prior role and now as the acting city administrator. And I think he really deftly coordinated with the state. So instead of springing something on them at the last minute, he really consciously and really well, he really brought them along and that played a huge role in our success. We had a real dialogue with them and I thought it was a great job by Brandon. I also wanted to recognize Marnie. You know, while the residents helped to tailor the plan to Carmel, Marnie brought the technical expertise. When you have a question about something housing related in Carmel, Marnie knows the answer or she knows how to get to the answer. She's a real professional and we couldn't have done it without her. And, you know, it's too bad because when I was initially thinking about these comments, I was actually going to you know, give folks a round of applause, but we've sort of so deflated the room here that I don't feel like it's the right mood, unfortunately. What I like about this plan is that it disproves the received wisdom that providing housing requires a community to sacrifice its character. And I think we've proved that that's not the case. But at the end of the day, I think the strongest testament to the success of this effort comes from the state itself. They've called our plan creative and innovative, and they were so impressed that they began telling other small coastal communities to look to Carmel's plan for inspiration. This is what they wrote in their letter approving the amendment. Quote, HCD appreciates the hard work and diligence of the city in the housing element amendment update and acknowledges and appreciates the extensive collaboration and innovative approaches employed during the entirety of this process. Significant progress has been achieved in developing community driven solutions that meet housing needs, the unique circumstances and conditions of the city and statutory requirements. So I'm pleased to vote for this plan tonight. I think it's an incredible accomplishment by this community and something we should all be proud of.

Thank you. Jeff? Sure. I take it you're a yes vote.

