City Council - Regular Meeting

Are you guys ready?

You guys ready? Ready?

All right, folks, thank you for showing up six o'clock. We're going to call the meeting to order. Please join me for the Pledge of Allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. Thank you. All right, roll call. I see all council members are present. Any report out on closed session? No reportable action. Thank you. Conflict of interest declarations. Do we have any? Seeing none. All right, agenda reviews and changes, deletions? No changes, Mayor. All right, thank you. Let's roll right into item B1, presentation, National Night Out. Recipient is Bo Gastineau, one of our sergeants. Yep, go ahead.

Proclamation of the City Council of the City of Cloverdale recognizing National Night Out in Cloverdale. Whereas National Night Out is an annual nationwide community building campaign traditionally held on the first Tuesday in August that brings neighbors, law enforcement, first responders, businesses, and community organizations together to strengthen relationships, promote public safety, and foster safer, more connected neighborhoods. And... Whereas on August 4, 2026, residents throughout Cloverdale joined the Cloverdale Police Department in celebrating National Night Out, demonstrating the strong partnerships, community spirit, and shared commitment that helped make Cloverdale a safe and welcoming place to live, work, and visit. And whereas the... Success of National Night Out reflects the collaborative efforts of the Cloverdale Police Department, Northern Sonoma County Fire Protection District, Cloverdale Ambulance, the Cloverdale Community Emergency Response Team, CERT, the Cloverdale Lions Club, the Cloverdale Police Officers Association, city staff from across the organization, Local businesses, community organizations, sponsors, volunteers, and residents whose collective commitment created a welcoming event that strengthens community relationships and celebrated the spirit of public safety. And whereas the City Council recognizes that strong relationships, open communication, and meaningful partnerships between law enforcement and the community are essential to building building trust, enhancing public safety, and fostering a strong, more connected Cloverdale. And whereas National Night Out serves as a reminder that a safe community is built not only through public safety services, but through neighbors who know one another, community organizations that give back, businesses that invest locally, volunteers who serve, and residents who remain engaged throughout the year. And now, therefore, be it proclaimed, that the City Council of the City of Cloverdale hereby recognizes successful observance of National Night Out on August 4, 2026, and encourages continued community engagement and partnership throughout the year to help keep Cloverdale safe, welcoming, and connected. Dated August 12, 2026, so ordered by Mayor Brian Wheeler.

I did not make it out to National Night Out, but I saw the photos. It looks like everyone had a really good time. I heard from members in the community that the children had a great time, and it's just a wonderful event. So thank you guys for the wonderful job you do on that.

I want to thank you all for putting this on every year, and I think our community really enjoys it, and I think it's a good time for children to learn about the police force and the fire department and other things of interest that they may look at one year to go into those kind of careers. So thank you.

Yeah, Bo, thank you for all that you do for the city. National Night Outs is a big progressive event for families and kids alone, and it's great to see that. You chose to raise your family here and be the force that we wanna see in raising a family in a safe neighborhood. So we appreciate what you do for Cloverdale. Thank you.

I'm gonna reiterate what they said. Thank you for everything you guys do. Community engagement in Cloverdale is what makes us special. And knowing generations of your family, thank you for all that you put into it. Thank you for staying here and working hard and showing the community what it's really like.

Bo, thank you. Thank you to Cloverdale Police. You know, you guys are not only the cops in town, your neighbors. You hook people up and talk to them when they need to be talked to. I'm not even going to bring up the rib competition because I think the new chief of police was a little skewed on that. But anyway, and obviously one of the cops won, so it was stacked a little bit. But we'll get it next year.

Our ex-chief, Parker, did not win, so.

As long as Chief Parker, the old chief, didn't win, we're cool with that. But anyway, thank you guys for doing what you do. You're always accessible, and, you know, we transitioned right into the new chief. I think he's fitting in well, and I encourage the community to get out and get to know him. Well, get to know our cops that they don't know, and we have a lot of new ones, and also talk to the chief. I know he's going to be up. Tomorrow's the first day of school for a lot of folks, and he's going to be pretty visible in there. Get to know the guy. He's going to be a huge asset, and I think it's...

great for cloverdale so once again thank not only ubo but the entire cpd you guys are awesome now can we get a picture thank you yeah can i just say a couple thanks uh thank you guys for your recognition um it always feels good to give out gifts rather than speeding tickets sometimes so um like council member marjorie mortensen said um there were so many people who made this thing possible and i'm just gonna she already reiterated it but i'm gonna do it again um Cloverdale Police Department the entire staff volunteered their time to make this event possible from dispatchers to CSO to our records to all the officers it's all hands-on event and then we talked about ex-Chief Parker it wouldn't be possible without his foundation he makes it really easy just to kind of follow in his footsteps and our current chief filled that role perfectly Just to go down the line, you had mentioned all the vendors and local businesses that support these small events. I think they donated upwards of $1,500 in gifts and gift cards and our POA donated another $1,000 to give out to the community. So it's just great to see such a small knit community come together for an event like this. There's so many more people I'm probably missing on this list like ambulance and everybody who came out but thank you to the community who always supports us and lastly like council member mark laski said most of us from the cloverdale police department are actually from cloverdale so it actually feels great to do an event like this and give back to the community that raised us so thank you guys again

Sorry, we're gonna move into, we do have the student liaison report right now. We don't have them, but I would like people, if you know anybody, please get on the city's website. There's a guide on how to do that. We love having our student liaison up here. The ones we've had are awesome, and they're a great addition up here to the dais. So please, if you know anybody, guide them in that direction. Now we're gonna move into public comments. D1, verbal comments. Any person wishing to speak on an item not listed on the agenda may do so at this time. pursuant to the Brown Act, the City Council is not allowed to consider issues or take action on any item not listed on the agenda. Three minutes are allotted to each speaker. Do we have any public comments? And please, when you come up, state your name for the record, please. Push the little button.

There we go. My name is Robert Maddock. I live here in Cloverdale. I am here actually to say thank you to the public employees of Cloverdale. I had a really difficult situation at my house when my sewer line got cut by a neighbor. We had to replace the entire thing. So I specifically wanted to thank Kevin Thompson, city manager, for this being a community where we can talk directly to the people who run it. And it really made a big difference. And I really appreciate the cooperation of the city manager, as well as Derek Montani, Robert Bobbies-Bagnola, and others in the city staff who really worked with me. I'm on Cherry Creek Road. The other thing I'll mention is when we did the repaving on Cherry Creek Road, we found that there is no road base. And it's actually buried with Yards and yards of river rock. Here, Russian River, river rock. And if you ever are going to work on Cherry Creek Road, try to save that rock. It's really beautiful. I'm re-landscaping big areas in my yard with it. So it's beautiful. Probably scooped out of the river back in the day when people just went down there with a bucket and scooped it. But I also really just, in addition to saying thank you for that, I want to say I really appreciate our city parks and our new preserve. I've been hiking the trails. I hiked the Hank Trail this morning on that side. North side, I like the brand new preserve. So thanks for the great job you're doing. A lot of people come to complain. I'm just here to say thanks.

Hello, Colleen Shields. Council, city officials, and fellow Cloverdalians, as a 30-year resident of our beloved city, I can't sit idly by without sharing some thoughts about the proposed Esmeralda project. Let me preface my comments by apprising you that I am not anti-growth. I just want to see the right kind of growth in our sweet little town, safe growth, conducive growth, growth that positively supports our population and businesses. Growth that follows mandated guidelines. As most of you are aware, there are toxic waste issues on the proposed site in question. There are concerns about lack of water issues. And I can tell you that I personally know two of our own residents who witnessed toxic waste not being disposed of properly and which was buried on the proposed site. They witnessed this firsthand. That alone should be a red flag. Why then wouldn't you demand current testing and possible subsequent well monitoring? Why then isn't a current EIR required? If things go through as is, we are not doing our due diligence and would not be comparing apples to apples. We need to square up, have integrity and do the right thing. I'm concerned that the decision five individuals make could negatively alter the landscape of our community and the safety and availability of our precious water supply. This is a huge decision and honestly feel should be up to all of the constituents of this district. Therefore, I propose that this item of business be added to the November ballot. We all choose to live here and don't need to marry the first suitor that proposes. We don't have to say yes because something is better than nothing. We have the sacred responsibility as stewards of this land, this town, this lifestyle to think things through. and be wise before making such a decision. We don't have to act out of fear and be tempted by the lure of money, believing that one entity is the panacea for our financial woes. Sometimes waiting for other options is a viable decision. Quite often, patience truly does pay off. Please listen to our legitimate concerns and can truly consider them prior to making any permanent decision. As your constituents, we are owed at least that, respectfully submitted.

Any other public comment?

Good evening. I'm Rob Kozlowski. I live here in Cloverdale. First of all, I'd like to speak on an issue that wasn't included in the July 22nd City Council meeting's written comments. Those written comments should be part of today's record and warrant your review. They focus on the reasons for no water rate increases at this time. The importance of speaking up is to remind my fellow Cloverdalians and city leaders that their priorities need regular validation by members of the public. This became evident during the most recent five-year period of water rate increases. Here are a few examples. One, solar panels were prioritized over public works projects. Overinflated and projected savings were used to justify deficit spending, yet future operational parts replacements and maintenance costs for the solar system remain unaccounted for. Smart water meters were prioritized over water capital improvement projects. Faux savings were projected, yet stated benefits remain undocumented to date. Office air conditioning was prioritized over wastewater capital improvement projects. No benefits for Cloverdalians was ever identified. The City of Cloverdale assumed long-term debt in 2022, but put it on the backs of residents in the form of massive interest payments. It was an $8 million financial scheme prioritized over pay-as-you-go payments. This irresponsible foray led to deferred water and wastewater public works projects promised to be completed before the five-year double-digit rate increases imposed on residents' water bill since 2021. Even so, some modest progress has been made during the past fiscal year, as it should with a $10 million war chest accumulated during the past five years of water, wastewater bills. However, please stop more rate increases over the next five years in violation of Proposition 218, where rate increases should be tied to costs related to water infrastructure projects and not for unrelated boondoggles. At the outset, I said city leaders' priorities need regular validation by members of the public. However, this has become harder with the lack of subcommittee meetings and a consolidation of four subcommittees into two. For example, the public works subcommittee meetings during 2024 were canceled six times. During 2025, they were suspended seven times. These are failing grades, not only for public meeting schedules, but also for government transparencies regarding to needed capital improvement projects. Curiously, the first meeting of the Public Works or Infrastructure Subcommittee convened nine months later on May 4th of this year. It was held just one day ahead of the two year budget workshop, giving residents no time to meaningfully participate in the financial future of Cloverdale for the next two year budget cycle. With that in mind, I encourage you no to hire water bills until we consume the $10 million war chest and look at how much more money this will bring in without completing a lot of the major projects. Thank you.

Angela Cordova.

So I have several things that I want to talk about. First, I receive a threatening text message because I speak out on Esmeralda. That's okay in our community. That's what Esmeralda brings, a threat against my life. That's a joke. That's a fucking joke. Saying the number won't be traced. Devin has the audacity to send an email to the Dry Creek tribe, basically telling them that if they don't cooperate and support Esmeralda, that she is going to oppose their future projects. Who is she? She's nobody. She's nobody. But more threats from Esmeralda people now trying to hush the tribe. That is comical. Calling anti-Esmeralda folks a mob, that's another joke. There's never been a threat made from any anti-Esmeralda person to anybody. There's never been aggression. There's never been violence. There's always been public presence and people with legitimate concerns, and it will continue. It's not going to stop. Public records requests in our city have become a joke. It took for me to threaten you with a lawsuit from my attorney, to threaten you with public complaints to the attorney general, to the state controller, the state auditor. and the grand jury because this guy thinks it's funny to dictate what the law is you don't dictate the law you adhere to the law so when you have people in this room who are sitting here today that have requested public records it's your job as the city attorney to educate your staff that they are violating the law which is going to cost you a big lawsuit As you know, and within hours, I had my public records on my email. Within hours of my threat, that's bullshit. Yesterday, this guy, months of asking, and he thinks it's funny to go over. You can watch the clock. I'm going over. I don't care. He laughs at City Hall and says, oh, they didn't use the right verbiage. The verbiage was there. You're not a dictionary, but that's how you'll be treated now. When I finally got my public records, I haven't even gone through them all, but I'm looking through them as well as two other people and an accountant. There's connections with the public money that you're giving, the tax money that you're giving to the chamber. We've already made connections to Michael Yarney, Steve Cava, Resilient Cloverdale, Rebecca Ennis, JDS, DGH, Daniel and Diana Homsey, Esmeralda, and Devin Zugle, Cloverdale Emergency, and the list goes on. And there's money that's not even accounted for. You know what that's called? Failure to oversee our tax dollars that you're handing out.

Any other public comment?

My name is Jennifer Sullivan. And I'm a Cloverdale resident. So why did the city of Cloverdale allow consulting and legal work for Esmeralda be done when Esmeralda didn't have the funds in its reimbursement account to cover that work? On April 8, 2026, this council amended the city's own budget to authorize $137,000 in Esmeralda planning expenses, expenses the city said would be reimbursed by Esmeralda. Esmeralda's reimbursement agreement required an initial $20,000 deposit. And whenever the balance falls below $10,000, the city shall, not may, it shall notify Esmeralda that additional funds are required. But on October 2nd, 2025, the account fell to $8,482 and stayed below that contractual trigger for 77 days. Then on December 18th, another $25,000 in Esmeralda-related engineering and legal costs was posted. By December 31st, 2025, Esmeralda owed the city $16,523.75. So what happened? Did the city send the required replenishment notice? If so, why wasn't Esmeralda's reimbursement account replenished during that 77-day period? Did the city pay any of those costs before Esmeralda reimbursed them? If so, from what fund? For comparison, in a recent developer-funded environmental review, San Rafael required developers' deposits before the consultant began work. Why isn't Esmeralda being held to the same safeguard? During that April 8th council meeting, I asked whether Esmeralda had paid what it owed. The answer was they paid everything. Fine, then show us. Produce the 2026 activity statement I have been asking for. Show when the $16,523 was paid. Show the replenishments. Show how Four Leaf, West Yost, and Legal Services and other Esmeralda costs were paid and reimbursed. have sent at least eight emails with about these outstanding records that received no city response go back and read my emails when asked to narrow requests i narrowed them when asked to clarify them i clarified them i acknowledged staff workload i've been respectful and i wish this i wish i could say that the city of cloverdale has treated me the same A resident should not have to send eight unanswered emails, formal notices, and repeated follow-ups just to obtain records that are public under California law. If Esmeralda paid every penny, show us. If taxpayers never carried a dollar, show us. If the city followed the reimbursement agreement, show us. Transparency is not asking residents to trust you. Transparency is showing them the records.

Any other public comment?

