City Council - Regular Meeting

Good evening, everyone. Welcome to the January 21st meeting of the Larkspur City Council. Thank you for joining us tonight. And can I get roll call, please? Council Member Kandel.

I'm here.

Council Member Margulies. Here. Vice Mayor Paulson.

Here.

Mayor Way. Here.

Actually, no.

Sorry.

Mayor Andre. Great. All right. If you can, please join us for the Pledge of Allegiance.

And I'm sorry, just real quick, is that screen not working today? Thank you.

All right. Now we're moving to public comment. This is the time for any members of the public to address the city council regarding items that are not on the agenda or on the consent calendar. So please approach the podium. Please state your name and your city. And you have three minutes.

My name is Ross Esselstyn. I'm from San Anselmo. So the last time I was here, I spoke about flight finances. I'm going to do it again briefly. Since then, I have spoken at the town of Ross, the town of San Anselmo, and the Board of Supervisors. Every bit of trust in Gabe Paulson, he should get accolades for what he's doing, but I want to make a wider distribution of a bit of information. San Anselmo, or... County staff is only just figuring out things that homeowners told them four years ago on how difficult it is to do the project in San Anselmo. Two years ago, San Anselmo voted against the project in San Anselmo. It's now coming down to they understand they can't do the project. If we all pause, including the advisory board and the board of supervisors, there's about $10 million total left over that can go towards the levees. Staff is racing to try to get a budget approved for something that can't be built. I want to go back to 1965 for a minute when the levees were built. A nickel on $100 of value was going to be set aside to maintain the levees. If you paid $10,000 in taxes a year now, that would equate to about $500 of that 10,000 that would have been in a fund to maintain the levees, the dredging, and the concrete channel. In the 60-something intermediate years, it's now $31 because it's eroded in 50 different ways that I don't understand, including Prop 13. So $500... is now $31. And the staff is deciding that they're going to use about half of that $31 that was supposed to maintain the levees for other uses. Staff is young. They're new. We know more than they do. And I've said it before, but I believe Larkspur needs to advocate very, very strongly on behalf of Kent Field, Greenbrae, and non-incorporated, because that money right now, staff thinks they can spend, and I think they can't, and they shouldn't. I've stood up before the Board of Supervisors, and I said, we should take all the money and push it downstream to do something that levies. It's the best flood we've ever had and probably the most productive. Thank you very much. I appreciate it.

All right. Thank you, Ross, for your comments. Is there anyone else in the chamber who would like to make a public comment? Thank you. So we'll close public comment. We'll move to presentations, of which there are none, and approval of the consent calendar. Would any of my colleagues or a member of the public want to pull one of the consent items, one of the items off consent calendar for discussion?

No?

Okay. Can I get a motion, please?

Yeah, I'm happy to move the approval of 4.1, 4.2 on the consent warrants and minutes. I'll second.

Can we do a voice vote? Okay. All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Abstain? Okay. Motion passes. Okay. Now we'll move to Item 5, the City Manager's Oral Report.

Good evening, Council and members of the community. I'm Assistant City Manager Shannon O'Hare, and I'm filling in for City Manager Dan Schwartz. I have two updates for the Council and the community this evening. First is Zero Waste Marin has launched a short survey to better understand Marin County residents' attitudes and knowledge of recycling, waste disposal, and composting. There's a very brief survey available and responses will help the Zero Waste Marin team design future education and outreach efforts in a way that's understandable and reachable to our community. So Larkspur and beyond residents are invited to participate. There's a link to the survey on the City of Larkspur homepage, as well as on the Zero Waste Marine website. The second item I have is that the Larkspur Library is looking for high school students to join our team of teen volunteers. Volunteers will be supporting librarians, assisting with programs, and helping with library projects. It's a great way to give back, gain experience, and be part of the library community. And I suspect will be an even more exciting opportunity when the library finds its new home at the building right next to Redwood High. Anybody interested is welcome to apply through the City of Larkspur Library website or drop by the library and talk to one of our staff about interest in the program and opportunities. That's all I have for this evening.

Great. Thank you for your report. Do my council members have any reports?