So I didn't think I'd have to start with this, but sort of reference Hans's comments, I'll start by saying that I also care about Carmel, and I think that my comments from last night really back that up. I think that housing is hard. I think what we've seen across the state is that every community struggles with it. There's no one solution for every community, but I find, I'll start with the lead, I find that the this amendment is not going to produce housing. And so I'm going to be a no vote. And I'll start by saying that my comments that I'm going to make here are not based on the law. They're not based on ACD's approval or what I think of ACD's approval of this plan. My comments are based on what I think is best for Carmel. Like this is an opportunity for Carmel to say we are pro-housing and we think that housing is, you know, an integral part of what makes this place a community. And people, you know, we talk, Hans talks about population loss. I've always talked about population loss. And I don't feel like this plan is going to make a dent in that. So my objections are based on two things. First, what I think the actual production of housing is going to be, and I'll talk about that. And then what I think the political consequences are going to be when we fail to produce housing. And I don't mean, and I do not mean by political consequences, I do not mean the builder's remedy. Like I'm not, like I don't think about this plan as being I don't think about housing as being an effort to avoid the builder's remedy. I think about housing as being a plus for any community. And I think in a couple of years when we have not produced housing, regardless of what ACD says or the builder's remedy says, I think we're just going to be in a world of hurt. I think that not producing housing will effectively doom our community. a couple of people have said, you know, this has come up a number of times that this is a plan. And, and I, you know, cut my teeth and, you know, we cut our teeth in Silicon Valley and we both, you know, we both worked on projects and, and I worked on, you know, I was a project manager, an individual contributor and a project manager, um, And what we used to say when we were in the thick of things in Silicon Valley was if sponsors refused to endorse bad plans and engineers refused to work on bad projects, sorry, bad projects and bad projects, there wouldn't be any bad projects. You know, it takes people to stand up and say, you know, this is something I'm not going to do. I don't believe in it. I don't believe. And so that's what I'm going to do tonight. Let's see. Let me go through all my notes here. I'm going to read some stuff from the preamble of the staff report. So one quote is, at the direction of the city council staff and the community group Affordable Housing Alternatives explored alternative affordable housing solutions that would disperse the city's RHNA obligation throughout the community rather than concentrate the units in a few locations, namely the parking lots. And if we take ADUs off the table for a minute, because we have lots of discussions about ADUs, and I don't think anybody in this room thinks that ADUs actually produce housing that's used here. I know of one. What this plan does is it takes the hundred and some units from the parking lots and it disperses them in downtown. And so now we have a plan, you know, when we take the ADUs out, which I'll talk about in a minute, and we look at the remaining two or three hundred units, every single one of them is in downtown. And we heard at the beginning the owner of a restaurant on Dolores Street come talk to us. about the impacts of, you know, admittedly a big project, you know, on Dolores and Fifth across from the post office, about what that's doing to his, what that's doing to his unit, what that's doing to his business. And that's 20, you know, 10 retail units and 10 apartments. And so imagine what downtown is going to be like You know, if it takes a couple years to get this plan moving, and then we have four years to produce, you know, 200 units downtown or even 100 units downtown, imagine what downtown's going to be like when there's construction on every block at the same time. You know, someone talked about, and I don't remember who it was, talked about the John DeLuz building. Like, that thing has been under construction for five years. Like, I don't have any idea where the construction of that is. But that tenant long ago decamped to the dreaded block that's now being impacted by Pastors, by that project on that corner. And that unit sits empty. Like the retail unit sits empty. There's no visible signs of construction above it. And that, to me, is our future. Like our future is a lot of two-unit projects two-unit projects that disrupt three businesses around them. Or in the case of Dolores, there are people that live upstairs on the other side of Dolores. And we're going to be hearing that all the time. Like every city council meeting is going to have two people come to the microphone and say, this project is disrupting my life. I can't sleep. They say it's going to go on for six more months or 12 more months. What am I going to do? And that's political chaos. And I know that housing is difficult. I said that at the beginning. But part of this process is managing the political consequences. Because it's managing the political consequences that allow us to proceed down the path and build housing. Like if we don't have our politics in order, like the five of us are sort of creatures of politics, by definition, that's what we do. And if we don't have our politics in order, when it comes time to start building these housing units, then we will not build housing units. And we will end up in a situation like what happened when Jason Burnett was mayor, or what happened when we tried to build the police department, or whatever it is. We will have a run on City Hall, and people will get fired, and nobody likes that. And it's really unpleasant to be around. Page 7 of the packet. Next quote, the strategies were developed based on unique local conditions and specialized community knowledge. Traditional methods of accommodating affordable housing and high-density multi-story buildings were viewed as incongruent with the historic fabric of the city. Okay, so, you know, we have senior housing. Like, I can't remember the last time someone came to me and said, Trevick Court or Norton Court destroys the the fabric of the city because frankly those buildings don't they're on the outside of downtown you know they're in the you know they are in the sort of they're not in the commercial core they're on the outside which is supposed to transition to the residential area and they are basically residences and yeah there are two stories but they're not it's not you know a six-story housing project and i think that this quote This quote in the packet, and I think that the reasons that this group exists to the reason that this group sort of went out on this path to, you know, that's a red herring to me. Like not wanting to build nice, you know, nice or whatever two-story buildings on the parking lots where people live and with parking underneath them. Like that is not like we are replacing a parking lot, which is basically blight, right? with places where people can live. And so I don't find that this reason that this group exists, this stuff about incongruent with the historic fabric of the city, no one would say that about Trevick Court or Norton Court or any of those buildings. And so I find that to be wrong. I find that to be not good. Another quote is the result is this result is creative and innovative programs that allow for the integration of affordable housing without the demand for significant public subsidy. Now, I will grant that the contribution of the land under under the sunset, you know, under the sun, the contribution of the Sunset Center parking lots and the parking lots at Vista Lopez, I will grant that that's a public subsidy. But what I believe, and I'll talk about this in a minute when I talk about the individual programs, is that the programs don't pencil out. And we've allocated $1 million. We allocated $1 million in our budget to be a housing trust fund. So that is a public subsidy. That's the definition of a public subsidy. And my fear is that that's not nearly going to be enough. And by the time that we are finished, you know, doling out public subsidies, we will have equaled or surpassed the value of the land. And it would have been if we're serious about producing housing. Now, we may not be serious and we may not do that. But if we are serious about producing housing, then it's going to take money. You know, that's how this game works. And we live in a wealthy community And I believe that we can afford to find solutions that involve money, unlike many of our less wealthy neighbors who really are stuck and who really are in the position of having, like Santa Cruz, for example, of having to upzone their downtown core, whatever it is, in order to have these projects pencil out. So they provide public subsidies by zoning you know making life making life making the downtown area or whatever less amenable to what they view as our community character and we are in a position to not have to do that but we have decided you know we made the decision somehow that we are not going to do that and we have fooled ourselves into believing that the programs listed in this housing element are not going to require public subsidy I do not I do not agree with that let's see, integrate housing units throughout the community. I talked about all the units being downtown and the impact of we really haven't integrated the units throughout the community. You know, I think that the, you know, it is possible for a notion of shared sacrifice to bring communities together. You know, I think, when you look back through history, when you look at like the second world war, or you look at situations where communities have to sacrifice to achieve a common goal, like there is an element, there is a very valuable element of community there. And it seems like we have decided as a community that we are not willing to sacrifice anything. Like we want You know, we want, I don't know whether it's we want to just make HCD happy or I don't know whether we're being selfish. I don't know what it is. But I believe that this is, I believe that, you know, producing housing is an opportunity for the community to make some sacrifice and come together and open our doors a tiny bit. And I do not believe, I do not agree with the, you know, with the thesis of all this that building on the parking lots is going to sacrifice our community character. Like I just, I do not, that is not something I agree with. So now I'd like to go through, now I'd like to go through some brief remarks on each of the programs. ADUs, you know, ADUs are listed in the housing element as providing 79 units of housing. And I get, I get that HCD, you know, counts those as housing, as housing, as housing units because, because in every other community or a lot of other communities, they produce housing. Like, I get it. But again, you know, my objections here are not based on ACD. My objections here are based on whether or not we are going to produce any housing at all. And I do not see 79 units of housing coming from ADUs. Like, I know of probably, I know, you know, I can probably point to 15 ADUs, and I know one that's occupied. And it may be, it's the one I've heard bandied about, and I don't want to just tell people where it is, but that's the only one that I know about. So I don't, ADUs do not give, do not inspire me. Hotel conversions. There are too many. You know, the plan's reliance on 160 new hotel rooms is really far-fetched for me. It's far-fetched for me for a couple of reasons. Mostly the reason is it's hard for me to imagine where these 160 units are going to go. Like we've had, you know, we say that we're going to, that 160 of these hotel keys are going to go. Now I understand that some of the keys can go to like the Pine Inn could buy a couple of hotel keys and put them over their parking lot. Like I get it. So that's five or however many it is, however many it is. But where are the other 155 units going to go? Like, seriously, like maybe they're going to go on maybe they're going to go on the three garages parking lot, you know, on Unipro. So that'll be that would be 20. So now we're down to 140. If someone, you know, and I'm not talking about whether the numbers make out. I simply don't understand where 160 hotel hotel units are going to go. You know, we saw what happened, and we saw what happened last year, two years ago, with, you know, Carrie, previous council member at Tyson's Hotel, and how that was just on the verge of springing up a whole, you know, a whole row of, you know, of CEQA and all that stuff. And it's hard for me to imagine that we're going to be able to replicate that experience, like we're talking about 30-unit hotels, It's hard for me to imagine that we're going to be able to replicate that experience five times. And when I say that we'll be able to replicate it, I'm sort of looking at Marnie. But the problem that I have that I talk about a lot is whether the council is going to be able to deal with it. Because I spoke about this last night a little bit. Sometimes issues come up, and they suck all the oxygen out of the room. And so the council. gets sidelined by dealing with, and I'm going to use this example, hotel after hotel after hotel, and we don't get to do the other stuff that we need to do, like pass a budget or rule on someone who doesn't like their neighbor's house or work on greenhouse gas emissions or whatever it is. Whatever other important work we're going to do, these programs seem like they're going to suck a lot of the oxygen out of the room And there's not going to be time for the five of us to do other work that's important to the city. So that's something. And I picked up on something in there. And I'd like to read something. There's a comment in the hotel thing about hotel residential suites. And I copied, the city will explore the possibility of allowing purchasers of hotel keys to designate a subset of the newly established hotel rooms as hotel residential suites, hybrid units that would be owner-occupied at a market rate residential suites for a portion of the year, and that would be required to add into the hotel inventory for the rest of the year. Those are timeshares. That is the definition of a timeshare, which is prohibited by our code. Like an owner-occupied thing. that's rented out. I know what this is because my parents, before they passed away, owned a timeshare. This is what that is, Hilton Grand Vacations timeshare. You live in it part of the time and you rent it out part of the time. And I say that because this is an element of something that we don't really think about, timeshares. And we don't really think about it because supposedly we have banned them. And yet here it is, sneaking back into the general plan through this back door. This is one thing. Here's the thing about timeshares. And I can imagine what's going to happen, who's going to come out when it becomes clear that this line is talking about timeshares. Like, is that really a door? Like, we talk about the character of Carmel and the residential character. And yeah, these are downtown. So we've shown that we don't care as much about downtown as we do about the R1 district, a view that I don't share. But this is not a good, like, this stuff about timeshares, this is not good. There's a comment in the plan about live-work units from Program 1.11c in the verbiages, but Carmel's numerous alleys and courtyards contain a great many small impaired commercial spaces that are not a good fit for traditional retail or commercial uses, as evidenced by the high proportion of these spaces that are either vacant or overutilized. Now, I get that. I get that there are spaces in the back, but part of the charm of Carmel are those residential spaces in the back. And we talked about this, you know, when we talked, you know, we had this sort of weird conversation about charm last night when we talked about sidewalks. And part of the charm of Carmel is the unexplored, you know, or the unexplored, less expensive retail spaces in the back. And we have talked, and I remember when the first Pastore building, when the Pastore project, when the first of three versions of the Pastore project came up, that project across from the post office, that project was dinged because there weren't any of these pathways. Like that was the thing that the planning commission dinged the first pastoral project on was the inability to go from that, the inability to go down a pathway from one host to another, from one parcel to another. And I get that that's not retail. I get that you know, the pathways is a little bit different from the retail, but there are pathways to have retail. And that is a cherished part to me. That's a part of old Carmel. You know, when we talk about, when we talk about the things that make Carmel unique, those pathways and those retail spaces at the back, those are important. And it's different than having an apartment in the back. Like, you know, our motto is sort of, you know, retail downstairs, living spaces upstairs. And I would hate to see, I would hate to see these pathways, these pathways sort of thing. I'll also say, and I see, I see Christie in the back. I'm not buying, like, I'm not buying the 12 number on the Stonehouse Terrace. Like, I'm not, like, that's something that is being offered to me, you know, to Dale's point, when he said, should we buy these numbers? Like, that's a number I'm not buying. Like, I'm not buying that there are 12 residential units at all in the Stonehouse Terrace that are waiting to be built or converted or whatever. Like I'm not buying it. And it calls into question for me, it calls into question, you know, sort of the veracity of some of the other numbers. You know, we talked about the Dowd Arcade. Like, I don't know, like admittedly, I don't know what's up there. You know, but I'm not really buying that there are 13 units up there. And maybe there is 5,000. Maybe there are 13 studios up there. And maybe there are, you know, 5,000 feet of retail, 5,000 feet of space up there on the top of the Dowd Arcade. But I'm not buying it. Yeah. And finally, the church sites. One of the reasons that there was so much outcry over the parking lots was the misguided notion, the incorrect notion, that we would lose control over the parking lots. And the fact was that the city was never going to lose control over the parking lots because we own the property. Like building housing on the parking lots, whether you like it or not, it is factually incorrect to say we would lose control over it because it's our property. And if we put out an RFP for a developer that was going to do something that we didn't like, we could just say no. Admittedly, that's a treacherous or political path, going down the process of having an RFP and then saying, no, we don't like what you're going to do. I get it. I get that there are politics there. But in the end, it's the city's decision as to what and how to build on the parking lots. So there was never a question that we were going to lose control over the parking lots. And the problem with the church, the problem with the laws that, as I understand it, the problem with the laws that this housing element uses to facilitate these church, facilitate the apartments on the church lots or on the church property is that we will have no control over that. Because state law gives churches wide discretion about what they are allowed to do and how much we are allowed to protest what they do. There's an entire state law that is dedicated to churches. And if we thought that building on the Sunset Center parking lot to use one of the three parking lots in North Lot was a problem, because of the neighbors around there, what is going to happen with the Church of Christ, Church of Christ scientist parking lot, you know, that front, you know, that's in, that's really on the outside of the commercial core and sits between Lincoln and Monteverde, right? That is smack in the middle. That is smack in the middle of the residential area. And I will tell you, that when I ran for office in 2018, and I still remember this comment, when I ran for office in 2018, this Church of Christ thing has come up thing. This Church of Christ project has come up over and over and over again. It comes up all the time. One of the neighbors over there told me that literally the only thing she cared about was not allowing someone to build something on the Church of Christ parking lot. And this neighbor was two blocks away. And so I remember, so this is eight years ago that someone told me that that was literally the only thing she cared about. And so what is going to happen when the Church of Christ comes to us and they say, okay, we're ready to put 15 units or however many units on the parking lot. And these are our plans and we don't have a lot of room to push back. And the five of us are up here saying there's nothing we can do. Like to me, that is a political consequence of the decision that we are making now. And I think that we should try, my view is that we should try to avoid these political consequences that we think or know or suspect are going to happen. And so I think that transitioning the 30 or 40 unit buildings on the parking lots for three 15-unit buildings or however it is on the church sites, that's like jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire. And we may not see it. We may not see it right now because the parking lots were identified in the first housing element. And the churches are buried in this housing element amendment. We may not see it, and there may not be people at these meetings that are raising the stink about the inclusion of the churches in this housing element, like what happened with the Sunset Center. That may not be now. But what we've done is we've created a situation where there's going to be a lot of pressure, and we've stuck a cork in it. And we're not going to allow the pressure. The pressure is never going to be released. if it turns out that the Church of Christ decides to build there, and everything will blow up when that happens. That's what I think will happen. And so I think that this reliance on these churches without having the backdrop, without having the backstop of the parking lots as a possibility to do in our housing element, the commitment that we will do that if these other programs doesn't work, I think that is a significant problem. And finally, and I promise this is the last thing, it is unfortunate, I find it very distressing that we've spent two years doing this and we have not made any progress on the plan that we passed. This is an eight-year cycle. We need a lot of time at the beginning of these programs to develop the programs and then put the programs into place. And now we are two years behind. And so now, instead of building three, instead of the target of building 349 units in eight years, we have the target of building 349 units in six years. And that will only make life for us worse. Thank you.

Thank you. All right, Bob, it's your turn. Are you still there?

Oh, I'm still here.

All right. We don't want to see you, but we want to hear you.

I appreciate not being seen.