My name is Paul Peary. I want to go back to we've had a couple town council was back to June, June 20, June, June 20, something meeting when we were here. and uh the town council uh established that june 26 i believe is now the city of cloverdale's survivor cancer day Am I correct in that you guys said June 26th was going to be when we celebrate the people in Clover Hill that have cancer and how much of a struggle that is for everybody? Well, you know, it took a while to sink in. But when I went home and I started to think about it, it was like, oh, my God. I mean, you guys are ready to carte blanche past COVID. a project on the Superfund site where we have no idea how much toxic chemicals are going to be exposed during all this 10 years of construction and then put thousands of people on top of that land. I mean, I hope the new... Hospital that you're going to build in downtown number has Thinking about maybe tripling their size of their cancer center. I Mean, this is really really Crazy something is not right here Going you're you got a toxic piece of land that you want to take a 2009 EIR and say we don't have to do it again and When they've buried wells, they've buried the thing. No toxic chemicals were ever removed off this land. They were spread. And you're going to geologically rip it up, spread it all over the place to build new construction and think that we're not going to have consequences. Where is every, I've been a structural engineer for 45 years. Every project I've ever developed in the planning phase has a geotechnical report that declares that this site is safe to build on. Where is that report right now that Esmeralda is financed? Is it in the city and you're not declaring it? We don't know. That geological firm, that geotechnical firm might have just massive liability insurance policy to develop land that was a Superfund site drill it, rip it up however you want to develop it. There's only two ways to build foundations on land. And that is either deep D9, rip it up and pack it all back in, or drill piers. So all that soil has to be tested. And Michael Yarn says, we'll just deal with it when it comes. That's not the right answer. The answer is to do your diligence Do a new EIRI. Find out where this site is in 2026 before you rip up the land and expose everybody to these chemicals in Cloverdale and figure out what the right way is to build this land. Not let Michael Yarn and Devin Zugle have their Esmeralda Disneyland dream. Okay, and then there's, I just, in the time that's passed this summer, I have multiple friends in Cloverdale that have all, two of them died last week. And it's just, it's shocking to see this pain. I have one more friend, Ross. Everybody must know Ross and his dog. He's really, really sick. And they can't cure him. I mean, it's just awful. And it is such an awful life for these people to be exposed to this cancer and end their lives this way. My wife and I, we drive them down to their doctor's appointments and bring them back. And we just come home and we're fine. We just can't believe it. And it's everywhere here. And we want to expose thousands of more new clovered aliens to a super fun toxic site without doing diligence of a new EIR and finding out what's the right way to build this site.

Thank you. Any other public comment?

evening lance via i do have some concerns about the esmeralda site i've like i said before i own the property just to the south esmeralda i can see where a couple of the sites were and there's a reason why nothing grows on those sites a lot of toxins out there the twinkie even nothing is growing out there had my uh my well tested water's good now but i'm really concerned about my kids when they start digging all that stuff up, they're gonna run into my well, the dust particle's gonna come up onto my house, and who's gonna pay for my kid's hospital bill? It's gonna be Esmeralda. I'm really concerned about this. Thank you for your time.

Any other public comment? Okay, I'm seeing none. We'll move into written comments. Written public comments on items not on the agenda submitted in accordance with the public comment submission procedure below will be listed in order received. Written comments are on the Cloverdale Agenda Center. You have access to all the ones that came in. So please, if you need to see the written comments that came in for this agenda, they're on there. Moving to presentations. E1, receive a presentation on the Measure DD Street Rehab Program.

Thanks, Mayor. Derek is sick tonight, so I'm going to take this one. Mike, I think there's a presentation. So this was a request to bring back what we've been talking about, what we're going to do with Measure DD. We've kind of committed that we're going to use a majority of that money to repair streets. We've been working through what we think are the worst streets. We have a list that we'd like to present to the council. And so one of our main goals out of this is to try to get some prioritization. We've listed them and kind of what we think could be a good priority list, but we'd like to get some input on that. There's two things going on here, we're going to be grinding and repaving certain streets. And so the assessment of those streets doesn't require a full reconstruction. And we'll go through those second. But the streets proposed for grind and repave our Jefferson Street from fourth to school street. It's approximately 939,000 square feet of new pavement. And everyone knows Jefferson Street is in terrible, and all of these are in terrible shape, so that's really why they're on here. Franklin Street from 2nd to 1st Street, it's about 8,700 square feet. South Street from the dead end to Cloverdale Boulevard, it's approximately 15,000 square feet of new pavement. And Hillview from Tarman to Cloverdale Boulevard. So those are ones that are probably a little cheaper because they're not a complete redo, but they're just a grind and repave. So that's, Mike, is that you, so you have that list up there? Yeah, so you can see the list and the order that we're proposing, but we're interested in getting some input on the order. We can go through all of them and you guys can think about it and then we can come back if that's easier.

Yeah, let's do that. Okay.

So maybe you can advance the slide, Mike. The next section is the full reconstruction. And so this is more expensive, but they're in the condition after our assessment that they need a complete reconstruction. So we've got, I think that, I don't think that's the right list, but yeah.

Keep going.

So I think you keep going if you can, Mike. The first one is Mayor Way. Mayor Way from Hillview Drive to Brookside Drive. It's approximately 14,000. Okay. We'll keep working on it. I'll just read them out. tarman drive the dead end to dead end that's approximately 25 000 square feet of new pavement hill view um did we mention hill view already yeah okay so this is the second portion of hill view from clark to tarman uh rosewood drive from clark to tarman is about 24 000 square feet There will be also, where needed, there'll be ADA improvements. So when we do a certain amount of work, we have to do the ADA as well. Hey, Eric, can you come up? Maybe I can just ask you, one of the streets requires the potential tree removal, and there's some pretty big sycamore trees. We're going to try to see if we can put root barriers in there but just as a consideration that that could potentially be do you remember which one that wasn't eric rosewood yeah i think it was rosewood and then perhaps a section of hill view as well so that's what we came up with i mean if you want to add more streets that's now's the time to do that or we can just try to go through each one or try to prioritize. If you're happy with the prioritization, we can proceed with that. As these move forward, we'll be bringing awards of bid. So you'll see them again, you'll see the contract and all that with the insurance. So I'll just leave it there. And maybe Mike, we'll start with the first. So this is the street rib. This is the grind and repave.

He said a lot of technical difficulties and Zoom is also down. It's all kind of failing at the same time here.

Yeah, that's good.

There's four, yeah, four.

So we are going to start on Franklin that could potentially be done this summer. We're pretty far along on Franklin, just as a note. So that's probably, that one is already kind of in the design. So that probably would just be number one by default because we've already done work on it. That works, Mike. That's fine. It lists them.

So do we need to, I mean, we're, I know we're waiting on slides.

Do you want to, this is the, the ones I just mentioned for the grind and repave, which is the cheaper, um, fix. So again, Franklin is already underway. So that's probably just naturally number one, because we've already decided design work on that. And we're hoping to get that done this summer. The other three, if you're okay with the order, we can just give this a blessing and move on. And then we're gonna be working hard to get bids out to get these done as quick as possible. If there's any particular reason that you wanna change the order on these, let me know, or we can just go with Franklin first and work our way down.

I mean you want to finish out this presentation or each section go by and see what council ask because we've got so many different like lists here and see what their priorities are how do you want to work it well maybe we can just look at this list and if we agree we can then move to the full construction reconstruction I like the list go ahead yes I'm sure you're good yeah we'll get to the public one second

My whole comment is because the mayor and I both wanted triplet done. I'm kind of wondering why triplet was left out.

We could put triplet in if that's what the request is. We didn't think there was consensus for triplet and I mean, I'm seeing head shaking.

From what I remember, triplet was not on the top list. It was on the list, but not one of the top.

We can add it, though.

We can add it right now if there's consensus for that.

I think it's kind of important to add it because one of my neighbors was concerned, like if there's a fire and there's 99 apartments getting everybody out and we would need to use triplet and have that barricade unlocked. And it's just like such.

It's in bad shape for sure. Agreed.

But I'd like to continue, Kevin, with these. Sorry, I'll get, and we can add triplet. Yeah, it is in disrepair, but I'd like to see the list that we have. Are you in agreement with the other list if we add triplet on there? Definitely. Okay, and Council Member?

Yeah, no, I agree, but I have questions on like Jefferson Street, right? It's just a grind and repave section, and that street's historically, isn't there like a creek that runs under there and it continually undermines that street? I would wonder if we're going to get geological studies to, you know, I hate to throw good money at bad money.

Yes. There is a creek under there somewhere. We did get kind of a ballpark.

It needs to be done, but it just needs to be done right.

It could be more expensive when we get.

Well, yeah, it's definitely going to be more expensive because we just, I don't agree with grinding and repave a portion of it where it's going to fail in five or 10 years. I think we should. go to the base, fix it from the bottom up.

Yeah, I mean, certainly some of these streets can switch over once we get, we did do an initial assessment. We had a ballpark figure on all of these. By a local contractor who went and looked at all of them, but it wasn't an in-depth. So there may be things. Jefferson may go down to the next category as a complete redo. But if I think we just want to get consensus that these streets. Yeah.

And then a full reconstruction. you're saying tarman gets a full reconstruction and obviously a lot of those pipes are old underneath there for compaction so are we doing just the top or what's our you know that that needs to be vetted out as well if we're going to do compaction and some of those pipes are you know 40 50 years old or if they're clay asbestos laden and they're not going to hold out that's another thing that we need to do a deeper dive on we have to discuss that and it's a possibility in the tarman area that the pipes

When we get that assessment, we'll be back. Maybe there's other funds that could be used to do the pipes. There's impact fees. I don't know.

And just the overall impact for the community, especially on Tarman, it's not a very wide street. And when we go to start paving that street, you're talking probably over 100 vehicles that are going to be misplaced. So that's just going to have to be a little bit of community outreach on our part to make sure that that's vetted out as well.

I do. And we're learning on First Street, we learned a couple lessons on that. So we're going to continue to get better. We're going to use the measure DD signs and give people as much notice when knock on the doors, do mailers do everything to make it people as aware as possible that what's going to happen in front of their house.

Thank you for this report. Looking at the top four that we have for the Granary Pave, I'm glad to hear Franklin's already started because we were supposed to start that a while back and I knew that Derek was working on it, so I'm glad to hear that it's moving forward. I would agree with the Jefferson South and Hillview in that order as you have it posted on the agenda. As for the portion of Jefferson Street they're talking about from 4th Street to School Street, the creek is to the south of that portion. However, you don't know what you're going to encounter. So I think that we plan for this, or hope for this, and plan for the worst, and that's what we're going to find out. When it comes to Franklin and Jefferson South and Hillview, these are very highly trafficked areas. They're getting probably 1,000 cars a day each. And so it's pretty amazing how many cars travel on these roads and how many people it affects. When it comes to South Street, that's your entrance into the Charman track. And so that is terrible. That one probably has, you know, one foot to 18 inch differences in elevation. And so I'm glad to see that's finally getting done. then the hill view from tarman to the boulevard that's always been terrible since the 60s so that's good when you go into the full reconstruction that area has it's needed it for a long time as we've discussed from day one i would actually switch that order though i would go with hillview tarman rosewood mayor if you look at the way that we are trafficked and the amount of people it will take per day So Hillview is number one, Harmon two, Rosewood three, Mayer four is the direction I would put on those.

Okay.

And as for triplet, I don't disagree that it needs to be on our list, and it is on our list, just not on the top four. And so it should stay where it is, and when it gets in line, it's next, and it's due to traffic patterns and things like that.

Yeah, thanks, Kevin. I see that, you know, I like the Hillview. I would like to see Hillview completed all the way from the boulevard down. And also a couple of questions, you know, and this goes along with what Council Member Lasky said is grind and repave. What's the duration of that? You know what I mean? I want to make sure. that these are being fixed for as long term as we can get. Prior to me moving to Cloverdale and then getting to Cloverdale, some of these that are on our list have been complained about by the town. You know what I mean? Whether it's Jefferson, whether it's, I mean, Hillview. These have been, whether you're on social media or you're just talking to people in town, these are streets that desperately need it and it's highly traveled streets. And in my opinion, you know, these we're finally getting we've got DD in there. We've got some money and we're making progress. And I want to see this move forward pretty quickly. I would love to see some of these streets and we are doing that. But and the other thing is, is when we do, yes, it's going to disrupt cars. It's going to disrupt parking. But that's where Cloverdale is going to have to kind of partner with us and give us a break here. If we're doing the roads that have been complained about so many times and we're finally doing them, give us a break. There may be a few days where you're going to be put out on parking a little bit. Work with us. We're going to work with you on that. We're not going to be able to accommodate every car and parking for everybody, but we are going to have your street done. That's our that's our goal here. This is we've been pushing this for a couple since I came on council. And I'm glad to see it moving forward. I agree with the vice mayor's list on the complete redo on that I would like to see that list go Hillview and whatever you came up that was one I didn't have time to write it down. But we are moving forward. And, you know, we do have a turnaround coming up on council, and I hope they continue to push this through because this is a priority for the city of getting these fixed. We gave you our word we're going to do it, and that's what we're working on right now. So bear with us. We may have you park different. We may do different things, but work with us. We'll work with you.

Kevin, just one more thing for you or Derek, whoever gets to this. When you're working on Jefferson Street between school and 4th, There's an area that doesn't have a curb. And the worry that I had a few months back was that we're going to have to do some type of eminent domain for these driveways because there's our large, I believe it's like an olive tree or something out on the sidewalk where it would be, things along those lines. And I really want to make sure that Hopefully we don't have to do that. Hopefully we don't have to worry about ADA and things in that area. And as much as I appreciate it, that's someone's land and it's a big fight that I don't want to have to have. And I don't want to have to make some community members mad with that. So if we can look into that before we really start that project that we're doing our due diligence and preparing the community properly with that one.

just want to add that the full reconstruct list does include sewer water and storm drain where necessary so that was part of what they were yeah thank you thanks verify me a quick question city manager Thompson what is the time frame that you'd expect for these four projects as proposed Well, I don't exactly know. I mean, we're getting Franklin done, and I know Derek is working hard. We've got extra help now with Eric. So we want to get as much done this summer and just – get it all lined up. So I don't have a great answer for you, but I can get back to you guys.

And some of these might start this year. And I think the interruption would be the winter, and then they would pick up in the spring. Correct. And it looks like if, you know, with these four projects, you know, if they were to, you know, one or two this year, the other two can get done next year. So I think one of the questions I would have just – around a contingency amount for unexpected circumstances. If there were to be, I guess it's maybe like our fourth choice could get just pushed a little farther. But, you know, the fact that the DD money is rolling in consistently, that push out is not going to be too far out. So, I mean, it looks good that these are lined up. If, you know, I guess the I like them and we're excited to get working on the next bunch. So it looks like it's all going to kind of happen pretty quick.