I'll give a quick update just on the police council. We had to have a meeting, unscheduled meeting, because everything was going so well with the electric vehicles. We're electrifying the fleet and it moved faster than we could get the charging stations in. So we had to jump through some hoops with PG&E to get the charging stations sped up so we can charge all our electric vehicles. So I'm just happy to announce that the electrification, which we talked about probably a year ago at this point, is now happening and moving forward pretty quickly. So that's it.

Yeah, just basically the upcoming meeting this Tuesday will be for Flood Zone 9. And, you know, we heard some public comment. We'll be going over sea level rise as an agenda item. So just a heads up. At the next meeting, I'll try to bring back some information. So I'm chairing that committee. And, you know, a little bit of what's at stake is, you know, we decided – as a JPA, or as, sorry, you know, through the county, not a JPA, to, you know, try to address some of the, you know, 30- and 100-year floods and, you know, everything in between, 10-year floods. And that's been going for years with very mixed results. And a lot of the money has been allocated for a project in San Anselmo. So we want to see if that moves forward. And also, you know, how we move through the next few years, seeing how the... You know, extreme weather needs are changing and the governance of that agency is changing as well. So a lot more to say, hopefully next Wednesday. Thanks.

And I'll just provide a brief update on NCE, which is our local agency. CCA, which provides electricity to Larkspur residents. There was a board meeting last week, several important issues before the board, one of which is rates. The agency is holding two budget sessions coming up, two four-hour budget sessions on Wednesday, January 29th from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., And also on Wednesday, February 11th from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., those sessions are open to the public for anyone who is interested in learning more about MCE's budget and rates for this upcoming year. It's going to be challenging because PG&E is raising the PCIA fees for all the CCAs and also at the same time PG&E has lowered their rates to customers. And so MCE along with other CCAs are going to have to balance whether or not they're going to be able to cut rates and to what extent in order to stay competitive with PG&E. And then the second item that was on the board meeting agenda to report out is MCE has signed a contract a couple of years ago to build battery energy storage, a pretty large project in Solano County. near the Vacaville-Dixon substation. And that project, the developer of that project has applied for expedited permitting and processing through the state. And so the CPUC is looking at that. But the residents of Solano County don't like where it's situated. It's sited on prime agricultural land. The residents there are very concerned about just contamination of the soil, the water, and fire risk. And so this is an ongoing discussion with MCE and that contract. So anyways, I will have more to report. It's just an issue that the board is working through right now. There's no resolution yet on that. Okay, so Sarah, do you have any updates? Okay, great. All right, so now we'll move to number seven, public hearings, and I'll turn it over to Assistant City Manager Shannon O'Hare to say a few words about that.

So due to an administrative error in the notice of public hearing, which we are legally required to do as part of this process. And for the record, I would like to say is not part of our city clerk's office or Larkspur staff who sent in all of the required materials. We will need to take this. We are not able to take this item up tonight and we will have to continue it to our regularly scheduled meeting on February 4th. so that it is properly noticed in compliance with the law. I can share a couple of things about this item. Over the weekend, the city received public comments requesting modifications to the code amendments as currently drafted, and there's interest in discussing modifications. However, I want to note a couple of things. Because this is a public hearing and adoption, Any substantive changes to the text would require the city to restart the process and take the code amendments up at an additional two hearings. I also received a couple of questions ahead of this item about what the city can and cannot change under existing state law. The staff report on February 4th will outline the steps required should the council wish to pursue any changes or Some folks may remember, I don't think a lot will who don't follow this closely, that as a reminder, the state legislature last year recently passed AB 130, which was formerly AB 306. which greatly restricts the ability of local jurisdictions to make significant deviations from the building code until 2031. The local amendments that are part of item 7.1 as written are allowed under AB 130 because they are carried over from previous years, which is permitted in it. So any newer additional changes that we make may be subject to the new state restrictions. So staff will clarify which additional modifications would be legally permissible under current state law in that staff report if there are any additional questions the city attorney will stop me if our uh conversation deviates too far but this is an agendized item so if there are any clarifying questions that the council may have i'm happy to answer them

I just have one question, Shannon. Thank you for that. So I think I heard you say that staff will clarify which of any of these modifications would be not permissible because of AB 130. When you mentioned that, you're talking about the modifications that were suggested as public comment. Is that correct?