Let's see you while you talk.

Well, I am here. See, I really am. Well, look, I'm supportive of the amendment, and that's a third vote to move this thing forward. And I appreciate the defense of the amendment that Hans provided, and I appreciate the opposition, the very detailed opposition that Jeff provided. I'm certainly not going to go counterpoint with Jeff's objections. I don't think I have the oratory or perhaps even the mental capacity to do that. So I'll just try to be pretty simple. First off, this is... This is a planning exercise. The California Department of HCD, Housing and Community Development is a planning department. And what do government planners do? Government planners are trying to the best of their ability to sort of shape the future. and knowing that they often don't really have a significant role in building the future. In this case, HCD has put out a, I will call an aspirational, perhaps wildly aspirational demand called the RHNA, the Regional Housing whatever it is, but that's the numbers that they've sort of just thrown on every community in California about the number and the mix of housing units that we are being told to build. uh... and uh... you know so uh... it that i did reminds me of the boss came in and told us all that we needed to double sales and six months and you know she wanted our plans are desk on monday uh... while we all came up with you know that was a wildly aspirational goal we came up with some wildly aspirational plans uh... They didn't work because the demand in the first place was too much. So I've always viewed this entire process as one where we're kind of having to do a dance that the state has demanded we do. That doesn't mean I don't believe that we can and should be building housing. I think I've established my housing credentials to this group in the community before, and I don't think I need to keep doing it. I believe in it. But something that, the work of the AHA group has done for me is actually kind of make me a believer that maybe this isn't wildly aspirational, that these things can work. And they're plans. And they've done to the best of their ability. They've vetted them to see if they might work. It doesn't mean they will work, but they might work. And all five of them may not work. Maybe just two of them work. Or maybe they all work and maybe one works extremely well. We won't know until we actually try. My biggest problem, what this comes down to is it's a yes or no on amendment. If we don't do the amendment, we're gonna stick with our current plan, which has also been approved two years ago, thanks to the work of a lot of people and the leadership of Bobby Richards and Karen Forlito. My biggest problem with that plan was all the eggs are in one basket. It included most of these other elements, but it didn't seem to believe in them. Really, it didn't put a lot of numbers on them. It really had all the numbers essentially on the parking lots. We should not just say it's on the parking lots. Those parking lots are in neighborhoods. They're in people's communities. They're not blight. People live around those things. So I think we need to understand that as well. But I really think that it was just too much and too big. And it was buildings that were going to be too big. It was a process that was going to be too big. It was going to involve developers that are too big. It's going to involve money that's too big. And frankly, it's going to involve a risk of getting it wrong, a risk of failure that is enormous. And I've given the speech before that don't try to hit grand slams if you've never played baseball. You need to start by hitting singles. And that, in its essence, is what I believe this amendment allows us to do. It allows us to try a lot of smaller things and see which ones we're good at, see which ones work, and get the momentum in those instead of swinging for the fences and trying to put all these units in one place. I mean, I'll close with this. I've actually done four public-private partnerships that have similarities to this. And so I'm not naive as to the complexities involved. And I'll tell you about one. It got started in 1996. It involved a hotel, so it was more. But it actually involved quite a bit of housing, parking, and some various public amenities. And the conversation started in 1996. It was first approved in the year 2000. Between the year 2000 and 2005, it was subject to three voter referendums. Two were successful and then one finally failed. And that meant it needed three more approvals. The project broke ground. The developer came in. The developer secured financing. The developer was somewhat more than halfway through the project. Their lender was Lehman Brothers. Lehman Brothers went bankrupt. Suddenly, we didn't have a lender. The project went dormant. For a while, the lender, or sorry, then the project manager, sorry, the developer went bankrupt and went dormant for a little longer. Then the new owners came in and they did finish the project, but all of the public benefits that originally the lender and the developer were going to take care of fell back to the city and we ended up writing million-dollar checks. That's a real story. about what can happen when you get into something enormous. And I'm sorry, Jeff, that, yeah, we could control it for a while. We can control it through an RFP process, but then once that developer starts going and once their lawyers get involved and once their bankers get involved, little karma by the sea loses a lot of our ability to control. And you might just be picking up the messes. So, you know, that's my fear. um so i'll leave it at that but i'm i'm entirely supportive of this um this new approach i applaud the work that was done by aha they amazed me in fact and you know i when i first went to one of the early meetings i suggested that they were only going to succeed if they impressed the hell out of the state regulators and they appear to have done that and I think that has given us some clear runway to move forward with this and try to make it work. Thank you. Thanks, Bob.

So this is tough. I was there for the first three meetings, wasn't I? First three meetings for the AHA group before we had, Bob and I had to drop out and I guess I had some frustrations early on. One of the things that really pops in my head is, did they just get the wrong assignment? Should the assignment have not, don't take the parking lots off, but how can we make this better? How can we have more control? How can we actually build housing? And Jeff, I have to, from where I'm sitting, I agree with everything you said, and I thought it was really well said. And I'd like to just stop there, but I THINK I HAVE AN OVERLAY ON TOP OF IT. NOTHING I'M GOING TO SAY IS AT ALL A CRITICISM OF ANYTHING THAT WAS DONE, AND I DON'T THINK PEOPLE REALLY UNDERSTAND THE AMOUNT OF WORK THAT WENT INTO THIS. I WENT TO THREE MEETINGS, BUT I DON'T KNOW HOW MANY MEETINGS WERE THERE, 80, 90? MAYBE? YEAH, IT WAS A LOT. WHEN YOU DO SOMETHING EVERY WEEK FOR A LONG TIME, IT ADDS UP. and detailed agendas every week. I still don't understand the actual structure of it. And if what we did was okay to do, I would love to do it with Public Works and lots of other things, but I've been told that's not a good idea. So I'm not criticizing the work. It was a huge amount of work. But when I'm sitting here to vote and I really get the impression I'm just checking a box to say, the state's going to be happy. And I'm really with Jeff that I really would like to build some housing. And I have really been digging deep, partly because some people I know in town that have restaurants have tried to do these conversions of retail spaces to restaurants, for instance. And they put huge amounts of money in before they found out at the end they needed fire sprinklers and this and that. And if you have two-story buildings, you could, 2025 building codes with earthquake, all kinds of things. And the hearing that I attended and analyzed in great detail for Mad Dog a week ago Thursday brought up, every single one of these programs and what the challenges are gonna be, and I really, I know it's a planning exercise, but in this town, I'm really discovering that we have a real divide between planning and building, and that's not good, because people are planning projects that then can't be built, and there's all kinds of changes that have to be made, and we need to figure that out. I don't know how, but the Building Code Board of Appeals is the one that gets all these things, and I was told it wasn't important, So I didn't put a lot of time into putting people on it because there were people on it. They're there for life. But it turns out it's really, really important, and I'm spending time doing that now. I really don't think a lot of these programs are going to survive that test when it gets to building. And I hate the fact that we're going to find out after we put in a lot of time on ordinances and all kinds of other things. And Jeff covered that pretty well. I don't need to say that. Adopting this element isn't going to change any of that. Brandon and I have had many discussions. I brought this up not for the housing element, but because if this is true that the state fire code is onerous and you can't change it and you can't, it orphans every building in town that we have for another use because 80% of them, 90% of them don't have fire sprinklers because they were built before 1970s. So I hope I'm wrong. I hope these programs produce real housing. I really do. But tonight I have to vote on the evidence in front of me. And I haven't seen enough to believe these numbers are realistic, especially without public land in the mix. Public land was part of the original plan for a reason. We spent, what, half a million dollars or more on the original plan. And for some reason at the end, they felt they needed the public land in order to make it work. I know we were all surprised, like, how did that get in there? But professional consultants said, without that, this just isn't going to work. And we've put more time. We've done a lot of surveys. I was part of that. But in the end, it's still the same. And I think removing that without some thoughtful modifications, which I think we could have done to solve some of Bob's problems. And Bob is right because he's been there. But I think what we've done is made people feel better. But I think it's going to be far more difficult, as Jeff said, to achieve the outcomes we need. And for that reason, I can't support this housing element as written. But I want housing built in Carmel. I want housing for our seniors, city staff, teachers, first responders, artists, the people who keep this town running. And my vote isn't against that. In fact... I don't see how some of that, especially the seniors, is going to be satisfied by some of these programs, but maybe so. Trivette Court is my gold star in terms of what this could look like. Voting no doesn't mean I'm walking away. I want to keep working on housing even while I'm in office and after my term ends to get this right. I'm here to help however I can with that process because it's going to pass. It surprised me a while back to find out that our own general plan and coastal land use plan specifically states in very clear language that it favors building a parking facility at the north end of the Sunset Community and Cultural Center. I think a lot of people will be surprised about that, but it says it in one line as clear as you can say it. I'd like us to keep that and other similar options alive and moving in parallel We don't have to just do this. We can do other things. I know that Marnie and Brandon pointed that out to me today. They can be moving in parallel no matter what we decide. RFPs can let the city shape the outcome directly or at least explore what those options are. We didn't even do that. It doesn't cost much to send a 15-page RFP out saying, here are the things we want, like build our city hall, build 1,500 underground parking spaces, build workforce housing, build this. And I've never done that. Bob has. So maybe I'm wrong that that's a pie in the sky thing. But I think we should at least explore it since this is going to pass so that we have another option should this not work. But again, I'd like to thank everybody for all the work you did. And I hope we keep working together on this. And I hope we can depoliticize that if that's what we've done tonight by asking questions. But I'd like to thank everybody for this. And I think it's time for motions. Hans, probably you should do it. There are two. We need two motions, actually. We're going to have two votes.