We generally put a 10% contingency when we award the bid. in the contract, but what I'll do is maybe we'll just keep this on the radar and I'll keep you guys updated either through my weekly, or we can re-agendize this for a later. It sounds great.

Yeah. It looks like, you know, even if there was something, you know, with some underwater flows or, you know, some other circumstances that we can run into, the delay is not going to be that great. So I like it. Thanks.

I have a question. Two of us said triplet. Vice Mayor said no to triplet. So where does triplet stand?

We're putting triplet on the list.

What? We'll put triplet on here. We'll have Derek have the contractor take a look at it, start working on getting estimates.

Thank you.

Triplet would likely be next year summer endeavor. maybe the next step is we'll try to get some timeframes. And I mean, one of the, we, we, the money is rolling in, but some of these are going to be really expensive. Okay.

So that's what I was just going to comment is you're, you're talking 10 years worth of list. This isn't just a next year thing, unless we're going to be going and, and borrowing money, borrowing money against it. If I try to do pay as you go, this list is going to take us my lifetime. So we have to think about other ways to handle this. It's just the way it is.

Well, we're, I think we're getting, we're getting slowly there. We got streets. I think what we keep this maybe in the next couple of agendas ahead, we talked about the borrowing the money. I think we kind of want to do a pay go, but let's, um, we did get some ballpark on these and we were pretty encouraged by the ballpark figures from a local contractor. So again, there's just so many unknowns as council member Lasky said. So, um, you know, maybe we come back and say, these ones are easier. They need less in-depth work. Let's knock those out. My point is I'm glad that we've got some kind of consensus on what we're doing, and we'll just keep the tabs on the money and come back and report back on the progress. Thank you.

Any other comment up here? Any comment from the public on this item? Please come down if you could.

First off, thank you for finally addressing this issue. I've had a lot, a lot of complaints from different people over the years. Who are the people who have bid and have you chosen a company to do it?

No, each project will go to formal bid. And then as we award the bids, the council actually has to approve those bids. So we're just trying to get a list together.

We did have like, so you're not to the bidding part?

No, no, no, each each project will come back to council with a dollar amount and they have to award the bid ultimately.

Okay, great. Thank you.

Daniel Frankston. I know Derek's not here. And I know the issue of bonding out the double D money is something that's going to be possibly addressed in a future agenda. I believe it was requested back when the bonding issue first came up in June or May, that we see a map. There were a series of maps with a one-year bond, five-year, 10-year bond. And what I had requested, and I believe other council members as well, would be to see what the progress would be if you do the pay-as-you-go. Because ultimately, you're looking at, was it 20-year payback period? Well, what would the streets... What would the accomplishments be if they were done one street at a time over a period of pay-as-you-go? And the other thing that I think would be really helpful is if there were a page on the Cloverdale Net website that addressed specifically Double D, the revenues that's coming in, and the proposed expenditures. That way people could know as they go, they could say, oh, I see where I am on the list. Because I hear people all the time saying, How come mayor is on the list and San Antonio is not on the list, et cetera? And there are valid reasons for it, but I think it would be very helpful for the public if there were a page where people could access, they could see what's going on, where things stand, both financially and in terms of construction and future construction plans. That's all. Thank you.

And, Mayor, if I may, I just wanted to reiterate on Daniel Frankston's comment. I just want to confirm that that was a 10-year pay-as-you-go option to be considered as well. The longest period. Yeah, I would definitely like to see a 10-year pay-as-you-go option as well.

If I may, I think we did discuss the borrowing the money and doing the bonds, but I think once we had the local contractor take a look at the streets we identified, we were encouraged at the cost, and we thought that maybe the pay-go would be better. Pay-as-you-go option. I think that was what we did, but we can still bring back that discussion if we want to. I support the pay-as-you-go option.

Kevin, I would definitely request that we bring back what the advisors had showed us for the bonding because the percentage was so low right now that it was actually cost-effective to bond out versus pay-as-you-go because of the cost of construction going up. I'll contact them and get updated numbers and

Any other comments from the public on this item?

Seeing none, right, thank you.

Are you done, Kevin, on that?

Yes, thank you.

Okay, thank you. Consent calendar. All items under the consent calendar will be considered together by one action of the City Council unless any council member or member of the public requests an item be removed and considered separately. Do we have anybody?

I'd like to pull item F4. F4.

And I would like to pull item F1.

I would request to pull item F3 and F5.

So the entire consent calendar. Let's just work our way down from F starting at F1.

I can actually do a motion to, if you'd like, for F2 and get that one out of the way. That would be done. That's the only one that's not pulled.

Okay, let's do a motion to get F2.

Move to approve F2.

Sorry, I meant F5. I wrote the wrong one down. Sorry.

So then I would make the motion to move to approve F2 and F4.

So not F4.

Second that.

Take it to a vote.

Approving F2 or approving F2 and F4. All in favor say aye. Aye.

Oh, no. F2 and F4.

F5 was pulled. No.

It was pulled by you. Yeah, I was pulled by you.

Is F4 pulled?

No.

Item F2 and F4.

Still active. That's the motion.

All in favor say aye. Aye. All opposed say nay.

So, Mayor, we've got to move now to the public hearing out of order. Oh. Just because it's around 7 o'clock and we're supposed to do that exactly at 7. And then we can come back to the items from consent.

We are going to move into item G and come back to the consent calendar and the items that are pulled. We are going to move into G1, and it is public hearing to receive community input regarding district boundaries for district-based elections.

Thank you, Mayor. I'll be brief. I'm not sure if Zoom is back up running. It is. So in a minute, the city's demographer is online and is going to walk through the mapping software we have. Just a brief recap, as the council knows, in response to

Are they the E-W-W-E-R-B? That's the only person on there. No, let me see. That's why I didn't promote yet.

E-W-W-E-B. It's not there. I'll text them one sec, but... So as the council knows, in response to demand letter and very unfavorable past legal decisions, the city council adopted a resolution of intent to transition to district-based elections, where individual council members will be elected from individual districts, not citywide. There will be, this election in November will continue to be at-large. All three members will be elected at-large, but in 2028 and thereafter, it will be by districts. So there will be a period of time where some members on the council are elected at-large and some are elected by districts, but by 2030, everyone will be elected by districts. So one question that we want direction from the council on tonight is whether or not to proceed with a directly elected mayor. That's an option for a general law city, and that's something that the council can do as part of this transition process. Why we ask for that direction tonight is if you have a directly elected mayor, you would then have four council members elected from districts. If you have... no directly elected mayor and it continues to be just someone elected by the council then we need five districts so we want the council and the public to know how many districts they should be drawing that is the main point i would add the other thing is just the the sequencing of election normally when we go through this process people are really focused on the districts but we also need to decide which districts will get elected when so because there's three at-large council members going to be elected in 2026 in 2028 if there is no directly elected mayor that would mean two districts will be up for election then and three will be up in 2030 if you decide to proceed with a directly elected mayor in 2028 it would be one person elected from a district one of the four districts and then the mayor and then in 2028 the other three districts one thing i forgot to mention about the directly elected mayor it can be either under state law you can have a directly elected mayor who is elected by the voters for either a two-year term or a four-year term. So you don't need to decide that tonight. That is something you can decide later on in this process, but we really do want direction on whether or not you want to proceed with a directly elected mayor. In the staff report, I don't have the number directly right offhand, but it allows the districts to be a couple hundred people bigger, elected mayor because you're dividing the city by four rather than five so the consultant is having to re log back in so he should be on and then after tonight maybe tomorrow but if not by Monday there will be links to this online tool where the public and council members can draw maps and there will be both an electronic tool and good old-fashioned PDF that you can print out. The PDF you'll see does have population areas, but it can't be, you know, it's one piece of paper, so it can't be as granular. The online tool is much more specific, and you'll see you're able to do that as you go. It will adjust as you go. So our next public hearing is scheduled for September 9, which We are required to publish all of the maps that might be considered then seven days ahead of time. So maps will be published on this website no later than September 2nd. We really encourage you to submit maps by August 31st because that gives the demographer time to check and say, hey, you drew a map of five districts and you left out this area. What do you want to do next? To make sure you can get a proper map in gives them a little bit of time to do that. And with that, I don't know, Mike, do you see if Justin is able to have logged back in?

Are we waiting on a presentation here? Yeah.

Okay. That's not on the EW.

So Alex, are we just waiting on WBB to... I don't think that's him. So one thing, I mean we can...

take public comment if you want. One thing I'd notice if we're not able to do this tonight, there will also be PDF instructions on the website of exactly how to use this online tool. And it allows you to draw the maps. Each district's a different color and it will automatically adjust the population as you go and let you know when you are above the target population because The goal is to have equal districts that are allowed to be different by certain amount, but to have equal districts So with that maybe I'll see if there's any questions from the council at this Thank you Really just gonna kind of come back to alternatives And this is a question for city attorney I

Can you relate to us in the public the status of any current or denied or passed bills that would limit this to a certain population?

Yes. So there was a piece of legislation proposed this year that would set a cap. I believe it was $50,000 or smaller. That has died, so it will not be adopted this legislative cycle. There's another piece of legislation that is still alive, or at least it was two weeks ago, that would sort of in some way strengthen the CVRA and make it harder for local agencies, that more complicated process. That was alive still two weeks ago. So it doesn't mean that in the future... The legislature won't create a carve-out for small cities. They haven't yet, and they won't do... It's clear that won't happen this year. Just based on how long this has been going on and they haven't done it yet, I don't have a lot of faith in them.

My thoughts on this is that the direction is that we... or the recommendation, say, is that there's not much that we can do to fight this unless we had large, large bank account, and still even then, you know, it might just be burning our money. So I think, you know, adopting it sends a signal. You know, so I think if that's going to be the record, it would be a good idea TO EXPRESS OUR FEELINGS AS A COUNCIL. I THINK WE CAN EXPRESS OUR LETTERS TO SENATOR MCGUIRE, I WOULD SAY ASSEMBLY MEMBER CHRIS ROGERS AND DAMON CONLEY AS WELL. I THINK THAT WE SHOULD GET ON THE RECORD AND EXPRESS OUR dissatisfaction if our council does feel that way, that maybe we can get some momentum with some other cities that also are kind of pushed into this. And if the discussion around the numbers is an issue of equity, that might be the case for a city of you know, over 50,000 or maybe 40,000. But for a city of 9,000, I think it causes some harm to the quality of our council. So that's my thoughts on this before proceeding.

And certainly if that's the direction, we could bring back a separate item at the next hearing for you to approve or frankly at a sooner meeting just on consent for you to approve a letter or two. Is that something that you would be able to assemble and Absolutely, if that's the direction of the council.

Send a letter opposing this. Yeah, let's do it. Let's put that on a future agenda.

Can we talk about it first? Okay, I think this is something we have to do, and if we had done it sooner, we wouldn't have to pay the money to an attorney. So why waste more staff time on this? We're stuck doing it. So why are we writing to Assemblyman Rogers and other people, you know, just like cut our losses and just go ahead and get the job done because we don't have any choice. So writing letters to people to me is a waste of staff time.

Any other comments? So as we move towards districts that this is going to go through, are all cities in Sonoma County district-based?

Not all yet. They have come from most of them. I believe Sebastopol and Cotati still are at large, but the rest of the cities have had the transition in the last couple of years.

And Sebastopol and Cotati are on par with our... About our same size. Same size. Give or take. Okay, and as we move forward with this to, quote-unquote, avoid litigation for the city... and people start, you know, want to get involved and start drawing maps. So I would say access to people who don't have access is going to be a big issue. So I would think that, uh, Maybe we do some kind of presentation with PDFs, people who can fill them out manually versus online, or let the library have access to a certain page so some people can go get help from the librarians and go that way. So we need to do a public outreach to let people know why this is happening and how to go about it.

That's a great comment. The PDF, I forgot to mention, you know, someone can get physical copies from City Hall if they want of the PDF. We can look into giving some copies to the library as well so they have those on hand if people want to get those there.

Yeah, we also have a computer in the city hall lobby that they could use as well and get assistance from our front desk. Out of California, how many cities have been successful in going against the litigation, fighting this attorney and winning? I'm not aware of any. And at this point, how much money do you think it's going to cost us just for that litigation where we're at right now? I think there's a minimum on how much he has won.

Because we went through this process and adopted our resolution of intent, state law caps the amount of attorney's fees that we would have to pay this person who submitted it. In the law, it's $30,000 adjusted for inflation, which that was back in 2018, so it brings it to about $40,000, and then... there's also a cost for the demographer of, I forget the exact amount, let's say $25,000. So it comes out to about $65,000 or so.

And if we don't move forward and we push this into just the beginning stages of litigation?

It would be costly. I mean, the litigation, where it becomes costly is that the plaintiff's fees are going to be way higher than $40,000, right? They're going to say... I spent a million dollars on this, and those will get cut down, but they'll have more attorney's fees. They'll no longer be subject to the cap, given the very low likelihood where when it's really just paying the person more money.

And that's my point, that I want to make sure the public knows that this council doesn't want this to happen. It's terrible for our community. We all understand and agree. that we don't want or need districts. It's going to hurt us in every way, in my opinion. But we don't have a choice at this point. And hopefully in the future that changes. But right now, we have to go through it because we don't have the money and general fund to sit and fight it when you're talking about millions within months. And that's the sad part. So our hands are tied and we're moving forward with something and I hope everybody It doesn't hold this one against us, but actually kind of supports us and pushes back against your state to do the right things with the laws that they are moving forward or not moving forward with, like they had the ability to do and they didn't. So this is where we need our community to also to reach out to Mike McGuire and Chris Rogers and Damon Connelly and anyone else that you can reach out to.

Okay.

And I'll just add one thing that the demographer told us an example when we had a meeting with him a few weeks ago of a small district that got one of these letters, had an open seat on the board, and they wanted to show, hey, don't, Don't come after us. Look, we have an open seat. We'll try to get someone here. They went through this process, did all this advertisement of trying to get people to fill out. No one submitted a ballot. No one submitted to be appointed. There was no interest in being appointed. Sort of the whole purpose of the redistricting is that you're trying to get people who are maybe otherwise not being elected, and no one even submitted to be appointed. And this same plaintiff sued them for taking too long in starting the process. They lost that because there's a deadline in state law and they had missed it. And, you know, they ended up having to pay a lot more money because of that.

All right. So we do have, we know there's still a, there's a glimmer of hope with a bill. There's still one alive, correct?

The one that's live does not lower it down. I think if there's any hope it's in the future that the legislature might change it and allow us to switch.

