City Council - Regular Meeting

Tuck your shirt in, come on. Okay, we're ready.

Good afternoon. It's Tuesday, August 4th, 2026, and we're at City Carmel-by-the-Sea City Hall, and I'd like to call this regular meeting of this Carmel-by-the-Sea City Council to order at 4.35 p.m. City Clerk, would you please call the roll?

Councilmember Barron?

Here.

Councilmember Booter?

Here.

Mayor Pro Tem Delz?

Here.

Councilmember Jamal? Here. Mayor Byrne?

Here.

All are present.

Councilperson Barron, would you like to lead the Pledge of Allegiance, please? Thank you. In general for this meeting, if necessary, the council will be taking a 30-minute break around 6.30 p.m. The meeting is going to be a little different today. We had a closed session just before. I think you'll realize that. Talk about city administrator. And there's still some business we have to do in a closed session. So we're going to do the extraordinary business and the public appearances. And then we'll be going back into a regular session, closed session. while we still have the other one in session. So we're gonna have two simultaneous closed sessions on city administrator. I really apologize that we're gonna have to delay the start of the regular meeting for a half hour, about, but it's really important. This is very important work that we're doing to hire a city administrator. And our recruiter is here, Wendy Brown. We thank her for being here in person today. We're trying to move things quickly. So what we're going to do first then is the extraordinary business item. We're really excited to have Nicola here. I'm going to let her introduce herself from the Monterey Symphony, and she's actually done a special thing and brought her instrument. She's a very talented musician, and she's going to do a short PowerPoint presentation, I believe, and then honor us with a song.

So I appreciate that very much. That's nice. Can I have five minutes on the clock? Am I allowed to have five minutes on the clock?

You are allowed to have at least five minutes.

Oh, at least five minutes.

We'll give you a couple extra.

Okay.

No, that's all right. That doesn't apply to you. The moose or the five minutes or the three minutes.

Okay.

Thank you. You can go. I have a PowerPoint. That's not, oh, look at this. Hello, good afternoon. I'm addressing the council and everyone. Hello, everyone. Hello, citizens of Carmel. My name is Nicola Riley. I'm the president and CEO of the Monterey Symphony. We can skip to the next slide. or I can do it right here. I'm the president and CEO of the Monterey Symphony. You might recognize me from some of my earlier work, model for children's drawings, French horn teacher, electric violinist, taking serious phone calls in the egg chair at Target, teaching at Carmel High School about what to do with a career in the arts with other arts notables. I've been the president and CEO of the Monterey Symphony for 10 years, a blissful decade with no bumps along the way. I'm also a proud Carmel High and Carmel Middle School parent. My son Connor Riley just graduated from Carmel High. That's him scoring the winning touchdown on the left in the Carmel High versus Monterey game. That's right, he's that running back right there, number 23. He's gonna be a firefighter. That's him on the right with me at the Monterey Symphony's 80th anniversary gala. And I have another kid, Enzo Riley, who will be starting at Carmel High this fall and graduating in 2030. So I'm deeply invested in this community and have been here for almost 15 years. Fun facts about the Monterey Symphony, we just turned 80. We look great for 80. Founded in 1946 by music teachers who thought it was really important that this community have a symphony orchestra. We were a community orchestra for a long time performing here in Carmel and also in Salinas. And then we became a fully professional orchestra. We have a $3.5 million budget and an endowment that is 10 times that size. We perform throughout the academic year. We open the season in September with Love Letter. This year it's Love Letter to New York, and then we continue the rest of the year at Sunset Center. We have about 60 tenured orchestra members. We have a fully union orchestra and crew, so we're represented by the AFM, which is the Musicians Union. We are in the same chapter as the San Francisco Symphony, so when we bargain our union contracts, we're bargaining with the big guys. And we have a 100-year contract with IATSE, that's the Stagehands Union. 100% of our patrons are from Monterey County. We have about four people who come from Santa Cruz. We're not sure if they're confused or they just really like us. But we are totally Monterey County based. All of our donors are from here. All of our patrons are from here. And in our 24-25 season... which was completely sold out, by the way. Every single concert completely sold out. 50% of our patrons were brand new to the Monterey Symphony. So everyone who says, oh, classical music's dying, it's old, it's boring, it's terrible. Not us. We're not old, we're not dying, and we're definitely not boring. And here's why. Look at this. Look at all these happy people. Look at Sunset Center. It's so beautiful, so majestic, just lit up like that. And this is us at Forest Theatre. So we started doing these concerts at Forest Theatre coming out of the pandemic because we could only perform outside. Because the basic business model of a symphony orchestra is put a bunch of people in a closed room and blow hot air on them for a couple of hours. So that didn't work during the pandemic. So we said, let's do that outside. So we started these love letter concerts and we're now in our sixth year. These completely sell out, totally family friendly. People wait in line for hours to get in and get their seats. We do costume contests. We have kids. We have families. We have entire families. We do a silly theme or a wonderful theme every year. When we started these, we started with Love Letter to Carmel because we felt like we needed to give something back to Carmel. Because during the pandemic, we had special permission to do concerts on our balcony because wine tasting was still okay for a while and our offices are above a wine tasting room. And Carmel was really good to us during the pandemic. We stayed in business, we kept everybody on the payroll, everybody had benefits, kept all of our musicians employed, all of our stage crew employed. And so for two years, we celebrated the music of Carmel, composers who live here, a lot of Mark Mancina, Alan Silvestri, A lot of Clint Eastwood. Clint came to our concert, and Melinda Deruin, who's one of our featured artists, sang Misty to Clint while the sun was setting behind Forest Theater at one of these shows. It really doesn't get more Carmel or better than that. We do family concerts. We do those at Sherwood Hall because frankly, there's only 718 seats at Sunset and we need about 5,000 seats for our youth concerts. So we do these at Sherwood Hall where we can get about 4,000 kids in in the morning. We also do them at Sunset, but Sherwood Hall is really the best place for us to do these concerts. We do them for our Love Letter concerts and we do them a few other times during the year. We get tons and tons of letters from the kids. Here's one of our youth concerts at Sunset Center. We have our youth concerts coming up this September. And before we bring all these kids, we go and we visit all of these schools and we talk to them about what it's like to come to a symphony orchestra. And we typically visit the kids in grades three through six, which is when kids typically pick instruments because we want them to know that the French horn is cool, but the violin is cooler. And how do we get all these people to come to the symphony? We don't just say, hey, it's the symphony. Beethoven's cool. No. We do things. We do fun programs and parties. We have a really popular thing called the Women's Night Out that we started years ago. We're now in our ninth year. And we pick a crazy theme. It doesn't make sense. It doesn't have anything to do with the concert. We just pick a theme. Last year, it was White Lotus. Before that, it was vibes. And this year, there's a lot of names in the running. We'll see what happens. We do a youth arts night where we want kids who play in orchestras to have the experience of being a donor. So we invite them to the concert. We throw them a party in Studio 105 before the concert. And we don't let any adults come. And this is how we get people to come. We put one of these events before every single concert that we do at Sunset. So that's what we do. And we're opening this season. This is our 26, 27 season. It's our 81st season. Our offices are right up the road. I walked down here with my two inch heels and my high heel permit in hand. We're right here on the corner of 7th in San Carlos. So our Love Letter concerts are September 15th and 16th at Forest Theater. Love Letter to New York this year. And then October 17th is our opening night at Sunset Center. And if you haven't been to the symphony, I strongly encourage you to come. Because the thing about music is it actually lowers your blood pressure, makes you happier. It gives your brain some space to contemplate what it's all about. It lets you slow down. And it's good for you. And it's just really a healthy thing to do. So that's us from Love Letter last year. That's me. I'm the mime in the middle. So thanks for having me. And the mayor said, well, bring your violin. Play a little something for us. So I played the violin for 40 years. I used to travel the world doing this when I was a kid. And then I decided I wanted dental insurance, so I became an arts administrator. So this is for you guys. Some of you might recognize this.

so so so so

. . .

Thank you for that incredible performance, not only the violin playing, but your PowerPoint was wonderful. And thank you for being here tonight. All right, so next on our list is the public appearances. Nova, would you like to read the public appearance notice?

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. While stating your name is optional, it helps to identify speakers in the meeting minutes. Under the Brown Act, public comments for matters on the agenda must relate to that agenda item and public comments for matters not on the agenda must relate to the subject matter jurisdiction of this legislative body. Remote or in-person participants who do not comply with the requirements of the Brown Act will be muted.

Thank you. How many people are going to make a public comment tonight? All right, so about four or five. And if you want to make a public comment online, please put your hands up too.

All right, who wants to be first?

Beth. Hi, Beth.

Of course, a hard act to follow.

Yeah, it was. All right, good afternoon, mayor, council members, and staff. I'm Beth Bowman, the executive director of the Sunset Cultural Center. I wanted to take a moment to invite the community to join us as we launch Century of Creativity, our five-year centennial campaign celebrating the remarkable history of the Sunset Campus. This year marks the 100th anniversary of the historic Sunset School building, now our north wing. Over the next five years, we'll celebrate the evolution of this campus and the people, performances, and community that have shaped it, culminating in the 100th anniversary of the Sunset Theater in 2031. Our kickoff will be a centennial press conference and ribbon cutting with the Carmel Chamber of Commerce on August 26th. Then on October 25th, everyone is invited to our community celebration where we'll open our doors to celebrate Sunset's past, present, and future. One of the most exciting parts of this campaign is collecting stories from the community. Whether you attended school here, performed on the stage, volunteered, taught classes, attended concerts, or simply have a favorite memory of Sunset, we would love to hear your story. These stories will become a part of our centennial archive and help tell the story of this extraordinary place. You can learn more and share your story by visiting sunsetcenter.org. I'll also leave flyers in the back of the room with information about the campaign and instructions for submitting your story. Thank you, and we hope you'll join us as we celebrate a century of creativity and begin the next 100 years. Thanks, Beth.

That was a very nice piece that you sent out, and I'll be there. What date was that again, just for everybody?

August 26th. It's a Wednesday from 1 to 2.

Okay, very good. Hope everybody shows up. All right, who's next?

Hello, I'm Richard Kreitman in council and community. So I'm going to take another tilt at reopening the Carmel Scout House for the use of the community. It was one of the most beloved venues in the community until it closed in 2002 for lack of handicapped access. And we've had a number of attempts at it over the years. Last one was about three years ago. I stood up here representing regional scouting. That one didn't work out. But we'll give it another try. And very similar to what the last speaker said, And there are a number of us who are working on this. I'd like to invite the community, if you have any photos or film or warm memories of activities at the Scout House before it closed, please share them. We know there were dances, there were meetings, there were recitals, there were rehearsals, lots of Scout meetings, CRA meetings, Carmel. city Christmas parties were held there for many years. So I was trying to come up with, I couldn't figure out how to make a new email address. But if you find, if you have something and you can share it, please, my email is RC, as in Charles Kreitman, K-R-E-I-T-M-A-N, at gmail.com. And again, look forward to sometime in the next year getting this. facility up and running again for the benefit of the community. Thank you.

Good to see you, Richard. And I hope you have some success with this round. I tried it once myself. Who's next?

So you guys know I couldn't miss this today. And I want to read off some of the interesting things that our Lord and Savior Dr. Fauci said when he was in charge of this COVID. There's no reason to be wearing a mask. Everybody should be wearing a mask. I do not recommend you wear a mask. I often myself wear two masks. Even if you're vaccinated, you need to wear a mask. If you're vaccinated, you do not need to wear a mask. Children over two years old should be wearing a mask, later admitting that there was no study done on children. In his diary, he wrote that the case fatality rate was more like 0.2%, which is commensurate with 2018 flu numbers. An article in the New York Times wrote, the mask mandates did nothing. Will any lessons will be learned? Fauci also said, the most important thing is to keep the physical six-foot social distance, then testified that the six-foot rule, quote, just sort of appeared. There was no science behind it. There were no trial that looked at 10 feet versus six feet versus three feet or not even worrying about it at all. And there were no clinical trials going one way or the other. So now let's remember what this city council did based upon those contradictions and that fraud. I'm sorry to bother you, Jeff. Hello? Great. Can you put your phone down? Can I get a copy of that later in a public records request?

Could you please continue your statement?

You don't have to tell me what to do, OK? I know the rules. He should be paying attention because he was on that city council. You criminalized sunbathing and picnics. You imposed curfews. You sent your armed officers to job sites to stop people from working. Thank you. Did any one of you denounce Roerig on his way out? I'm so glad to see you're awake. No, you heaped accolades on him. He was predominantly responsible for this. Karen Folito called in a couple of months ago and said, well, we didn't know. Well, I knew. I tried to warn you. I'm just a plebe. And second of all, I don't even believe that. because you arbitrarily enforce the rules when you wanted to, like promoting events in Devendorf Park that were packed, and then you attacked a visitor after inviting him to the beach and your officers slammed his head under the surf. I'm holding you accountable. Does anybody back there have the courage to admit that you were wrong and you were fooled? I can't be the only one. Thank you.

My name is Maria Ruz, and today I'm here to talk about the Community Activities Commission and the upcoming August events. First one is Car Week. This is a very exciting time. Many of us, including my husband and I, are car enthusiasts and we look forward to the upcoming car week. So let's watch out for the steps of things that you have to remember. Tuesday, August 11, we have Concourse on the Avenue. That goes from 10 to 4 on Ocean Avenue from Juniper to Lincoln and the cross streets. On Wednesday, August 12th, we have Aston's on the Avenue from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., also Ocean Avenue, San Carlos to Monteverde, and the Cross Streets. And on Thursday, August 13th, we have Ferrari Owners Club Concours Carmel from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Ocean Avenue, Junipero, Dolores, and the Cross Streets. We also have something that I thank this council, especially you, our mayor, is a free shuttle from Larson Field, the baseball, next to the Carmel Mission to Carmel Plaza, corner of Winnipeg and Ocean, running from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. So we can take care of our people, the visitors, and everybody else during the events. The city is also placing additional portable restrooms near the existing restrooms. That's FYI. Now, 6th Street between Mission and San Carlos, in front of the fire station, will be closed to traffic for the week. This is to keep the street clear for traffic emergencies. Correct, Chief? Carmel Police will deploy a traffic diversion plan Thursday, Friday, and Saturday because we heard everybody, light and clear, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday are very congested, so that's what our police department is doing. So text CARWEEK to 65513 to receive public safety text during CARWEEK from the County of Monterey. All this information can be found in our city's website. So here's the deal. During this week, I will ask everybody to be a bit patient with our visitors, a bit curious with our events, and a bit generous with your hospitality. our city is well known for its beauty and our welcoming attitude so let's keep it that way so please be patient and give yourself an extra time to go to places around the area but enjoy the week that's car week so one last item in the community activities commission for august is the 55th phone crafters marketplace jury on august 26 we need somebody or somebody from the community to volunteer We're going to be during, basically the jury will be evaluating all the home crafters and we'll make a selection for the final event happening. Thank you so much.

Thank you Maria. Who would like to speak next in the chambers? No one. Online, I'll give you ten seconds to put your hand up. Cindy. All right, we'll wrap up public comment. I knew Cindy would do it right at the last second. Go ahead, Cindy.

For council, city staff, of course I wasn't going to say anything, but an invitation like that, how can I hold back? I don't have anything exciting to say except thanks for doing what you do and week after week taking care of the council and the city, and that's it.

Thanks, Sydney. We're doing the best we can. All right. We'll wrap up public comment. Thank you, everybody, for participating tonight. I'm just going to go ahead and do the announcements. It doesn't take long, and that way we can start off with our public hearing right after our closed session, which we're going to go to shortly. City Administrator, Assistant, Acting, I don't even know. Acting City Administrator. You're the Acting City Administrator. No announcements, sir. Thank you. All right. City Attorney, do you have any announcements? No announcements. Like I said, this is going to be fast. Councilmember announcements? Come on, one? Okay, we have one.

Thank you, Mayor. Just a quick item about the Tor House. So this is quite a big deal. The National Trust for Historic Preservation has a quarterly magazine, and it's titled Preservation. And so the summer of 2026 issue has a profile of the Tor House, which is featured on the cover of the magazine. And there's also a photo essay and feature about poet Robinson Jeffers inside. So the magazine can be read online. You go to savingplaces.org. forward slash preservation magazine and then click latest issue and that'll give you a chance to see the beautiful photographs and read the profile.

Thank you and congratulations on your talk at the Carmel Foundation. Thank you. I heard it went very well. I couldn't make it. Margaret and I had a late anniversary dinner after she broke her arm. So I'm really sorry I missed it. I'd just like to say one thing. I'd like to thank everybody who's been involved with the pit project, Alrica Plaza. It's been a long, long time to get to the point where there's no longer a pit. I don't know if anybody noticed lately, but the contractor that's doing the concrete has just done a phenomenal job. And it's not filled with concrete yet unless they poured already, but it's about to be. So there's no longer a hole in the ground. That's a really positive thing for the community. I just like to make that announcement if you haven't noticed. Anybody else? None. All right. So do you want to read us into the closed session, Brian? If you missed it, we're having to do a closed session for the city administrator. We have our recruiter here, Wendy Brown, who's been nice enough to come in person to keep things moving along. So we're going to take a half hour break here and then we'll come back.

Yes, this is a conference with labor negotiators pursuant to government code section 54957.6. The agency designated representative is the city attorney. The unrepresented employee is the city administrator.

All right. So I guess we're going to have to clear the chambers.

Yes. Or we could go downstairs. I think you talked about giving a time specific to resume. Can we just go downstairs too or do you want to do it here? We can go downstairs.

Okay. Tell you what, you guys can stay here. We're going to leave and go down into the downstairs conference room and we'll be back at 5.32, that gives us a half an hour. We'll do everything we can to get back here at 5.32. All right, thank you. We stand in recess for a closed session. All right, everybody. back from closed session. City Attorney, do you have anything to report out from the closed session?

Yeah, there's no reportable action from the closed sessions.

Okay, thank you. We'll return to our regular meeting. And we have one public hearing for tonight. It's consideration of adoption of fee schedule amendment to the fiscal year 2026-2027 fee schedule, including updating fees citywide, community planning and building, public safety and public works, and discussion and direction regarding a fee waiver policy continued from July 7th, 2026. And Jamie is going to take it.