I move to approve Resolution 2026-053, and I move to approve Resolution 2026-054, amending the general plan by adopting the six-cycle housing element amendment. My recommendation is you treat those as two motions and vote on them one at a time. I move to approve resolution 2026-053.

I'll second it. Council Member Booter?

Yes.

Council Member Barron?

No.

Council Member Drummond? Yes. Mayor Pro Tem Delves?

Yes.

Mayor Byrne?

No.

Motion carries 3-2.

And the second one? I move to approve resolution 2026-054, amending the general plan by adopting the six cycle housing element amendment.

Second it.

I have a comment.

So I realize that we're pretty far apart. I think that the, you know, I've talked about this before that, you know, amending the general plan is, pretty big deal and I think that the three of you should consider reaching out to the mayor and myself to I can't believe I'm going to say this polish this cannonball to to make it more likely that you, to make it possible for us to vote for it? And you can say no. And I don't know, I do not know what form that would take. It's 8 o'clock at night. I don't know what form that would take. But I do think there is a chance to, I do think that there is an opportunity to take a step back and find something that will get the two of our votes.

So I completely appreciate the sentiment. And I'm normally interested in doing that and having these votes be 4-1 or 5-0. I think you and I have been talking about this for quite a long time. And I think there are things that we can do that don't have to be in the housing element, one. But then second, I think there are You, in fairness, have been talking about some of these things for a while, but the level of detail on some of the things that have been mentioned sort of really kind of just showed up in some ways. Like this conversation is the conversation we should have had kind of over a year ago. I think it was May of 2025. And this document really hasn't changed in like 14 months. And so the thing that I would say is, at this point, to your point, we're two years into an eight-year cycle. And I feel like we need to start making some progress. And I feel like there was an opportunity earlier in the process to have those conversations. That was the right time to have these really detailed conversations. I think at this point, I'm usually inclined to do what you're saying, but I think at this point, I think we just need to move forward. Can I say something?

Sure.

I mean, you say that we should have known this 14 months ago, but I didn't know what was going to happen last Thursday at a Mad Dogs meeting where we found out that these things are onerous and Jennifer's finding that out too. And Other restaurant friends of mine spent $100,000 and had to just cancel their two projects because of this. I mean, I'm really starting to really become concerned about it for our whole city, not for this, because it orphans our buildings and there's no way around it. I mean, Jeff and I both are proponents of at least exploring what we could do with the parking lots because it was completely taken out And I think both of us agree that it should have at least been explored. Correct, Jeff? I mean, I don't know how, I don't think we can modify it at this point, but. I would love to have that as a backup plan. I already said that. I mean, I already reached out and said that. So I don't know how we can feel more comfortable if that could happen. I don't know if that makes you happier, Jeff.

Could I just interject? Yes. The whole purpose of our resolution back in 2024 with the previous council and the whole reason the AHA group formed was to take the parking lots off because the public outcry. They didn't want it and the neighbors were concerned. They didn't want it and Sunset Center was concerned. So now we're going to turn ourselves around in a circle and go back to where we were? It makes no sense. You're trying to get the parking lots back in because you want to help your developer friend.

I do not.

I say we take the vote.

I'm actually not interested in Sunset Center.

I say we take the vote.

Okay. I tried. Jeff tried. Jeff, are you okay now? I said what I said. Okay.

Councilmember Booter?

Yes.

Councilmember Barron?

No.

Mayor Pro Tem Delves?

Yes.

Councilmember Jeremiah? Yes. Mayor Byrne?

No.

Motion carries 3-2.

Okay. I believe that wraps that up, correct? Correct. I don't want to move forward too fast here. Okay, we're done. All right, I think we're going to go to dinner now. All right, I think we should go to dinner and we'll be back at 8.30. It gives us 25 minutes. Is that good? Okay, 15 minutes. Everybody okay? I'll just keep going. 20 minutes. Okay, we're going to be back here at 8.25. Thank you. He knew.

Organize these to make sure we get through the most important ones.

Yeah.

The city administrator one first? What? The city administrator one first? Mm-hmm.

Everybody in agreement? Mm-hmm. It's Brad or anyone who wants one.

Okay.

So we're talking about delaying number two of the public hearings, going to number three, and then number five.

And then whatever time left for you.

We're going to three, five, and then after two.

So we just have to check with Brian.

Why don't you start the meeting back up, Mayor, then I'll ask.

We're back in session at 8.29.

So, Mayor, if I could ask the attorney a question. Yes. We're having a conversation about possibly pushing some items or switching around what we get to first. Brian, for item number two tonight, which is consideration of adoption of the fee schedule, there are certain statutory requirements for noticing ahead of time, 60 days, twice, noticing twice, all those things. If the council were to not get to that item tonight and just continue it to a date certain, is that okay or do we have to go through the whole 60-day rigmarole again?

I think the 60-day period applies to when the fees go into effect. It doesn't affect the noticing for this meeting. No, you have to notice twice ahead of time. Well, maybe we should have Jamie come up. Because my understanding is the 60-day period applies to from the date you adopt the fees until when they go into effect.

That's correct. But we have to notice in advance

again for discussion again in 30 days. So if we don't do it today, we have to send that. We've already noticed for it to be today. We have to start over with a new notice next time and then wait another 30 days for the second notice and then wait another 60 days. Maybe.

That's what I was asking Brian. Because if we just continued it to a date certain from this meeting, are we okay? Did we meet all those requirements? Maybe you don't know off the top of your head.

Yeah, I'd like not to guess at that. I didn't recall that there were two notices that were sent out. Were these notices published in the newspaper? Okay, were there any like mailed notices or?

No, just the public notices in the newspaper. Just the public?

Well, we'll deal with that if we have to. I still think the two most important ones that we need to get to for sure are the ballot language and then the city administrator, and then we can round back to number two if we have time. In my opinion. It's up to you guys.

Let me give some thought to that while we go through the rest. Okay. If we're doing number three, I'll need to have my PowerPoint brought up.

Brandon, while he's doing that, there's no problem with when the fees will take effect? It'll just delay when they take effect. It'll just push it down the road.

And you're okay with that? It's okay with us. Yeah, we're not like there's nothing. Yeah. Okay.

Bob still with us? What?

Is Bob still with us?

I'm still here, guys. Okay, we ready?

All right, we're ready to go. All right, so this item is... dealing with the issue of the primary arguments in favor of the two ballot measures, the TOT and the transaction and use tax, also known as sales tax. Next slide. On June 2nd, the council gave direction of return on... July 7th with the proposed primary arguments, which have been revised based on the input from council on June 2nd. Next slide. Pursuant to this section of the resolutions, the city council, when those resolutions were adopted previously by council, designated the mayor and the council members to author the primary arguments and also designated the mayor and council to submit rebuttal arguments as well on the measures if there were an opposition argument to be filed. Next slide. Here you'll see the TOT ballot question. I'm going to read all this slide to you. You can see this is something that was presented to the council previously. It would be a new 2% TOT tax. You add that to the existing 10%. to get to a total of 12%. Okay, this slide begins the argument, primary argument, in regard to the TOT ballot measure. Again, I'm not gonna read the slide to you. It's here for you to look at and the public. You'll see that it starts with Half Moon Bay at 15%. The other cities are listed. The final city on the list is Monterey at 12%. Next slide. Continuing with the draft of the primary argument. Again, I'm not going to read the slide. It's there. You can all see it. It was in the agenda packet. It was published last Wednesday. No, it was even before that, wasn't it? Yeah. This has been on the city's website for about a week and a half, I think. This is the next page of that. Well, let's go a little too fast there. So why don't I pause here, and I guess I could ask the question. You've seen here the draft primary argument for the TOT. This is the last page of that draft primary argument. I can either stop here and you can give input on this one or I keep going and go on to the sales tax one and then we do it all at the end. But it might, may I suggest it might be easier if we do them one at a time. And so on the TOT, could we go back a couple slides? All right. So here's the first page. Does anybody, I should mention that. Oh, the comments. Yes, I understand. I should mention that these were drafted by, pursuant to direction of council, by Council Member Buder and by Mayor Pro Tem Delves. And yes, we do need to have public comment at some point. Yeah. Do you have any questions from the council?

I have a question. Nova, this is actually a question for you. We put in here as sort of a placeholder measure X and then measure Y. Is the letter given to us by Monterey County Elections?

Yeah, the letter is assigned by them. And I believe they're going to assign the letters on the evening of the 7th, which is a Friday. So we probably won't actually know what the letter is until Monday. What is that, the 10th?

So it's understood that this is just a placeholder.

Yeah, that's just a placeholder.

Perhaps what we could do, instead of having the letter X there, would just be to put a line. Because what I'm concerned about, if somebody sees an X, they might think that that's the letter that's been assigned. And then things happen. So we don't want that to happen. So perhaps a line instead of the X.

Any other questions? All right, public comments on this? I do have one more. Go ahead.

No, but did we ever get a chance to determine whether the line breaks are okay with the city's

So I looked at the county's template and I did a copy and paste of the first version and it fit, it barely fit, but it did fit without any formatting of the bulleted list.

So the line breaks on the city list.