I just wanted to make sure that was clear. And as far as sending a letter to the folks, I think that's a good idea. We've got to say Cloverdale's at the table, and this is what we're thinking. We oppose it. But is it going to go through? Probably. I agree with the Vice Mayor. I agree. This is going to jack Cloverdale all up on this. You know what I mean? But it's something that Cloverdale also can't afford to fight and burn all this money through when ultimately it's probably going to happen. So the option is to just go ahead and send the letter, which I'm in agreement on that. I think that's a good idea. Have the city send a letter up, say we oppose it, and then continue on with whatever direction you need tonight.

Mike, I believe he's on now. If you can promote him, and then Justin will just walk through this software now.

Good evening. I have to apologize. I went on to the meeting and everything just restarted and I really have to apologize for tonight. But it's a pleasure to be here with you. And if I can just share my screen for a second. What I'm going to do is walk you through the tools that we have for the districting process. And so I want to emphasize that we have a lot of different tools available to members of the community to draw their own maps. And a lot of the different tools are really designed to highlight different kinds of participation for those of you who would like to submit your maps in different ways. So to start off, we have maps that basically have Just the streets, the major roads, and other features. So these are really aimed at if you want to draw your community or your neighborhood, you don't have to worry about- Justin, are you able to zoom in on your screen a little bit?

Sure.

These maps are neighborhood maps, so they show you some of the roads and streets. And all we'd ask you to do is use a color like a highlighter or colored pencil or even just a Sharpie and draw an area that you think represents a community of interest. This is really the most basic way that we can understand what your neighborhoods and communities are. We'd ask you, you don't have to worry about your population numbers on these maps. you can just use them to show us what your neighborhoods are. On the back of this form, or perhaps in your email when you send it to us, you can describe what your neighborhood or communities are. For those of you who wanna go a little bit more in detail, we do have maps that have our total population numbers on them as well. This tells you, for example, that there are seven residents living east of Redwood Highway and north of First Street. This is kind of the next step up. If you want to draw not just your neighborhood, but try to figure out whether or not there's enough people to represent a district or to constitute a district, you can color this in or add your populations together until you reach the target population of a balanced population district. Again, we'll take anything. Even if you don't have a population balance district and you just want to show us where your neighborhood or community is, we can take it on this map as well. Both of these maps are available in English and Spanish. And we also have a link on the city's website to our interactive web viewer, where you can zoom in and see more detail than a paper map allows. But it also has these population areas on them. So these are not quite census blocks. They're made up of several census blocks, kind of bounded by what we think are major or more important streets, to the extent that we can do that. And then for those who want to go a little bit further, we do also have a system online where you can draw your own districts from scratch. This tool, which is called Dave's Redistricting, go to the main page here. This is a website that lets you go create maps and draw really down to that block level detail. On the district's website, you'll see a link to our template. Just for the sake of example, I'm going to start with this template here. And we'll zoom in a bit so we can see more detail, make our screen a little bit bigger. What we have here is our template map. The template is basically the starting point where everybody can change from. You'll see here in the description, it gives you a little bit of instructions on what to do when you finish and a place where you can kind of write in and describe your map when you're done. The way you use Dave's redistricting is you always start by creating an account. So basically, it's really simple. You can sign up. You can sign up here. It's really simple. You just need your name, email address, and to create a password. Once you have that, you'll be able to sign into your map. And you'll be able to find the link to this web template on the city's website. And when you click that link, the first thing you'll do is you'll make a copy of the map. You see our template here is read-only. That's so that everybody starts with the same blank map. To start your own, you can duplicate your map. Create Yes to create a copy of it. And the copy, you can then draw your districts how you choose. The easiest way to do that is simply start by selecting the district you want to modify. For example, I'll select District 3 here. And then you can use this paintbrush tool to color in an area. Now you see some of these areas are quite large. So let's say we want a little more detail. We can select our block to shatter each of these precincts into many different blocks. And then we can paint just by clicking or holding the mouse key down the blocks and move them into that district. You can see on the upper left-hand portion of the screen, as we move blocks into this district, the population increases. And we can even see what our deviation, our difference from perfect equality is. So in this case, we're over our ideal population. But that's OK, because we're just demonstrating what this tool can do. If we don't like what we did, we can hit the Eraser. And we can erase blocks. We can uncolor them. Once we're happy with our district, we can click this little lock to prevent people from modifying, accidentally erasing, or adding it to a different district. Let me just add a couple of blocks. You always do the paintbrush tool before you hit the blocks in order to move them into that district. You can see as I go, I'm adding people to this district here. In addition to coloring in individual blocks, we can also turn on using this little layers button. We can label our precincts and our blocks with our total population. Just collect the total population and close it. And now as we see, we'll hit apply. And you can see as we zoom in here, we'll see the total populations of each block on the map as we zoom in. So 135 people in this block bounded by Cloverdale, Tarman, and Cloverdale Boulevard right here. When we're thinking we're ready to go, we want to go to this Tools button where we can use to find unassigned precincts. These are precincts that we've failed to assign to a district. So really good check to make sure if you missed any small or blocks that you may not have seen on the map. There's also a check to find non-contiguous districts. Non-contiguous, of course, being districts where all the precincts or all the blocks are not touching each other. In addition, if you go into the statistics menu, you can see all the districts side by side with their total population deviations. And it'll give you that total deviation that we want to keep under 10%. It'll even tell you here that my population deviation is too big. So this is not a map that we could adopt. When you're ready to finally submit your map, you can do one of two things. You can either go to share map right here and copy this URL, or you can get the URL from the web browser itself up here. Either way, it'll link to the same address. You'll then email this map, this link to the map, to our email address, districting at ci.cloverdale.ca.us. Keep in mind that if you don't email your map, we don't know the map exists. And that's actually protection, because if you're working on a map and you're not ready to submit or you're not ready for final changes, we don't want to take your map too early. By emailing it to us, you're letting us know the map is ready to be viewed, ready to be drawn in. We'll also ask you when you email your map, if you could describe what you were trying to do and any issues or anything that you would like the board and the community to know. Anything you submit as part of this email is part of the public record. So the council and the rest of the community will see it. Our commitment is also to draw in all the maps that we receive. So whether or not your map is population balanced, whether or not your map meets all the legal requirements, we will draw it in. And that's precisely why we also have a deadline for the maps. That's a couple of days before the posting deadline, August 31st. This is to make sure that if there are issues with the map, we have an opportunity to reach out to you to make sure to address any issues or to make sure that the map that you're submitting is the map you want to submit to the council. And so those are the basic tools we use in terms of that we have available to the community to draw. In addition on that web viewer that I mentioned earlier, we'll post all the maps we receive and it'll be a way to view the different maps side by side. And I'll show you that when we look at our maps at the third public hearing. Um, so I just want to, are there any questions about, uh, the web tools? Um, anything I can go over in more detail? I'll just say before, as we're thinking about that, we also do have a PDF that goes step-by-step through this process, as well as two YouTube videos, a five minute overall, like kind of introductory video and the 20 minute video in more detail. Both of those videos provide kind of more of a step-by-step. I know I, when I first started using the tool relied a lot on that video, kind of pausing, finding the tool, doing something. and then coming back. But this tool, especially the DAVES Redistricting DRA tool, offers a lot of power to be able to go into that level of detail.

So thank you. Hey, Justin, I have one quick question. Is there going to be a link to this? Like I said, you probably mentioned a thousand times on this, but a link to one, the tutorials that you said for the public, that was kind of, you know, it's a lot to take in right there. A link to the tutorials or the YouTube so when they do decide to get in and draw their maps that they have the tools to do it.

that's a great question our expectation is that after tonight we're going to be posting all of the tools on our district-based election website that will include links to all of the materials i mentioned including the youtube videos and the pdf perfect thank you sir

Yeah, Justin, I have a question for, did you say the maps have to be contiguous or they don't have to be?

So the maps do. So I'll answer in two parts. For legal adoption, the maps must be contiguous. So for example, if a map were to cross this unincorporated part of the city.

That's my next question.

That would not be a map the council could legally adopt. However, for submitting draft maps, we will take anything. if we realize there's a problem like that we'll reach out to the submitter because we'll have the email address from that submission to make sure that they know they're submitting a map the council can't adopt or shouldn't you know they can't legally adopt so once we submit and if we know like probably that area where you're showing is going to be annexed into the city and those residents would they automatically go right into that district that's touching them or encompassing them So that is actually good. It's a great question. You'll actually specify in the annexation order which district they will vote in. I don't believe there's a lot of residents in this area right now. Um, so basically the order could put them into the Southern district or potentially depending on the lines into the district to the North. Um, I've, you know, um, it just, you know, whatever makes the most sense for the city. Um, the annexation order would specify that.

Okay. So basically we're, we're looking to get the footprint of Cloverdale. represented in that map. So what kind of what I'm going at is the people that are gonna be annexed in, are we gonna have to pay an additional cost for that at a later date once that?

There won't be. Even though that might upset the population, even this, we don't have to do it yet. We will in the future after every census have to go back through this process. Not all, it's a little different at that point, but there is a, after each census, you gotta go through this process, and the population may or may not have changed. Sometimes cities are just adopting the exact same maps. Sometimes even if there's no population change, you've decided, hey, let's redo how we drew things.

And for any annexation, as long as the annexation is under 25% of the city's population, it doesn't trigger a mid-decade redistricting. So if there's no residents or very few residents in an annexation area, then it doesn't trigger a redistricting. The order, as part of the ordinance specifying the annexation, will say the new residents will vote in District 4 or District 3, whatever it is.

I have a question for Attorney Alex Mogg. Suppose somebody has like a big house and then they decide they want to downsize and they're on the council and they move into another district. Does that mean that they can't be on the council?

Correct. So it's the same thing as if you moved out of the city. If you are on the council representing District 1 and you move within District 1, that's fine. If you move to District 2, you have to give up your seat. Or wait until your term is over to move.

Do we have any questions from the public on this?

Could you please come down and... Wow, that'll teach me to leave early at the last meeting. Alex, I think your response on Prop 218 to me was confusing as I don't see how using water bill money for office air conditioning is a valid use of water infrastructure projects. And tonight, your comments on this are even more confusing on the redistricting, for which I have a few thoughts. First, Ms. Morgenstern, I'd love you to not give up, don't give in, send these letters. One of the comments I heard growing up was have a spine and fight this. This seems a bit ridiculous to me, this whole notion. I had a little bit time this afternoon, I noticed that Antonio Gonzalez was named president of the Southwest Voters in September of 1994, and he has sued over 100 cities and school districts using the California Voting Rights Act. And he's been busy, or that organization, I think he's gone now, they've transformed a lot of these at-large election systems that have worked well for places like Cloverdale into these district areas. According to the website, this organization has been instrumental in setting up an academy to train organizers, activists, and candidates running for office, as well as other elected offices. And these guys are based in Texas. So why are we not standing up and fighting against an organization from outside our state, let alone outside our county. I was wondering if there's other help besides the local folks, because in April 2026, during the same month, I believe you received a threatening letter from these activists. The U.S. Supreme Court issued a ruling in Louisiana versus Calais, striking down Louisiana's redrawn maps and ruling that the Voting Rights Act did not compel the state to create these kinds of maps. So this ruling also obviously applies in places like California, not just Louisiana or Virginia where this is happening right now. So again, I encourage the council to send the letters. And I would ask, how does this mapmaking help us? Can the California Supreme Court help us in fighting this? We need to take a stand, not just roll over like, I guess, Roanoke Park and other cities in our county. Can the bigger Supreme Court help us? And do you need a million dollars to fight this? What is the amount of money you need to fight this? Don't just say, oh, I'm sorry, we got no money. We got $10 million in the water enterprise department. So there you go. Thank you.

Just really quick, Alex, who was the Southern California city that it cost them 1.4 to fight and they settled at that amount to lose?

Well, I don't remember off the top of my head. Cities who have fought it have spent a lot of money and all lost. So Santa Monica went all the way to the Supreme Court. They lost at the trial court, won at the Court of Appeal, lost at the Supreme Court, spent millions of dollars. No one has won fighting this. This is your legislators need to do their jobs.

I just have a quick question. I don't understand how this works. Could you please state your name for the record and step up? What happens if there's no candidates?

The question was what if there were no candidates?

One or two districts.

Yeah, that's a real possibility. The council would then need to appoint someone to serve in that seat. They would need to appoint someone from within the district, that particular district.

Good evening, everyone. Regina Beery. I realize this is like a very odd thought and request in question. What about all of the citizens that aren't within the city limits? Is there any way legally that we could create several unincorporated Cloverdale districts? They don't pay city taxes, you might say. What if there were some sort of flat fee to be registered to be able to vote? Is that in any way something that we might be able to work toward because we have so many people that are part of this community that aren't within the city limits.

Under state law, you have to be a resident of the city to vote in city elections.

Okay, so there's no potential for us to create unincorporated districts that could vote on city matters. Absolutely not at all. Okay. The law has spoken. Worth a thought.

Any other public comment on this item?

Thank you. Robert Maddock again, Cloverdale. I am an attorney, and I am actually admitted to the United States Supreme Court, so I can comment on that. I would say it would be economic suicide for this town, this city, to try to fight this. It's great if someone else wants to contact Mr. Bezos or someone like that and see if we can get a $100 million fund. I think that would be great. I will volunteer to write an amicus brief for that. However, in the meantime, beg you not to waste another penny on this because it is an absolute waste of taxpayer dollars. I have worked within the public sector as an attorney for my entire attorney career and I've negotiated contracts in multiple counties in this area, multiple agencies. I have discussed this specific issue with Sonoma County cities And it is undeniably something that can only be changed by either the United States Supreme Court ruling on this specific issue, and the case out of Louisiana does not address this, specific issue, or our legislators need to develop a backbone as the vice mayor, and I believe the mayor also described, and actually stand up for this because it isn't right. This is a small town. We don't need this shoved down our throats by a bunch of out of town and out of attorney or out of town and out of state of attorneys. I would like to start a group called Lawyers Against Lawsuits, but I will save that for another day because I think these kinds of things really become tools that just are used by people to manipulate and actually don't accomplish what the original and I think justified basis was for. On the actual issue of redistricting, what I will say is from what I've seen in other cities, a small city like this, if you go with five districts, you are going to have more problems with trying to find council members and you also have to redistrict more often. It only takes one large apartment complex in a town like this and now your numbers are thrown off and you've got to redistrict. I also think that in a town like this, a strong mayor who's elected for four years and provides steady leadership is a positive thing, and I support that. I absolutely support Cloverdale. Love this town. Wish it could stay the same way the council is now. but it can't. And let's be realistic about it. I also do support sending a letter. I do think that's a worthwhile use of my taxpayer money to fight that. And if you want to give us brief support, give me a call.

Any other public comment on this item?

Seeing none. So Alex, we've done a lot here. So we want direction for tonight.

What do you need? Direction from the council on whether or not to have a directly elected mayor. So we know to communicate to the public whether they should be drawing four or five districts.