Good evening, Mayor and members of the City Council. Today, the City Council reviews a few revisions to the proposed fee schedule for the 26-27 fiscal year.

Sorry, we had a cell phone go off here. I think it was Donna. But we're back and Jamie can continue.

All right. So the purpose tonight, when the city council approved the updated fee schedule in May, we discussed the potential for revisions and improvements to that. The purpose of today's meetings for the city council to review a revised schedule that includes those suggested enhancements. So previously we had approved it in May. We're going on the approved schedule right now, and we're here to talk about updates. So specifically there's four different kind of types of updates and you see them marked up in the schedule in red. The changes in the schedule include allowing for and giving guidelines for the potential for waiving fees, which is something we've never done before, had written out. They include an update on the citation bail amount, i.e. the amount of a ticket for parking over the time limit. They include simplifying and clarifying the fee wording regarding the collection of costs, and they include language to allow for the recovery of unusual or one-time costs. So to talk about those in a little bit more detail. First, over the last couple of fee schedule reports, we discussed the potential for allowing for the modification or waiver of fees. Fees are collected to recover the cost of services provided to individuals. But sometimes services provided to individuals might also have a community-wide component, or the finances of the individual might preclude an otherwise beneficial project from taking place. The suggested changes establish guidelines for waivers allowing for a case-by-case decision to be made, but also they do add the burden of decisioning. Other cities have done this and they've generally tied it to the waiving fee, the waiving of fees to the signature limits that they already have in place. So-and-so is allowed to sign for a certain amount, so-and-so approves above that. So fee waiving first. Second, included in this is an amended parking over time limit to bring the citation bail amount or the amount of the ticket up to $48, which is in line with the neighboring cities. This is consistent with guidance from the state of California that recommends that parking citations be similar to those in neighboring cities. And I also note a frustrated young driver recently pointed out that the proposed amount is equal to about three hours of work. In addition to the proposed updated base amount of ticket, we have preliminary outlined for you a suggestion to have a stratified ticket in place, which means when you have a repeat ticket offense, the amount of the ticket goes up. A surprising 7% of those who received three or more tickets in the first three months of the year had received, sorry, a surprising 7% received three or more tickets in just the first month of the year. So we've got some, a good number of repeat ticket folks. And that may have to do with the fact that it was a lower fee amount and actually roughly equivalent to a day's parking charge. Another suggestion for the council to consider that wasn't presented on the schedule is do we increase the parking ticket amount for just certain sections of the year? Right now that's not being done by other neighboring cities. And one final point to consider. $12.50 of every ticket goes to the county. So we are currently collecting only $27.50. So bumping it up a few dollars is something that goes back into supporting our parking program. So that's parking ticket amount. Number three, the goal of most of the edits in the schedule is to add legal costs and simplify the wording regarding the collection of costs. The revised words include the collection of legal or other costs based on the costs incurred. And here's kind of the important part. A review of fees shows that this direct cost approach is a fairer way to collect costs. And the specific example is this. Fee studies normally result in charging an average amount. In the case of appeal fees, many appeals incur $150 to $200 worth of legal costs, but occasionally an appeal can run as much as $6,000 in legal costs. If the city were to average those fees out, like you often do when you do a cost study, every single appeal would have another $2,000 in costs associated with it. The revised language allows for that $150 to be charged, but also protects the general fund from the $6,000 when that sometimes occurs. And note, only costs directly related to the service being performed need to be passed along as fees. Number four, types of changes. Language has been added to allow for the recovery of unusual or one-time costs. There are many specialized services that occur rarely and generally result in the city hiring outside consultants to perform them because we don't have the expertise. Rather than make an exhaustive list of possible contingencies, other cities have addressed these occasional extra costs by adding the language suggested in the revised schedule. So just kind of sitting there as a catch-all. So if something big comes up, we can recover that cost that's been incurred by that individual asking for that service. And it saves us from having a 65-page fee schedule. In summary, The completion of the study allowed us to balance fees to actual costs. And comparisons show that the proposed fees are generally less than the same fees calculated in other cities. Tonight, we're reviewing the fees. Then they'll come back next month for adoption. And the recommendation, we recommend that the schedule be reviewed and adopted as presented. So a lot of stuff there. That's it. Questions?

Okay, thank you. Anyone have a question on the presentation that she just gave?

Go ahead. Thank you, Jamie. The first one, I think I actually should probably ask Brandon regarding the city administrator fee waiver authority for exceptions. So I'm just wondering how easy or difficult will you make it for people to prove that they have a financial need for a waiver? For example, if somebody's on a fixed income or over age 62, like what do they need to do to prove it without making it too difficult for them?

Yeah, we would look for examples of, you know, for example, like a PG&E or a CalAM, entities like that that already have programs that offer reduced costs, forms of proof that they look for. We're not looking to invent the wheel or do anything special for us. So just generally accepted forms of proof, just like we do with we have a program for reasonable accommodations for development when it's a physical limitation. So we just need the minimum amount of proof for that. So we're not looking to create anything too difficult.

Okay, perfect, thank you. And then actually I have two questions really quick about the parking citation. So I was wondering if I could ask the chief on those. So somebody asked me this question, and I thought it was a good one to ask you and have everyone hear the answer. So they brought up rental cars. For example, if we're now talking about a second hire for a second offense, but let's say it's a different driver and it's within the one-year period, is that person going to get the higher offense, even though this is their first time in Carmel, just based on the fact that it's a rental car? And do you have a way of your system knowing that it's a rental car?

Yeah, thank you for the question. I think if it was a rental car that came back to town within one year, then it would be at the graduated events. That person would be able to appeal that and say, hey, I just rented this car this week. I didn't have it six months ago. We wouldn't know necessarily that it's a rental car without looking very deep into that process, which the parking control team doesn't do that.

Okay, and then this is a little bit unrelated, but I was wondering, since we have that program, I think it's about like $30 where a resident gets the sticker for one year and they get the extra hour, for example, downtown parking. Does your automated license plate system know that that's one of those cars that gets the extra hour when you're giving tickets?

Yes. So a resident, I think it's $40 right now, and they get three hours of the timed parking.

So their license plate is already in the system and it will know that?

Yes. Okay. We're still, we're putting them in right now, but that is what the system does.

Okay, perfect. Thank you. Sure.

Hans?

Hi, Chief. Hey. Mine's about parking too. Okay. So if, this is about if you spend over two hours in a spot, the fees. Right. maybe it's not categorized legally as a fee, but if somebody parks like in front of someone's driveway, for example, can you tell us maybe that's a fine? I don't know if the legal difference, but how much are those charges?

I'd have to look at the fine for that, but it's different. That would be like a citation, like it could be a parking citation, but it could also be a municipal citation. Usually we try to do parking citations for that type of violation. I do promise you that the first thing we do in this department is we try to get ahold of registered owner and have them move the car. That's our policy. That's what we do just to be better stewards of parking in town. But if they don't move or they park in front of your driveway, for example, then we do usually write them a parking ticket.

Okay, and that's, just to be clear, maybe I should ask you, is that set through this fee schedule or is it a separate?

I think it is. It's just, it would be the $40, today it would be a $40 parking ticket. It would be important if somebody parked in front of somebody's driveway? Yeah, and we would likely tow the car if it was parked blocking your driveway. Not just yours, sir, but I mean a resident's driveway, especially yours. A resident's driveway, we would tow the car if it was blocking your driveway.

Yeah, I just bring it up. I had a couple residents reach out and they were like, hey, I just wanna make sure there's a strong financial deterrent to that type of parking behavior.

The $40 plus the tow fee plus the vehicle release fee, which is $202, it does add up. Rarely do we have to do that. Usually we can get ahold of people through our systems and they move it. But if they flagrantly are blocking someone's driveway, that's a big deal.

Okay. Bob? Still on parking. So this, these fees, they're not only parking over the limit. It's if, I guess it's just different if you're parked in a green zone for too long, same deal. How about the loading zone? Loading zone also. Yes. Because the limit of the loading zone is 30.

Yeah. It's, it's a yellow loading zone. Why is it slipping my mind? It's 20 minutes, yeah. That's all I got.

Jeff? The second and third offense fee, the dash means the other cities don't do it at all? Correct. Do any cities do it?

I haven't heard of it, but I know that there are, they're called progress enforcement programs. That's what they call them when they step them up like that. That's the fancy name for it. I do have some other ideas, some things that I think would work also in town, but for that, this is an option. That's not a big step up between the first, second, and third offense, in my opinion.

I'll just tell you, I just got a $128 ticket from the wonderful city of Monterey. So I don't know, I don't know exactly what I did, but it was for parking on Garden Road.

Wow, that's a lot. It depends on where you park there. They have like, I believe from what I've been speaking to their parking team members, that if you park like near the, if you're close to the aquarium, they have a different scale of parking, which I believe costs more money.

So since I'd like to put you on the spot, how did this come up and do you think it's a good idea?

Since no one else is doing it. It was the team, the team brought it up to me to see if we could do this. If this was the plan for council, the answer is yes. I, I think it's a good idea. I wouldn't object if you told me you wanted to allow people to get three $48 tickets before we bumped it up to $75 and then the fourth one or the fifth one would be $125. But there are real people that come to town and they work here and they are parking and they're getting multiple tickets. And I know it's a small percentage that that happens too, but I could see where three, and this is your decision, but maybe if you could discuss that idea, maybe giving them three tries within a year. There are a lot of people who get tickets in town right now. If they had two or three times to get that $48 fine, and then we really step it up, and that $75 means a lot, and the $125 point really means a lot at fifth ticket. And then after five tickets, I literally invite them to come to the police department and we talk about their parking issues.

Do you have the ability to do this right now? Yeah, we do. We do.

When we write tickets, it shows a picture of that car and it shows how many they've received in whatever timeline we decide.

So this is not an administrative issue or time-consuming? We can do it. All right. I'd like to know what the other council people think about that particular thing, but we'll go out to the public first. All right, that's it for questions for me. Jeff, do you want anything before we go to public? All right. Public comment, please. Hopefully we have somebody that wants to make a comment about that. She's a brave soul.

Hi, I'm Tamara Mickey. Our city is in a real deficit right now. I think that every penny we just hired two new people to pass out tickets. I think this is a good time for us to take a strong look at this. Why aren't we closer to what the state average is? I think we should be closer to that. I don't think this is something that we need to try to sort of just meet where the other local cities are right now. So I would advocate us getting closer to that amount, 60, 65. So time to try to recoup some of the other things. We have parking issues. until we can address that, at least this is something that we can do in the interim. So I would recommend that we go higher. Okay. Thank you.

Maria.

Maria Bruce, I'm just curious on two aspects. The first one is, from the current tickets that you're giving for the first, second, third offender, could you separate tourist categories versus employees, people that work in the city? And what is the number? Are the percentages much higher for employees, people that work in the city, than people that are visiting our city? So that would be very interesting to know because in some way I would like to address it from the standpoint of are we penalizing the people that work in the city? And is there anything else we can do differently? Like we are able to pay our 40 sticker that gives us additional hours. Can we do an incentive program for the people who work in the city, for example, that we give them a discount on the permit and they can put it in their cars and we can sell it to them for like ten dollars. But there are people that work in their city that are people that are not making a lot of money. So that would be my first question and observation so that we can separate those tickets how we escalate them or not. Okay, the second one is a question for you city administrator and it's the fee waiver authority. And I noticed that you say it's if it is obvious that is a public benefit and you have some categories there. My question to you is how do you make that decision on your own and what is the amount? I mean how what is a waiver that you're really entitled to offer to somebody who has offers a public benefit? Because it's not described here. There's not a scale of numbers or money allocated as to you waive a fee. So that would be something interesting to either add to the document or clarify to the public. Okay?

Thank you. Thank you.

Hi, Shirley Moon. I'm here to ask you to consider waiving all of the fees for historic properties. And I think we have a fundamental question to consider, and that is if the property owners accept the responsibility of owning a historic property, should they also be financially penalized for doing so? And last night you had an interesting conversation about the Mills Act and decided that it wasn't an appropriate fit for our city. And I think it's time for us to, as a city, consider being a partner with the people who go through the extra expenses for keeping and maintaining historic properties. It does not seem fair that there will be additional fees added just because of a designation of being historic. And since last night you mentioned that you enjoyed putting faces on the problem. I'm here to give you a real-time experience with me. I have a historic property, a very tiny cottage, 75 years old, and I'm trying to replace a roof. It's already been replaced once, so it's not the original roof. It is a cedar shake roof currently, And with the new designation of this cottage being in a very high fire hazard zone, I started looking for an appropriate roof material that would be complementary to this tiny post-Adobe cottage. Found some reclaimed flat tile roof and went to get approval. And my penalty so far is $3,828, not including the $1,000 I had to pay to strengthen the framing of the roof. So that's a real-time figure. All of those dollars that I'm paying for fees are dollars I'm not paying for preservation of the property that we're trying to preserve. It makes no sense to me. Another real-time figure you can appreciate, the garage of this house has wooden gutters. Although the garage is not designated historic, I don't like putting on a material that doesn't match what else is on there. So I've just paid $2,000 for one gutter. That's a real-time figure for taking care of historic old properties. The current policy is such that the incentive right now is for me to not do that i don't have to go through anything i can put on another wood shake roof i don't have to go to the historic resources board and i would have saved myself four thousand eight hundred and twenty eight dollars but i'm motivated to do something that actually improves the cottage This is not a metal roof. It's not an asphalt roof. It's not plastic. It's not rubber. It's authentic.

Shirley, could you summarize?

Yes. I think it's time that the city becomes partners with people and waives these fees. I'm happy to be your first partner.

Thank you, Shirley. Well said. He checked off one of my items I was gonna bring up, so timely. Anybody else? All right, going online.

Cindy, go ahead. Thank you, Mayor, Council, Cindy Lloyd. I have an idea. I live in the sphere of influence, although I was born and raised in Carmel and lived inside the city limits until 30 years ago when I got a house outside the city limits. Oh, excuse me. However, I can't get any kind of a parking sticker. So my idea is what about issuing parking permit stickers to those of us who live in the sphere of influence that might bring in some more revenue and give us a little more time in town because what it does without that is it's a deterrent to go into town for those of us who live in the sphere of influence and the city of Carmel is our town. Just a thought. Thanks.

got it got it cindy you have that one brandon that's an interesting idea all right i think nobody else last chance here all right let's bring it back for discussion should be interesting um i'll start with you hans we've got several issues plus any other issues that you want to bring up that

Do you want a fee schedule? Do you want to segment that?

Let's start with the parking fee because I think that's the easy one to talk about. Complicated, but... Can you hear?

So...

The council is talking about the fee schedule.

So when I was a middle school teacher in Teach for America for two years, I found that... bringing the hammer down was generally a good way to change behavior. And so on this one, I think that we need to raise the parking charges. I think there's certain parts of town where somebody would just park and it's, you know, kind of on par with what you'd pay for a day's parking, you know, on cannery row, or if you go to the beach boardwalk. Um, and so I'm for hire, um, on the first offense, I could even go up above the state average. Um, you know, I think I'd be at like somewhere like 80. Uh, I do agree with a second offense, third offense. I hear what people are saying about the employees. Um, but we're trying to get employees out of parking in the downtown. Like that's part of the point of doing this. It's also part of the point of the paid parking program that is being contemplated. And so I think the message to employees is we need you to park outside of the immediate downtown core. So I'm for 80 on the first offense, 120 on the second, and something higher on the third.

Okay. Alessandra, let's go with you next.

Okay. Thank you, Mayor. I agree with Tamara's comments and I agree with Hans that there's definitely room to increase those fees. I started off low, but certainly I'm open to discussion. I was thinking something like $52.50 for the first one because that takes into account the $12.50 that the county takes automatically. You could do $67.50 for the socket. and 8250 or 85 for the third, but I'm certainly open to hearing the rest of the council if we want to negotiate on those.

Bob? Over a few years, I'm entirely supportive of significantly increased parking fees. But, you know, you got to crawl before you walk and walk before you run. And we haven't enforced parking in a meaningful way for a decade. So, you know, just what we're doing already is creating a significant behavioral change. I just see it in terms of more employees parking in the neighborhoods, which some may object to. I don't. So I think we're already seeing some progress. I'm thinking that maybe this year isn't the time to go drastic, to go big. And on top of that, we have two ballot measures that we're seeing a fair bit of opposition from the business community. And I'm not really looking to give the business community more reasons to be mad at us. My view is that having available parking is positive for the business owners. and that enforcement creates more availability and so I don't really expect to hear a lot of griping about it, but I bet we do because it's the employee piece and we do need the employees to park somewhere and if suddenly they're getting a $128 ticket, that's a big deal. I kind of like what the chief had, which was, you know, 48 times three, then go big, bigger, you know, within the year. And I would, you know, if it was like 48 for the first three and then 75 and then something bigger, I think that's just a little bit more nudging and gentle into what we're trying to do.

all right so we're only talking there'll be another opportunity to talk about things other than parking yes okay we're just taking one at a time so i'm okay with raising the parking fees so that they are in line the parking penalties so that they are in line with um neighboring jurisdictions the the problem i'm having with anything past that is basically the unintended consequences of pushing what is now a downtown parking problem into the residential neighborhoods. And I realize that we pretty much already have that problem, but it seems like fees higher than this are simply going to make that worse. And I do not think that that's the right plan at this point.

So your thoughts are to raise it to 48 and just leave it there. Don't have the escalated charges.

You know, my, if, if I were a emperor, I would raise it to 48 and not, and not have it not have it escalate. You know, I, I don't think that You know, it sounds like punishment. You know, the comments from the public and whatnot. It sounds like the idea here is sort of listening. The idea, it seems like there's talk about deterrence and there's talk about punishment. And I think that the talk of punishment really leaves a sour taste in my mouth. I don't think it's our job to punish people. And I don't think that that's a good look. So I can live with the 48, 60, and 80, but I would actually prefer if it was just 48. But you would go for that if we have three people in favor of that.

You're not against it completely, you just prefer it.

I would say so far, but we haven't gotten to the second part of the conversation.

Okay, all right, good. All right, so I'm going to go back. I'll just tell you what I think. I tend, of all those speakers, I agree with Bob the most. And I agreed somewhat with what Jeff is saying. I know a lot of people that work at restaurants and they're not going to be happy with me if we do that. But at the same time, on the same angle, we're trying to get people to leave downtown. So I see that part of it too. So that's my thought. And I think the times three just sort of complicated. I think in general, Bob's comment, like let's walk before we run. Let's just, get even and start doing the next step. And then next year, the council could come back and renew this if they want to review it. So let's go around again. Hans, given what you've heard so far, what's your thinking?