In the written staff report, I think that when staff prepares it, we'll talk generally to what kind of modifications would be allowed without calling any specific public comment. So if council wants to intervene in any modifications, generally we can provide the parameters that people can be a little prepared ahead of any discussion that takes place verbally, what would be inbounds or out of bounds as part of this process. That's a good question.

Thank you.

Thank you, Shannon. And also, could I just ask that it would be helpful to know, one, what some of the other jurisdictions are doing with respect to some of the public comments that's come in, if staff could just let council know if these comments are in line with what we're seeing with other jurisdictions or not. That would be helpful.

Always happy to include what our neighbors are up to and what their processes are.

Great. Okay, so now we'll move on to business items. 8.1, Library at the Commons. I think our Director of Public Works, Julian Skinner, is here and is going to provide us with a presentation.

Yes, good evening. Julian Skinner, Public Works Director for the City of Larkspur. So this is one of our Quarterly updates on our library project at the Commons. I have a couple of slides, and if I can get it to work, a couple of videos, too, that I took inside the building just to update folks on the new library. That's just a reminder to everybody, we do have a webcam at the site, so if you're curious as to what's going on or If you're out of town and want to see what the building looks like because you're not able to drive by, you can log on to the city's website under the library page. We have a camera that's out there taking photographs of the site every 10 minutes or so. I downloaded this one this morning. This is the overall project schedule. Reading from left to right and the red arrow indicates where we are today. So as you can see, we're getting close to the end. Most of the significant structure work is Building envelope, siding has been completed, and we're now getting into the finishes of the building, so a lot of painting, carpeting. The planting works a little bit behind schedule based on we're in winter, but things are looking good for the foreseeable future. Anyway, so they're working on irrigation now, and we expect the planting to finish shortly after. And as you can see here, and I'll get into a little bit more detail lately, I don't have exact dates yet, but we are closing in on finishing the project and then having some events at the site. This is, in addition to the library, we are doing a bit of site work. We're widening Rose Lane leading up to the driveway into the library so that folks leaving on Rose Lane can have a dedicated left or right turn lane onto Doherty. We'll be installing a traffic circle at that new driveway that lines up where the back Lucky's driveway is. And then creating a small parking lot on the west side of Rose Lane. So this is Bauman Landscape who are doing this project. This was a photograph from earlier today. They're forming up the curb that's going to be just north of where the traffic circle will be. And where the truck is parked is where there will be about 12 parking spaces along the fence next to the shopping center. This is what the parking lot side of the building looks like for those that only drive by and see the Doherty side. This is what you would see walking up to the building from the new parking lot, the glass entryway there and then just to the right of those doors. The book drop has already been installed and you can see the support structure there for the book locker that will move from downstairs at the site to the new library. And then the orange pile on there kind of stands out, but just in front of that you can see one of a handful of bike racks that will be scattered around the site for folks that choose to travel to the new library by bike. Um, this is up on the roof, um, just to show that the, um, solar panels are all installed. Um, most of them are on the sloping, um, south, uh, roof, but there are a few panels, um, on the flat roof too. And then this is the habitat garden. So this is the south end of the site in the foreground here with the garbage bag on it. You can see that's, um, one of the eight electric vehicle chargers that have been installed. There's actually four structures there. It's a dual head. So there's eight chargers in total. And then kind of in the right of the photo is the habitat garden that's being formed up right now. The pathways have been graded and the irrigation is going in. This is standing at the west end of the site, looking across the commons area. So in the foreground here, we have what's going to be the granite crete seating area. So there will be canopy trees here and there will be benches and tables and chairs for folks to sit at. And then moving into the background, we have the main walkway into the building from the parking lot and beyond that. will be the turf area of the commons area and then this is the structure of the shade structure that's going up it's in steel it will get painted black the same as all the steel on the building but that's underway now also Inside, this is at the west end of the building, kind of the reading room area. You can see the walls are primed. The windows are all in. The ceiling's gone up. This is the wood ceiling, and the lighting has been installed for the most part. In some areas, they've started with the carpeting only in a couple of places. It's already covered now to protect it for the rest of the work, but things are definitely moving into the finishing stages of the project. So this is the first of the videos. So again, this is standing in front of the building, and I'm going to pan across the commons area and the parking lot and come back to the building. And then the next is inside. So I'm about