Let's bring it to council.

So a question for the city attorney is, That is absolutely not possible that we could do two at-large seats?

It is not. So the government code establishes what forms of government are allowed for a general law city, which Cloverdale is, and that's not one of the options that is provided. And what type of city is that allowed? You do like a hybrid? Theoretically, a charter city has more authority over their form of government, but Cloverdale is not a charter city, so we'd have to become that first.

The way that I would hear the rest of the council's thoughts, but I would be open to a two-year at-large mayor, definitely not a four-year, but I'm open to five separate districts as well.

I would definitely be open to a two-year mayor. And I think the only, you know, like one positive thing coming out of this would be the voters would be able to elect their mayor. And I think that would be a positive thing. But I would only want that for two years because if the mayor's not somebody that's working out, you don't want to be stuck with them for four years.

Seeing that districts might be a, you know, a problem in the future, I would do four districts and one mayor.

Council Member Lasky, did you have a preference on the two- or four-year term for the mayor? That's what we're, four-year.

Okay.

Sorry, I'm just kind of keeping track of everything. Okay. definitely am in favor of the at-large mayor and knowing how the mayorship works I think that two years you're just starting to actually get your feet wet and understand the job so I would be up for a four-year mayor

In the same way I agree with Mr. Mack down there. I can tell you if you've if you've sat here one year is not long enough. Two years not long enough. You need you need the four years to do it and to be effective and really grasp everything that you need to do. There's a lot going on with this with this chair here. So I'm in favor of the four districts and the at large mayor on a four year term.

So what I heard to recap is I heard unanimous support for the mayor position, although I think two members or at least one member would only support it on the basis of a two-year, but there was a majority for a mayor plus four years. So we'll proceed with the four-year, excuse me, with the directly elected mayor in the four districts, and the council can make a final decision about the length of term when the ordinance comes before you. We'll have that number in it, and you can change it at that point. Is that something that we could hear from the public? Absolutely. So that we can change that in the future too. So there's no need for a final decision on that right now.

Yeah. Is there any public comment on the, on the term of the mayor? Do we have any public comment on that?

The only comment I really have on that is that I always felt like it was our job as we rotated the mayor, that it was our job when we were mayor to engage with the newer council members and show them exactly what it entails and what it takes. If you elect a mayor, and you're stuck with them for four years and you don't like them or they're assholes, then you're stuck with them. It's that simple. But if you rotate mayors, then everybody coming up has an opportunity to learn about what this is that you guys are doing in the service to our community. So an elected mayor is sort of stupid, I think, in a small town. That's all I got to say.

Colleen Shields. I'm concerned of the lack of experience of an elective mayor. I, too, like how you're groomed, how you learn, how you gain your experience. You're there for each other. You have a groove. You're working together. I really like how you guys have been running things as far as that goes. So if it works, don't fix it is my philosophy. Thank you.

Susie Cummings.

I think with as small of a town that the four districts is going to work out better, that you're more likely to get people from each district. The only concern I have, I do like the idea of an elected mayor. The only concern I have is that four years, it may... make it hard to find somebody who can dedicate four years to some to that difficult of a job. And that's my only concern is that if you can find somebody who will do four years, I think that's great. But it might be hard to find somebody so you might end up with two years. Perfect.

Good evening. My name is Dana Starr. I grew up in a town under 8,000 people, very similar to this. My whole life living there and it continues to this day is a district of four sections with an elected mayor. And they are doing four years. But I am rather fond of this idea that the shorter period allows for mixing it up, not mixing it up because it's just to mix it up, but because in two years somebody can go, oh, I think I want to run again for another two years because I'm getting the swing of this. I can see where I can go. Or they can go, you know, I don't really want to do that. and let somebody else run. But I can say also that with even the four district division, that there were sections, particularly in the poorest section of the town, that nobody would run. And so they had to find a way to get somebody to sit for that neighborhood. And that would be even worse if you had the five that I can share. Thank you.

Any other public comment on this? Okay, seeing none. Alex, are you good with your direction on that? Okay.

Okay.

Through the mayor, could you explain the process and timeline just a little bit so that everybody can understand how quickly this really is going? So we need your involvement.

Yeah, so... We initially under state law have 90 days to do this whole process. We agreed with the plaintiff. They gave us an extension for an extra 45 days. So the schedule, thanks, Mike, is up there. The next public hearing is September 3rd. So at that meeting, you'll look at the maps that have been submitted. You can submit some. The consultant will also submit some to make sure we have some that are legally okay. And you can pick which ones you like. You might find one that you all know, this is the one we want. You may not be ready to make a decision then. You may also think, hey, we like this map, but could you do X or Y to it to try to change it? Move it over, include that neighborhood, those extra blocks over there. So there's then an opportunity for more maps to be submitted before the fourth public hearing. At the fourth public hearing, the council would make a decision. This is the map we want. This is the order of the districts are going to go for election. And we would, the council will conduct the first reading of an ordinance at that meeting. So vote and you know, introduce an ordinance at the meeting, and then at the fifth public hearing, you would then adopt that ordinance and it would be done. So the schedules up there. We have a little bit of flexibility in case something comes up and we need to move a meeting, you know, two weeks, but we don't have tons of time. Thank you, Alex. ready Alex could we ask if he could make like six maps so that if we don't want to make a map we have like six to choose from yeah so he the consultant will be making three to five maps I believe it's a number that are compliant depending on the city of our size you may sort of just run out of compliant ways to do it. So there may only but he will be producing some maps as well. So even if no one from the public or no council members do maps, you will have maps to look at it and choose between.

Could you please come down?

Regina Berry, quick question. You may have addressed it earlier. The maps that we as the public create, they will all be accessible to everyone else so that if they want to click on them?

Yeah, so they will all be available on the website at least seven days before the hearing.

All right. I see no other comments. Let's move back, and I apologize. We're going to move back. Oh, you have one? Sorry.

So, Alex, based on that comment, Is it just the voting public of registered voters in Cloverdale can only do district maps or it's open to anybody?

Anyone can submit a map and the council can take a look at that. We don't check if you're a registered voter. Any map will be submitted and then it's up to the council to decide what map ultimately to choose.

Consent calendar and the active ones we still have left is f1 f3 and f5 So let's start with f1 the one that I pulled Kevin. Could you go ahead and just go over that right quick?

Yes, Susie's gonna give us enough Good evening mayor vice mayor council members so the water and the sewer leak adjustment policy the water policy that is items one through three is exactly what our water policy currently is. What we have or what we are proposing is that we add a commercial sewer charge adjustment. That would be like the two that you've seen in the past year and a half where if the sewer, if the The businesses are charged based on the number of units of water that's used. A single family resident, they have a flat fee for their sewer. So it wouldn't affect a single family. It wouldn't affect a multifamily. It would only affect one of the businesses that their sewer is being charged based on the number of units of water that's being used. We're proposing that if they can prove with pictures receipts that the water went into the ground did not go into the septic it didn't have to be treated that we would not charge them we would charge them their regular average rate and not charge them the additional units of It's a sewer rate, but it's only water that's being, they're being charged by the number of units of water. So number four is just proposing that we change that so that I don't have to bring these back.

Okay, any questions?

No, I think it's pretty self-explanatory. And, you know, in the past, we've just kind of, you know, it's no harm, no foul situation. The sewer's not used, we're not charging for it. So pretty straightforward. Would like to make a motion.

Okay, do I have a motion for F1?

Yes, I'm sorry, Rob. Apologize. Yes, I have public comment on this item.

Rob Kozlowski again. First of all, I'd like to thank the city for its one-day response in stopping a water leak next to our home. One day within it being reported, so that was pretty phenomenal. The guys came out on a Sunday. Then they completely fixed it with new parts and asphalt within a couple of days. So kudos to the water team. So I really appreciate that. But on to the issue at hand, I think the city is asking for an amended water leak policy. My fear is in order to give money back to businesses instead of holding them accountable to fix the leak right away. If it's a residence, usually you see the leak and you get help or you fix it right away. Meanwhile, I've been unable to secure through the public records request process the city's water loss tap reports for 2020 through 2025. The required 10-day turnaround response time is now approaching 65 days. That request was submitted back on June 7th and counting. Now I just got a quick note while I was sitting here that I might be getting the reports tomorrow. But historically there appears to be a huge amount of water consistently around five million gallons annually That's reported unmetered This is high quality potable water that could be billed yet residents are being asked to subsidize this law with proposed higher water rate increases and the last batch publicly available city water audits cited outstanding leak issues such as customer metering inaccuracies as well as build build meter accuracy. And this was an audit done by the AWWA, and I'm hoping to see what that shows in 2021 through 2026. So if I get those tap reports over the next couple of days, we can look at that and see if there's been improvement. But I won't belabor the point about no double-digit rate increases, but I'd like to see us fixing these things before we keep raising rates. If we can bill for another, even a portion of the $5 million, in unbillable and it's high quality potable water, that would be great. Anyways, thank you very much.

Okay, just just a follow up. The water is capped at a $460. So even a business that if they leak 130,000 gallons, the most that they're going to get a break is $460. It's a one time just like everybody else. The sewer, is the difference. They're charged differently, and if they're not actually using the sewer, they're already paying for the additional water. I think it's fair that we write off the additional sewer. Thank you, Susan.

Okay, any other public comment? Okay, seeing none, do I have a motion for F1?

I'd like to make a motion to adopt a resolution entitled the Resolution of the City Council of the City of Cloverdale Adopting a Water and Commercial Sewer Leak Adjustment Policy.

Second.

Second.

Okay. Did you get the first and second? Thank you.

All in favor say aye. Aye. All opposed say nay. Motion passes 5-0.

Now. The other active one we're coming back to is F3. Consider adoption of resolution approving a contract with DC Electric Group, Inc., for traffic signal improvements at the Cloverdale Boulevard and Citrus Fair Drive, approving a Measure DD budget amendment and authorizing the city manager to execute the contract.

I can just give a brief report. We recently had trouble with the light, the traffic signal. We had our DC Electric come out, and the components in there are literally 40 years old. They can't get new parts. This budget amendment would allow us to upgrade, including right now it's in pavement signals, or maybe I'm getting that wrong, sensors, sorry. It does replace that with camera sensors so that it knows if there's bicycles or pedestrians. So it's pretty straightforward. It really needs to be done. It's our last, all the other stoplights have been upgraded. This is the last one. And it did fail recently for over 24 hours. So that's why we're asking to approve this budget amendment so that we can get it fixed. And it's being proposed with DD money.

And yeah, I did pull this item. I had a couple questions. At the time of the failure, were we able to go to like a red flashing light option? It did go to a red flashing light. And then just would like to know, what is the history of the issues prior to this incident with that light?

I don't know that we've had a lot of trouble with it. I don't fully know that. I do know that when they came out to look at it, this also provides a battery backup, which it doesn't have for when power outages happen.

Because, yeah, two thoughts on this. I mean, one, if, you know, the backup is the red flashing lights, I think that's still a functioning stop light. And then the bigger question is, you know, around the cameras. Do we use cameras similar to that anywhere else in the city?

Let me see if I can explain this because I'm not an expert, but. There's sensors in the pavement, and that's the old way to identify if there's a car there. This replaces that with a camera, and it's more sensitive, and it picks up pedestrians and bicycles where the older ones that were in the pavement didn't. didn't do that. And so it's really the modern technology. I don't think it's even that modern. It's been used for quite a while.

I mentioned this, you know, in regards to the questions on, um, South of the Boulevard, um, you know, people have some issues with the traffic lights down there and, um, you know, San Anselmo does use AI and I'm wondering if this is similar to that or do we use cameras at all anywhere else currently?

I believe we use cameras on the south because that's a new light. And we did upgrade the one on First Street. And I'm not 100% sure that there's cameras in there, but any modern signal does use the cameras. And so I will ask about the AI because you mentioned that before, and that sounds like a really good solution. So... I'll definitely bring that up.

Within any issue of any use of cameras, there's always an effect. They could be effective in monitoring traffic, but the issue of surveillance comes into play. And that's something I just don't want to necessarily just adopt too easily without fully, fully understanding the circumstances behind that.

My understanding of this is it's not for surveillance at all. It's not a flawed camera system. It's really just to replace those in-pavement vehicle detection loop systems. I don't know, Chief, if you have anything about this, but let's put you on the spot.

Kevin, I think also the lights that we put in in the last four years down there on the south end of town by 7-Eleven and Sinclair and all that are camera-operated.

They are. And I guess that those still, our public is having trouble with the camera system. I sense that.

I mean, I'm not asking you for an answer to that, but... Oh, it's true. We've been trying to adjust the south interchange for over a year now to get it where we need, you know, the turn. The turn was a big help there where you can turn when it's yellow. So... This one's a little more straightforward. That's an offset intersection. It functions well in terms of the lights and everything, but we may have not gotten the timing exactly correct yet, and we'll continue to look at that. This one's a little more straightforward. Yep.

I mean, we were really told by DC electric that they couldn't find they couldn't get the parts to repair what we had So that's the situation it is You know I just look at the cost of the spending and it looks like something that could be kicked down the road if it's continual problem in the future I could Be happy to entertain bringing it back Okay To your point Andres the

The pricing, I'm speaking as an electrician now, the pricing looks in line with the scope of work. To your point on the cameras and modern technology, the camera serves basically as a contact, right? It opens when nobody's there. When somebody appears, the camera sees it just like your ring door camera, what have you. And I believe it's just a closed loop system where the camera picks somebody up and is able to, you know, change the logic and green light, red light type of thing. So if you've ever been through Caltrans one-way traffic control, like right now on Highway 1 out at the coast, they have that. And there's no sensors. It's a camera. And it just picks you up. Follows you all the way through, picks you up on the other side, and if there's no other reading, the cameras turn, right? That's the way they're able to do the one-way traffic control.

So it's like a sensor.

Technology is closed loop, and the camera is just like a contact.

Totally understand that. Yeah, I just see that technology not really producing the results on the south side of town. So it just doesn't seem like... something to jump on if there was a you know that that worked on the south side of town i could see implementing it but don't want to create another traffic jam with a system that is not working currently

Yeah, we've had some issues. We've had DC Electric out come and look at those things on the south end of town. And I know we've had to adjust them. They were, I think they got it figured out. I couldn't believe they were affected by rain and with El Nino coming up. God, I hope they're not affected by rain or we're going to have traffic jams. But as far as I don't want to create, I don't want to kick something down the road, I know. And if we can't have parts, this thing completely fails on us. And now that's one of our main entrances into Cloverdale. And then we also have people picking up kids. School starts tomorrow. We've got a traffic jam down there nonstop. So I think... We should go ahead and we get the theory of the cameras, the contact, the, you know, running you through and all that. And I think that those need to be fixed so we don't cause issues down there. And DC Electric also knows how to fix, has come in and adjusted the ones on the south end of town, still working on it. So they're going to have the knowledge to do these and to get it installed properly. So I'm 100% on board with this one.