Yeah, I will just say I'm not interested in punishing anybody, but I am never going to over park on Garden Road ever again. And so that's what I'm trying to do. So I will go as high as you will let me go.

All right, Alessandra.

I just wanted to mention, because I'd also looked up some other cities. Granted, these are not neighboring cities, but Laguna Beach has $70 to $90. Santa Monica is $65 to $90. Manhattan Beach, Hermosa Beach, and Del Mar are all in that same $60 to $90 range. So I think we can go up to, like I said, $52.50 if we wanted to. If not, I'm fine with the $48. I do like the idea of the second and third offense because I think it is about deterring behavior that we don't want.

Okay. All right. So you'd go for basically the program that's there, 48? You'd like it a little higher, but you'd go for 48, 60, and 80?

Yeah.

Okay.

Bob, let's go one more time.

I'll go for 48, 60, 80.

Okay.

Jeff?

Okay. You'd go for that? All right. So do you want us to vote on that or because there are three separate things it's not gonna be sort of like Jeff said last night on the consent agenda we had to break it out.

You don't need to vote on each one if there's gonna be other modifications to the fee schedule you should have a similar discussion to what you just had.

So we but we can just say that's the direction we'd like you to go. But let's just if we could just say it one more time so we're clear so $48 And that's one time? One time. $40 one time after your first $48 ticket, it goes to $68. $60. $60. It's exactly what's on this. $48.60. Okay. And taking the third tier as well? Yes.

Oh, staff proposal. All three of us raised our hands for those three. Thank you. All right. So that puts that one to bed. Thank you. So let's go back to the waiver of fees then, and we'll start with Jeff this time.

Okay. So this is where I have some, I think, significant issues. there are sort of two paragraphs in this, there are two paragraphs in the city administrator fee waiver authority. The first talks about the, the first talks about, the sort of ability of the city administrator to weigh fees and the second paragraph talks about examples of where the city administrator might use his or her judgment to weigh fees and i'd like to talk i'd like to talk about these in my comments i think would be better understood in the reverse order so i'll talk about the first paragraph first I think that You know, there's a there's a fairly substantial list here which which to me there's first essential list of things that the city administrators should consider when he or she is waiving fees and to me I Don't think that that's in the interest of being sort of fairly understood i think that with a list such as this if we have a list of fees that the city administrator can waive and we go through this exercise every year as we do then we should have a concrete list of the things that the city administrator can waive and with an asterisk and i'll get to that in a second so if something comes up and i'm just going to use you if brandon decides that Wants to waive a tree fee because this tree is day during a power line or something, which is not in here Well might be in there somewhere I think that I think that that item should be listed in the second paragraph to to illustrate what the council's thinking is what the city's thinking is on what the acceptable what acceptable fee waivers are and So I'm not in favor of this general net where it says the following are examples of instances where services provided may be in the public interest. I think we should just have a list. It should say this is a list of things that the city administrator has the authority to weigh fees. The first paragraph talks about limits and the last line says, fee waivers exceeding the city administrator signing authority shall require city council approval. So what's your signing authority? $59,999. Okay. So I don't think that the city administrator should be waiving fees that are $59,999. Like that is clearly not the right number. And so what would be, what I would like to see, what I would suggest is that we have a reasonable number for fee waivers. If we're, if we're going to go down this route, that the fee waiver number be reasonable, whatever, you know, $500, a thousand dollars, $2,000. And then, If the city administrator thinks that fees are unreasonable given the situation, which is entirely possible, either because the amount is greater than the limit that we have set or because the specific item is not listed in the list of instances in which the city administrator has authority to waive fees, that the city administrator can then come back to the city council for approval to waive the fees. So that is what I believe. Do you want to pick a number? 5,000. I'm really interested that the number is less than $59,999. I'll say that. So you go for 20. And I'm also really interested in tightening up the list and making the list concrete. Got it. So both of those things are important to me. The amount of distance between $59,999 and our limit is less important to me. Interesting to hear what you think about that, Bob.

I do not like giving a city administrator the authority to waive fees. I think it's an invitation for corruption, influence, pressure. I don't want to open that can of worms, honestly. If the city administrator can issue 5,000 waivers of $5,000, suddenly that's like lots of $5,000 bills in that city administrator's pocket that he could spread around if he or she were lacking in some ethics. And that obviously doesn't apply to the people here. But I just hate opening the door. It also opens the door for political pressure. for the five of us to start pressuring the city manager to do this and do that. So I don't think this group, I know this group doesn't do this, but we need to future-proof this. So I'm with Jeff in that I would actually want it to be very, very limited, if any, waivers. And I think the better conversation probably to have, and I'm not sure we're, geared to have it tonight, but really is on the historic properties. It's what Shirley was talking about and that Hans brought up last night to have a more thorough conversation on what fees it would be appropriate to waive for historic properties to make it easier to maintain those properties. So I'm unlikely to support the City Administrator Fee Waiver Authority at all and if I did it would have to be highly, highly specific and highly limited.

You're basically a no?

I'm basically a no. Okay.

Alessandra?

Thank you, Mayor. I agree with my fellow council members and the reasoning on both of those. And also regarding the historic properties, what Shirley brought up and what I was sort of getting at also last night. It might need to be a future discussion, though. I don't think we have time tonight to do something like that. But I think especially if we're not going forward with Mills Act, we do need to find ways to create incentives and to ease some of the pressure and burdens and show some appreciation to folks who have historic homes and are putting in the time, effort, and money to be able to maintain them.

Okay. Other than the historic homes? Are you basically a no or basically a yes?

I agree with Jeff and Bob that it does create ethical issues in the future that we want to avoid. So I don't think that we should be giving the city administrator and any future city administrators that sort of power because it does have a possibility that things could go wrong.

Okay, so you're basically a no.

Correct.

Okay. Hans?

Yeah. I, uh, I am not a, not a fan of how it's drafted. Um, I didn't expect that there would be so much agreement on that score actually, but, um, I think that it's pretty broad, uh, in terms of the language, um, pretty broad discretionary power there. And so I would much prefer to have to us go through the work of having like a defined list, like Jeff mentioned, um, And so, yeah, that's my preference is to have a defined list, so.

All right, it sounds pretty clear that it's a no, but it has some possibilities. So somehow we need to spend enough time to develop that distinct list in the limit and maybe bring it back at some point.

On the HR, on the historic bit, would it make sense to have the Historic Resource Board take the lead on that?

And I think we could potentially take the lead on it. I don't view it as a fee waiver, per se. I think it actually is just you could lower them, you could eliminate them. I feel like it's kind of our prerogative. I remember asking you about this. I've actually been interested in this for a while. I can't remember if I asked you or Chip, but somebody gave me a dollar amount of how much it would actually cost. That must have been chipped, but that's something we could easily pull together.

You might want to pull it again. I'm remembering something in the neighborhood of like $80,000 a year. $80,000?

Yeah.

That seems reasonable, that amount.

So it's not trivial, especially given our budget situation.

but it's caramel by the sea and it's historic. I mean, somebody made a really good comment about that last night. I don't know if it was here in the public. I mean, that's what we are and we should be investing in it and that's one way to do it.

Well, certainly one of the things you could do today in future agenda items is if majority of you want us to come back with a future item with a bit of analysis and talks about like how much it actually costs or how much, how many fees do we take in, which essentially is we remember pay for staff time. So the council would be saying,

we want to give free staff time for these historic projects which is wonderful if that's what the council wants to do we can tell you how much that is and come back and propose some programs if you want to agendize it for a future meeting I mean there's also the cost of the historic consultants sure maybe the city puts a fund together to help subsidize that instead of the mills act but the mills act had significant fees as well so it's All right, so it sounds like you've got two assignments almost now.

Yes, I think I'm going to look at Jamie. I think, sorry, Council Member, if I could just really quick. What I heard on this fee waiver, thank you for the really clear direction. I think we'll just look at this as tabled and then when we come back possibly next year for the budget and the fees, we'll rejuvenate this conversation ahead of time so we can spend time building the list with council. and do all that. I don't think this is an immediate thing we need to come back to you with unless any of you feel that it's super urgent.

Well I have a procedural question. Can we approve the fee schedule without these two paragraphs? Yes. So it seemed like that's the right thing to do, right? Well, I have some other questions about fees. There's a couple other categories.

We have still categories to go through. But before we leave this one, I just wanted to be clear. We took the direction as this is just going away. We're going to leave it alone. And we'll bring it back in a future conversation to get more detailed in it. But the way that this was agendized is you can, this is essentially like adding or removing a fee somewhere else. You're just amending this fee schedule. So we're taking it as strike all of this section.

and move on yes all right Hans you want to go to number three simplified descriptions oh simplified descriptions including legal costs as a heading oh the legal costs yeah so the only concern I have with this is You're basically, if I'm doing a home renovation or I'm building a house, I'm essentially giving the city a blank check, right? And they're just going to charge me whatever it costs them. And there's something along the lines of like what you do in insurance, where you have like a deductible, thinking from the perspective of the insurer, you know, is there some element to which the city should have some skin in the game? Like, I don't know, 10% or something where they feel some pain as they're racking up these bills, sort of a thought that was kind of rattling around in my head. And then there's, you know, there's another kind of equity question and maybe it's just, you can't do anything about it, but you could have two different kinds of planners. You could have a planner who doesn't ask any legal questions, and then you could have the planner, like probably if I was the planner, as you know, I'd probably ask the 10 questions. So like you wouldn't want to, I would, you wouldn't want to have me be your planner. So like, how do we, maybe that's a something that you could do behind the scenes just to norm on that. So people are sensitive to it. But those are, My concern is just about the fact that somebody kind of signs their life away and who knows how Brian's racking up the bills behind the scenes.

Alessandra?

I was okay with it.

I don't have anything to add. I'm okay as in the report.

Okay, I'm okay with it too, but... You heard. Yeah, thank you.

And that's we would treat it just like we do with our historic consultants. We really do try to protect the public's money as well. You know, we try to limit our amount of time as much as we enjoy talking to Brian. We try to limit it as well. So we would do that for our clients.

It was a good point, Hans. Thanks for bringing it up. I think I think you got the point. Number four, unusual services. Is there something we need to do on that?

No. I assume you're starting on this side. Everybody's good with it?

Everybody's good with it. All right. I have, I really apologize for doing this because I should have done it earlier, but I've been hit with certain situations, sort of like the historic houses. There are just some costs that I would like to have staff take a closer look at. One of them is the landscape plan check. There are a few instances where I've had residents question this, where they just thought, wow, I have to pay $875 to put a few native plants in front of my house. And they did. And I've done it, and I'm not asking for money back. But I'm basically taking my beautiful garden and putting all native plants in because I think it's the right thing to do. It's going to save water, and it's going to be good for the birds and all that. and it was $875 before I did anything. And I don't know if there's some class of landscaping plans, because I'm not building a $5 million house where that's just round off air. I don't know how to look at it. Maybe take a look at it in certain situations where somebody's doing something good that we want them to do. Maybe it's $250, but I'm not going to tell you what to do. Just an idea for the future.

Well, we can't change the fees at a staff level. So if you're asking us to come back in the future.

I'm just saying in the future. Okay.

Like maybe next year when we come back for the fees. Can I ask you a question on that?

Yes, you can. is it the same you know 800 ish whether somebody's like building a new house and they're putting in brand new landscaping over the whole thing is there any is there another tier or is that that's it no matter what you're doing i don't know immediately off the top of my head i'd have to scroll through the the fee schedule i think that's it Cause I'm, this is one of those where I I'm with Dale. Like I, I completely agree whenever we can add tiers, because what ends up happening is you have a lot of people building a brand new house, scraping the whole lot takes a lot of staff time. And so when my assumption is when Jamie does her time in motion study, that is really dragging that number up for people who just want to, you know, change around a few plants or do something pretty minor. And so having a, like a lower barrier to entry option there could be great.

Or people just do it and they don't come in and get a permit, which I would never do, of course. Second one, Brandon, is pressure washing. I was just involved with some pressure washing. Commercial district getting ready for car week. And in the process of doing that, I was reminded that you have to, let's just say it's Pepe and he wants to clean up all the stuff in front of his bakery, which builds up pretty fast. If you want to do that, you have to get a temporary encroachment permit and it's $453. So it's $500 to pay the pressure washing company. It's almost $500 to get the permit and the whole thing's going to take an hour or two. So it's really temporary. We're not encouraging our businesses to clean their sidewalks and so they're not. And I've talked to quite a few of them and they just say, I'm not going to pay $500. So there might be something you could look at to make that a little less painful.

We can look at tiers. I mean those encroachment permits, you know, remember that we have to create, you know, we would go and create the stanchions with no parking signs. First TAF goes and puts them out. For the pressure washing specifically, we're making sure that they're catching the water, that it's going into the van. All those things but certainly I think I think the council's suggestion of tiers for some of these things like the landscaping and temporary sidewalks were not yeah streets if you're not if you're not taking out parking spaces if you're not closing streets there's you know maybe a tier one temporary encroachment a tier two temporary encroachment and

Related to that, I would also suggest that you have pre-approved companies, if it's legal to do that, that you know follow the rules, that you know how they do the signings. They suck the water up so that you don't have to have public works people go out there and babysit them like we did at the very beginning a couple years ago. It's something that we need to look at. Yeah, thank you. Okay. The same thing is related to signage fee. It turns out when somebody wants to put a sign up, it's $1,000, I think. And if you had three companies that were pre-approved and you know who they are, they know the rules. They're going to follow the rules. So if they come in and say, I'm going to do this sign and I'm working with XYZ, it takes a lot less time than somebody's doing a totally one-off thing and they're doing it themselves. Because that's a lot of money, $1,000 versus $250 or something if they're working with a legitimate vendor. And then the last one is a bigger, much bigger issue, and it came up last night with the Golden Vow, is projects have just gotten really expensive. And we're using a table that sort of cuts off at like $350,000 or something. And I think we need to take a fresh look at that because we're going to discourage, you know, it's a $500,000 fee on some of the projects in town now. And that could discourage people from making improvements on their building. And so I think those fees should definitely more align with what it actually costs us. And it turns out it may cost $500,000. But I think we need to be able to explain that to the contractors and the companies that are doing these improvements because right off the bat, it seems like it's pretty high.

Okay. We can, unless council feels otherwise, we'll just plan to make those part of the budget conversation for next year as we bring in fees forward. Yes.

I mean, there might be some issues that it's going to be sooner than that, but it'll hit us.

Yeah. It'll be. Yeah. Thank you.

Yeah. Okay. That's all my things. Thank you. It was a productive discussion. Anything else before we close this one off? Since we're doing this for you.

Jamie? We need a motion to approve the fee schedule? Yeah.

But all the issues you brought up tonight are taken care of and now we can approve it?

Yeah, it's a two-part process. So we announce it and we talk about it today. Then we come back and talk about it again. So I think we'll be making a change in the next one for some of the things that we've said we want to do now and for some of this other stuff we'll leave it and catch it the next cycle round. So we don't need to do anything today. It was just for review.

They do have to, don't they have to make a motion and approve what they just did?

Brian? Well, I guess the question is whether or not staff feels they've got sufficient direction from the comments that were made by the council. in order to return with a resolution that would be incorporating the changes. So there's no resolution.

There's no resolution. I wasn't sure if we needed, I don't know if we necessarily need a motion, but I think it might be wise to have someone state the four things that happened, get a motion, and do the votes on it.

That's certainly the prerogative of the council.

Anybody want to take a stab?

I'm sorry. If you're going to come back with this, do you want to take a stab at like a tiered landscape plan check option that we could do if we wanted to?

I would not be in favor of that. I mean, if that's what the majority of the council directed, we could. My opinion is that probably to really put that together and think about where the realistic lines are is more work than we were intending to do as part of this, but it might just delay it another month or something.

i like the idea of tiers i think that makes sense on a lot of these things but at least starting with with that um and maybe three different levels like a very basic project an intermediate project and then like a full brand new landscaping so brandon maybe just pick two and i think the ones we're picking are the of the landscape plan check um and the sidewalk um encroachment that

that those would be two that we would like to see a less expensive option for less complexity.

If I've got three, I'm looking one, two, three. Okay, cool. So I guess I'm going to object. You know, we have a process for fees. You know, we have the fee schedule come up every year. We have three months of budget discussions. We have something in writing here, which unfortunately was not put in resolution form, no disrespect to staff, was not put in resolution form. So it needs to come back next month. And now we're gonna bring something back next month and it won't be right because work like this is never right the first try. So we're introducing something into this process that is gonna require another hour or an hour and a half of discussion. And then we're gonna see this or we're gonna see this next month. And then we're gonna see it the next month with a resolution where everything's right. And so now we've spent three months on something Honestly, we spent five hours of city council time on these fees, which frankly could have just waited until the fee discussion at budget time next year. And the only thing that would be different would be the parking fees.

Okay.

Got it, Jeff.

So do you want to withdraw your suggestion or do you want to leave it? Okay, we're going to go for it. Yeah, we've got direction. Okay, so do you want to read off what the resolution is? Because you're going to have to execute it. It might be better.

Well, yeah, so I can just recap what I believe we heard, and Jamie's standing by to help me out. So on the parking fees... or the parking fines for the tickets, we're gonna go with staff's recommendation, which is the three tiers. So we'll take it up to $48 for the first one, and then $60 and $80. That's correct. And then on the city administrative fee waiver authority, we're striking that altogether out of the document. We're not gonna pursue that. Simplified descriptions with legal costs, we're going to leave that as proposed by staff. Unusual services, all okay with how it is. And then in addition, we're going to come back with proposal for tiered fee structures for landscaping and encroachments, temporary encroachments. Yes, and you had a couple other suggestions for future. That's right, but that's not part of it. That's not part of it. We're going to be bringing it back to you about this one.

Correct. Same thing with the waiver of fees. That's right.

And then point of clarification. This process requires two separate meetings and then 60 more days. So the soonest you're going to see that parking go into place is 90 days from now. And if we were to delay that second meeting, then the whole thing goes further.