in the middle of the main library here, standing right about where the circulation desk would be. And I'm starting out looking towards the doors on the south side of the building that face the parking lot. So you can see again, some of the lights are in, the wood ceiling's in. There's still a lot of building materials and construction equipment around, but you can see most of the ceiling work, windows, flooring's not in in this area yet. There where the two lights are, that high wall there with the wood, that's the donor wall. And then panning across to the teen area is on the left. And then directly in front of me here is the children's library. And the next is now I'm walking through the library into the community space. So these were the additional meeting rooms that we added into the project. And start out as soon as you leave the library space, the bathrooms are here. And then walking down the hallway to the east end of the building, there's a water fountains with a bottle filler. And I'm going to look into what's the medium conference room. So this is the one that connects to the children's library. So you can see there's some set of doors there that are been slid open that connect to the children's library. That's the IT closet on the right. then we're coming up on the left this is the staff area so there's a couple of storage areas in here there's a kitchenette for the staff and then an open space for six workstations and then the library director's office is in the back corner i'm going to walk into the largest of the conference rooms It's about the same size as this room without the dais area, and it's being plumbed and wired so that we could hold public meetings here with Marin TV access. And again, this has the sliding open glass doors at the east end, so it opens up to the patio. There's a warming kitchen in there in case anybody has catered events that they want to hold in the space. And then back out, and there's the archive display in the hallway. And then this is the exit door at the west, at the east end of the building. And then this is the smallest of the conference rooms that the contractor's currently using. They're working out of that room. So that's why their trailer's no longer in sight because they've set up shop in the smallest conference room. And then one last one here is a walk through the children's library. So again, walking in from the main library space into the children's area. So the same wood ceiling goes in this area. And then it also has a sliding doors as you see on the right here that open up to the children's patio. And then on the left, there's some cubbies that can either be used for children to sit in or to house books. And in the background, you can see where the sliding doors open up into that medium conference room. And that's the outdoor patio that's connected to the children's library. And there's just a reminder of the budget. There's no budget amendment or request tonight. This is the budget for each of the six library projects as they were approved, showing the different amounts of funding that are in here. Again, there's the big state library grants for 5.2, and there's another state targeted grant, the Levine grant for a million. And then $6.5 million from the Commons Foundation. And then the other funds are Measure B and Measure G and some bond interest. And then a general fund in the last column. So things that are upcoming, we'll be doing commissioning. So this is where an independent third party comes through and tests all the equipment, make sure everything meets all of the codes for efficiencies. And then we'll be doing the final project components. So we'll be coming back to you and showing you what the options are for the enhanced parking lot paving. out in the east end of the parking lot. And then we're also looking at a small water feature in the commons area that a donor has come forward with money for. And then we'll be working on completing the landscaping. So the contractor and well, their subcontractor will be doing all of the landscaping and planting around the building. And then Refugio Marin will come in and do the planting in the habitat garden once we have the pathways and the irrigation all completed. And then we'll be hitting substantial completion pretty soon, probably sometime in the next three to four weeks. That's more of a contractual obligation. That means the building is substantially complete. And in theory, you can get a certificate of occupancy and that lets us start to move furniture in and do any of the stage moving of the books from this library or new books that we're going to bring in. And then probably about a month after that is final completion, which is when the contractors finished all the punch list work and they take the fence down and they they move out. And then obviously somewhere in between there, we'll be moving things into the new library. We'll have some soft openings. We'll have some run throughs to make sure that everything's working, that we can. checkbooks in and checkbooks out and things like that efficiently. And then we'll have an opening and a ribbon cutting. We don't have dates. We'll get them to you as soon as we can. It's looking like probably the middle of next month, the middle of February for substantial completion and then the middle of March for final completion. And then, you know, depending what the weather looks like and how everything's running over there, we'll schedule a grand opening and a ribbon cutting and let everybody know what those dates look like moving forward. That's the end of the presentation. I'm available for any questions.

Great. Thank you, Mr. Skinner, for your presentation. I'll open it first to the council members. Anybody have any questions?

No question. This is a big thank you. Looks fantastic. You're doing a great job. And I suppose I thank you. That's all.