Yeah, and I think they said that if you take up extra room, you just pay more to have it printed.

So what that conversation is about would be that if there's not space that you would wrap these so they wouldn't be listed one under another so that they would fit in the space provided, is that?

Yeah, I mean, preferably not because your eye doesn't pick it up in the same way, but anyway. Okay, public comment?

Somebody, you stayed. We're looking for input here.

Nancy Toomey, speaking as a resident. And I still remain firm that this is not time urgent and could go on a future ballot. And that's enough. Thank you.

Okay. We're talking about the ballot language here? The TOT language? tax has already been submitted.

Mr. Mayor, the only comment I would make on the list of cities there is Visit Carmel specifically calls out two competitive areas, Napa and Santa Barbara. Both of those are at 12 and 2. So just a comment regarding the fact that we directly compete with those two cities. That's a good thought.

So you're saying add Santa Barbara and take one of these off?

What I'm ruling out is that Half Moon Bay was called out by the innkeepers. Places like Malibu, some of those places may not be quite as relevant. Visit specifically calls those two locations.

Santa Barbara certainly is competitive. That's right.

Napa and Santa Barbara compete for the same traffic, and they are both the 12 and 2. Okay. Thank you.

All right. I figured Kelly would come up.

Good evening, Mayor, Council. I would just like to say that I appreciate the effort that was put into developing these ballot measures. We have a growing community of support to support you in these initiatives, and we look forward to reaching out to you in the weeks ahead about that. Thank you very much.

Thank you.

We support the language as written. And we do have a hand raised on Zoom.

OK. Looks like we can go to them.

Stacy, go ahead.

This is out of my league. I don't know a lot about TOT, but I did listen last night. I'm still here tonight. I just wanted to just say out loud again that with this money we are paying. I don't know how many people, if you add Visit Carmel and then See Monterey, and then I don't even know if we pay the Chamber of Commerce, but that and whatever else we pay, that must be like 20 people probably, 10 at least, because I've met at least half a dozen or more of them at the Visit Carmel workshop. But anyway, my point is... And then I compare and hear how many city workers we have doing the stuff that the residents need on a daily basis. I'm in there every morning, not every morning, but a couple mornings a week. I've been coming in at 8.15, 8.30. I don't know what time everybody's supposed to get there, but I'm unable to find anybody hardly to help. So as a resident, I would just like to explore the idea of remembering that we do have residents before we take our top money, and maybe we have to, again, I'm ignorant on this, I don't know if we have to spend all top money on social media, I mean, you know, public relations and getting people to come here, but we do, I am still a resident, we have residents, a lot of them it sounds like are gonna be renters, and they get to vote, But, you know, the few that are hanging on that want to keep Carmel because, you know, people just don't know. They just don't know. They didn't even... Most people I talk to after 20 years of being here don't understand the difference between the one square mile of Carmel-by-the-Sea and Carmel. Most people do not know that that live here that are residents 20 years. So... people outside of Carmel that just hear us on KSBW or wherever, you know, whatever, they definitely don't know the difference between Carmel-by-the-Sea and Carmel. They have no idea. They think the Crossroads is Carmel. They think the barnyard is Carmel-by-the-Sea. They think St. Philip's Church out there on Carmel Valley Road is Carmel-by-the-Sea. So let's just say that we are one square mile and if people could not just the 30% that's voting here because we know 70% Second homeowners, they don't vote. Or maybe some second homeowners do vote, but I don't know of many. Anyway, residents who live here, please invest more in the city so that we have more workers there. Thank you.

All right. Thank you, Stacey. Should we clear the air on that? I think maybe Stacy doesn't realize what we're doing with this.

No, I'm ignorant. I'm sorry.

No, you're not ignorant, Stacy. And I really appreciate your coming to the meetings, by the way. What we're doing here is we have approved a TOT and a sales tax, very small sales tax for the ballot. And what we're doing here tonight is looking at the language that we're going to use for the argument for both of those tax initiatives. In general, those the taxes are gonna come in and be used to improve the town for capital projects, and really we could use it for whatever we want, but we're saying it's gonna go to help make things better, streets, sidewalks, and that sort of thing in general. So I think that'll make you happy. All right, so we're back to the ballot language here. We're done with public comment, and any discussion before we approve or change this? We had a suggestion to put in Santa Barbara because it's one of our main competitors.

I think the list is fine the way it is. And we could just move on. For me, we could just move on to the next one. I'm fine with the language.

I'm fine with it, too.

Hans?

Since this is your project. Yeah, no, it was very intentional, the way that the list was developed. I'm good with keeping it. I appreciate Lance's comment because he's absolutely right, but I think this is the right list. You've had that discussion already? Yeah, this is a super minor thing, but it may just be the way that it should have been this packet. There's kind of a weird line break. Sorry, I guess this isn't the sales tax version, so sorry. I'll defer that comment.

Okay, all right, so we're good with that. Next. Next.

So I think we also talked about changing the X to just a long dash. Okay, same thing on this slide. Go back. Here's, it's got the X as well. So wherever you see the X, put a line in so that they don't make a mistake. Okay, let's go to the next slide. All right, now we're, you have up on the screen the TUT transaction and use tax. It's also referred to as a sales tax. Here's the ballot question that was in the resolution that he adopted. I'll just pause for a minute here. You can all see it to refresh your recollection. He's proposing to increase the sales tax by 0.375%. So that would be an increase from the existing 1.5 to 1.875 and the revenue amounts are shown there. Okay, next slide. Here, and again, here it says measure Y. Wherever it says measure Y, strike it out and put just a line. I'll just say to you, here's the first page of the primary argument. And then so you'll see what it is. And again, it was in the agenda packet that was published some 10 days ago. All right, next slide. This is the next section of that argument. You'll see where it says measure Y. Next page. This is the last page. And again, the measure Y will be changed. So perhaps we should pause here, ask for questions, take public comment.

Any questions from council?

I had a question, Dale. Okay, good. It's actually on the ballot language for sales tax. Can you put that back up?

Yeah, we can back up a couple slides. There it is.

I wonder, so down towards the bottom, approximately $1.8 million annually in additional revenue. Is it Does it read better if it's 1.8 million in additional annual revenue and approximately 9.4 million in total annual revenue? Does it make any more sense to move the annual over?

This is a resolution that was already adopted and has been sent to the county.

Never mind.

In other words, it's good enough.

There's that. But to respond to your question, I mean, it seems to me that it covers the point.

It does. It's fine.

Brian, could I have you make a point? There's been some talk that we can still change whether we're going to have these two ballot measures. Could you clarify that for the public?

I'm not sure of your question. Yes, the ballot that the... Resolution has been submitted to the county, but the deadline to submit the resolution is August 3rd. And Nova, do we get on the schedule anything from the county about a date to rescind that resolution?

They said it would require a resolution from council be adopted stating that we're rescinding the one or both of these resolutions. And I believe, if you just give me a second just to confirm the email I got from the county, I believe they said it would be by August 7th. Council would have to adopt a resolution to rescind one or both.

So if that's the case, you could either rescind it or modify it up until August 7th.

So we'd have to have a council meeting, we'd have to agendize it, we'd have to bring it up and pass a resolution. Yes. All right, that clarifies that. All right, so let's finish this off so we can move on. So I think, did we ask for public comment on this? Not yet, but we're waiting for questions from council.

I had a question on the language on one of the next slides. It's the one that talks about the food purchased in grocery stores. It's clear like this, most food purchased in grocery stores is exempt, but we could also put most food.

You need to back up.

Most food purchased in grocery stores is tax-exempt. Just put it tax with a dash exempt. Does that make it a little bit clearer? I mean, it's fine, but I'm just trying to make it a little bit clearer.

Yeah, the problem is I think we're right at the 300-word limit.

If we put a dash, though, it wouldn't count.

If you added a word, you'd have to subtract another word. I mean, to me, when you read it in context, I think it's clear. But if the council thinks that the word should be tax exempt, we could do that.

But it won't really add a word, because if you put a dash, it's still considered one word.

Well, you know it doesn't work that way when you count up to 200.

No, if it's in the dictionary, as a dash between it, it really does count as one word. It's not two. It's fine if we leave it. I'm not trying to get into the weeds here.

I think Alessandra's right, but in terms of putting the word tax in.

I think she's right, too. Nova, do you know if we write tax hyphen exempt, if it's going to come as two words or one?

It looks like tax exempt with a dash is in the Webster's dictionary according to the law.

Let's try it.

And then if they come back, we can take it out. Yeah, I'm finding that too, that it's hyphenated. And my memory is that under Section 9 of the Elections Code, the hyphenated word on the council is one word.

So as long as you don't apply it. Just put a hyphen in there between, like, two arbitrarily.

No, that doesn't count.

Okay, is everybody else good with this?

Like odds-booter.

If we put tax-exempt, everybody good with this? Just wait.

It says tax-exempt is usually written as one hyphenated word when used as an adjective.

Andy, Andy, Andy. No. Okay. That was it? Do we have another page? Was that the last of it? We saw the first part. Was there a second part? Yes.

Back. Back up one slide. So this is the last page. Yes.

I like this.

By the way, on this issue about whether tax exempt is one or two words, if the county is the ultimate arbiter on this, so if they do a word count and reject it, then there's a slide you're going to see later that's going to allow for some minor editing for non-substantial changes. So we can take care of that later.

Okay.

All right. Everybody like this? I'm sorry. I'm kind of lost. Have we taken public comment yet on this?