I mean, what DC told us was they could get it to work, but they couldn't promise that it's going to work for very long, and the parts were hard to find. And so we're just trying to get ahead of it.

One more comment? So based on DC Electric says the price assumes existing conduits are accessible, free of debris, and in good working order. I would maybe strike that and ask them to mandrill the conduits to justify their price.

Can you say that again?

I would support further investigation into this before maybe we bring it back. If that's what's your suggestion, I would support that.

For me, I would just say just strike that one and just ask them to mandrill the conduits to justify their price. I think the price is in line with the scope of work.

Would that be an amendment or would we bring that back to the council? Well, what the way that is going right now would have to be amended and brought back. And so that was my question is, is this going to create a safety hazard or an issue if they fail before we're allowed or able to fix these things if we don't have a special meeting if something happens?

It's hard to know. I mean, I'm just going off of what DC Electric told us, which is, hey, we got it working, but it's fragile and it's old, and we can't guarantee it's going to stay working for very long.

I do want to acknowledge the concerns from Mayor and Vice Mayor on this, just that the backup was that it was a flashing red light. So I don't, you know, we haven't experienced a full breakdown. I don't want to just think that everything is going to be a worst-case scenario necessarily.

I agree, Kevin, on this real quick, and I agree with Council Member Lasky over there. He's got some pretty extensive knowledge on this. I'm not opposed to striking that, what's in there, and redoing that contract a little bit so it gets narrowed down the scope of work on that, and then actually bringing it back at the next meeting, if we could. I would support that.

The amendment you suggested, Council Member Lasky, that's in the scope of work? The amendment you suggested would be to the scope of work from DS.

I do see that he does have contingencies in there right now for, uh, for the cost for 6,994. So that might be, uh, his CYA. If the conduits do not mandrill right there, I imagine he's going to pull out some of the existing infrastructure and add his, uh, Cable for the camera so and I'm imagine not what is that? What's the minimum size? City standards inch and a half onto it. I don't know Recorder Okay, this is not to exceed then okay, yeah, I'm actually fine with that and you can leave it as it stands through the mayor if you want to make that change to we could do that and the council could approve that tonight and then

Assuming he agrees, Kevin would have the authority to sign the agreement with that change. There may be a price increase as long as it's within the total not to exceed amount. If it would create a large impact, then we'd need to come back for further approval.

Well, and I think that's actually covered, Council Member Lasky's concern is covered by the not to exceed. So I think that it's actually almost a moot point at this point.

So I have no more comments. Any more comments?

Sounds good. I support my counsel on this. Public comment?

Do we have any public comments on this item? Go ahead, Jennifer. Yeah, it was.

So I'm going to admit I'm a total nerd and I'd love to contribute to this conversation, but

I have a PRA request specifically for concerns about traffic impact and signal performance results. I submitted this public request 125 days ago on April 8. So maybe that's one PRA request of my three that haven't been addressed that maybe could be addressed.

Thank you.

Any other public comment? Okay, I'm seeing none.

I'd like to make a motion by title only. adopt a resolution entitled Resolution of the City Council of the City of Cloverdale approving a contract with DC Electric Group Incorporated for traffic signal improvements at Cloverdale Boulevard and Citrus Fair Drive in the amount of $69,940, authorizing a 10% contingency in the amount of $6,994 for a total not to exceed amount of $76,934, approving a Measure DD budget amendment and authorizing the city manager to execute the contract and related documents.

Second. All in favor say aye. Aye. Opposed say nay. Motion passes 5-0. All right.

Okay, folks, we're going to take a five-minute recess right now before we get into F5. So bear with five-minute recess.

I've got to feed my dogs and I want to go home.

Oh, they're your dogs now. I'm going to tell you.

All right, guys, we're calling the meeting back to order. And let's move into F5, final one on the consent calendar, ordinance amending Cloverdale Municipal Code Section 2.04.010, compensation for council members.

Thanks, Mayor. I'll just be very brief. Council introduced this ordinance at the last meeting to decrease the council member compensation from $950 a month to $300 a month. That was at the last council meeting, and there's a second reading tonight for adoption.

Yeah, I have a comment. I have some arguments against the pay cut. It creates barriers for working class residents. It's lowering the pay makes the position virtually voluntary, making it nearly impossible for working professionals, single parents, or low income residents to afford the time away from their jobs. It's limiting the candidate pool, which is going to be really important when we break into districts. A reduced stipend restricts future candidates mostly to retirees or the independently wealthy who do not rely on a stipend to offset living costs or lost wages. It's ignoring the real-time commitment. Serving on the council involves long hours reviewing complex city agendas, attending meetings, and managing communications with residents that go well beyond a casual volunteer role. It's an undoing progress on diversity. It helps having an adequate stipend helps level the playing field so diverse community members can run for office without sacrificing basic financial stability. The reduction in council stipend represents a negligible fraction of the city's budget because the total annual savings of $39,000 amounts to roughly 0.26% of Cloverdale's 14.9 million annual general fund spending. You know, it comes across like I think it was introduced to make impactful savings, but it really doesn't. The cut is a symbolic gesture of fiscal responsibility rather than a meaningful financial solution. It strips away standard compensation while leaving the city's structural revenue issues completely unaddressed. The Sonoma City Council voted 4 to 1 on August 5, 2026 to introduce an ordinance that moves their monthly stipend to $950. The Sebastopol City Council voted 3 to 1 on July 7, 2026 to finalize and pass the ordinance raising their monthly stipend from $300 to $950. When it was first introduced at our budget meeting, it seemed like it had been something that all three of the people that were for it had already discussed and kind of did a daisy chain on. So I just think it's kind of like a corrupt thing. And I think it would be better if we left it the same.

I think Councilmember Morgenstern you made some really good points on this you know I've come to understand the benefits of having the option for a stipend I would ask my fellow council members to reconsider the option to opt out and just want to really go back to our last meeting that there was an outburst of expletives made by our mayor that was quoted in the press Democrat. And I would like to ask you to really explain what you meant by the quote, it's the white guys or it's the guys up here that are doing everything they can to make sure Cloverdale makes it through.

I would absolutely love to explain that. That was totally taken out of context, and that was not what was said. What was said and the outburst was is, and I'm going to say it again, since the age of 10 when I'm continually told up here that, hey, you guys are the privileged white guys up here. No, that's not it. What we've done is busted. I've busted my ass since I was 10 years old. And like I said, I'm going to say the exact same thing. We don't have your crony here to re-unquote stuff. So bottom line is I wish my father was here. I've been driving a shovel since I was 10. And I've earned absolutely everything I got. So when you say, hey, oh, these guys with a pension, you know how you get a pension? You earn it. And that's exactly what I did. So for the misquote in the Press Democrat, that's great. If you read that rag, that's good. But the bottom line is I did not say it's the white guys making thing happen up here. Totally taken out of context, and that's completely untrue on the record. There you go.

And I'll just continue my comment. The quote was your actual words. You did say it was the white guys. Nobody mentioned race in this discussion. And so that's where I'm curious about why you brought up race. The conversation was about diversity, and diversity means diversity of opinion. When you certainly see a group of three council members who don't delegate in public, it gives a perception that there's a group. So I'm going to ask you a question about the group that you mentioned is the white guys. Am I included in that group? It was your actual words, but if you can speak on the mic.

I'm not going to engage with you. Your intention was to come here and stir the pot tonight like it always is at most council meetings.

So that's where I'm at. So I'll read my questions. I'll read my questions out loud. The questions I have for the mayor about his comment about the group of white guys when nobody mentioned race during the meeting is I wonder, am I included in that group? Is council member, excuse me? Sure, you are.

I don't see anything else. I see people up here and I did not say that.

So when you said it's the white guys getting everything done, were you excluding council member Morgan Stern as a woman? But this is my question because race was never mentioned. And do all members of your described grouping live up to the required responsibilities of the city council? And I would like to see our list of responsibilities that our city clerk put out in our candidate's handbook. And I would just want to read the responsibilities. So this isn't about pay. This is about the work that we should all do, whether we're getting paid $0, $5, $300, or $950. The responsibilities of our city council are to review agenda materials and prepare for meetings. Review agenda materials and prepare. Participation in open and transparent decision-making. Open and transparent decision-making. To listen to residents, businesses, and community stakeholders. And I just want to call out the June 10th meeting. During our budget adoption at three hours and 45 minutes and 50 seconds, deliberation was done not publicly but very visibly between council members to push the budget forward when we still had another meeting to deliberate so we had half this room filled up with members of the public that were not listened to and deliberation was not done transparently um also the other then and that goes to responsibility listed here number five Follow the Brown Act and ethical governance requirements. And also number four, work collaboratively with fellow council members and staff. And I don't see our council living up to those responsibilities. I hope they can. So it's not about pay, but it's about the work that we are appointed, elected to do that we should live up to do that work. And if cutting your pay gives you some type of credit, let's look at the work that's being done and that we should live up to the responsibilities that we're here to perform for the residents of this community. And the other question I would have for the mayor is, did you vote to raise the stipend for your time on council?

Yes, I did.

Okay. And my final question to you is, are you voting to lower the stipend now that you don't seek reelection?

No, I was voting to lower the stipend and my thought process behind lowering the stipend is we had a council member after that budget meeting that I guess wasn't transparent, but was scheduled and was open to the public, went around pretty much and talked to most nonprofits there, which I think should be maybe funded. They should go out and it shouldn't be one of those, hey, I'm going to hold out my hand and Cloverdale's got money and we're going to We're going to go ahead and fill it with Cloverdale money is why I was like, okay, no problem. So as a public servant, what I wanted to do was like, okay, so if we're going to fund some things and we've already committed to funding those things, then let's go as a public servant and take some of our money and let's go ahead and lower us. And then we have the money and we can fund these nonprofits that were guaranteed money.

I'm not sure what you just said. It was kind of a babble. But, you know, when you're working on a budget, there's no commitment there until it's passed. The budget was passed three to two. Deliberation was done in private, on camera. And you can see that at the June 10th meeting at three hours, 45 minutes and 50 seconds. It was a Brown Act violation. Recorded. So check it out. You know, and going to talk to our community to find out what the needs are and if there's some organizations struggling, is there an issue with that? Is it beneficial to our community to fund organizations that are putting $15,000 in their reserves when people are not being fed in this community? And you mentioned the food pantry at the last meeting. You haven't stepped a foot inside the food pantry.

Actually, I have, and that was while I was working with the city, and I wondered why when we had all the homeless folks in town, and I was actually working with the city, picking up trash and mowing the parks for the city, and I actually drove over there and said, why are you guys, is there any way you can not waste this food that you're wasting right now because you're giving it to folks that you know cannot or have the ability to cook it? So what happened was almost every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I would walk down or whenever the food distribution was, and I'd find boxes of food in the planters. If I put my hand on them.

Mr. Mayor, point of order. We're getting way off topic with this, and we need to get back in line with what the agenda item is, please. Thank you. I think this is a good idea based on size of our city and our budget that we give more money back to the community than to ourselves because this is not a position to make money on. If it's going to affect elections, we currently have five women and four men that are seeking seats. They average from, I think, late 20s into their 70s. So we have a pretty good different demographic. You can do age, race, and gender. And so this is a great group of people that are running for election for 2026, and it is not based on the pay. So obviously that doesn't make a difference. And so I'm excited for this.

So when I ran for office, I did I did so under the guise that I wanted to know where my tax dollars were going. I had no idea what the compensation was, and that was not a goal for me at all. Like I said, I would rather do this for free and make an impact and not be here to, as they say, ride the pine. and just take the compensation. It's a thankless job indeed. And then you have to have somewhat of a passion to help your community to do this job. So like I said, I didn't get off the couch to get any kind of compensation for what I can lend to the city.

So there's that.

The last thing I'm going to say is we're not here to be supported by the community. We're here to support the community and do what we can. So I think it's backwards thinking to think that we should be getting as much pay as possible versus doing a public service like this position is created for.

I think this whole thing was weaponized. You brought it up, Todd, at the budget meeting. You got that far away from my face when you said it. And then our attorney over there was smirking and smiling like this was all planned out. So I just think let's be transparent and let the public know exactly what happened.

Absolutely. In 2024, I voted against this. I've never supported it. We should have never been making $950 and I still don't support it. And so the second that it was brought back to us as a possibility, I brought it up again. That's exactly how it worked. It was not in your face. It was not vindictive. It was that we do not take this position in public service to profit. We do it to help our community.

Well, then you should have donated your salary this whole two years, but you didn't. And you say that you give the city $1,000 a month, but you have no receipt.

I'm not going to go down.

He spent $140 on candy. It's all just bullshit.

All right, so go ahead. Do you have any public comment on this? Yeah, come on down.

All the years that I was on council, we got 200 or 300 bucks. That was it. It didn't even cover gas to meetings. We're in Cloverdale here, long ways from a lot of the meetings you have to go to. And gas is very expensive. You're eliminating a whole class of people by lowering this the way it is. Every town around here is going to be 950 shortly. So you look at that and you think, okay, so what is it that you get if you go run for council? I don't know the public really knows that, but you get medical. You get your medical paid for, or most of it paid for. Then you get this stipend, which in my case was very little, but you also get the ability to turn in receipts. Have any of you ever turned a receipt in for a hotel, for gasoline, for the big group things that you guys go to? Like when you went down to Southern California, did anybody turn in a hotel? Was the city, did the city pay for that hotel when you guys went down there?

I would really ask the comment on that. Michael, since you're in charge, could you tell how many receipts I've turned in in the last six years?

I don't have those records in front of me, but I can tell you it's very minimal, if at all.

Our hotels are paid ahead of time, like Mike. So you have paid.

I will state for conferences, council typically, I mean, the city typically through the council's budget, which is adopted in their budget. So there you go. You did claim, you did.

I did not. I have never turned in a single receipt, not for one conference.

I'm not saying that you turned a receipt in.

What I'm saying is that the city pays for that stuff.

Council is, we pay for their conferences regularly. As far as reimbursement for travel, which means hotel, airplanes, or driving, that is what the council typically submits their receipts for. We have a travel and advance policy. But to address Council Member Land's question, he has not submitted any of those for travel.

But he has stayed in hotels that were paid for.

Travel or hotels. I'd have to look at the record. I can't speak to it without looking, but nothing has been submitted.

Okay, so I'm not just looking at you. Please do a PRA on that one. I'd love it.

Have any of you guys put a dollar on the credit card? We didn't pay for our reimbursement. Anybody?

Correct. It depends on the comments. Run your question by me again, Marianne.

Have you ever turned a receipt for reimbursement?

I've turned in one reimbursement receipt. Okay, so you did.