It's probably a good thing. Okay. All right. Thank you very much. Good discussion, public and council. Thank you very much. And we're going to go to dinner now. Sorry for those of you who are waiting around, but Hans didn't have a big lunch today. And it is 7 o'clock. And dinner is downstairs.

I'm just thinking, do you think this one's gonna be a long one? Do you think we can get through the next little one or do you? Financial? That's totally up to you. What's next? Financial stewardship. It's fast for me.

It's not fast for me, okay. It's not gonna be, sorry. All right, we're gonna come back. What's the fastest we can do it, everybody? 7.20. 7.20, we'll be back at 7.20, thank you.

thank you

Thank you, everyone, for waiting for our dinner. Appreciate that. We're back in session at 722. And we're going to move on to orders of business. First one is discussion and direction on financial stewardship work group ad hoc, which was continued from July 7, 2026. Jamie?

Tonight we bring back a recap of the financial stewardship workgroup's recent efforts. When we set up the workgroup, it was comprised of financial experts and tasked with quarterly meetings to look at policies and budget. But also, importantly, it was tasked with improving communication and upskilling the whole council. The workgroup's been busy, resulting in updated policies and procedures, a start to the process of exploring revenue opportunities, enhanced understanding of the trust and pension liabilities, the increased financial reporting, and a beginning of the long process to address deferred maintenance. Going forward, there's some discussion regarding the future of the financial stewardship work group. To support this decision, it's important to understand the options and the ramifications. A work group can start meeting at any time a need has been identified. A standing committee meets without identification of specific needs, but adds a significant additional burden of time for council members and staff, and is generally not used in cities our size. Regardless of whether the work group or standing committee is formed, the City Council is the responsible party for all financial decisions. There's a surprising amount of work that goes into a meeting, so it's important to look at the difference between existing council structure, work groups, and committee meetings. Work groups can meet as needed, incurring only the time required to address the matters being discussed and the time required in the meeting. A finance committee, on the other hand, requires all Brown Act compliance, and that is already being done for the city council. That means it would be significantly more to have a standing committee at a time when the administration is looking for efficiencies. Given the fact that the matters addressed by the committee all become the responsibility of the City Council anyway, this is an interesting thing to discuss and decide on. summary the city council is responsible financial condition of the city and having a finance committee doesn't change this the many meetings of the work group 22 so far i think have been an efficient way to give the council new tools and the community has likewise benefited from this enhanced discussions that have taken place at the city council meeting based on the work of the financial stewardship work group The conclusion here is that the council is to provide direction on what to do with the future and the financial stewardship work group. That's it.

Thank you. Questions? Go ahead.

Thank you, Mayor. Thank you for your presentation, Jamie. I think this is actually probably for Brian. I was just wondering if an ad hoc committee in general is disbanded, how much time needs to pass before it can be reinstated?

There is not a specific time limit under the Brown Act. It's generally thought that it should be of limited duration. But the Brown Act doesn't define a specific number of months. So it's a matter of judgment by the council.

So just to follow up on that, next year with the new council, a new council could decide to do the ad hoc. And would that perhaps be considered OK, considering it's new members of the whole body as a whole?

Well, you don't want to have multiple members of the council serving on the ad hoc, different members serving on the ad hoc committee, because then you could potentially have three or more participating in the discussion.

Okay, but it would still be kept at two?

It would be the same two?

Perhaps. I'm just throwing out options.

Well, once repeated ad hocs are approved for the same purpose, it tends to be inconsistent with what an ad hoc committee is, which is of limited duration and scope.

Got it. Okay, thank you.

Jeff?

Bob, no questions? Hans? Okay. Public comment? Come on up.

Number one, I appreciate all the work that went into the whatever language we're using around what has occurred over the past duration that really got into the weeds with a lot of the work that you did. So thank you for that. I guess my question is, I'm actually looking for feedback from you guys, and I guess we'll get that in the discussion that you have, which is, you know, what value did you get? What did you see the positives and negatives about what occurred over the last year? So having more insights on that would be very helpful.

uh for us to hear uh directly as you move through whatever decisions you want to make so that was my answer if you could clarify sorry to ask you a question could you be more specific about what you're asking us to give you feedback on

is so you've had a group in a committee or work group, whichever is the right language over the last year ish. And what did you see is the great wins out of it from your seats? And what did you see are the weaknesses or the questions or the issues that came up over the course of that period of time, the pluses and the minuses. So I'm just looking for your observations as a full council.

Okay, something above what you just saw in the presentation.

Yes.

Okay.

Yeah. Yeah, and you're looking for your personal views.

Okay, so the people that were on it. Yes.

Good. Please.

Thank you. Anybody else? We had one other one. Kelly.

I actually have two sets of comments, if you'll allow. The first are mine, and the second are from Jim Beck, who had to leave this evening.

Okay, that's fine. I'll give you some time.

Okay. Good evening, mayor and city council, city staff. Thank you for the opportunity to speak on this topic. To me, this is a straightforward and important decision. I simply do not know how this council cannot transition the current financial stewardship ad hoc must turn it into a standing committee. This council led by UDEL is the first council in too many years to take the financial stewardship of our city seriously. The financial stewardship ad hoc was created and will remain a legacy, perhaps the most important legacy of this current council. Establishing this ad hoc was a bold and transparent move that speaks to the integrity and accountability of each of you. Prior to this ad hoc, we had one city budget update a year, frequently in the eighth month of the fiscal year, with little to no ability to practically impact fiscal year planning. When I first joined the Forest and Beach Commission over five years ago, I'll never forget during my onboarding when I asked the then Public Works Director, what are the biggest issues you think our city faces? Without hesitation, he said, deferred maintenance. Kelly, it's everywhere and in all directions. That was over five years ago. It was frustrating and a mystery how we could be running a city without an inventory of this deferred maintenance and better systems and accountability on how to manage it. As I advocated along city staff for funds to implement the three-year deferred tree maintenance catch-up plan back in early 2024, I was also surprised just months later when someone said to me, Kelly, why do you keep asking about the tracking and the budget? We don't operate with budget line items like that. We just get an annual budget and move money around to where we need it to get the job done. WHILE I WHOLEHEARTEDLY UNDERSTAND THAT EVEN THE BEST LAID FINANCIAL PLANS FREQUENTLY NEED REVISION This interaction reflected an important cultural observation. While it would have been easy to have simply waived this response off as being woefully unaccountable, I am certain there was nothing nefarious about the person who said it. They were simply reflecting a difficult cultural norm that our systems haven't yet set us up to be accountable as we'd like. It's honestly been unimaginable to me how city government could run without quarterly updates. I can think of no public or private company environment where anybody running a $30 million budget would only be held accountable to one formal budget update meeting a year. IN DOING SOME RESEARCH ABOUT WHAT IS STANDARD, I WOULD LIKE TO NOTE THAT IT IS STANDARD PRACTICE OF CITY JURISDICTIONS TO HAVE ONE CITY BUDGET UPDATE, AS WE DO HERE, AND, IMPORTANTLY, AND FOUR TO FIVE ADDITIONAL UPDATES THROUGHOUT THE YEAR TO CITY COUNCIL. IN OUR OWN NEIGHBORING CITY OF MONTEREY, THERE WERE SIX UPDATES IN ADDITION TO THE ANNUAL BUDGET REVIEW JUST LAST YEAR. I CAN'T TELL YOU HOW EXCITED AND RELIEVED I WAS TO LEARN THAT THIS AD HOC HAD BEEN CREATED. WITH THIS AD HOC AND YOUR COUNCIL LEADERSHIP, WE NOW HAVE THREE BUDGET UPDATES VERSUS JUST ONE. A COMPLETE AND INITIAL ACCOUNTING OF 100 MILLION IN DEFERRED MAINTENANCE THAT IS THREE TIMES MORE THAN THE ANNUAL REVENUE WE TAKE IN AS A CITY. YOU HAVE EMBRACED THE FISCAL DISCIPLINE REQUIRED TO BALANCE SERVICES WITH OUR INCREASING DEFERRED MAINTENANCE. You have embraced that we require additional revenue measures to address our significant gaps and taken the high road to resist special interests that have suggested you do otherwise. And we have more work to do, a lot more to do. Just think about the last discussion prior to the break and how helpful it might have been to have had a standing committee that could have provided a recommendation or guidance on our fee structure to our city. Quite honestly, once you see how behind we are, you simply can't unsee it. Our residents deserve transparency and accountability with our city funds. Establishing a financial stewardship standing committee while we implement stronger and more transparent financial systems, more frequent budget updates, and a stronger culture of accountability within our community are urgent and important priorities. THIS SIMPLY DOES NOT FEEL OPTIONAL TO ME. I HOPE YOU WILL UNANIMOUSLY SUPPORT A FINANCIAL STEWARDSHIP STANDING COMMITTEE. THANK YOU. THOSE ARE MY COMMENTS, AND NOW IF I MAY, I'LL GO TO JIM.

HOW LONG ARE HIS? YOU TOOK ABOUT FIVE MINUTES THERE.

are not as long as mine.

Okay, all right.

And I'll just.

Try to do it quick.

Okay. Jim, this is Jim Beck, resident of Carmel. On the standing ad hoc, kudos for first establishing it. It's one of the most consequential under the radar things this council has accomplished. Perhaps I was too subtle in my recent letter to the Pine Cone, but this financial stewardship committee launched the most effective pursuit of fiscal responsibility I've observed since moving to Carmel. The council assigned two qualified council members to lead the effort. Others may have delivered the same results, but kudos to council members Delves and Buder for taking on the challenge. Some of the outcomes. One, began discussions on KPIs to press accountability of departmental productivity gains and or lower expenses while maintaining or improving service to our community. Two, surfaced a total perspective of capital requirements, including what is now being referred to as deferred maintenance, and set a long-term plan to address these needs. Three, challenged our city administration to propose a budget with recognition of both OPEX and capital needs, rather than simply a budget that maintains services with what little funds are left over for capital administration. City administration responded admirably, recognizing this as a major cultural shift from prior public administration budget exercises. And five, the resulting budget and deferred capital needs made apparent the need for this council to address difficult politically charged revenue increase initiatives. The bottom line is that the foresight of this council to launch this committee, the work of this committee, and the council's leadership in setting a path of fiscal responsibility should be commended. However, I know in working individually with committee members and with our acting city administrator on KPIs, capital recognition, budget development, including designating two low-hanging fruit revenue opportunities, This work by a financial stewardship committee needs to continue. The work has just been started. We need to maintain that momentum. This committee should be a standing committee, not an ad hoc or work group effort. I also think that promoting this concept of full and permanent status sets in motion another legacy element specific to fiscal responsibility by the current council and particularly for the members whose terms come to a close this year. Thank you.

Thank you. Two pretty powerful statements. And Nancy, I think a lot of your questions were answered. All right. Anybody else? Nobody there. Maria, I guess you're online now.

Yes, I am. I apologize. I came to eat dinner. Just a couple comments. First of all, I do applaud the financial stewardship, the work group, and all the terrific and additional reporting, assessment, both from the way we manage our finances to full disclosures to assigning different responsibilities about how we manage our funds. However, I am a little bit different in the way I see the world. I think that reporting is absolutely required. I think that every quarter or every two months reporting is essential for any manager of any kind of budget. However, I don't see the need for an ad hoc to stay in place. I just think we can give the direction to staff in some particular KPIs or CapEx itself, or the use of our funds, any specific direction on what will be needed for the council to be reported on. And therefore, we will continue to evaluate and assess but I don't think it's necessary to have an ad hoc committee standing or form a different committee or a different group just for the reporting element. I think we can empower them, allow them to report, and unless we see some different behavior, then we can do correction mechanisms through a different form of ad hoc or something else. But in my opinion, it's service purpose. I think it's seen we've seen tremendous success from it And I applaud this and the service of both of the council members were part of it However, I think it's plant it's time to hand off Allow for the city to report on them and we give them the direction of what to report on and we'll be listening to those Reports.

Thank you Thank You Maria Anybody else? Okay, we're going to close public comment and come back for council deliberation and discussion. Jeff, you want to start?

Sure. So staff has presented us with, so first thank you Hans and Bob for all the excellent work you did. Staff has come back and presented us with three options. I definitely have a least favorite option, which is keeping the committee as ad hoc. I think we should either turn it into a standing committee or be finished with the work. I'm a little bit torn. You know, I was I'm kind of struck by this slide that is in this that's in the staff report about the amount of work required to to do this. And, you know, I hear, you know, there's a lot of talk now about KPIs and metrics and stuff. And, you know, I've spoken about this a little bit before. You know, what we don't have is sort of an emphasis on caramel character. I think that we I think that we, you know, that stuff kind of falls by the wayside. And I believe that by elevating the, by turning the Standing Committee into a, by turning the Ad-Hoc Committee into a Standing Committee, we give the impression that money is paramount. I've spoken about that before. And I don't think that that's why people move here, like to be frank. So my preference would be to eliminate the committee altogether and save staff from the burden of having to prepare for another meeting. My second slightly behind preference would be to establish it as a standing committee. Thank you.

OK. Thank you, Jeff. Alessandro, you want to go next?

Sure. Thank you, Mayor. I appreciate very much the work that Bob and Hans have done. I think it's a great job. Certainly the comments that Kelly made and Jim Beck's comments really summed it all. You can't quite take, you know, go further than that. Certainly they did work with our fiscal policies. They improved the budget process, the discussion of the revenue opportunities, the tri-annual budget reporting, addressing the deferred maintenance needs and coming up with a plan. So I would just want to hear from Hans and Bob what they would like to do, but I certainly would support them in the direction they would want to take. And if that's a standing committee, I'm very much in support of that.

What about in terms of continuing it as an ad hoc?

Well, it sounds like, according to our city attorney, that it cannot continue as an ad hoc.

All right. Thank you. Bob, you want to go?

Yeah, I mean, I think there's three options here. And I think the, you know, the standing committee or nothing are clear. I think if you wanted to do an ad hoc, the only way you do that would be at the beginning of the budget cycle. So essentially every January we appoint a new ad hoc to provide oversight to the budget preparation. And, you know, perhaps with... a specific focus on some new things. Originally, we were very much focused on the process itself and our policies. That was the first year. In the second year, we were much more focused on CapEx and understanding that challenge. And so you could do it that way. And I'll come back and say what I think. But I wanted to get to Nancy's question. What benefits did at least I see from the financial stewardship work group? You're working in a small group. We had very frank discussions. I mean, there were just five of us in the room. And we didn't pull any punches at all. And it was a very respectful, incredibly collaborative approach. And we had time. That might be the single most important thing, that through five financial stewardship groups or meetings of five or six at an hour and a half to two hours each, that's a lot of time. that you don't get up here. And the devotion of that time, I think, yields just a more granular level of understanding, at least in those individuals involved. I know for me, it did that. And it allowed me to articulate our financial situation better than I otherwise could. And I think that is important. But also, I think it sends a very clear message to staff that this is a priority. Because I think that was what has been lacking in many government organizations is the budget is kind of the bare minimum of what it needs to be. And it just depends on who's elected and how much they care about the numbers. So I think that was the benefits of it. I think those benefits would still apply if this becomes a standing committee because it's focused. At the end of the day, that may be the single biggest word. I think it's been mentioned that I think If you look at the outcomes, I think we just got started. We just scratched the surface. I think we have a better budgeting process. I think we improved our policies quite a bit. But on the journey to more transparency and accountability, it's early days. And going from budgeting, which is just guessing about the future, to actual financial management, which is understanding the present, understanding reality, understanding where you are, understanding what you can do better in real time. We got work to do on that one. And I think we need a focused committee to do that. Jeff, I hear you on the money is paramount. I think from my view of what my job is as a city councilor, money is paramount. And that's not coming from a point of greed. That is just coming from that, you know, the single biggest thing in my mind that we do every year is figure out how to spend the people's money and how to do it in a way that benefits our constituents appropriately, right, and then and achieving that balance. And I agree with you that when I'm preparing a budget, I am not focused on community character. That is a different hat and one, But frankly, I don't accept as willingly as my job as a city councilor. I think community character matters very much. I want to encourage it, but I think community character comes directly from the community and it's sort of not our job to try to legislate what that is or it's just too hard. So I think it's that we need to create an open and welcoming environment and that helps community character. So with all that said, I would, the other thing I'll say is when we came up with the name Financial Stewardship Work Group, it was, I scratched my head at it first, but I came to appreciate it primarily because the word stewardship, that's really what we need. Now stewardship implies that you have a long-term perspective, right? That you get a process going, but then you steward that process forward year after year after year. And I think if we create this vessel of a finance subcommittee that we just know it's always going to be there and it won't always have me on it. It won't always have Hans on it. that you're making a conscious decision every year or two about who to put on it and take on that stewardship role in addition to the full city council. I think it provides an opportunity for new members of city council that have an interest and or an aptitude to join perhaps a more senior member who's already been on the finance committee, so that you're building that bench, if you will, and contributing that stewardship. And frankly, I think it might help us attract some candidates that are more interested in the finances and maybe a little less interested in some other things. But that helps, I think, with the diversity of our city council. Thank you. That was great.

Hans? Yeah. So first of all, it was fantastic working with you, Bob, on this. And I think it was a great experience. I think we achieved a lot. I also wanted to thank Brandon and Chip and Jamie and subsequently Marissa for their openness and you can imagine that this was a departure from the way that things operated for a long time. And they really did come with an attitude that was not defensive. It was an attitude of, yeah, let's do this. And so I just don't think that that's been recognized enough. And I thought that that was extremely helpful. I thought we had great staff work along the way. And I think that's the way it's supposed to work. We're supposed to agitate and try to push in a direction. And the staff is supposed to provide the technical pathways and the options. And I thought that all of that was fantastic. So thank you. I think that the benefits, first of all, I would make it a standing finance committee for a lot of the reasons that Kelly and Jim talked about. I think it provides a sort of institutionalized mechanism to keep the council focused on these issues. There's any number of things that tend to come up, appeals, different state mandates that have to be dealt with. And it kind of keeps your eye on the prize. I think that, Bob, you talked about time as being one of the biggest advantages here. Look, we have taken a lot of heat already for having long meetings. And as, as was mentioned, these were monthly meetings during budget season. It was every two weeks, an hour and a half at a whack. And I just don't think that there's any way that we could get into the kind of detail that we got into in this setting. I just don't think that there's the physics don't work. You know, just as an example, we had a discussion about CalPERS, a couple of discussions that were pretty detailed in the committee context. And we had, I think we did the right thing, which is bring that up to the council so everyone could get a look at it. And that was very helpful. It wasn't quite as detailed as what we got into in the committee context, which I think is okay, but it's just, it would be great if some folks on the council were digging just that little bit deeper. So, Yeah, that's kind of where I'm at. I also, you know, the notion of an ad hoc, I don't think really works. I think that having a standing committee better future proofs it from a standpoint of in the future, a council might just decide, hey, we're not going to do the ad hoc this year or whatever. And if you have a standing committee, I think it takes an affirmative step to get rid of that, which is probably harder to do. And I won't get into all of the specifics that I have listed here, but there's any number of any number of topics that I think are ripe for us to go a little bit deeper, like Bob said. And I think that that's something that we should do. Thank you.