No. No, we haven't had questions on this part yet. So everybody seems to like it. So we'll go to public comment on the sales tax argument.

Nancy Toomey. So I thought a previous version of this was corrected, so on your wording, to include pharmaceuticals and food. items purchased in the grocery store environment. And I don't know why that went away. So that's just a question or a comment for your consideration. And then the other is that I personally fully support this. It is a use it or lose it. It's gotta be there. And I do have, if this is my last time to speak, then I did also want to comment that I do believe it's the responsibility of the city to host a informational session on these tax measures. or I would like to recommend that you do. And that's in your camp to decide if you want to do that and how you want to do that. But I believe that's in order here because there's a lot of stuff in the weeds on these that I think will benefit the community to be more informed on all of them. Thank you. Thank you, Nancy.

So what I heard was should we put pharmaceuticals and food? I'm sure you thought about that.

I don't think there's a... I spent two and a half hours trying to cut like three words at the end, so I don't think that we're going to get there. Okay.

I'm fine leaving it as is.

Jeff? Okay, I am too.

Hi, just for clarification, and I think this is more for you, Brian. In the wording, if you go back to the TUT, it says TUT sales ballot question, if you go to that section, would it be clear for the reader, the next go back?

Hold on, can we back up?

Yes, one more back, one more.

There you go.

There you go. If you see where it says transaction and use tax, they're with lowercase letters, but you spell T-U-T on the top. So why don't you just put them in caps so people can relate to T-U-T as the way you're talking about transaction and use tax. If you use capital T, capital U, capital T. So we can, the reader can say that's what T-U-T means. Since you're not defining the abbreviation.

Let me just say that. What you see in the title of the slide is not what's going in the ballot. What is going to go into the ballot are the words that are with the white background.

Okay, so there will be no definition on top.

There won't be. But you see in black letters on the white background, that is what's going to be in the ballot.

Okay, so you'll just spell it the way it is. Perfect. Spelled out.

Thank you.

Appreciate your.

Any other public comments on this? Oh, I forgot to say. You forgot to give your comment?

I'm in support of both of the ballots, and I think we should go and let the citizens of the city decide.

Okay, thank you. All right, no more. Anybody online? Nobody's online. We'll bring it back. Any further discussion?

All right, let's move on to the next slide. Keep going. Keep going. More. All right, so the deadline to submit the primary argument is August 7th. It's 5 o'clock. And the rebuttal deadline, if there's been an opposition, is August 17th. Next slide. This is an election timeline. You've seen this a number of times. I'm not going to read it to you. Well, I was going to give more than two seconds to look at it, but... Okay, here it is. I assume there's no questions. Okay, now let's go. So the recommendations are the motion to approve the primary argument in favor of the TOT and to authorize the city administrator to revise the primary argument if it's necessary to comply with any requirements from the Elections Department in consultation with Mayor Pro Tem Robert Dells and Council Member Hans Buehler. The reason for the added language is To give you an example, tax exempt. If the county comes back and says that's two words and you're one word over the limit, then there's going to be a need to do some minor editing. And that same qualifier is found in the second motion, which is to approve the primary argument in favor of the TOT. So you would not, if you're making the motion, have to read the entire motion as it's up there. You could just, for shorthand, say that you're making a motion to approve the primary argument, but the understanding is that the full text of the motion is what you see on the slide.

Does somebody want to make a motion? I'll make a motion to approve the primary argument in favor of the TOT ballot measure as written on the slide. Second.

I'll second.

Roll call.

Council Member Barron.

Yes.

Council Member Booter. Yes. Mayor Pro Tem Doves. Yes. Council Member Drammel. Yes. Mayor Byrne. Yes. Motion carries.

All right. Make a motion for number two. I'll make a motion to approve the primary argument in favor of the TUT sales tax ballot measure as written on the slide.

I'll second it.

Roll call.

Is this with the change to the tax-exempt?

Yes. We've got five approvals in motion. Why don't you just modify that?

We need Council Member Barra to say that that's part of the motion.

I need to think about it for a minute. Okay. Yes. Start over. Try it again. I make a motion to approve the primary argument in favor of the TUT sales tax ballot measure as amended with the dash and is further written on the slide.

I'll second it. Council Member Barron? Yes. Council Member Booter? Yes. Mayor Pro Tem Delves? Yes. Council Member Dramoff? Yes. Mayor Byrne? Yes. Motion carries.

I think that was the last slide on that, wasn't it? OK, questions? I think we've already resolved those. All right, that item's complete. Mayor, I've been given some thought to this item number two. My recommendation would be that you continue the matter to a date certain, if you want to continue that, that you continue the item to a date certain if, based on some further research that I don't have time to do right now, we find it needs to be noticed twice. despite the fact that most public hearings that I've ever seen, you can continue them to a date certain because they've already been noticed. And you're giving notice at the meeting that it's being continued. So if you want to do that, I think you can do that. But if you can't, then we'll have to issue some more notices.

Okay. So for now, we're going to continue it, but we'll wait to see if we have time.

Yeah, we don't have to continue it at this point. Brian, just giving you the option. If we get to a point where council would like to adjourn the meeting and we haven't got to it yet, you should continue that item to a date certain.

Okay, do we want to just go straight to four?

I think, Mayor, I think you had suggested to knock off them in the order that we want to make sure they get done, and I think that the city administrator recruitment was the next one.

Okay, we're doing item five, city attorney update regarding executive recruitment firm selection process for a city administrator.

Good evening, Mayor, Council. I'm going to just briefly refresh our memory on this item before I hand it over to Brian. So we recently discussed the recruitment selection for a recruitment firm for the City Administrator. Sorry, that was a little backwards. And Council's direction was for me to issue an RFP, which it was issued and it's currently active. The direction was to identify six top recruiting firms, 12 national firms, bring them back to council, and then council would narrow the six firms down to three during a closed session. So there was a question presented or that came up whether that was appropriate for council to do that narrowing down of the six to three in a closed session. And this is where I hand it off to our city attorney to respond to.

Thank you, Marissa. Thank you. Yeah, I did the research and couldn't find any case that specifically dealt with narrowing from six to three in a closed session. However, based upon my review of the government code section 54957, it's my recommendation that you not do that in closed session and that you want to have some other, that the agenda provides you can give direction to staff. So, you can, in light of my advice, if you choose to follow it, would be to come up with some other alternative. I mean, I could suggest some, but I'm sure you can probably decide on your own as to how you would narrow it. I'll just mention one would be to have Marissa narrow it from however many are received to three, and then you consider the three at an open session. But there's other options that you might want to think about. Is this something we're gonna vote on tonight? You can make that decision tonight.

Okay, all right, questions? I don't know if there are many questions. The choices are to have Marissa do it or we do it in a public meeting. We've eliminated doing it in a closed session. That was Victoria's thought and she was right. Thank you, Victoria, if you're listening. Any thoughts? I think we're looking for questions. I think we all understand it.

I don't know if there's going to be public comment on this item.

I'm going to ask. There has to be, yeah. Any public comment on this? Yes.

Maria Bruce, my comment to you is very simple. I believe that the HR effort, the evaluation of HR specialists for hiring a city manager, city administrator, I think ought to be, you should rely on the expertise of the in-house expert that we have. you should let them make the decision, make the evaluation, count on their expertise because as many of you, some of you may not have even had that experience in the past, maybe you don't have the experience of HR capabilities and maybe if you have not many managed people or have to do the hiring, releasing of human beings in your life. So since some of that expertise doesn't reside in your capabilities, I would say let the city, I always forget the title, City Assistant, City Administrator, Marissa, to do the evaluation with her expertise and bring the most qualified three individuals that she considers. She is the expert on HR aspects. Thank you.

Thank you. Kelly.

Hello, Mayor and Council. If this cannot be done in a closed session, I would strongly encourage you to make the selection in an open session. I think there is no more important position in our city as I think about what we have ahead of us in the next five to 10 years. And I think that many of you do have expertise in this area, and I would like to see you all lead the process of determining the right party that will recruit our candidate. Thank you.

All right. Seeing none. Anybody online?

There's no hands raised online.

Let's bring it back. I mean, the choices are pretty clear. Cut it, have Marissa cut it down to three or have Marissa cut it down to six.

I've got another option. I was doing some research and actually a very common way that these things are dealt with is with you send a couple of council members to go and do it. And so one hybrid option here could be to have Marissa go through and score, provide initial scoring, and then have a couple of council members in an ad hoc who would at least have the benefit of seeing the full universe of all of the search firms. And ideally that lowers the, degree of difficulty on us because she's already provided to sort of an initial stab at scoring. And it prevents us from what Jeff was talking about, which is this unwieldy public scoring process, which feels like it would take hours and hours and not really be workable. So there's a hybrid option for you. Is that okay for us to do, Brian?

Yes, with ad hoc, it would not be subject to the Brown Act, assuming that it's limited in duration and scope, and appears that this would be. Yes. With regard to the scoring, that'll be a judgment call that you all make. I mean, there can be challenges with that. You could rely on her judgment as to which are the top ones to be considered, but She could also do scoring if you choose that you want to do that. Then you've got to come up with some kind of process for scoring, or she could do that. I don't know. Maybe we'll listen to Marissa on this one. Yeah, I was going to ask her.

Marissa, you want to give us your honest appraisal of that option?