I echo his comments. I think it looks fantastic. And I think that once the library opens, it's going to be very exciting for our community. So thank you very much for the hard work.

I'm echoing what both of my other council members said. Thank you so much. And I was super excited to see the photo of the solar panels. So thanks for including that, Julian. It looks great. And I know the community is very eager to get access. And it's a beautiful, beautiful building. So thank you for all your hard work.

All right. Well, I'll open it up now to public comments. If anybody wants to make a comment, please come to the podium and state your name, your city. You have three minutes. Okay, so no public comments in the chamber. Any public comments online? Okay, great. All right. Well, I'll close public comment and bring it back to the council if there's nothing further. Thank you again, Mr. Skinner, for the presentation. And we will move on to item 8.2, update on the January 2026 Larkspur flood event. And I think also Mr. Skinner is here for that.

Yes, it's me again. So in our presentation tonight, we have A little bit more information than we were able to share with you at the last meeting where during the presentation, actually during the city manager's report, we gave a brief update on the flood based on the information we had at that time. So I'm now able that we've agendized this to go into a little bit more detail and be available for any questions that you or the public may have. So as a reminder, again, some of these slides are duplicates from the last one, but what we're looking at here is the events from January 1st to the 5th, where we had some significant king tides, where we experienced tide levels that were up to 18 inches above what was predicted. And in context, this is a blow up of the tide levels. charts that show in red the elevation of the tide that we experienced that was measured and then in blue what was predicted and then I have some yellow lines here for reference that show what a 10-year tide is what a 100-year tide is and then what the FEMA 100-year base flood elevation is so the highest of the tides was 8.7 on Saturday but Thursday through Monday were all higher than what we would call a 10-year event. So they were all what we would call an extreme tide. And then tidal flooding, as I mentioned before, is not new to Larkspur. We have king tide cycles every year, and these were the highest king tides. They were predicted to be the highest. We have another set of king tides coming in the last week in January. that are predicted to be about four to five inches lower than the set that we went through. They're not always the same height. And then we do get king tides in the summer too. They don't have as much impact typically in the summer as they do in the winter. Historically, king tides have been an issue when they've been combined with rain events, and we've got storm surges coming down the creek from the Ross Valley, and we see tide levels higher than what's predicted. Not as high by this much. But we do see some street flooding with our king tides. We know that we have streets where we have some of the low points where the catch basins are in the streets. Those are the grates that collect the rainwater runoff from the street and take it to the storm drain that take it to the creek. We do have some low spots that are. Elevation seven and lower. So for context, when I'm talking about elevations, remember that the level of the creek got up to 8.7 feet. And we have some low lying areas of our streets where we know those elevations are down at seven. So this event was forecast as a 7.2. So typically had there not been this surge, we would have anticipated to see a little bit of water in some of the low lying areas of streets, which we on occasion do see during the King tides. Um, and that's kind of elevation seven. When we get up to elevation 7.5, um, with our creeks and it comes back through our storm drains, that's when we start to see standing water in the street, mostly along the gutter. You'll see it on Doherty, you'll see it on Larkspur Plaza Drive. And then when you get up to elevation eight for the creek level, which we've seen a couple of times in the 10 years that I've been here, That's what we call major street flooding, meaning that the flooding is actually now crossing over the center line of the street and we have to consider whether we need to close the street for public safety or not. So that's elevation eight typically is our trigger for when we need to start figuring out if we need to close streets or not. And again, we were at an 8.7 during this last event.

I'm sorry, before you go on, the infrastructure that we have in the city for the 10-year line, the 7.8, I think I heard you say that there's some flooding in the streets. It doesn't cross the W line. We don't close streets. It's kind of in our normal world. Is that accurate?

Yeah, if you had a static tide of 7.8 and there was no more rain coming down that was pushing water on us from the Ross Valley, then you would still get some minor street flooding. Like a Doherty and Riviera Circle, that floods probably half a dozen times a year based on the king tide elevations.

Thank you.