You didn't even pay for it. One. You paid for all.

So can we maybe have a question, finish the comment, and then the council can answer so it's not so much back and forth.

Well, what I feel like you're doing here is... And if you guys want to give... Like, I chose not to turn receipts in. That was my choice. I was running a business. I was comfortable. I didn't feel like I had to. But by doing this, you're eliminating a whole class of people, and that bothers me. Because there's a lot of people in this town that I know that are very bright, brighter than me, brighter than all of you guys, who would not run just purely because they can't afford to. So... It really makes me think that you're trying to just be the three or four white guys up there running everything, and that really bothers me, that you won't give another group a chance. If you guys want to just say, no, I'm not going to take it, great, but don't make other people go by what you want, because that's not fair. And I just find it sort of disgusting the way the game that you guys are playing and the public is really about had it.

Any other public comment?

Council, if I can, for the record, just to clarify my statement, there is the opportunity for the city will often pay for conferences and hotels, but it is up to the council members for mileage reimbursement. There's an entire travel and advance policy, and I do suggest any members of public or council to submit a public records request, and we can get those records.

When we went to Sacramento, you put everything on the credit card, including our hotel and the convention and all our foods. So there you have it. Thank you.

So what I remember from the last meeting where this, this conversation came up was that it was that like Cloverdale had designated it disability month or something like that. I can't remember the exact name. And Marjorie had, had said during this meeting, like at some point that this money makes a difference for her. Like, I mean, she just came out publicly and said this and she, I don't understand. It's really hard for me to grasp why three members or people would just right in front of her face take that away from her when there is a viable option to just give your pay back to the city. And I don't know if... I don't know. I mean, I feel like it's an easy solution. I don't know anybody who can live off of $900 or who's going to be like, you know, rolling through town in like a Porsche or like a Land Rover, like, woohoo, look at my council money. I think it's, and then the other part of it too is there is this impression that it's devaluing what you guys do. It's devaluing how important the work is that you do. And you are very fortunate that, and this isn't to say that you haven't worked hard, but I mean, my goodness, I love a pension. Like to be in that position is a blessed one. And it has nothing to do with like, you know, you not working hard and all that. Like it's not everybody's in that position for a variety of different reasons. And like if a single mom wanted to run, um yeah i just i think it devalues what you guys do and i think that the solution to just give back your your salary it's it's easy and we wouldn't be all here fighting and i just i don't know what else to say but it really broke my heart because yeah i mean this is a fellow council member and i feel like you guys all should be taking care of each other and by doing that you're looking out for cloverdale

I wasn't here to witness what happened, but when I consider what other positions of this city are making, why aren't other people skimming off the top of their salaries?

Do we have any other public comment?

OK, I'm seeing none.

Any comments from the council?

Yes, thank you, Mayor. Just want to ask my fellow council members to reconsider their vote. I think this amount of pay doesn't make us a better council members. I think this decision doesn't make us a better council. You know, personally, I did bring this issue up to reduce the pay when I was first on council. I thought that, you know, like maybe some council members are in this for the money. I've come to change my opinion on that. It's not because I need the money, but I don't want to limit somebody else who does. I think it's the option to opt out is great if there's. four of us that are opting out or give that money back and one person needs it, it's not going to affect the budget that much. I could tell you even that extra money allows me to do so much more work in a month. Taking two weeks off to paint a mural at Washington Gym. Taking two weeks off to paint the interior of the Grange. You know, I wouldn't be able to do that without just, that was enough money I can go get a sandwich down at Eagle's Nest. And that's it. And I would work my butt off for the next two weeks that month to cover my bills. So I would just ask my fellow council to reconsider their decision. Let's amend this to give, us the option to opt out and give the ability to others that might need this money to do this role. And that's my ask.

I do have another comment to make. The single raise for one staff member completely eclipses the small amount saved by cutting the stipends of the entire elected council. Performative versus impactful savings. I just feel like this whole thing's a big drama created by the vice mayor. And he was that far away from my face when he said it. It was meant to hurt. And I just think it's a huge drama. And the council needs to come together rather than three people constantly deciding what the hell is going to happen on every issue. It's not right. And it's like turned into a dictatorship. And then they sit there and moralize about it and say, oh, I worked hard my whole life. Well, other people have worked hard their whole lives as well.

Yes.

I will gladly make a motion to waive the second reading and adopt an ordinance amending Cloverdale Municipal Code section 2.04.010. Do I need to read the whole thing, keep going?

Yeah, just.

Compensation for council members to decrease council member compensation to the specified amount per month of $300. Second.

All in favor say aye. No. Aye. All in favor say aye. Aye. Aye.

No.

All opposed say nay. No. No. Motion fails, three to two.

Thank you, Mayor. There was an item that we didn't list on tonight's agenda, introducing our new assistant city manager, Eric Sanders.

We still have other action items on the agenda.

All right, let's get into next item is h. One considered prior to stage prior. Consider the prioritize water resiliency projects list its relationship to the FY 26 through 31 capital improvement program for those water rates.

Again, Eric, Derek is out ill. So Eric is volunteered to, to go over this one. This was a request of the council, I think a couple, maybe last meeting or the meeting before to review what we've put together as a potential water resiliency list. And the list. Some of the projects are in the sea. I'll let you talk about it, Eric. But it's it's really a list that we want to have at the ready in case PG&E money comes along as part of the dam removal or other grants. We want to just identify these projects. And I'll just leave it there, Eric, if you want to talk about them.

Sure, thank you. First of all, I want to introduce myself. I'm Eric Sanders. I'm the Assistant City Manager here. Thank you. Mayor and Council, Mike, if you could put the slide up on there.

Is there a presentation on this item?

It's the one that looks like this spreadsheet.

One second.

So anyway, while you're getting that out, I wanted to just reiterate that this item presents the updated and prioritized water resiliency projects list. that was originally developed by West Yost back in 2025 to identify projects that would improve the reliability and resiliency of our water system, particularly given the uncertainty surrounding the Potter Valley project. And the intent was to identify projects that may or may not be on the capital improvement plan, but projects in general that in the event some sort of funding would become available, that we could just turn to the list and say, OK, what's number one? What's number two? What are the things that we want to do in order to bolster our water resiliency? So at the council's direction, staff prioritized those projects based primarily on the timing in the fiscal year category in the CIP, although I understand some of them aren't CIP projects, like I said before, but they are prioritized by the timeline there. You can see in that column 26 to 28, you know, and so on and so forth. And that was sort of was our, the way that we prioritize these for the council to say, okay, if and when this funding does become available, Here's where we start. And if you look at the list here, the ones at the top are primarily CIP projects. And as you go work your way down the list, you'll see that the next group is for projects that are fully budgeted in the previous year and then finished projects that have been completed and then at the bottom are projects that are on the list as priorities. However, they have not been budgeted in the CIP. So I guess what we're asking tonight is for council to receive the updated list, review the priorities and funding categories and provide direction to staff on whether the council agrees with the proposed prioritization.

And I think we want to keep working on this list. This is kind of a first go at it. And so again, I think really As Eric said, not to repeat what you said, but you know, as as funding comes down, we want to we want to be ready for that as best we can. But I think our goal really is to have you review it, start amending it. Maybe we forgot something, maybe something should come off. But maybe this is like an ongoing thing, kind of like the streets.

Can I add a comment, Mayor? Thank you. I just want to thank you, Eric Sanders, Assistant City Manager, for getting this out so quick. I mean, this was at our last meeting. It was just very recent. So I appreciate the work. And the idea about this list, I think it's going to be an evolving list. My thoughts behind it, it's an important tool to obtain funding and clarify goals to take full advantage of funding opportunity windows as they can arise. My thoughts about the list also is to reach out to prospective funders or partners to see how we can improve the list, because I think we need to make the list that's going to work for people that would potentially fund or help us find funding. That would include North Coast Regional Partnership, potentially PG&E. Even there's environmental groups that want to see us have some water resiliency opportunities. within our city. So the thoughts about the list that I have, you know, these are really pertaining to our municipality. I think, you know, in the future, expanding this to include potential studies of groundwater recharge, and possibly that might be a... know getting a little far ahead but i think it's something that we need to start working on is like you know regional solutions uh with with groundwater recharge since we share our sub basins with other um jurisdictions and some of them are defined some not um i think that you know recharging those sub basins would probably be a regional effort potentially as well so i appreciate your work on this

I just want to say that I'm really excited about this list. I know there's more work to be done besides this list, but at least it's a move in the right direction.

Eric, welcome aboard. Thanks for the presentation. Appreciate the work hitting the ground running. It's awesome. Maybe we can look at, to Council Member Marquez's statement there, as we go into DD funding, we can try to get some bioswales for groundwater recharge as an overall plan for, you know, our water resiliency. But great first steps. Thank you.

could definitely add that to the list and or at least look into what it would take to get those types of studies started yeah welcome aboard eric i'm hoping we do a whole uh kumbaya session at our next meeting for you take some pictures for the paper however this list was a little history lessons list was created when i was working with a group to get a department of What was it? Fish and, what was it? Fish and Wildlife. Fish and Wildlife, Department of Fish and Wildlife. Chuck Bonham was the head of the state, appointed by Governor Newsom, and he was coming here and working with us and debating with us regarding the Potter Valley project. When he saw the predicament that we would be in after listening to us, he asked for a list and that's what this list started from. They were in no particular order and we did that on purpose because of cost and we didn't know what each thing would cost or how much money he would be willing to give us in certain ways for grants. There was a lot of grant funding with reservoir bonds that the state had that he gave us zero dollars and nobody was getting any bonds or bond money for reservoirs. It was all going towards rehabilitation of creeks. So what we did is we created this list and worked with the state to pick out some projects. Two of the projects that we've been funded through him and through us at that committee was purchasing water out of Lake Mendocino to help supplement us when we are having our drought or curtailments or even just low on water at the end of the summer. And the second one is for aquifer recharge and deeper wells and finding the geologic areas that we can actually have those. So those two things are not on this list, but that is what that was created for. There's some good stuff that we can add to this, but I really don't want us to be like 1 through 10 is all we're going to do because this needs to be a fluid document. We need to know if we have $150,000 to spend, we can go to number 8. and not say we're going to stick that in the bank until we can do number one. So thank you for your hard work on this. I appreciate making a solid list of what we've already accomplished, what we look forward to doing. But there's a couple things that we should add is making sure that we are completing the studies for the water purchase and completing the studies for the geologic conditions for the aquifer recharge.

Thank you, Vice Mayor. I also wanted to point out there is a column on here that is titled Estimated Cost. And even though this list isn't necessarily prioritized by cost, it does have several categories here, low, medium, and high. And I know that the folks over at West Yost put this together. I believe the low category of cost are projects that cost less than $100,000. medium would be 100,000 to 1 million. And then the high category would be any project over 1 million. So it'd be relatively easy for the council to take a look at these and say, Okay, well, you know, we just got a grant for 250,000. One on here is in that price range. Oh, this is medium. Okay, here they are. So thank you.

Eric, thanks for coming on board. Awesome presentation. Yeah, this list is an ever-evolving animal here. It's going to be continually updated. But the frustration I have with this is when I look at number one on CIP years, Cherry Creek, South Crest Reservoir as InDesign. And it seems like I've been hearing InDesign for about two years now. So I know after talking to a lot of the folks at the water plant, and I know they're scrambling, they're patchwork and things together. They need. We need some stuff done. We need tanks coated. We need contact tanks. We need everything to keep it running in order. And that's my frustration with this. I understand it's a funding thing, but I think priority, this is, but like I said, this has been kicked around since the previous city manager. And it seemed like we did study after study after study. And by the time we got to the fourth study, it was just, the same one as the first study and it was kind of kicked down the road i don't want to see that happen i want to see actually pick some of these off um and actually get them completed and put a little more umph into uh west yost if we need to and say hey what's going on let's kick this let's keep this going let's get it going faster How can we put pressure on people? How can the design go quicker? How can we get this to approval and get it going? And that's just good for Cloverdale. You know the water plan as good as anybody, but you know what needs to be done. So anyway, thanks for the list. But we really need to kick some of these down and kind of veer away from studies if we don't need them, if they're being repeated and concentrate on the studies we need that are going to fix Cloverdale Mendocino water purchase. those are the studies that are needed. But it's more studies on these continuing projects. It's just frivolous. I mean, just wasting our time.

Understood. Thank you.

Yep.

Great work. I mean, We're going to introduce our assistant manager at maybe the next meeting, but the last three weeks, jumping into this and our conversations around our water resiliency, we had a potential fire risk a couple weeks ago, and jumping on that in the middle of the night, just excited to see this happen so quickly. Really appreciate it.

very welcome this is my town after i grew up here and uh you know i care very deeply about everybody that lives here in town all the people also that live on the outskirts of town and all the infrastructure here um you know i i i'm a product of this town too so thank you for that thanks sir lfg

So we'll continue to look for projects, add them, and maybe have this as a periodic item on the council as we amend the list and get better numbers and just keep it alive and keep it current.

Do we have any comments from the public on this?

I don't. My name is Brian. I don't think that the estimated cost should be prioritized. I think that the way that it affects the community should be prioritized. So

Hi, Rob Kozlowski again. The only thing I can say is, folks, please build something. Cloverdaleans have paid $10 million over the last five years to build up a bank account to build the water and sewer infrastructure. The tabular graphic presented by the City of Cloverdale, to me, is shocking by its level of project omissions, deferrals and cancellations or apparent cancellations. coupled with demands for another study regarding new wells. It's an application of the plans articulated in 2021. Please use that list. Look at the 2021 list and you'll see that some of those presented tonight are on there. But anyways, that list was used to justify these massive water rate increases over the last five years and the partial replication of those same plans offered to demand another round of double digit rate increases through 2031. The proposed plan is an unwarranted money grab, it feels to me, since we have the money, and we're jacking up fees in violation of the law embodied in Proposition 218, and I'll disagree with Alex on our correspondence on that one, where water rate increases must be tied to the cost of providing those water services. Considering the following table that was just offered up. The Cherry Creek Reservoir, 59 years and rusting, has been moved to 2028 for completion, a six-year deferral from what we've already paid for. A new well with the 2023 completion has been replaced with the study slated for 2027 or 2028, a five-year delay without a drill even scheduled to start that well. The Ritter Reservoir, 38 years in rustling, with a 2024 completion, is now unscheduled. We missed that one. The backup chlorine tank, hailed as critical at the time in 2021, was planned for completion last year, and it has been dropped from that list. I don't get it. Transfer pumps and a Ferber tank slated for 2025 last year has been renamed Del Webb Foothill, it looks like, and moved to a 2030 completion, a five-year deferral. In spite of five years of residents paying double-digit rate increases, almost no critical capital improvement projects have been started, yet alone completed. Yet the waste water and water department surpluses have ballooned to 10 million, as I mentioned. The nice-to-do activities, such as installation of grant-inspired water meters and non-water-related work on a just-activated solar system and air conditioning of city buildings took priority. To me, this is administrative mismanagement. Have Cloverdale residents been misled in how their water sewer payments have been used? I say no more to rate increases until the focus becomes sharper and promised water sewer projects are completed. With bills already 62% higher than 2021, please get on with rebuilding the city's aging and crumbling water infrastructure as evidenced was actually on the property of the Cherry Creek Reservoir. So there was a leak already in that area. Thank you for your time.