So... There is a traditional methodology to narrowing down or scoring firms that I plan to use on the first batch of them. It's strictly based on relevant experience, of course, in council's preference and direction, which was provided during the first discussion. The same could be used to narrow down the six to the three. It's not unknown to me. The process is not unknown to me.

The question is, how do you feel about an ad hoc committee of two coming in and helping you go from six to three?

It's up to council, Mayor. It's up to you all. I have no preference at all. Okay.

And I think, Council Member Buddha, correct me if I'm wrong, I don't know if it was your recommendation to have the ad hoc committee review and take it from six to three or review with Marissa, the scoring, and then that sort of ad hoc group, bring it down to one and bring that one collectively back to council.

No, actually neither of those things. So my, my thought was, um, if you go through and you have an ad hoc, um, just take it from whatever, 20 to three. And again, have Morissette provide some initial scoring, but you at least get a couple of council members who get a chance to see the full universe of the search firms. And that might give the public some additional confidence that we've been involved the whole way.

If I may, Council? Yeah. So I just want to remind Council that during our first discussion, Council's direction was for me to narrow it down from six to three. I'm sorry, from the full proposals down to six. So if you are changing direction, then I need to know if we're just scratching that completely, and there will be an ad hoc to score all of them from the beginning.

My preference is to just have Marissa narrow it down to three and bring us three. I mean, I think we're looking for the best one, and I think that the best one is likely to be one of the three, and let's just keep it easy. I agree with Jeff.

Bob? Yeah, I think that's just the most efficient way to do this, and we'll get three good ones. I think we need to move more quickly here.

Alessandra, you good?

I don't mind doing it the way Hans suggested, but I am worried about the time because we're still talking about choosing the firm. We're not even actually talking about getting candidates yet. So I do feel we do need to move on with that.

Okay. That was a good suggestion. I have a question.

Yes. If we, I guess it's for Marissa, if we elected to do that and just have you narrow it down to three, can you bring us the three at the next council meeting? Is that too soon?

Let me look at the calendar.

That's a really good question.

I know. I don't even know what day it is today.

It's four weeks from today.

I can, yes, I...

When's the RFP deadline?

The 10th.

Oh, so coming right up. All right. Coming right up.

It's coming up.

Okay. I can, yes, to answer your question. You'll need a motion.

Alessandra, you want to make a motion?

Actually, I would rather not because I didn't write notes on what we were saying.

Jeff, go ahead. Let me see if I can do this at 9 o'clock. I would make a motion to ask staff to compile all of the responses to the city administrator RFP, reduce... select the three that they believe are the top three firms and bring them to the city council meeting in August. In an open session. In an open session.

And there will be no closed session.

There'll be no what?

And there would be no closed session.

Correct.

I'll just say that. Well, he previously said there would be, so I'm just saying you're affirming there won't be. And there'd be no closed session.

Sorry, I just thought of something else. This is dependent on the firm's availability to come in in August.

So that was going to be my question. We need to confirm, like, what does Council want in August to be? Do you want the three firms to come and present?

I am actually not, like, I speak only for myself. I don't need to see the three firms. I'm willing to make a decision based on Like, you know, what happened in Monterey, to me, was pretty illustrative. You know, they had three firms, and they chose the one that showed up. And, you know, on the surface, that sounds like a thing that, on the surface, it sounds like, yeah, they chose the firm that was the most interested. But beneath that read is the idea that the other two firms said, yeah, we're just not going to show up. And they may have discarded the number two or the number three, the best firm, because the firm said that there's too much friction involved in this process and we're not going to participate. And so I'm willing to, and I speak only for myself, in the quest for expediency in doing this, I'm willing to not necessarily see them and look at the presentations.

I think we committed to the public that we were going to do the final three in public, right?

Yeah. Yeah. We'll review the presentations in public, but I'm less interested in the interview of the person.

That's what we're asking is does council want it for the August meeting? Do you want us to just bring back a presentation on the three firms or does council want the three firms to be present to sort of present themselves to you? That's the direction we need.

It's here. What do you think?

Yeah, I mean, you've got to interview them. You can't just read their RFP response. So you want to see them? Yeah, you've got to talk to the human being there and try to get a feel for them, and we've got to talk to the actual people. Alessandra?

I'm questioning then if maybe we should just do a special session with just this topic, and then we can bring the three firms in rather than doing it at a regular council meeting.

The question right now is, do you want to see them in person, or if they come on Zoom, whatever?

Well, that's what I'm saying. Yes, a special meeting with them in person.

Bob? Give us some thoughts.

Yeah, well, I actually could go either way on this. I think we should just lean more. The concern on one half is that, you know, it's We need to be as public as possible. It's just I hate to spook the firms, right? And when you ask three of them to come in and do a dog and pony show against each other, they're kind of showing each other their secret sauce, and some of them don't like that.

That's what I was talking about. And I think that's true, by the way.

I do think that's true. So we've got to decide one or the other. I'm going to lean more towards the public process. In fact, I would... ask them to, I almost would say, please only show up on Zoom. Because I think Jeff's right. I mean, you might get the one that says, you know what, I know I'm in third place, so I'm going to buy a plane ticket and go put myself in the first place. That doesn't make them the best.

Yeah. We saw that in Monterey.

So, I mean, you know, a 20-minute Zoom interview, I don't think that's unreasonable.

All right. I'm willing to go that way.

I'm confused. As I understood from Council Member Barron, and I thought I heard two others join that, was that the candidates would not be appearing either by Zoom or in person at the August meeting.

Bob had a hybrid. Basically, they're all on Zoom, so we don't have to worry about them getting there.

The motion did not reference one way or the other. We asked, staff asked for clarification. Staff asked for clarification. And I guess we have sort of decided, like, Bob's solution is fine, you know, fine for me, 20 minutes on Zoom. Like, that seems not unreasonable.

My only other question was, I think Alessandra actually did have a good question about if the firms can't hit that specific time for the August meeting, should we provide some flexibility so that we could do a special meeting if we need to? I think that's not a bad idea.

If we did a special meeting, we could do it earlier, too. Right. Working hours. We can work with NOVA to try to schedule with all of you. Yeah, great. Okay.

So I think that's a good, I think it's a good idea to do it during work hours for them and the public and us.

Okay. And do we have three votes on zoom? I think we do.

And that's part of your motion. Yeah. I'll make that part of my motion.

Do we have a motion?

Can I clarify, is your motion to do it as a special meeting during working hours or to do it potentially as a special meeting? I honestly don't.

I honestly have no opinion. So if someone else would like to make and manage the motion, that would be great.

My suggestion is you let Marissa and or Nova just coordinate a time. That's good for the three.

And for the firms. All right, so I think the motion is... To, yeah, go ahead and restate it.

The motion is to have Marissa narrow it down to three, have the three presented to us in an open session meeting TBD date with hopeful 20-minute Zoom presences by the firms. 20 minutes for each? 20 minutes, yeah.

And then we select one from that. All right, that's the motion. I'll make a second. Roll call, please.

Council Member Barron?

Yes.

Council Member Booter?

Yes.

Mayor Pro Tem Delves?

Yes.

Council Member Drammel? Yes. Mayor Byrne?

Yes.

Motion carries.

Very good, thank you, everybody. Item four. Discussion and direction on financial stewardship work group ad hoc.

Can I make a request? Yes. With your indulgence, could we do, so the police station is sort of ripe for doing, and I see Tom showed up and Shari is here, and we need them to do the sort of PD presentation. Could we do the PD before we do the financial work group?

I have no problem with that. Anybody else have a problem with that? Imagine Alessandra's happy about that because we can get through it. Doesn't seem very happy. Well, good for you. Can we consensus?

Sure, the folks are here. Let's go.

Okay. All right. Good. Sherry, we're going to do item number six. update and request for direction regarding architectural services for the new police and public works facilities project. I'm gonna step outside just for a second.

Is there a presentation?

Yeah, I can't find mine.

Is there one printed on the dais?

I don't have one. I don't think.

We can get them printed for you real quick. Do you want to print a copy?

Did you email it to us?

Oh, I need one too.

Do you know when you emailed it, Nova?

I thought it was emailed last week while I was out, but I'll resend it.

No, it's okay. I can find it. Oh, it came from Shelby. Okay.

Okay.

Good evening, Mayor, council members, community members, and to my colleagues. I'm Shari Carlette, Acting Public Works Director. So tonight, we'll be presenting the most exciting part of the day. We'll provide updates on the selection process taken to identify the top four architectural firms for the Police and Public Works Facilities Project, along with upcoming decision points for the council. We'll also present how the selection committee reviewed all submitted proposals and qualifications using established evaluation criteria. This evaluation and scoring process resulted in the identification of the top four firms best suited for the project. Then we'll also discuss the next steps requiring council direction including selecting the top firm to move forward with the design, establishing the preferred pacing and timeline for this process, considering whether to hire a municipal bond expert to help evaluate potential funding mechanisms, and determining if additional education or analysis on funding sources is desired. With that, I'll hand it over to Tom to present the details of these discussions.