Whoops. Again, we experienced significant street flooding at three primary locations from left to right, Larkspur Plaza Drive, and then towards the middle of the screen here, the Larkspur Marina, and then out at Redwood Highway and Industrial. The blue arrows here indicate the direction that the water was coming, mostly from the creek or from the marsh over creeks and in between houses into the streets. Again, this is some aerial footage from some of the news reports that you likely saw. This is the Riviera Circle Marina neighborhood, just houses surrounded by water. This was the highest point over the weekend where you see the creek level, and that's the same level as the water that's covering the street. You can't even see the street between the houses and then on the other side. Of the houses in that neighborhood, there's a lagoon. So in this case, we had water going directly from the creek in between the houses to the street and then in between the houses again and then into the lagoon. This was out in Redwood Highway in front of the Cost Plus Plaza, Trader Joe's. Again, the street was impassable and it was closed during the high tide events for the four days.

And then large for Plaza drive.

This is again a low lying street that typically sees ponding and low level flooding during a usual king tide cycle, but it was close to the point where the water was a couple of feet deep here at the intersection. So this is some information. This is Marin map is countywide. It has property information and it has contour elevations on it. So just for context, I pulled up Marin map in a couple of these locations just to show you. um kind of the elevations of the street and so this is focusing in on riviera circle one area but pretty much the the street if you drive around there is pretty flat it goes up and it goes down but it's pretty level the whole way around and i've highlighted um they're hard to see on this map but these are contour elevations the street here is elevation seven So, again, if you look at the contours, you can easily see where the creek water can make it through below that elevation, below land of elevation 8.7. The water was coming through from the creek into the street and then making its way up to the lagoon. And there's a number of areas around Riviera Circle on the east, on the west, and on the north where the water was coming in between the houses. In previous events where we've had high tides up around Elevation 8 and a little bit higher, we've seen water come in between houses on the north side of Riviera Circle. But in the 10 years I've been here, we haven't seen it come through on the west or the east, which it did this time. This is Industrial Way and Redwood Highway. So the freeway is running north-south on the left. Those are the pink lines. And then in this location, we know that the water came from the marsh, like from the bay through the marsh, and then it crested over the old railway right-of-way. which is where that elevation eight is looking at the contours here. There's an elevation eight, so a low point in that pathway. This is where we first observed water coming over and then it flowed down industrial way. And then you can see that as you get out to Redwood Highway, there's elevation seven out there. And then the low point on the freeway is an elevation seven. So once the water got into this It just started to pool in these low lying areas. And then there is a point on Redwood Highway that's as low as elevation six. So a good almost three feet under what the high tide elevation was. This is Larkspur Plaza Drive. I'm going to show a slide in a little bit that shows some of our pump stations. You may recall that we actually do have a pump station at Larkspur Plaza Drive. And we have an active CIP project to look at replacing that pump station. It's undersized. So we've got some recent topographic survey information for that area. And so I pulled that up. And what you're looking at here is Larkspur Plaza Drive is running horizontally on the sheet. And then Creekside is coming in from the bottom. And there's a pathway that goes around Creekside. And it has a crosswalk at Creekside. That's at the bottom of of the sheet here. That's about elevation 8.3. So the water during this event was coming from the channel into the street. And you can see the low point on Larkspur Plaza Drive here is about elevation 6.5. So similar to Redwood Highway, where it's a good two feet plus below what the tide level was There is a pump station on Larchford Plaza Drive, and there is a wall that runs between the street and the channel. But it's an old wooden wall and an old earthen berm, and it is not substantial enough to keep those floodwaters out. And the pump station that's there is not designed. It's not big enough to pump out all of the creek water that comes in. This is taking a step further back and looking at Larkspur Plaza Drive. The area we were just focused in on is the seven that's at the bottom there, the elevation seven. And then progressing up on this page, there's kind of a dog leg in the street and then it ends in a cul-de-sac area. This street again is very flat and it's around Elevation 7, so well below what the high tide was. The city's pump station is just to the left of where that 7 is at the dogleg, the one that we're looking at replacing. So speaking of pump stations, I got a lot of questions as to why did we flood? Were our pump stations not working? And the simplest answer is the pump stations are sized and designed to remove the runoff from rain events that collects in low-lying areas and pump it out to the creek. They're not sized or designed for when the creek then spills into the street to be able to pump that water back out. They're just not big enough. They're not sized. To do that. So we have a pump station at Bon Air is our newest pump