Those were all good statements. I don't really have much to add to it, except I really want to say how incredibly successful this was when we In January, if everybody remembers, there were, what, 10 ad hoc committees? And we basically decided to clear them all out. And then this was the first one I think that came up. And we originally agreed to have it for six months. And then we decided to keep it through the whole budget season, which I think was a really good thing to do. It's probably on the borderline of how long ad hocs should last. But our city attorney said it was OK, so it was OK. You brought up a really good point, Hans, is that you're doing deep dives into subjects and the rest of us were sort of sitting on the sidelines, not getting the benefit of that. And I think your point about the standing committee, we could watch those meetings, right? I don't think we could call in and say anything, but we could watch them and that's valuable. But also the fact that you brought some of the key concepts like the CalPERS thing to us. And we got to see some of the details. It was excellent. I just can't say enough good things about the work that you did, Jamie did, Marissa, Brandon. And I just want to thank everybody for being so open. And the agitation board was great, Hans, because that's sort of what you did. I know that first, the very first night that we talked about doing this, I went into Jamie's office. Can I say this, Jamie? And she was in the office with a little bit of consternation on her face, like, oh my God, what just happened? And I said, Jamie, trust me, this is going to be incredible for the city. It's going to be incredible for you. And would you agree? She would. So this is a new thing that we did. And thank you so much for the public for letting us do it. and supporting it. And it's changed. And Jim Beck was, you know, talk about agitation. He was the guy that came in here to push us. And at first it's a little annoying, but I'll tell you what, after hearing him speak two, three times, and after seeing the results of this committee, his statement was really powerful. And so was yours, Kelly. Thank you so much. It means a lot to us to hear people speak that highly of our work. It really does. And I hear good things all the time. That being said, I've had conversations, it hasn't been for a while, but having a new standing committee is work. It's really work. And I think you supported it just now, Bob, right? And I was surprised because you've been always telling me that adding another one of these, it's a lot.

Yeah, committee's had time. This is a committee that includes two city councilors. I think we're working in... an area that is more focused and it's work we ought to be doing anyway. So I'm not convinced that adds crazy amounts of time. It might force it to be a little more disciplined. Here's an example, Dale, that if you, since we have now agreed we're going to do, if not quarterly, at least every four months, we'll have reporting. Well, guess what? If we have a date set for a finance subcommittee meeting that says this is when we're going to talk about, you know, January, February, March, April, and that's a set date, then that forces staff to get the books closed and, you know, produce that report. It's sort of like quarterly reporting in the public sector. So private sector, sorry, private sector. So I think you can, I just think it's a lot of work that needs to be done anyway.

And there's going to be some payback at the other end. So I have a question for the two of you and all of you. Who should be on that committee? We have some really unbelievable finance people in this town that have tremendous track records. Should we have people from outside the city on that committee too to add their expertise?

You know, I'll be honest. When I first got elected, I... I kind of came in with that idea. And the staff really just reminded me of how much of a wild card Unelected, well, just even elected people can be pretty wild cards. But if you start bringing in people more randomly, it can just introduce a real wild card. And perhaps the middle ground is if you create this as a committee that has to have publicly noticed meetings and public meetings, if someone is really interested in the topic, they can show up. And frankly, it's not a meeting you necessarily have to have in the chambers. It's a meeting you could have over at the library in the gathering space or in a smaller venue where people could sit around a table, just like we did during financial stewardship. And I think the public might be able to feel a little bit more part of it.

Hans, how do you feel?

Yeah, we spent $100,000 for all of this stuff up here, and apparently I'm told we can have meetings if we rearrange the furniture down there. So I think that that's the kind of environment. I don't think that they're going to be pounding down the door to come to the meetings, but there's definitely a handful of people that are in my mind that I would encourage to be there, and I think we could make it more participatory than sort of your average meeting City Council meeting and I think that that that's probably a good way to square the circle. Alessandra?

I'm fine with everything I heard as I said I support Hans and Bob.

Jeff? I think standing committees are composed of council members period so I don't think you I don't think you even have the option of including members of the public as members of a standing committee. Brian? Is that true?

I'm sorry what was the question?

Can can standing committees consist of a people other than council members?

No. Okay.

All right. Well, that's easy. So we just encourage those smart people to show up at the meetings and participate as public comments. All right. Sounds like we have pretty unanimous support for a standing committee for better or worse for staff.

Oh, I don't, yeah, don't put, I'm more excited about it, yeah. So we do need, I think we need a little bit of, now we've got to kind of mold this clay a little bit, so we need to know who the council would like to have on the committee, any other direction about frequency of meetings, anything like that, and then we'll need to, Brian, we can come back, there's a couple ways we can do this, right? We can come back with a resolution, we can, do it via ordinance, which is probably overkill for something like this. What do you think may be required?

I would say a resolution would be appropriate. I thought I saw some reference in the staff report to having a charter defining the duties. So I don't know that a charter would be needed, but the resolution could certainly recite what the scope of the committee's assignments would be. And as far as the schedule, the council could indicate the frequency of the meetings or leave that to the discretion of the committee.

The council can direct the committee, you know, as we get into budget season, the council could say, hey, we'd like the subcommittee to meet more frequently. It can be a little bit flowing. But I think what Brian said is really one of the most important parts is that sort of like the constitution or whatever you want to call it, the charge on the subcommittee, that's really important to get from the five of you. What do you want this subcommittee to do? So you don't have to figure that all right now in the moment, Any sort of breadcrumbs you can leave us would be helpful because obviously we have to come back with that resolution at the next meeting. We'll take our best shot at it. But as much as you can give us in this meeting, laying those breadcrumbs, telling us who's on the committee, anything like that would be helpful for us.

Might I suggest that first of all, I think it's probably logical to start with that the two existing members of the stewardship committee become the charter members of that committee. I might also suggest that we have a final meeting of the stewardship committee to wrap it up. And maybe at that meeting, you could help define some of these guidelines and bring it back to us at the next meeting. I mean, they seem to be the most qualified. Yeah, that's a good idea. I think that's a good idea. I'm going to look to your colleagues.

Yeah, I agree. I was going to suggest something similar that the two of them put together how they see it going and then we can approve it as a whole.

Well, I think, but I still, my comment still stands. If the five of you want to give direction to those two folks and the staff that are going to be like, you want to give direction to us as we go down into the cave and craft this, now's the time to do it. We would appreciate that very much.

So how much do we need to do tonight? How much can we do at the next meeting when they come back with the framework?

You can do anything or nothing tonight. If there's something that it really matters to you, you want to make sure that's part of the standing committee right now, you don't need to hear back from these guys or us. You know, if there's something you want to tell us right now, we will make sure that we weave it in. Because if we're downstairs working on it together and the majority of the council says you must do this, then we're going to incorporate that.

Okay. I think Bob and Hans are going to agree to be on the committee. Are you okay with that?

Yes, absolutely.

Jeff.

Okay.

What other, do you need us to vote? Do you need us to do something besides say, here are the two members, they're going to have a wrap-up meeting for the stewardship committee?

Yeah, what I'm asking for is if there's any nuggets, we're going to go and we're going to create the constitution essentially for the subcommittee. If there's anything tonight that you can tell us, any of the council members want to tell us, has the financial stewardship worker that's going to go down there and create this constitution. If there's anything that really matters to you right now, you want to make sure that's in that constitution, tell us right now and we'll weave it in. Otherwise, we're just going to come back with a draft that's based on what we all think and you guys can change it then.

I'm good. So Mayor, my recommendation is that you not make the appointment of the members of the Standing Committee now, that you instead follow what we've been hearing from which is to have, for them to have a discussion as an ad hoc committee as to their recommendations about what to be included within the scope for the standing committee, then the staff can take that draft resolution, bring it back to you, With that resolution, that would be the time to, if you found it appropriate, adopt the resolution or revise it as you deem appropriate. And at that meeting, you would make the appointment to the members of the standing committee.

Okay. Do you have everything you need then?

So I have a comment.

Go ahead.

The things that are important to me, so on the other boards that I serve on, the standing committees are instantiated by the charter of the board. And they have set meeting times. So, for example, on MST, there's an operations committee and an admin committee, and they meet every other month. Opposite to one another on community human services. There are a number of board committees and they meet every month So I would like to see those I would like to see a structure that's a little bit more formal like that rather than sort of ad hoc if you were and I would like to see that the meetings are I know I know that these meetings need to be public and since we are going to set them up and they're Brown Act meetings, I would be interested in seeing them recorded since we have the capability of doing that. And seeing them, seeing it adopt a somewhat formal meeting format wherein they produce, they have an agenda, obviously, since they're subject to the Brown Act, and they produce minutes that are ratifying

Thank you, that was excellent. All right, I think you've got your marching orders.

Unless there's any one, once, twice, three times.

Okay, thank you. Great discussion, thank you so much. All right, so we have a really exciting one next, from my perspective anyway. Resolution 2026.060 authorizing the city administrator to execute a construction contract with Silcon Constructors for the beach access 12th and 10th Avenue stairway. Repair Project Carmel Beach Coastal Protection and Access Improvement, bid number 2526007 for a total not to exceed amount of $364,417.13, including base bid $223,149.70, add alternate $80,531.24, and contingency $60,736.19. STAFF REPORT. I DON'T KNOW, DO YOU WANT TO DO A PRESENTATION, SHARI?

Okay yeah I think I think Mayor you know we're I'll try this Char you please stand here at the podium because they're gonna have questions but generally what we're bringing to you is a contract that's obviously over any of our signing authorities we went to competitive bid as you know the first time around we had arithmetic errors caused us to have to re-bid it we've come back we have our lowest responsive bid and we are recommending that the City Council authorize me to execute the contract. and we'll build the stairs as quick as we can.

Can you, if I could ask a question? Please, yeah. Could you tell us exactly what this includes?

Okay. Since the public's here, they'd like to know too. Okay. So basically this is a repair, emergency repair project. So it's not a whole reconstruction of the whole thing. So again, this was due to the El Nino that damaged the stairs. So it has some structural components and non-structural components. so the structural is basically the foundation we're putting the foundation deeper into the bedding to address what was happening before it was rotting it was just wood and then basically making this concrete and making it a little bit more resilient and then you know replacing some of the piles like the wooden piles the threads and, you know, the bolts and all that kind of stuff, the rotting parts of the damaged areas. And then there's ADA components of it too, which is basically the additive bid, you know, includes the guard, the railings and some of the bands, I guess, like the striping bands. And so basically making it more, like compliant more to ADA. That's one, but also to the structural element of the damage stairs, both for the 10th and 12th stairs.

And I think the, I think the, The term of repair, you know, we don't want to scare anybody that we're just going to go down and, you know, slap some two-by-fours on the side of it and sister these things back together. We're calling it a repair because of the processing that we go through. We're not ripping out the entire staircase and building a brand-new staircase. That would be a different permit through the Coastal Commission and all those things. This is technically a repair, but it's going to look like a brand-new staircase. It's a major repair. Yeah.

Okay. Thank you. Any other questions?

I've got a couple.

Go ahead.

Thank you. I've got one for Shari and two for Brandon. So one thing I noticed that is normally not included when we see these is this ad alternative for $80,000. And I was just wondering if you could explain to the public what that is.

Yeah, so sometimes when we bid projects, we look at the budget, right? The budget originally was $300,000 from the last fiscal year. So when we look at the budget, like sometimes we think when you look at sort of some sort of estimate, like it wouldn't look like you can't make it, you can't make it. And so we had to put like the base bid, which is like what's necessary and that includes the structural part of the project. And the additive bid is something like, you don't necessarily need it to make the components structurally sound. And so we had to do that just to make sure the budget that we can work out all the elements within that budget. And so that's why we have base bits and additive bits. There's pros and cons, right? Like that happens. I mean, the base bid is typically always the lower because the bidder always wants to be the lowest bid. So that's why the methodology of awarding this is based on the lowest bid. The additive bid is something we can optionally add on. And in this case where, you know, like when we look at it and we kind of look at some estimates, it just sort of like works in that way like okay like we can work on that uh with that number and so we just add it otherwise it'll just be a separate another kind of project to do um and i think with a budget of like 300 000 and we're asking a little bit more is to just complete the whole thing rather than go back and forth

And the thing about additive bids is that we have a little more ability to negotiate that part of it. We don't necessarily have to pull the lever on that part of the project. We've got the base bid for the project that Shari said that gets the staircase back to being structural. And then we can work on the additive stuff if we can get the price down on those or find somebody else to do that for us or whatever.

OK, I appreciate that. Thank you. And then my question for Brandon, one of them is because it was 2024, you weren't here with the city. So there was something on the city website, and it was an engineering report from Kylo in Monterey. And this was just for a temporary fix. So if you could explain to everyone the difference between the temporary versus what we're doing now.

Yeah, the temporary, so the Kyler Engineering was brought on to assess the structure and what could be done. You know, I kind of made the joke earlier about slapping some two-by-fours on the side of it. It would have been much more like that. It was how could we make these staircases safe to walk on right now so they don't fall apart, but not necessarily to keep them past a few years. And so we thought that's just not a good use of city funds, it seems, to do something like that.

Okay, thank you. And then my last question, Brandon, is there are reports that there's going to be a strong El Nino. So if you could give the council and the public an update next month, perhaps if we could discuss all of, not discuss, but have you give us an update on all of the beach issues, the erosion on the bluffs, the 8th Avenue sand ramp, and maybe even, we're not going to do the 4th Avenue outfall, but if there's anything new we need to know about that. Not only the status if we've done anything on those, but what is going to be done to protect them and make sure that nothing gets worse until we can actually do the repairs on some of those.

Absolutely. And you and I talked about this in our one-on-one this week. And so what I'm actually, what we're planning on doing is we've been meeting internally to talk about the Super El Nino coming. We've been talking to some of our sister cities around the area. And so over the next week or two, Shari and I, what we're going to do is put together a list of those projects. We've got designs coming in right now for the rip rap that's going to go into that, the erosion that happened that's opened up. So we'll put together the whole story for everybody. We'll put it in the Friday letter. We'll send it out. You know, I send a weekly update to you guys, send it to you guys. And then we'll also come and I'll make it part of my city administrator announcements next month. So we'll just try to get everybody that we can.

Excellent. Thank you. Appreciate it for both of you. Thank you.

Yeah, I have a question. So when I look at the bids, when I look at the bids on the packet, I see that the silicon construction, the lowest bidder was $223,000 and change. But I see that the grand total was $303,680.94. And when I look down the list, what I see with wave construction and, in fact, all-star development, is that the grand totals are less than $303,680.94. So I want to make sure I'm understanding this right. So Silicon construction, they were the lowest bidder, but the highest alternate. And so we don't have any choice but to use the lowest bid with the highest alternate, which makes the grand total more than the other two bidders. That's right.

Yeah, the way that this is bid, the way that we select contractors, the way this is advertised is based on lowest base bid. But, like I said, we will take a run at those additive things, and if we can't get a project within our budget, then we won't do the additive things.

Well, how do we, like, how do we as a council sort of and I don't know how to say this, hold you to that since the grand total here is basically $40,000 more than- It's a fair question. What choices do we have to hold Silicon to, hold you or Silicon to task here?

Sure, it's a very fair question. I mean, especially coming out of the financial conversation we just had, I think you could ask us, we'd be happy to come back and report. before we start construction, after we start construction, when the project wraps up on the total cost, anything like that we'd be happy to do.

Is there a way to set the guardrails so that the project doesn't come out to $364,000 when we could clearly do it for $40,000 less using one of the other bidders? Like do we have the mechanism to do that here in this forum? I'm going to look to Brian for that answer.

I'm sorry, what is the question?

What have you asked? Well, the issue I'm having is that the base bid on SOCON is $223,000, which is, frankly, only $5,000 less than the price on the bid on wave construction. But their ad alternate is $80,000. And so the ad alternate on wave construction is $40,000. So when you add those two things together, the grand total price of the project under Silcon, which is what staff is saying we are legally obligated to do, is $303,000. And the total price of the base project and the add-on for wave construction is $268,000, so $35,000 less.

I believe the specifications, and you can confirm, likely say that the base bid will be the determination of the low bid. Is that right?

Lowest base bid. It's the lowest base bid.

Well, I thought that's what I said. So the answer is the reason that Silicon is considered the lowest bid. I understand that.

So I understand that. So I got that from staff. My question is, was then what can we do about it here? So what I'm inferring is our only two choices are either to accept the Silcon bid for the base and the additive, which makes it $35,000 by the time you have the contingency, $40,000 more. for the total project than it would if we used wave construction. So we've boxed ourselves into the corner by specifying that we would use the base bid and not the base plus the add-on if we wanted. Or we can just do the base bid with silicon and cause staff, you know, ask staff to scramble to do the additive if that's what they want to do.

What if, Brian, what if they said they would, they will approve a contract with a not to exceed amount of $340,000 or whatever the, if you took the, if you took the additive from the second contractor and flipped it, whatever that total would be. So you're looking at the numbers right now, what would that be? If you put the additive under the SOCONs? 30, 263, 50, probably $320,000. So if the council could say, authorize me to execute a contract with Silcon for not to exceed amount of $320,000, that's enough to do the base bid project. And then we obviously have to negotiate to get that down or then have to come back to council.

Can we require staff to negotiate down as part of this resolution? We shouldn't. Can we require staff to negotiate down the price of the ad alternate with SOCOM to something close to the ad alternate of Wave or just or say either you negotiate it down to $40,000 or $50,000 or you just scrap it altogether?