Thank you, Director. Hello, everyone. My name is Tom Ford. I work in public works and have been involved in this project for the majority of this past year. This slide here is a brief recap of the journey of this project. Years of effort led to what we see in the first arrow. which culminated in phase one. That was the conceptual effort by Indigo Group, which essentially failed due to misaligned and misunderstood criteria for success of the design. The second arrow is November of 2025, when the city released a request for proposals, an RFP, to architectural design firms. We cast a really wide net. One thing I wanted to note is that the RFP incorporated many of our lessons learned from prior attempts. The RFP did very clearly lay out the scoring criteria that firms would be evaluated on, which we'll see in a moment on the screen. And for anyone wanting to see the RFP in its entirety, it's the loan attachment to this agenda item. The third arrow indicates that in February of this year, the city received eight valid proposals, really good turnout. My opinion, the clarity expressed in the RFP really paid off. I think it was really thorough and it was vetted and approved by council. We had a dozen firms attend the mandatory pre-proposal meeting and of them, eight submitted proposals. great conversion rate. There was a ninth proposal that was received, however they did not attend the mandatory pre-proposal meeting, therefore their proposal was ineligible for consideration. The fourth arrow is the step that we just concluded, which was an evaluation by the ad hoc committee and staff of all valid proposals over the course of several meetings. And those members of that selection committee are Council Members Barron and Dramov, our Administrator Brandon Swanson, Chief of Police Todd Traer, Public Works Director Shari Carlett, and myself. Shari aptly provided us an overview of what we're about to see here. I don't think I need to go over into, this basically just explains what we're about to see on the next couple slides. So first, we will review the selection committee's evaluation process. What you see on the screen, it's a little bit busy, but what you're seeing here is a distilled version of what our evaluation scoring criteria was. It was out of 100 points. Some of the main sections were the firm's understanding of Carmel's design context, very unique, their ability to fit a project into our unique historic and natural environment. Then comes the firm's municipal experience, also for 15 points. And then the following three categories in the middle of the slide reach for 10 points. Their understanding of police and public works operations. Then we have their analysis of swing space options to keep continual services available during construction and project understanding, including familiarity with Carmel's specific development review process. And then we have the remaining 40 points, that big block up on the right of the screen, that was allocated to the personnel that they proposed being part of the project, their years of experience both with the firm and with projects of similar nature, their ability to adapt to complications that came up during prior projects, their proposed communication with staff and the public, as well as any additional services offered. And for anyone who wants to view the exact wording of all the scoring criteria, it again can be found in that RFP that's attached to this agenda item. That criteria is on page 14 and 15, in case anyone has that pulled up in front of them. So we did let firms know ahead of time exactly how they will be scored. So there's clarity right up front. We went word by word in our evaluations. Shari touched on this a bit. I'd like to talk about the process for the selection committee when scoring proposals. It was to go through every criteria for each of the eight firms that submitted valid proposals, and we did this one proposal at a time in each meeting. So as an example, going back and slide here, As an example for the first scoring criteria, Carmel's design context, we'll go around one by one. Each of us will provide our score out of 15 points, as well as a justification for that score. In other words, we will point to specific sections or sentences or words in the proposals that we believe justified our score for that question, or excuse me, that led us to our score for that question. We will tally all them up, get an average score, and we did that for all scoring categories. And those average scores are what we see on this slide here. The scoring numbers in the two red boxes are rather small, so I'll kind of read those out loud. It turned out that a very clear bottom four and top four firms emerged. We originally had tossed around the idea of narrowing it down to three firms, but we go off the data, and the data appears to clearly show that there are two distinct groups of four. So that's what we decided to bring forward today. Of those two distinct groups, so one group of four, the bottom one on the screen, ranged from 56 to 72 out of 100. And the other group, the top four, ranged from 80 to 88 out of 100. Thought I'd also mention that just because a score is 80 or 88 doesn't mean that they would produce like a B or a C. level quality, if we're using like letter grades, we were highly scrutinizing all these firms and we maintain that level of scrutiny throughout. So it's very possible that a firm at 80 or 84, whoever it be, would produce an excellent product. And there was also a reason why we did not mention the names of the top four or bottom four firms in our staff report. This was a purposeful decision. So once we inform the firms who will be moving forward, we need to let them know the next steps in the process and we're here today to get what those next steps are. And we of course also didn't want to make a public announcement to the firms before seeking direction of the council. I had told them that we would get back to them by this Thursday, the 9th, so as to give myself and perhaps other staff at least a day's buffer to prepare our decision letters. This brings us to the first of four discussion points, which staff is seeking guidance from you on today. I should have told you this at the beginning. My presentation is exactly 10 minutes. I'm about halfway through, just to provide you a little benchmark there. Our first discussion point, staff seeking guidance on you from today, is whether and how to proceed with interviewing the top four firms. It is staff's recommendation to move forward with interviews. Shari had said that this is the That's the standard procedure in this RFP process. And our selection committee actually already identified a bunch of questions for each of the firms throughout our discussions. Following these interviews, staff would recommend that the top contender do a public presentation. That's an option. Shari can touch more on that aspect when she comes in to conclude the presentation. But that brings us to discussion point number two, that we would like guidance from Council on. As part of a firm's possible public presentation, the question arose of whether we should request them to produce a conceptual rendering of a hypothetical Carmel site. This came up for discussion, therefore we wanted to present it here. It's not particularly staff's recommendation, for actually one of the reasons that came up in the prior agenda item. So this type of task, typically, it can range in the tens of thousands of dollars. It's not quite common to ask firms to do this, and we just had a concern that it might make firms averse to proceeding with us. Another point to consider is that the criteria we would need to come up with for their rendering so that they'd have like a framework to work within would be a rather big task. It would kind of be like producing a new RFP itself. But we just, staff just wasn't quite sure yet that it would produce the intended results that we had thought it might. But this is a discussion point. Discussion point number three, it's pretty straightforward. Looking for guidance on council regarding the timeline of this project moving forward. Essentially boils down to do we proceed full steam ahead or do we pace ourselves given upcoming tax measures and many other city priorities. And then finally, as Shari had indicated, there's a lot on the screen here, but we're looking for council's direction on whether to seek a dedicated municipal bond expert to come and do a public presentation to let us know all the available funding mechanisms for this project. Whether that be from internal sources or external sources, but it is staff's recommendation that we proceed with scheduling such a bond expert to do a public presentation. therefore our question would to ask you would be if you'll be receptive to that to our question would be when in the upcoming timeline timeline of this project and then sure I just wanted to see if you wanted to recap these are kind of our the main four discussion points that were on the previous slides do you want to bring some

Thank you.

Thanks, Tom, again. So with that presentation, what we'd really like tonight is to get guidance from council. And then just to recap, the staff recommendation is to proceed with interviewing the top four firms with the selection committee. As mentioned, the selection committee will interview these top four firms and then select the top firm. after which the interviews will basically happen to better compare the qualifications and select the firm to design the project. And then they will be asked to, they can be asked to present to council about their approach, experience, design process, and community engagement plan. This is the typical or traditional process for consultant selection in most of the cities. So that is our first recommendation. The second item that we'd like to bring out is, as Tom mentioned, is During the selection process, there was a request or question about, I guess, obtaining Carmel context rendering and doing a public presentation. As Tom mentioned, it is not a typical recommendation by staff. But again, we're asking guidance from you and decision whether that's something you want to include. There's pros and cons in asking those renderings because from earlier, I guess, like Indigo's process, if you don't have community input, then that will be a difficult one. Asking for design also costs a lot of money. For the designers, it typically costs tens of thousands of dollars. And then third is asking your guidance and direction on the timeline on basically pacing this project with the upcoming TOTs and TUTs. That's something to consider. And finally, we also want to, I guess, get your guidance or direction on HIRING A MUNICIPAL BAND EXPERT TO EXPLAIN THE PUBLIC FUNDING MECHANISM, BOTH EITHER INTERNAL FUNDING OR EXTERNAL FUNDING, AND IF SO, HOW SOON. SO AGAIN, THOSE ARE STAFF RECOMMENDATIONS AND THOSE ARE THE QUESTIONS WE'D LIKE TO PRESENT TO YOU AND ASK GUIDANCE FROM. AND I THINK WITH THAT, WE'RE OPEN FOR YOUR FEEDBACK AND QUESTIONS. THANK YOU. Questions?

No questions. I'll just make a little statement. Staff is asking these four questions, and Alessandra and I may have different answers to these four questions. So some of them may be here because we don't agree. Some of them may be here because we don't necessarily agree with what staff wants to do. So we're trying to, like, I'm trying to say, I don't want these, these questions are not supposed to be prejudicial. Like they come out of the ether and we are really interested. And so, you know, I'm happy to tell you, and I'm sure Alessandra is happy to tell you what she thinks about the answers to these four questions. But part of the reason we are here is because we want to hear from, we want to hear from everybody.

I have a question. How, we just went through this process for this city administrator and the council and the public get to see the top four, top three firms in that case. Are you saying that we're going to trust you to pick one and we don't have any choice and we won't even know who those people are?

Sort of. How could that go wrong? I think that our sort of plan, subject to revision, which is why we're here, was to pick one and show up at the council meeting with the firm and a presentation from the firm and let you meet the firm and a possible contract.

Why do you think that's appropriate here and not for the city administrator? Given that we're going to spend a lot of money on this. I'm not sure you're asking the right person. And it went wrong last time. Two times previously. All right. Well, that's my question. Council's guidance timeline. Well, it's all discussion from here on out.

Are there any options?

Can I ask Brandon a question? Yeah, go ahead.

Brandon, how have you seen... this play out in other cities? Give us the palette of options here on getting, when you're interviewing an architect, but it could be, you know, another vendor like this. What have you seen in terms of how this could play out the different ways?