Any other public comment on this item? Okay, seeing none. And once again, thank you, Assistant City Manager Sanders for bringing it up. Great.

Any other comments from the council?

Alrighty, let's move into item I, council member reports.

Thank you, Mayor. Councilmember report for Wednesday, August 12th, 2026. Since our last meeting on Saturday, July 25th, we had an event. put together. This was cooperation with the City of Cloverdale and Sonoma County Ag and Open Space. This was called Un Dia de Campo. It was our first guided hike in Soda Springs Ranch, which was a bilingual English and Spanish hike. There was neighbors of all backgrounds and ages that participated. I do want to thank Irma, Raquel, and Olivia of Sonoma County Ag and Open Space, as well as Councilmember Morgenstern, who is on the Citizen Advisory Committee, and Superintendent Hector Galvan, as well as... Corey Waddles. I think everyone who participated that day really had a great time. It was just a gathering of community. Everyone learned a lot about our new open space. And I think everyone kind of became a steward that day, that they can go around and take their friends and family, kids, parents up there and teach them about all the different wildlife and trees that they've learned and really care for and appreciate our open space. On Tuesday, July 28th, I attended the Russian River Confluence Steering Committee. We discussed our goals for annual gathering coming up later this year. Wednesday, July 29th, I met with Caitlin Vegby of Legal Aid. We're working on updating the rent stabilization ordinance and creating a closure and conversion ordinance to... that Caitlin will draft a model of the ordinances and circle back in mid September. So, um, there's been some predatory agencies going after our, uh, different mobile home parks in the County. And so this is a way that we can, uh, strengthen our, um, ability to hold them off. Uh, On Wednesday, July 29th, I attended a Cloverdale community meeting. This was to connect with neighbors and share concerns about the proposed Esmeralda development. I think my biggest takeaway is the repeated concern I hear from residents that would like to have a say in the decisions made regarding any approvals of that project. On Monday, August 3rd, attended the Healdsburg City Council and delivered public comment to invite the Healdsburg City Council to consider appointing a member of their council to participate in regional discussions regarding water resiliency efforts and conversations surrounding the proposed Alexander Valley Water District. That was very successful. Councilmember David Hagley proposed the item for a future agenda. It was unanimously supported and I can confirm that the item will be on their City Council meeting for this Monday, August 17th. I will be in attendance for that meeting along with other regional stakeholders. Wednesday, August 5th was the LAFCO hearing. They are the Sonoma County formation commission for local The local, what is the LAFCO breakdown? It's the Local Agency Formation Commission. Okay. Sonoma County Local Agency Formation Commission. So they held a hearing to appeal the denial of the proposed Alexander Valley Water District, which was denied on May 6th, their proposal. During this appeal, I did deliver our public comment on behalf of the City of Cloverdale. The LAFCO Commission voted to continue the discussion with the intent that the Commission will do something other than deny. So that does not, if they were to grant the appeal, it would have been 35 days that they would have to submit a modified resolution. So this allows us and the City of Healdsburg to get our comments hopefully considered in that proposal. So the LAFCO did form an ad hoc committee with Chair Susan Harvey and Commissioner David Rabbit to draft a modified resolution. And as information I received prior to this meeting, they're still awaiting the next steps from their own legal counsel regarding how this is going to proceed. The staff did not expect the decision that was made that day. So we'll be working very hard at anything that pops up. we'll have to jump on it and work together to respond to our opportunity there. On Thursday, August 6th, I met with Karen Gaffney, she's the Director of Strategic Planning and Communication for the North Coast Regional Partnership. The North Coast Resource Partnership's mission is to enhance the watersheds and communities of the North Coast region through collaborative, multi-objective planning and project implementation led by tribes and counties. um so hopefully this will be something that we can participate in uh we're find out about some funding opportunities that might be regional funding funding opportunities to uh help us fund our water resiliency and that was one of the benefits of updating our list is that we can shop it around to groups like this that can help us out so they will be adding us to their email listserv so that we are notified of upcoming meetings and funding opportunities On Thursday, August 6, I attended the Eel Russian Project Authority board meeting as a member of the public, also with Vice Mayor Lanz. They gave a presentation on the new Eel Russian facility, NERF, which would be the proposed water diversion. There was a modeling analysis that was presented. You can check that out on YouTube now on Sonoma Water. There's a YouTube video of just that presentation alone. It's about 25 minutes. And I would say that my biggest takeaway from that meeting would be that we need to work on creating storage options in case of a potential dam decommissioning, especially our short term. storage options so it was mentioned that doing that as a region would be an effective way that we don't have a bunch of cars moving at different speeds that we can all work together on creating storage and I think everyone at that meeting on the board is in alignment with that statement. Monday, August 10th, I attended the Russian River Property Owners Association steering committee for the proposed Alexander Valley Water District. We discussed availability of members and the upcoming Healdsburg appointment. On Tuesday, August 11th, I attended the Cloverdale Leadership Committee. We received an update from CERT, Citizens Emergency Response Team, and I did propose the creation of a subcommittee to work on advocating for all Cloverdale organizations around funding needs and staying successful. And that's, you know, these funding needs do shift from time to time. So how... You know, maybe our city's funds are spent. There's a lot of fundraisers in town. Ace Hardware does raise a lot of money with their roundup. The Grange has potential funding or even just advocating for strengthening the boards of directors for some of these organizations that will ultimately help those groups stay successful. And so I would just say upcoming events to keep on your radar is the Healdsburg City Council meeting on Monday. Thank you.

On July 23rd, I attended an Ag and Open Space meeting. It was at Steamer Landing and the Petaluma River Park. And friends of the Petaluma River lectured us about their long-term vision for the peninsula. Eventually, they're going to add more things to it. including barbecues. And they told us about their free use of kayaks, canoes, and paddle boards, which are available for anyone at the Red Barn at Steamer Park Landing on Sundays. So that was exciting. I also attended the wonderful hike that Councilmember Marquez and Hector Galvin put together along with Ag and Open Space and what I really liked about that hike was they did different things so that we could introduce ourselves to different people and everybody got to know each other and nobody was on their phone the entire time and everybody really enjoyed the hike and I found it really worthwhile. And I also attended the discussion about Esmeralda, the event that took place at the Veterans Hall. And I thought it was really valuable to listen to different people in our community, their concerns about Esmeralda. And I also attended the Chief Parker's surprise party, which was really a fun event and a big surprise for him.

Good evening, Council. On August 6th, I attended my regularly scheduled Sonoma Clean Power meeting with the Board of Directors, and if anybody's still looking for transitioning to complete electricity, get rid of your gas. Sonoma Clean Power does have a rebate program, so if you're interested in that, look up the Sonoma Clean Power website. On August 10th, I attended the Sonoma County Transit Authority board meeting. That meeting was basically regional updates on their continual projects. Nothing too much to report out on that. Tomorrow, I will, on behalf of myself and my employer, We will be donating 36 backpacks to the Cloverdale Unified School District to, and we'll present those to the Superintendent, Glen Cisneros.

Besides the ones that have already been mentioned that I attended, I attended the Geyserville Planning Committee. It was a discussion about smart train, putting in a station in Geyserville and to see if there was community support. I had a meeting with Sonoma Water to discuss different regional concerns and ways that we can work together. That was another good meeting. Let's see here. I met with Mendocino County and Lake County supervisors to discuss the Potter Valley project and different concerns that they have and ways for us to be working together more to make sure that we have a sustainable water supply for our domestic water here. And then we also had a meeting with the Citrus Fair Board in regards to Alexander Valley Healthcare and Cloverdale and the school district with their building of Alexander Valley Healthcare. There's a corner that meets with all of our underground infrastructure and we needed to negotiate a few items. And so we had that meeting, what, three days ago. So that's all they had that was different from everything else that's been mentioned.

All righty, thank you. Um, I've had, uh, had about an hour and a half meeting with, uh, proposed care, uh, candidate for supervisor, uh, Tom Schwenthelm. Great meeting, had, uh, some good discussions on, on the needs of Cloverdale with him. Did, uh, attended the school ribbon cutting for the new school on the north end of town and the T through, uh, K, uh, new buildings that were in there. Um, had numerous constituent meetings and with conversations on everything from them voicing their opinion on Esmeralda to the upcoming elections to you name it. Those have been very numerous and very informative and also attended Chief Parker's retirement. surprise party, which turned out very well and, and had the new chief there. And there was a lot of support. It was sad to see him go. We also have a great new chief here. So Cloverdale Police Department's rolling right along like they should.

There's been a lot of talk of the PRAs tonight. And I we we fully acknowledge that we are behind Mike, how many do we have?

We've reached the 100 count already for this year. We have approximately 47 open PRAs. Many of the PRAs are multi-pronged. So if I had to be honest with you, 200 PRAs, maybe, realistically, from a search parameter. But yes, 47 identified numbered PRAs are open.

So we do take it seriously. I understand people are frustrated. And we've come up with a plan. It's a little drastic, but this is what we're going to try to do is actually close City Hall. for not extended periods of time, but maybe one day or certain hours of the day. This will allow Mike to get some help from the front desk staff who he's training to work on PRAs. Secondarily, we're working on potentially getting a temp. We've already contacted the temp agency. I forget the name of it. It's in town here. So we are, that's our plan right now. As Mike's been talking about this, and I agree with him, we are hemorrhaging. We're trying to get it under control, and we're going to start with those two steps. So please be patient. I understand Mike is a one-person department, and there's a lot of the election, just everything. So that's our plan. So hopefully things will start getting out the door. So I just wanted to bring that up. We mentioned we had nine qualified candidates that we received from the extended nomination period. So that's great, nine folks. Newsletter will go out tomorrow. We did conduct police department potential trainee interviews today. I didn't hear the results, but I know chiefs keep gonna interview the top candidates. That person will be sponsored to go to the academy through the city and then ultimately onto our PD. Mayors and Council's dinner is tomorrow night in Roanoke Park. And just really lastly, big shout out to the Public Works team who refurbished our dais. You can see it looks great, the symbol and all of it. So we did that in-house and really, really happy with the outcome. Thank you.

That's the direction of future agenda items.

have two requests thank you mayor the first one would be to agendize I say maybe timely manner when we're ready for a discussion of a potential LAFCO comment regarding the conditions and the modified proclamation for the proposed Alexander Valley Water District so timeline and their process has not even been set yet so i think when when it's ready you know i can notify a city manager and hopefully get that on the agenda and i would i would like to review any comment with my fellow council members i would totally be on board with that

The one thing I do want to make sure, I've had some comments from some different former county councils that says that this isn't legal for us to be being part of the conversation and part of the decision-making process. And so I want to make sure that our attorneys can look into that and make sure that we are doing it legally so we don't have litigation come upon us. Absolutely.

And yeah, I've been in touch with Vern and also the property owners, attorneys, and we could actually have all three of our attorneys meet and really align on that.

I would support that. Definitely agree with that. I just want to make sure that we're doing the right thing. Absolutely.

Just for the record, can you reiterate?

I think I heard consensus to bring back, whenever we know, a proposed comment letter on the new LAFCO conditions of approval for the formation of the Alexander Valley. I see what we already did, but...

Yeah, yeah, it's basically what we did. We're just when the date that just just to keep that option that we have it on the option to put it on the agenda. Appreciate the support on that. Second item would be to request for our city attorney to conduct a legal analysis regarding potential voter consideration of legislative approvals associated with the proposed Esmeralda development project, including procedural requirements, election timeline and costs.

Is this, just to clarify, to put the city to put something on the ballot? Potentially.

It's really to conduct a legal analysis to find out, you know, I think, you know, what is the council's affirmative authority under California Elections Code 9222? And how does the development agreement align with the government code 65867.5?

I mean, I could just send the council email. I mean, that's a pretty simple answer. It will not take long to do that. I mean, the council can decide to put things on the ballot. If it wants, you have to complete environmental review before you do that. It's too late to put anything on the November 2026 ballot, but we can put all the information in the email for the council. Yeah, that was... In a way that's not... Attorney-client privilege, because I know there's public interest. Yeah, definitely.

Excuse me, sorry. Sorry for interrupting. Yeah, I do understand that we would be definitely out of time for the November election, so an election timeline and cost if there were to be a special election conducted. And, you know, I guess with government code 65867.5, that could be something that there's a... Just if that would be something I would like to discuss publicly, if we could agendize that, that's the request. I think if we all receive information, I don't understand how we, for Brown Act rules that we would not be able to deliberate

you certainly wouldn't be able to deliberate i i thought it was just informational that you might share with your constituents um the council can't make a decision to put something on the ballot until environmental review is done so um you know until sequa is completed so um as the council knows the applicants in the process of requesting that city council approve an addendum so the council could approve that addendum and put the matter on the ballot. If the council doesn't want to approve the addendum and then decides we need to do a full EIR, you'd have to wait for the full EIR to be done and approved before you could put it on the ballot.

If we do receive information from yourself, city attorney, is that information that we'd be able to share publicly? if it's all right with the council i mean this is just citations to law it's nothing analysis i think we can prepare it in a way that is not attorney-client privileged because yeah that would be um you know my my ask here would really to be put in put it put it on the agenda as a presentation um you know which proposed esmeralda's which proposed uh esmeralda approvals may constitute ordinances. Also, would individual approvals need to be submitted separately, or could they appropriately be presented as a single ballot proposition? Just to get a little bit in the weeds there, but that would be the ask if we can agendize a presentation of that legal analysis. And I'm asking my fellow council members, yes. Thank you.

So the direction was to prepare a presentation that will summarize essentially the council's options for placing the Esmeralda project on the ballot, what the procedures are, what What elements of the approval and then what the costs associated with that?

Yes.

For sake of lawsuit, can we say any project, not the Esmeralda project, any development that comes into town? Because I would hate to be sued because we're focusing on one and trying to pick them out.

It's up to the council. I mean, it's pretty generic language, this particular project. because they're seeking the development agreement, things like that, it's not quite the same as someone who's just seeking a CUP where we really, you know.

And that would, yeah, that'd be the request. If, you know, the legal analysis can be done that, you know, we can do this as a specific project, I think that's my understanding, we can. Yeah, so that, okay. You got everything, Mike?

Yeah, Mike. All righty. We're going to call the meeting. Adjournment at 9.26 p.m.