Your authority is to, you can award only on the base bid and not on the ad alternate. And that way you would then have the base bid of 223. And my advice would be that you re-bid the ad alternate rather than to go back to the contractor to negotiate.

bid that they put in because the whole purpose of bidding law is for them to give their price not for it to be... Well if they're the selected bidder, I mean normally if we had four contracts, let's say if we didn't have an alternate and normally we had four contracts and we selected one and staff it would still be within their authority to negotiate right go back to the the bidder and say hey you know we'd like five thousand dollars off and we're going to give it to you but we'd like five thousand dollars off no you can't do that no your authority is under the public contracts code it goes out to bid when there's a bid received you can either accept the low bid

Or you can reject all bids.

OK. So let me ask a different question. We had this conversation an hour ago about your signing authority, which is $59,999. Can we approve the base bid and not this stuff? And could you then go back to Silicon as a separate matter, and negotiate a sole source contract with them not to exceed $59,999 and then just do that without coming back here?

Sure. If we can make, yeah, we would just have to make the findings to meet the sole source requirements. And if that was, those findings were met, then we could certainly do that.

I would just add that you might not get the same pricing because there's sort of like some economies of scale and mobilization costs and things like that, so.

And just to give a little context too, I think when we were doing a little bit on the estimating outside of this, like the railing alone would probably cost you around, I think like 25 something thousand just for one railing for one stairs. So that's just for the railing. And there are several items in the bid additives. The handrail is one of them for both. So that alone would probably be at least 50K. Okay.

Well, how do you think then that Wave Construction did the ad alternate of $40,300 given that you think the cost is $50,000?

I mean, I don't know who their supplier is, but the one that we kind of looked at from previous project, the supplier is from here. Wave is from Sacramento.

So I don't know who they are supplying. Different markets.

Yeah.

Jeff, I appreciate the light of thinking you're going down, but we need to get this contract approved. How many of you are willing to approve it as written? I do have one question, though. Go ahead.

You talked about community character earlier, and we just had the conversation about the money, but now the community character. So who actually approves the design of this thing? I understand that you're trying to get it to look like what's there, but who's approving what it looks like?

It's going to look like it looks right now. It's a replacing kind.

It's a replacing kind. Yeah.

So right now, I don't believe there'd be any plan to take it to the Planning Commission for design review or Forest and Beach Commission. We can take it to those agencies, to those bodies to check with them. But it's essentially a building permit to reconstruct something as is.

My only thing, I know that we desperately want these stairs, but the only thing that I would say is we also want it to look the way that we want it to look. It currently doesn't have any railings on it, right? And so this is a community where outside we have these crazy handcrafted railings. I'm not saying that we need that on these beach stairs, but the details do matter. And so... You know, it does make me like a little bit nervous that nobody's going to approve what the design of the thing looks like.

It actually does have an existing. It's just all bent up and kind of some overriding. And that's why it's actually replaced handrail. It's got stainless rails. Yeah, all the rails.

So the wood rails that go down the side, the handrails on the inside. So this is a replacement of exactly what's there. Exactly what's there.

Okay. Yeah.

I believe it has to be replaced exactly the way it is. Otherwise we have to go through a lot more with the Coastal Commission. So as much as I appreciate Jeff's efforts, I think we really need to get on with it because I mean, these were damaged in early 2023 and here we are like three and a half years later. So... It'll be nice. The only thing that scares me right now is with these storms coming. I'm hoping that when we get this done that they're going to be durable and be able to withstand the storm. But I really do want us to move on with this. It's been quite some time.

I think the discussion was valuable that we just had, and it might have brought up some things that we want to pay more attention to on the next project like this. But I'm looking for a motion to approve.

I'll do it in public comment. Oh, yes, we probably do. So I've got a couple comments.

It's been a long time. I forgot all about it. But I do that once in a while. Public comment, please. That was a lot of questions. No public comments.

You saved me. So before I give you a motion, I'll just...

Anybody online before we stop that? Sorry. There's no hands raised online. Okay, good. Go ahead. I'm sorry, I don't want to do a full public comment.

I think you know I think what Jeff's on to is public bidding is fraught with challenges and so you can structure it one way to stop some things that were happening before and then you end up with a different set of consequences because the rules are written and you have to follow them and it's hard and I have to put a lot of faith in staff to make the right calls and make the right decisions and this is a, you know, we are beginning a journey of doing a lot of capital projects. Sharia is a big part of that. We've hired a new project manager, I believe, as well and I think this is the first really, well that's not true, it's not the first test, the paving project went incredibly well. And you managed that top to bottom. And we trusted you on that. And you made a good choice. So I think that's what we need to be doing here. And my only direction is that let's make sure these stairs are really well built and really well done if we've got a big winter storm coming again this year. I'll say I think a lot of our capital needs are the result of not just neglect, but sometimes shortcuts. So let's not take any shortcuts on these stairs. And with that, I would move to approve this bid, this contract.

I'll second that.

Yeah, I have a comment. I want to be clear that my comments and what I may or may not do in 30 seconds are definitely not a reflection on the two of you or on any part of staff. I understand what Bob said, that we're caught in this sort of legal maze of trying to figure out how to balance the law with what I see as basically getting a better deal from someone else. And unless the motion contains instructions to staff on somehow reducing the ad alternate, what I'm looking at is a grand total that is, what I'm honestly looking at is a grand total that's $35,000 more than what we could have otherwise gotten the project done. And I don't really know what to do about it. And since we're just, honestly, we're just out of time on deciding what to do about it. I guess I'll decide what I'm gonna do when my name is called.

Anybody else? Roll call.

Council Member Barron?

Yes.

Council Member Booter?

Yes.

Mayor Pro Tem Delos? Yes. Council Member Jaramillo? Yes. Mayor Byrne?

Yes.

Motion carries.

Congratulations. We're gonna get new beach stairways. There was a cheer from the audience and the whole city. But we're just sort of tired, so we're not going to do it. All right, so now there are two items left, and we don't have the closed session anymore because we did it. There was a suggestion from the dais to do item number five first. thinking that it was a simpler one to get out of the way. And then we'll have a discussion about what to do with item four. So if that's okay with everybody?

It's not okay with me, but I'm sure I'll be outvoted.

I want everybody to be happy. Don't have to. Yeah, I mean, I'll go with the flow. Okay, so we're gonna do item five, provide direction regarding a potential urgency ordinance addressing home hardening and wildfire safety regulations citywide.

All right, while Nova's pulling this up, what we're going to be talking about is a recommendation coming out of basically a year's worth of conversations at our Wildfire Prevention Committee and other conversations around the city. What we're talking about tonight is what could go in a potential urgency ordinance. So to be clear, we are not asking you to adopt an ordinance or anything tonight. We're just talking about some potential items that could go into an urgency ordinance. So as I mentioned, this is a recommendation coming out of our Wildfire Prevention Committee. There are certain, on top of all the other things we've been talking about, there's been a lot of work and a lot of really serious conversations that have happened in there, all of them about resiliency and protecting this village from wildfire. One of the ideas that came out of that is home hardening. And those, that direction has been split sort of into two different buckets. One are suggested immediate measures that could be taken via an urgency ordinance and some other suggested measures that would probably be better deferred, at least in our opinion, to the design guidelines process because they require a little bit more public input. So tonight we're looking from council is policy guidance. First question, first and foremost, is do you want to proceed with an urgency ordinance? and if yes what measures would we see in that urgency ordinance and then from there we would possibly return at the next meeting with that urgency ordinance so what we have here is a matrix of the four measures you have this here as a handout and there's there's extras available if anyone would like them this is the simplified matrix there's actually a a more detailed matrix that has bigger expanded current rules and things like that. But for the function of this conversation, basically what we're talking about are these four measures and I'll just run through them really quickly. So the first proposed measure would address how gravel is treated, especially adjacent to structures. The idea is to create a noncombustible zone zero within five feet of the buildings. The current rule in our current code gravel counts as permeable site coverage along with other things like asphalt, which is impermeable, but they all count towards that calculation of site coverage, which is 22% of your building site. So in effect, people are being penalized if they're gonna put gravel around their house as a non-combustible landscaping cover. Right now, our code says you should use things like bark and mulch, which actually are not allowed to be right next to your house anymore through the zone zero language. So the proposed change would be to exempt gravel within five feet of a structure from those site coverage calculations. still the existing design guidelines for natural muted earth tone colors would still apply. We would suggest that be effective immediately. The second item has to do with the storage of firewood and other combustible materials. The idea here is just keep those things away from the house, keep them from becoming ignition sources. So the current rule, in our mapped WUI and high hazard zones, there's some pretty strict storage requirements. It's prohibited under buildings, decks, and eaves. Wood piles generally require 30 foot separation unless they're covered by some structure that has reduced flammability. You also have to keep the ground clear 10 feet around it. In all other areas of town, other than the high fire hazard zones, it's just our property maintenance and nuisance codes that apply. So what this is, if a site becomes dangerous just because it's overgrown, then we can take code compliance action, but it's much more broad than what's in the WUI zone. So our proposed change would be apply the same standard in the high hazard and WUI zones across the entire city. And we would suggest making that effective immediately. Third proposed rule would be ember resistant vents. These are the vents that go into your eaves, your attic, your crawl spaces, any opening, any penetration into or under the structure that requires a vent over it. What those do is they prevent wind-driven embers from entering those spaces and lighting the whole house on fire. The current rule is in the mapped hazard and WUI areas, properties must use very specific vents they actually prevent ignition inside of them and the rest of the city not in those zones the building code only regulates the opening size between a 16th of an inch and a quarter of an inch there's no requirements for the combustibility so our proposed change there would be to require those amber resistant vents city-wide this would be when those vents are replaced or altered. This is not meant to be retroactive. It's not meant to be punitive. We're not trying to make people go spend a bunch of money right now, but when they're replaced or altered, we would ask that they be replaced with these higher standard vents. And the last one to talk about are fire resistant windows. Once again, windows, they can become a major opening for a wildfire. So the current rule is in the MAP Hazard and WUI areas because, the recognition that windows can become an opening for fires to get in. They require dual pane glazing with at least one of those panes being tempered glass and a 20-minute fire rated assembly, meaning that wood windows are okay as long as they can stand up for 20 minutes. The wood can stand up 20 minutes without being burned all the way through. In all other areas of the city, there's actually no requirement with respect to the fire rating or quality of the windows, only the placement of those windows. And that has to do with whether your house is sprinkled or not sprinkled and how close your property is to the property line. But again, that's just the number of windows in the placement, not what they're made out of. So the proposed change would be to add that extra regulation for what the materials are in the hazard zones and the WUI zones across the entire city. Again, this would be effective when components are replaced or altered, not retroactive. A couple of extra rules that we would suggest if we go down this road. I mentioned not the alterations or replacement, not immediate retrofits, but also there are exemptions when strict compliance with rules like this would conflict with Secretary of Interior standards for historic properties. That one is most germane to the windows conversation. So we would suggest some language like that in an urgency ordinance as well if council decided to go that direction. So those are the four proposed measures that we have. You can strike any, you can add any, but that's where we're at right now. Here's an example of what we're talking about we see as future measures later down the road, probably too big of a lift for an urgency ordinance. Things like wood shake roofing, the eaves, exposed rafters, deck materials and design, gate and fence materials and design. THE CURRENT DRAFT OF THE DESIGN GUIDELINES, THE DESIGN TRADITIONS 1.5 PROJECT IS CONTEMPLATING FIRE SAFETY LANGUAGE. THERE HAVE BEEN GOING THROUGH ALL OF THE DESIGN GUIDELINES AND LOOKING AND MAKING SURE THAT THEY HAVE AN EYE ON FIRE SAFETY. SO WE THINK THAT THIS IS A MORE APPROPRIATE AVENUE FOR THESE HEAVIER LIFT DESIGN ITEMS TO FOLLOW. So what are we looking for tonight? As I mentioned, no ordinance or resolution this evening, but we are looking for some policy direction and then we would come back to you. So the first and most important question is whether you're interested in proceeding with an urgency ordinance to do any or all of these suggested measures. If yes, then which of the four measures should be included in the ordinance? And lastly, whether you wish to add any additional home hardening recommendations to an urgency ordinance before we return with that draft. So I am available for questions if you would like.

OK, I'm going to start with Hans since he's our fire expert.

No, you know, this is one of a number of areas that we were looking at. And from the very beginning, we knew we wanted to, again, kind of agitate in this area and get something in front of the council. And we had came up with something back in March. And here we are. And so As Brandon said, we basically outlined two different tracks. One was stuff that we considered kind of no brainers. Hey, let's bring that as an urgency ordinance. And then other modifications that we thought were required more discussion or were more sort of material dependent conversations, we thought that those were better addressed through design traditions. So I don't think there's much more to say.

So you recommend all four of these and participated in creating this policy?

Yeah.

Okay.

All right. Kelly and Tamara. Okay.

So you and others, you were part of that team? Yeah. Okay. Thank you. Alessandra?

Thanks. I don't have too much more to add. I certainly would support it. Definitely one and two, but I'm fine with putting all four in. And then I do agree with the decision on the other items to hold off and leave that for design traditions.

Mayor, I think if I could, at this point, I think we're looking for questions before public comment, then we'd come back for deliberation and comments.

Just trying. Okay. Thank you. Any questions now that we've heard from our fire expert? Anybody from the public want to make a comment? Thank you, Nancy. Are there any hands online? No.

Nancy Toomey. I would, don't know where this fits, but I think as I've been pounding on this one for a while, would like to have instructions as this goes through as an urgency ordinance, which I fully support that there also be reinforcements on where permits are required for any of these activities in individually or as a group. So educating the community on what needs to be done and how it needs to be done is essential. And I would like to extend that into the other guidance that we continue to get from the Monterey Fire, which goes into the other items that are in the pending bucket given design traditions work. that if people are looking to plan for what they're doing with their building to get it up to code and refreshments or refreshing to meet the desired fire resistant aspects and home hardening that we just got to get more information out so people can plan even if it's with hand waving and conditional references to it. So I just think that we're way behind the rest of the world that I see around us. And I'm cranky that we only got this much, but I'll take whatever I can get. So I appreciate this work and would like to see it be done. Thank you.

Thank you. Kelly, were you going to make a comment? Come on up.

I would just briefly like to add that this ad hoc, I think has been a great example of the collaboration of city staff, city council, community members, Forest and Beach, all the local, multiple fire agencies that have been participating. And Jeff, to your earlier comment, I think one of the things that's driving these particular four ordinances is the quadrant, which is what are the things that are high impact and low Carmel character, take away from character, right? So we're looking for high impact, low character impact on the city and these were the ones that seemed obvious that the committee wanted to move forward and I think the decision to move the other to design guidelines is exactly where they should be. Thank you.

Perfect. Thank you, and thank you for your work in the committee. All right, we'll continue our deliberation that I prematurely started.

Bob? Does council wish to proceed with an urgency ordinance? Yes. Which of the four measures should be included in the ordinance? All four. And do I wish to evaluate any other additional harm-hardening recommendations for the emergency draft ordinance? I do not. So I'm ready to proceed with this as it is. For your list of other, you and I talked about this last week, was I just never hear any conversation about wood-burning fireplaces. Many communities have at least started to phase them out, especially with remodels and certainly with new construction. And it's unclear to me what our policy is. When I remodeled my house, I was told I had to replace my wood-burning fireplace. But I'm not sure that was rooted in policy as opposed to somebody's preference. I was happy to do it. And then similarly, a policy on outdoor fire pits, wood-burning fire pits. Are they illegal and should they be? But those don't belong in an emergency ordinance. And I think we should proceed with this one. Jeff?

Thank you. I have a couple of comments. First, I am what I'm struggling with is the the reason behind doing this as an urgency ordinance and not as a normal ordinance. You know, Brandon, you sorry, Brandon. The staff presentation talks about putting these things off into the design traditions, which is admittedly sort of a long way away. But I think we have sort of a burgeoning problem in the city with regulations that are not really codified anywhere. So for example, we have a ban on beach fires which is codified in a coastal development permit, which doesn't appear anywhere on the city's website or anything. When in fact, it's not really a permit. It's really a removal of the right to do something.

We have an urgency ordinance for that.

Oh, so we have an urgency ordinance, right? Is that codified on the city's website? It is on the website. So we have these things that are, I'm corrected. We have these things that are like sort of done without like without going through the process. And so we also have like, remember, you know, back when, I don't know if you were here, we have an urgency ordinance that has to do with pushcards. you know, push carts downtown. Does anyone even remember those when the state allowed, when the state allowed push carts? So we have an urgency ordinance on the books that specifies the system for adhering to this ordinance, though there are 30 permits and, you know, they're renewed every year and now they're not renewed and there are probably spaces and people could get these permits and start, these things and start wheeling them through downtown.

I don't mean to correct you again, but it's actually codified in our municipal code.

So it's also codified. So Jeff, I know you want to move to the ADUs and get that in tonight.

So I'm having a problem, correct it again, I'm having a problem with the sort of the fast track nature of this and not going through public comment, not going through sort of a more typical process, a couple of things. Number one, gravel adjacent to structures. That does border on the design tradition issue, whether you can have gravel adjacent to structures. Am I going to be corrected on this too? No. Well, I don't know. And what? I shouldn't say no. I don't know. Continue. And fire resistant windows, the sort of interference, the sort of intersection between fire resistant windows and what you say up here, the Secretary's standards for historic properties. So what I would like to see is a little more a little more of a process before we do these things. I think these are all good ideas, but I would like to see a little bit more of a process and not just have them be sort of ad hoc elements in the municipal code.

Sure. Right now, the proposed process would be we're here to get the policy direction. What, you know, your comment about the the gravel example for like what it looks like or the windows and the historic interface. We're bringing in the policy conversation about these four items. We still need to come back to you with draft language and a draft urgency ordinance. So we're not asking you to formalize any of this tonight and make it official. We would be coming back for another public process where people would have a draft urgency ordinance to review with all this language, all these findings and all the recitals in it. So this is not by any means meant to be final tonight. Are you even interested in this? And are we so far off base here? Did we miss something?

I'm interested in it. I'm definitely interested in it. So to answer the question, I'm interested in it. I think that the city would be better off if we slowed down and took two extra months to go through the normal ordinance process.

So I might be able to offer some insight on this. What I've seen in my career has been that when there's a certain issue that you want to take action quickly on or you want the ordinance to take effect immediately, which is what an urgency ordinance does, is that you adopt an urgency ordinance so that it goes into effect immediately. And you couple that with a regular ordinance that goes through what you've been describing as the process, which has the first reading and then comes back at your next meeting for a second reading. and then becomes law 30 days after. And typically, I don't see urgency ordinances get codified into your municipal code, and that's not unique to Carmel. However, if it were, excuse me, a regular ordinance, you'd have to determine where in your code it would fit, and then it would be codified. So your choices tonight, given the description and the agenda, would be, if you wanted to direct staff to come back with the urgency ordinance, you could also direct staff to come back with a regular ordinance and you could consider both at that point well by regular ordinance by regular ordinance i mean i don't just mean

two hearings at the city council. I mean, some of these things would normally go to the planning commission first for their input, right? Isn't that right? If they're, if they're, if they were going to be codified as a regular ordinance, presumably in title 17, like they would sort of by definition go to the planning commission first. And so that would be a more, a more open process towards getting like planning commissioners feedback on what they think about putting gravel, how they think putting gravel next to structures affects the design ethos of downtown. That's the sort of process I'm talking about. That's the sort of process I mean to bring up.

Is that where, Brandon, you were thinking that a regular ordinance would... within Title 17?

Yeah, so Councilmember Barron's correct. If we were going to process a typical ordinance which would create an amendment to Title 17, we would go to the Planning Commission first for a recommendation to Council, then we'd have the two readings at City Council. that would be the quote unquote normal process for an ordinance, an urgency ordinance comes to council. We did, again, this came through the Wildfire Preparedness Committee, which is, you know.

So what could be done in light of this discussion would be the urgency ordinance could come back to the council for the council to take action. And the council could give direction to present to the Planning Commission draft regular ordinance for their recommendation to the council and then that comes up through the process to the council for your first reading and second reading process but in the meantime the urgency ordinance will be in effect immediately while the regular ordinance is being processed and then once the regular ordinance would go into effect it would typically I see it would repeal the urgency ordinance because that's not needed in

Brandon, I seem to remember having a, Can I say something? Yeah, sorry. I remember having a conversation with you, and I could be misremembering this, but basically, if it's an urgency ordinance, it can truly happen, even though it sort of touches on something that's related to our zoning code. If it's an urgency ordinance, it can go into effect immediately. That's right. Yeah. But if it's a regular ordinance, don't we still have to go through the whole Coastal Commission? If it's Title 17, yes. Right. So it's not... Now versus two months from now, it's now versus a year from now. Right. And so the, my only argument is what we come up with this in this urgency ordinance, like staff will do, I'm going to channel chip staff will do their level best to come up with something that's, that's good. And it may not be perfect, but maybe it's, maybe good is good enough in this situation to get these basic things available to people until we can come up with what's perfect and and like Brian said you know as it says in the staff report to reinforce the temporary nature of the urgency ordinance staff recommends that any ordinance ultimately adopted include a sunset provision automatically repealing the ordinance upon adoption of the revised design guidelines and associated permanent regulations. So I hear what you're saying about like this accretion of rules that aren't codified, but it feels like we've got a mechanism here where within sort of a date certain, like within a year or so, like that problem goes away. And so I just feel like, having something that's pretty good here and giving folks that flexibility, especially on the gravel, is worth it to have that flexibility now. And we can wait for the perfect version to go into effect.

I agree. Does somebody want to make a motion?

I need to ask Bob a question. Go ahead. Do you remember? No. where gravel stands in the design guidelines discussion? The answer is probably no.

Not with any accuracy. I think it's in there, but no. I have to say no.

The option is dirt. Hans, go ahead. Do you make the motion?

Well, I was going to say we're just providing direction here, but I'm happy to make a motion. My motion is that we provide direction to staff to come back to us next month with an urgency ordinance with these four components along the lines described here in the staff report.

All right. Let's just go ahead and get a vote. With the sunset clause?

is the sunset clause yeah that's i wrote that in the staff report that's intended to be in there yeah bob be a second yes roll call please no further discussion council member baron yes council member booter yes mayor pro tem delves yes council member drama yes mayor byrne yes motion carries thank you did the council want to um consider giving direction with respect to returning with a regular ordinance or you talk about that another day it seems like it's unnecessary

I think Hans' statement showed it was unnecessary. It's already going to sunset and be part of the design guidelines on its own. Thanks for including that, Brandon. That was well thought out. All right. Thanks for everybody that would participate in that. That could save us some fire issues in town. And it shows that we're making progress. All right, so now we're gonna have a discussion on policy direction regarding the permitting of accessory dwelling units, ADUs and draft amendments to Title 17 relating to ADUs. We're obviously bumping close to our possible curfew time. So if we're gonna have this discussion tonight, I know Jeff really wants to do it and so do I. I would just ask that we keep our comments curt and to the point and move the discussion along so we don't end up till 11 o'clock tonight because we could. That's my only recommendation. Would everybody agree with that? Okay. So this is an important discussion for all of us, I think. So we're looking forward to your presentation and your work was excellent, by the way, Evan, very detailed. Appreciate it.

Yeah, thank you. I appreciate the comments. So I do have two presentations, TDOT, I will do the brief one, just if there are additional questions, the second presentation is for additional detail if needed. So just starting off with that recommendation, staff is recommending the council conduct a policy discussion. You are able to provide direction to staff regarding the direction on any updated ordinance, as well as identify policy topics for further direction at a later date. You also don't have to take any action or provide any direction, just maintain status quo and just have a general discussion amongst yourselves. So in 2017, the City Council adopted an ADU ordinance. It's Ordinance 2017-010. The corresponding local coastal program update was adopted in 2018. In 2019, the state began passing a series of Assembly and Senate bills targeted at streamlining ADU approvals. These bills did include a preemption clause, which created some ambiguity regarding local authority and how we permit ADUs. This provision stated that if a local agency has an existing ADU ordinance that fails to meet the requirements of this subdivision, that being the ADU statute, that the local ordinance shall be null and void. This led to a narrative that the city did not have an ADU ordinance and the city began processing ADU applications consistent with the state statute. The state's law specifically requires in part that permitting ADUs up to 800 square feet that meet certain development standards are required without a public hearing or discretion. However, the state ADU statute also includes what is known as the Coastal Savings Clause, which requires consistency with the Coastal Act and coastal resource protections within certified local coastal programs remain in effect. So the city's LCP was adopted in 2004 and provided for the protection of coastal resources, including the city's community character as a special community and a highly scenic area for the purpose of the Coastal Act. Multiple policies were added or amended to the city's LCP by the Coastal Commission to ensure protection of community character as a coastal resource as defined by the Coastal Commission in addition to other coastal resources. In July of this year, the Coastal Commission, in coordination with the Department of Housing and Community Development, published a technical brief titled Guidance on Processing LCP Amendments for ADUs in the Coastal Zone. The specific guidance is described on the screen in addition to other guidance. But the commission recommends that jurisdiction should continue to carry out LCP policies to the extent needed to protect coastal resources. the commission being the Coastal Commission, encourages jurisdictions to be flexible in carrying out and interpreting their LCPs so that they can streamline the construction of ADUs without compromising coastal resource protections and that development standards such as setbacks that are designed to protect sensitive habitats or to ensure that development is safe from erosion or other coastal hazards should not be modified as this would lessen the effect of the Coastal Act's resource protection policies. So Government Code 66329, which is the Coastal Savings Clause, as well as SB 1077, that guidance that the Coastal Commission and HCD published, do support implementation of the city's local coastal program. This includes things like enforcement of floor area setbacks, tree protection requirements, historic preservation. However, the city should still be flexible in carrying out and interpreting the LCP. Examples of this include our current ordinance enforces a height limit of 12 feet for ADUs. However, this isn't really tied to any type of coastal act. REQUIREMENT IS JUST TO EFFECTIVELY SUBORDINATE AN ADU TO THE PRIMARY DWELLING. THANK YOU. SO THE HEIGHT LIMIT FOR AN ADU COULD BE INCREASED FROM 12 FEET TO, SAY, WHATEVER THE UNDERLYING ZONING DISTRICT IS OR WHAT THE STATE STATUTE PRESCRIBES. ADDITIONALLY, OUR CURRENT ORDINANCE DOES NOT HAVE ANY JADU PROVISIONS. so we could look to the state statute for requirements for JADUs. Additionally, our current ordinance requires owner occupancy, but enforcing that isn't tied to anything related to coastal resources, so just not enforcing the owner occupancy requirement. Those are examples of how we can be flexible in carrying out and enforcing our ordinance. current ordinance. Additionally, the city should plan to continue to amend our LCP to update our current ordinance where conflicts with coastal resources do not exist. So this is just a table of our ADU numbers across the years between 2017 and present. This is just building permit applications that we've received. So there are some pipeline projects associated with current design studies that have not been submitted. The type one, two, three applications are reflected in our current draft ordinance that the planning commission has been working on. Type one is effectively a conversion of existing space. Type two is a addition or new construction unit that complies with the underlying zoning. And then type three would be a unit that is either reviewed concurrently with a track two project by the planning commission or a unit that exceeds the floor area or some other development standard. And with that, that concludes my presentation. I'm available for any questions.

Thank you.

Thank you. Jeff, why don't we start with you? Just a quick question. Could you talk a little bit about what is currently in our municipal code regarding ADUs?

Yeah, there's quite a bit. So it does require compliance effectively with the underlying zoning, floor area, site coverage, landscape requirements, historic preservation, compliance with any overlay district. Public hearings are waived. It does identify that any type of permit application is just ministerial. There is a citation that volume requirements should be adhered to as well. It allows for new construction units as well as conversion units. There's no JADU standards. Owner occupancy is required. Parking requirements are waived for ADUs, but parking does need to be replaced for If parking is lost as a result of construction of an ADU, parking should be replaced for the primary dwelling. I think those are the highlights.

So there's a section, there's a section in our code, we can't find the number, 170850G, three that talks about ADUs, and it says, ADU shall conform to all requirements of the underlying residential zoning district. Any applicable overlay district and all other applicable provisions of this CAM chapter, including but not limited to height, setback, lock coverage, four area ratio, landscape, and historic preservation requirements, cumulatively with the primary residence, unless the unit is contained in a non-conforming structure. Do we do that now? Do we, so why do we not, why do we not enforce that requirement now?

So that goes back to the statement about the city being under the impression that our local ordinance was null and void. So then we defaulted to the state statute.

So we went back to recap, we went back to that requirement because we believe that the HCD We believe that the laws promulgated by the legislature regarding housing that were sort of enforced by ACD conflicted with our laws. Yes, that's correct. And so we made this decision eight years ago, however many years ago.

It was when, I think Evan maybe mentioned, there was this fast and furious, all these laws coming in.

And yeah, we've just gotten smarter, basically. I actually have that in the presentation number two. between 2019 and looks like 2024. There's been a few additional ones between 2024 and now.

Thank you. That's it?

Go ahead Hans. Well Evan, first of all, I just wanted to, I do have a question here, but I just wanted to say fantastic job. I found that this was like like just a model of a fantastic staff report. And I think there are ideas in here that like you have come up with that are gonna have a big benefit for our city. And so thank you for that. I think it stems from you doing a lot of hard work. This is one of those areas where I'm sure there were other people, but it sounds like you really led the charge. So thank you. My question is, So there's basically two entities that we need to sort of get a final ADU ordinance kind of blessed by in a way, which is the Coastal Commission and HCD, the Department of Housing and Community Development. So in your estimation, if we adopted a policy that said, look, we're gonna stick with that municipal code section that Jeff mentioned, basically what's in our existing code is what we're gonna apply. In your estimation, based on your conversations with HCV, do you think that they would go along with that?

It should be. We're going to stick with this and allow for these deviations and adopt a revised ordinance. It shouldn't stop at we are. ENFORCING OUR CURRENT ORDINANCE AND STOPPING THERE. WE DO NEED TO AMEND THE ORDINANCE. WE NEED TO CONTINUE TO WORK ON AMENDING THE ORDINANCE. OKAY.

AND SO I'M GOING TO TRY TO, IF WE HAD SOME OF THE THINGS THAT YOU TALKED ABOUT, YOU HAD SOMETHING ABOUT JADUs, ADDING SOME LANGUAGE THERE, YOU HAD SOMETHING ABOUT POTENTIALLY THE HEIGHT LIMIT, LIKE EXAMPLES LIKE THAT WHERE YOU HAVE SOME, YOU'RE PROVIDING SOME ADDITIONAL FLEXIBILITY. BUT IF WE HELD TIGHT ON, HELD FIRM ON, FOR EXAMPLE, just total square footage limits that are in our existing city code? Like if we did those things in tandem, is it your take that HCD would go along with that?

So I, when I've worked with and spoken to HCD, they've communicated to me that they want findings for support of where our conflicts with the state law are supported by the Coastal Act. So there's an attachment somewhere in here. I don't recall which attachment it is, but it's something that we've referred to in the department as the AD white paper. We provided that to HCD and after they did an early review of our draft ordinance, we send them a draft, they reviewed it, they gave us comments. We sent them this white paper and they gave us a call saying, hey, you know, like if your findings are supported by the Coastal Act, like that's good. You just need those findings supported by the Coastal Commission saying this is required for the Coastal Act. We've also sent that information to the Coastal Commission We just can't get a firm stamp of approval. I think what needs to happen is we just need to send it through the process. So HCD has seen this, Coastal Commission has seen this. Nobody's giving us a strong yes, a strong no. It seems like we just have to run it through.

May I? Yeah. But don't we already have something on the books that was approved by HCD and the Coastal Commission? Or at least the Coastal Commission, I mean, as part of our LCP.

Coastal Commission, yeah, in 2018. And our LCP in 2004. There's been, again, amendments to the state law that say now HCD needs to give a stamp of approval on any ADE ordinance. I don't believe they did that.

But they're not reaching back in time, are they, to go back to 2018 to say, well, we're going to retroactively say that your ordinance is bad. I mean, that's not how these things work, is it?

No, but we do need to update our ordinance to comply with the state law now where conflicts with the Coastal Act do not exist.

So when it conflicts with the Coastal Act, but we know that this doesn't... Where they don't exist.

So our ordinance now as it stands today... is not consistent with portions of the Coastal Act. There are portions of the State statute regarding ADUs that are in conflict. Our ordinance is in conflict with the State ADU statute, and there's no tie to the Coastal Act. So we need to bring those sections into compliance. We have to fix the holes in our existing code that don't comply with the State?

And aren't part of the Coastal Act.

Sure. The question I'm asking is, what do we need to do? Like, I'm asking sort of about the next year. Like, what do we do for the next, like, how do we resolve the conflict that we have? So granted that this, granted that this, you know, that we have a conflict with the Coastal Act, with the law, but where do we

What's our position right now? Well, that's the challenge we've been in for the last few years. We've been allowing this for so long. It's how do we reel it back in? but one way we can do that is policy direction from the city council.

That's one of the things that could come out of tonight. Right. Yeah. But it's, you know, that's a reason to do meetings like this, to have these, this level of policy conversation, because when something's been happening so long, you know, if we just change direction to the staff level, that's inevitably something's going to end up there anyway. So you're doing a better job of,

asking my question than I'm doing, because I'm tired, sorry. So we, like there are two things we need to do. We need to update the ADU ordinance, which is somewhere in some process somewhere with the Planning Commission and whatnot. And we need to update our policy guidelines to, we need to update policy guidance to fix or possibly fix whatever hole exists now, because we haven't done this in eight years, since 2018. Yeah. And both of those things are allowed by the way this item is agendized? Yep. Policy direction on the ordinance and maybe policy direction on the policy? That's correct. Okay.

Alessandra?

No questions.

I have a question. Like why are we doing this and not you? I understand the policy setting of policies, but can you put a matrix in front of us that makes it in perfectly clear terms what the inconsistencies are and what you're asking us to decide?

We're not asking you to decide the inconsistencies. We can do that. We are, we, so we have in our working, Evan is working on updating the 80 ordinance. So that is in process. What we're, what we need tonight is if there's, you know, tell us if you want us to continue down the path of, you know, leaning heavily on the local coastal program, the coastal act and keeping to the base floor area. If you want to continue down the road that Evan has proposed of these, you know, slight allowances so that we feel like the HCD will,

Have a better favor. Are you asking us, do you want us, do we think you should tighten up our ADU ordinance to make it more difficult to build an ADU? Is that what you're asking? I don't think. Or should we not do that so we could build more ADUs satisfy our housing.

Yeah, I don't think difficult to build an ADU is the right characterization of it. I think the right characterization is harmonize our coastal resources in the local coastal program with the desire to build more housing in the city. I get it. Well better said than I said.

So this is a question because I'm asking for clarification. So what I'm understanding this to be is right now the path we're on is essentially accepting all of the laws that have come out of Sacramento since 2018 that are enforced by HCD, by that department. And we have not, to this point, objected to that. We've just sort of accepted that because that's the advice we've been given. And now, thanks to you, we've concluded that, no, we've got a tool in our local coastal program that we can use to be more restrictive or less, frankly, but that basically that can overrule some of the laws that have come down since 2018.

Is that fair? The word we like to use is harmonize.

Yeah, that's a good word.

Yeah. But I guess a little more background on it was when we first took the very first run at updating the ordinance, we were doing a consistency check to say, is our first draft consistent with the state statute? And we're going line by line down the statute, and we come across at the very last part of the statute, and it's the Coastal Savings Clause. Nothing in this article shall be construed to lessen or supersede the Coastal Act. And it's OK, well, what does this mean? Like, is this ordinance consistent with this? And we're like, well, so we looked into it and it's, well, we're supposed to be allowing ADUs that are 800 square feet above the floor area, but we have this policy here that says, no, you don't. So where does this policy come from? What does it mean? And when we look into where that policy came from, it's grounded in the Coastal Act. So that led to, you know, all this research and discussion.

And what I think I heard you say, and this is the good news, is that HCD acknowledges that our local coastal program is a valid tool that we can use to harmonize, better harmonize ourselves with their rules.

Yes, so They just want to, sorry, Evan, why are we putting that up? They essentially said, show your work. Prove to us that you have the right findings.

Is that fair, Evan? Yep. Yeah, this, or the red arrow is pointing, that is part of the ADU statute.

Okay. We can ask you questions in the discussion, I'm sure. Yeah, sure. Yeah, so let's move into public comment, unless anybody has a big question you want to ask right now. Public comment? Have we sufficiently confused everybody? As much as I'm confused? Okay. I'm starting to understand it. Hi. Yeah, Mike, thank you. Welcome. Thanks for being here.

Yeah, I'm happy to be here. I've made some written comments. So in the interest of time, I'll just read from them because I think I'm limited to three minutes.

I already guaranteed him that all of us have read all the public comments. But he's going to do it.

So let me just read from my written comments. And thank you for taking the time. I do compliment Evan for his hard work on this. But I think without clarification, the ordinance may inadvertently encourage a demolition of some existing ADUs. And I'll tell you why. For an existing ADU, you know, if the staff takes a position that that is counted towards floor area ratio, then an owner may be incented to take the ADU down and build a new structure to take advantage of the full development and then later build another ADU even bigger than they have right now. So I would suggest also that as part of whatever ordinance you come up with, the property owner may demolish and reconstruct a primary residence while retaining an existing ADU provided the new primary residence is completed within a reasonable period of time. and also the temporary absence of a primary residence during the approved demolition and reconstruction of the ADU does not affect the lawful status of the ADU. Because I think if you ask Kevin his interpretation, if you want to rebuild your home and you get approval to tear down your home, he'll take the position that your ADU now becomes your primary home. Mayor, you and I talked about this during the break. It seems a little bit odd, but, you know, I think if you ask Kevin, he'll tell you that's his interpretation. So anyway, those are my comments.

Thank you. And I appreciate you putting in writing so that we can.

Well, I thought I may be able to make it to the end of the meeting. So I did come back with mother-in-law at some point. But I think I made some important comments.

You did. You did. And it's a very interesting situation that you're in. I don't think I've ever seen it. Are you gonna make a public comment, Chief?

No?

I was hoping we'd have one more. Nancy, you're not gonna say anything? Little nudge at 9.20 at night.

I'm sorry, I don't understand the difference between the first presentation and the second presentation and what we're trying to do here. I'm just really lost, and I thought I knew something about this topic, so I'm just confused. I don't know the difference. Okay.

Hopefully we'll clarify it a bit before we end this tonight. And that's part of this, right? That's part of the problem. Anybody else? Nobody online? Maria, you're not going to say anything?

Well, now that you nudged me and I've been listening attentively, no, the only thing I would say, thank you, Bob, for your last question because it clarified kind of the status of what we're analyzing. I also want to compliment back to what Hans said, incredibly complete package for us to read and understand the situation. Granted, a way that we can restrict or limit or constrain a little bit the way ADUs are being built, that would be great. But I don't think this is the time to do that. But this is just to make sure things are together. So I really appreciate the discussion. And I look forward to seeing what you come back with, the city staff come back with as an ordinance. Thank you.

Thank you, Maria. All right, we're going to bring it back. And I'm going to go to Jeff again. Jeff, I just want to thank you, Jeff, first of all, for this being here in the first place. It's clear that it was needed. And your discussion on water early and so on really sort of spurred this happening. And we appreciate it.

Thank you, Dale. And I had to thank Hans for your work on this as well. I am, as you can imagine, focused on the policy. And what I would like to see is now that we have this direction from the Coastal Commission to, as Evan says, maybe I'm not using this word, harmonize our interpretation of our laws with our LCP, I would like to see the council reiterate our support for the Section G section 17 dot dot dot dot dot g accessory dwelling units which talks about section section 2.c which talks about the requirements of adus so that is my uh that is that is my wish um i think that the ordinance is going through i think that the replacement for this this section of our ordinances this section of our code is going through a process and that's fine, but I would like to see us go back to this as a matter of policy.

Okay. Bob? Now that I understand it, I agree, Jeff, that I think, and if that's really the direction you're seeking, is do we think we should proceed with finishing the drafting of an ADU ordinance that takes full advantage of the powers that an LCP gives us, I think we should. I'll just take a very quick tangent to say that there's some debate about are ADUs really housing or are they just somebody else's spare bedroom? And of course they're both, but my position is pretty strong that ADUs are housing. They may not be housing when they're built. In the current environment, the ADUs, I think, in this town are, by and large, getting built to increase to add a bedroom, basically to add a bedroom. But over time, economies change, but people's attitudes change. that as attitudes change, I think owners of these properties may be more interested in having people live in the ADUs that may or may not be family members because ultimately they are a front door that's independent of the rest of the home. They have their own kitchen. They have their own bathroom. They have their own sleeping quarters. That's a home for some people and people will live in them. So I think we need to continue to build them and continue to view them as part of our housing program because I believe it at some level will work. I can tell you that on my block there are two ADUs. They've been there a long time and at one time both were fully occupied. Right now one is not but the other one is. So there are some in this town. A lot of them that maybe aren't really on the record, but that have people living in them. I originally thought this was more we were kind of picking a fight with the state or with HCD. And I wasn't up for that battle because I don't think we'd win. But you've convinced me that that's not what we're doing. harmonizing, as you say, which therefore I'd like it. One thing I would like to introduce and is just the idea of deed restrictions. Again, a deed restriction is something that goes with the land and so it's placed on your deed. In the housing space, deed restriction goes on workforce housing and there's multiple varieties of them. My son lives in Colorado in a deed restricted home that the deed restriction basically says the owner of the home must be employed in the county. Not by the county, but in the county. Very simple deed restriction. I have a good friend who lives in a deed restricted unit in Telluride, Colorado where that deed restriction says that he and his family, when they moved into that unit, could not have combined income exceeding X level or net worth exceeding X level, that the home had to be basically sold through a lottery system, and that price caps appreciation in the home is limited to 4% per year. I share that because that's a more complex deed restriction. But these are the tools. And the most important part of a housing program once you've got the front doors in place is to have these legal tools to allow you to enforce them. And then on top of that you need the enforcement mechanism. We don't have any deed restriction in place at the time. I think it could be a bit of a carrot for people that we might want to think about where perhaps that somebody wants to build an ADU and they do not want to make any agreement that it'll ever be occupied or ever be occupied by a certain income level person, that's fine. They can't have any extra square footage. But if they're willing to take and to put a deed restriction on that ADU, which is the deed to their home at this point, that they're willing to, when they rent it, to rent it to someone who is in the low-income category. They get a 10% bonus in square footage if they're willing to agree that they would rent it to somebody that's in a very low category, they'd get a 20% bonus. And if they're willing to agree that they would rent it to somebody in the extremely low, and those are my terms, but I know there's three categories, they would get a 30% bonus. And I think HCD would like that. And again, I think you just increase the odds of achieving what you're trying to achieve with the housing plan. So it's some of those kind of carrot and stick, clever things that maybe we could think about as we're crafting this ADU ordinance that are kind of, those would be different from what's in the LCP covered things right now, but just something to think about.

How does something like rooftop decks on ADUs enter into this discussion? And then I have a question about what a fully harmonized ADU ordinance would look like on a 4,000 square foot lot.

So in this discussion, rooftop decks don't apply.

Where does that come in? But Evan, I think if the council gave us policy direction right now, the majority of them said, in the ordinance that goes forward, we want you to strictly prohibit rooftop decks on an ADU. We could put that in the ordinance. There's no law that requires a rooftop deck to be able to be built on top of an ADU.

That's not part of harmonizing with the LCP. Or the Coastal Act.

Well, hold on. Didn't I, I apologize, but didn't I hear when you read your section of the CMC Part G, didn't it talk about volumetric analysis?

I made a comment about volume.

Yeah, it says all other applicable provisions of this chapter, including but not limited to, So it doesn't call out height. It doesn't call out volume metrics, but it calls out height, setback, lock coverage, for error ratio. historic preservation requirements, et cetera.

So our current practice would be to count rooftop decks as volume. But what we're saying is if the council wanted to just skip the whole volume conversation in the future ordinance, you could just say, if three of you want to, strictly prohibit rooftop decks on ADUs, if that was something the council was interested. We will continue to, I'm not suggesting it, we will continue to apply volumetric study two rooftop decks right now. But we're not right now, right? We are right now.

We do also have objective design standards that are going on concurrently for ADUs that could be incorporated into those design standards as opposed to an ordinance provision. So you don't need us to do that? It could just be in that document? We can take any type of direction.

Okay.

I don't, so a design feature would not be part of the ordinance necessarily. It of course could, but we do have those separate design standards that are going on.

Another aspect. So could you, in as simple terms as you can do here at 930, tell me what a fully harmonized situation looks like on a 4,000 square foot standard Carmel lot?

What can you do with ADUs? Yeah, so if you're familiar with what a Type 2 ADU is under the proposed ordinance, it's a ADU that it could potentially be up to 800 square feet that attached or detached that complies with all of the development standards for A single family.

I've got a lot. I don't, but.

Yeah, sure.

I've got a house with an 1,800 square foot house, including the garage, maxed out FAR. Yeah. And now it's fully harmonized. We've got our ADU ordinance in place. What can I do?

So if you have an existing house with a 1800 square foot site, you could convert 50% of your house to an ADU. You could demolish the garage and add a 200 square foot ADU and not have to replace your parking. And those are your options on a fully built out site.

But I can't put an 800 or 750 square foot ADU on the back of my house to make a 2,500 square foot house?

Correct. It would be similar to the old subordinate units. So if you're familiar with those, we have a couple hundred subordinate units that were permitted back in the late 80s, early 90s, that were effectively ADUs.

So the kinds of units that we're seeing built right now wouldn't happen?

Correct. So Mayor, I think one of the, I asked Nova to put this slide up and this is like, to Evan's credit, this is a brilliant slide because what it does is it shows the type two that he was just talking about where the ADU and the house are harmonized to meet that 1,800 square foot limit. There have been 31 of those built. That's important to recognize that it can be done in this city. So that's sort of like the conversation you guys are having. I think this is illustrative to that point that it can be harmonized.

Interesting. Well done. All right. Anybody else have any discussions, comments?

Those two. I do.

Go ahead. Thank you. No, that's what I'm asking.

I thought you were going after the public again. Oh, no. So Bob makes a good argument about the deed restrictions, but I have a question for something that was just up here that Evan showed us. It was page 14. It's under background. Because it says updates to the ADU handbook 2025, and I just want to make sure I'm understanding this correctly, it says, clarifies that ADU law prohibits deed restrictions on ADUs. A deed restriction would be an additional standard and thus cannot be opposed on ADUs. So would that contradict what Bob was suggesting? It's right at the bottom right. I think it's different.

Yeah, there are certain deed restrictions that cannot be included. So for example, a JADU requires a deed restriction and owner occupancy. ADUs are not allowed to have deed restrictions. However, I don't recall off the top of my head what that is in all circumstances. I would have to report back on that.

Okay. That would be interesting to get your thoughts on that. That's not right.

What? It's not right.

It's not right. Nancy? Nancy? Can I? Why don't you wait until after she's asked all her questions.

I was just going to start with comments.

Comments. Go ahead. Sure.

So just in general, just basic. For me, the keys with the ADUs are having the setbacks, the four-foot setback with the side and rear yard, the height limits, keeping it at 12 feet. It must be a subordinate structure and must have the same or compatible architectural style as the main house. I think since our housing element does rely so heavily on ADUs, and so far it's the only area that we are actually seeing production in numbers. I don't want to do anything that discourages construction of them, and I want to continue to encourage people to build them, yet I do believe strongly in what Jeff and Bob were saying about defending our LCP and standing up for it and finding a way to harmonize, so to speak. And as far as the rooftop decks that you mentioned, Dale, I think that that is something that we should look into prohibiting because I think we need to focus on just keeping them for housing. And that's sort of I'm fine with the direction we're going in with the harmonizing and the defending the LCP. Thank you.

So Brandon, I have a kind of question for you. So to summarize, it sounds like we here will be providing council direction to staff to change how staff is applying our current municipal code provisions relating to ADUs. That's right, we will go back to the strict interpretation.

Adherent now, henceforth forevermore until otherwise told we will.

Yes. Meanwhile, you will work on creating an ADU ordinance update basically. Okay.

Which Evan's pretty far down the road on. Right. And we, I think we continue to harmonize and then that's exactly where we're going to go with this and we'll just, I think Evan's 100% correct. We need to lead the way. Carmeline needs to lead the way on this because we don't have anything out there that tells us whether this is going to be a successful strategy. But, you know, with Evan writing it, I think we have a pretty good shot. Go Evan. Yeah, go Evan indeed.

So how does the water issue that Jeff brought up a while back interfix with this? Do we even need it? Can we even talk about it? It's a better question.

I think we need to bring that one back to you in the future, yeah.

OK, so it's still hanging out there somewhere.

OK. Yeah, I just wanted to highlight, I know Alessandra just mentioned a concern about kind of shutting down ADU production in general, considering it's part of our housing element. when you go back and you look at Evan's data, especially if you look at like sort of the more recent period, of the 38 ADUs that received a building permit since the January of 2024, only 15 exceeded the square footage limits for the site so 39 of the 22 adus that received a building permit since the beginning of 2025 only seven exceeded the square footage limit so that's 32 um so i think that gives me some comfort that like we can sort of have our cake and eat it too um uh I think we could probably get 70% of the ADUs that we've been getting. And the ones that you're not going to get are the ones that are the concerning ones, right? The ones that are in violation of our LCP. And you know, in my mind, that's a, that is a good balance to strike between preserving, you know, community character and the look and feel of our community and And so, yeah, I think that's the direction we should go, provide that direction to staff.

If I could clarify, or if you could clarify what you were talking about with deed restrictions, were you talking about if somebody wanted to build something larger than their allowed 1,800 square foot on that lot, that if they deed restricted it, we could approve another structure? Is that what you were getting to?

I'm basically just saying that, and it's just an idea, but that if you're willing to agree that you will rent this home to someone in the low-income category, we'll give you a 10% square foot bonus. Okay. You know, from a 4,000 square foot lot, you can go from $1,800 to $1,980. It might just give them, if they're at $1,600, it might give them a little more room.

Might give them a little more room. Yeah. $1,600, yeah. I've seen a situation like that recently. But that's...

So in the packet, page 529 of 569 discusses deed restrictions. This is the, it's attachment 13. It's the state HCD. ADU handbook. Can affordable housing deed restrictions be imposed on an ADU? The answer is no. A local agency cannot impose a deed restriction on an ADU. Then it goes on to explain it. A deed restriction is not such a standard and thus cannot be imposed.

What about as an incentive program?

that i would again we'll have to i think that it's an interesting thing if we're you know if we're taking the position that our lcp allows us to to not be subject to these like buy right adus there may be a path there where we can create an incentive program to go above what our code allows uh so we'll do some research on that i think that's that would basically be something for the that's for the ordinance that has nothing to do with how we're going to start uh using the current policy the way it is right now that starts i think it's an interesting idea I do too.

Alessandra, what about you? How do you feel about this?

I'm fine, and I certainly agree with what Hans is saying. It's a form of housing, and let's just get it to fit a little bit better within our character, but still encourage it because it's a key part of our housing element, and it's something that we're actually getting done.

Great. Well, I think if I could just ask, I think it would be nice to get a motion and a vote just on this to move forward the policy. We would appreciate that. Jeff, could you do it?

If I could figure out what the...

Code section?

That's what I'm looking at. So I think it's code section 17.08.050.G. So the motion would be to instruct staff to interpret 17 blah, blah, blah, G in accordance with the words that are written on the page in our code. Strict adherence to section G, yep. So I'll look for a second and then I have a question.

Do you want to make any, sorry, sir, do you want to make any part of the ordinance part of your motion or as we proceed forward with the motion, proceed forward with the ordinance to harmonize it as much as possible, all the things you guys talked about, do you want to make that part of your motion as well?

Sure. Can you clarify that part for me?

So what I heard during the meeting was what Council Member Barron just said, strict adherence to Section G. What I also heard from a majority of the council was to continue moving forward with our drafting of an AD ordinance that harmonizes the LCP with HCD while taking full advantage of all the powers associated with LCP with respect to protecting our coastal resources.

And incorporating the comments on rooftop decks, which I support. With Alessandra, I see a lot of things going up and down. If that's your motion, I second. Okay, so now I have a question. What's the cutoff for, we had this discussion the other night, sort of what's the cutoff for applications that are in process?

Brian, correct me if I'm wrong here, but I think legally, technically, best practice at least anyway would be if someone is in the application pipeline in the review process we've already started processing them under the old application of how we interpreted the policy we probably shouldn't stay the course on those any new applications or applications that have not begun being processed yet we would take the new policy interpretation but I would prefer to be able to change course on ones we're doing right now but you tell me Brian if we can do that

The application would be governed by whatever your ordinances were that were in effect at the time that the application was submitted.

The wrinkle with that though is the ordinance is not changing. It's the interpretation of the ordinance.

Well, let me, while you're thinking about that, let me say that that might be a policy discussion for the five of us.

Yeah.

Because if the five of us want to treat applications that are in process under the old policy guidelines, then we don't need his answer to the question. It's only if we want to treat applications that were in process to the new policy guidelines.

Got it.

Right?

That's true.

What I'm remembering from a month ago was that there were at least three of us that wanted to, that maybe or maybe didn't include me, but I know that that I know that that sentiment was expressed during that hearing that that particular application was in process. And so regardless of what we did, what I wanted to do the other night that we are now doing tonight, that we should treat the people in the pipeline as the interpretation of the law being the old one.

That was my opinion. That already remains that. I really don't want the fight that will be inevitable if we start retrading. people that are already in the pipeline. That's just my opinion.

Yeah, I think there's a fairness issue again. They were told something and in a lot of cases people have invested thousands or tens of thousands of dollars in architecture and et cetera. And so that does, it doesn't seem, it doesn't seem fair.

I would agree with the fairness issue. I mean, it's if they were told a certain way and it's already begun, they have to be continuing on with what they were told.

So, okay. And so the definition of in the pipeline is that they have paid money to the city. That's right. Application fee. So once they pay an application fee, they are in process. We're all, we're sort of okay with that. Okay. I'm okay. I'm okay with that too. You're off the hook, Brian. I don't want to, I don't want to fight that battle either.

So then Mayor, we have the direction that we need. I just need to vote on the motion and the second that are on the table right now. Roll call, please.

Council Member Barron.