station. And that actually helps to keep some of the hill view area that used to flood during every king tide. dry during this event. South end of the Hillview neighborhood didn't experience any significant street flooding during this event because the pump station was there. So what it was doing was removing any of the rainfall from that neighborhood and pumping it out to the creek. Even though the creek elevation was elevated, the pump station is able to pump that rainwater that falls from the lower end of Hillview out to the creek. The north end of Hillview is not connected to that pump station, and there was water in the streets in the north end of Hillview because the water came into the streets from the creek. The south end of houses and the berm there is a little bit higher, so the creek didn't overtop that neighborhood. And then you see the Larkspur Plaza Drive just progressing from left to right. Heatherwood Pump Station is down in the Heather Gardens neighborhood. That pump station is currently being rebuilt in a joint project with Ross Valley Sanitary District. They have bypass pumps in place while they're rebuilding it. So those were able to handle the rainfall events that we had. None of the tidal influence made it this far back during this event. We have a pump at Redwood High School that you see at the intersection of Lucky and Redwood. Actually, we have a pump station there a little bit further down where the canal is. That's a Corte Madera pump station. And then in the parking lot, the high school have their own storm drain pumping station. So the combination of all those three pumping stations, you still saw that the high school parking lot was flooded during this event. And then moving over to the east side of the freeway, we have a pump station that we call the boardwalk pump station that sits on Caltrans property at the north end of Redwood Highway. And then we have a pump station, industrial pump station that is right next to Corte Madera's pump station that's on that smart levee that I mentioned before where the water breached. again uh the industrial pump station did get overwhelmed on friday and it did shut down but we were able to get it running again but even when the pump station was running on saturday and sunday and monday it couldn't handle the creek overflow that was coming into the neighborhood So a couple of takeaways or points. We're still working with our local partners to put together all of the conditions that led to the elevated king tides from the information that we have based on the precipitation, based on the tide gauges that we have and looking upstream, it seems primarily this flooding was the result of the elevated king tides. It wasn't any surge of stormwater coming down from Ross Valley. Up in San Anselmo, their water levels were all well below flooding or even warning thresholds in Corte Madera Creek. But by the time you got to Bon Air Bridge, the elevations were up at 8.7%. So we're working with the Office of Emergency Management at the county, working with National Weather Service to get some more information. There is another king tide forecast for January 30th to February 1st. Its forecast is a 6.8. Again, this last one's forecast is a 7.2, so it's a little bit lower, but we're very interested in hearing what may have led to this most recent event and if we should anticipate something similar coming up for the next cycle. So we'll be letting the public know once we've had those meetings and we have a better understanding if we have any concerns about the january 30th events but a 6.8 king tide like i said we have these a handful times of year and they have not traditionally been an issue unless we have an atmospheric river or really it's back to back to back atmospheric rivers where the creek just doesn't have an opportunity to to go down in between those events and then you get the the king tides coming in um and working against the elevated creek levels from all the storm runoff And again, we didn't really have any issues with our storm drain pipes or our pump stations other than industrial that we got up and running the next day. They're just simply not designed to handle this amount of overflowing creek water or bay water there. sized and designed based on forecasted storms of 25-year increments, and they're designed to carry that water hitting the ground, making its way to the catch basins, getting to the pipes, and then being carried out to the creek, in some cases with the assistance of a pump like Bonair and Larkspur Plaza Drive and some of our other low-lying areas. As you likely know, there have been regional efforts underway for some time looking at elevated sea level, looking at sea level rise specifically. And so the events that we witnessed during this last king tide cycle are much more akin to a sea level rise occurrence than some big storm coming in. down the creek. So we thought at this point it would be a good idea to have a kind of a refresher on what some of those studies have looked at recently. A couple of primary ones, there's a handful and the links to these documents are in the staff report. If you go to the most recent one, which is the TAM study, it has a list of all the other studies that have been performed in the Bay Area looking at sea level rise by various jurisdictions. But These are the ones that focused on Marin that I'll point out. The one on the left is referred to as the Bay wave. It's the Bay waterfront adaptation. And I can't read that from here. Vulnerability evaluation. That was a 2017 effort that looked primarily at if we have varying scenarios of sea level rise, water is going to be the impacts to Marin County. And then most recently in May of last year, the Transportation Authority of Marin completed a sea level rise adaptation planning for Marin County's transportation system. So The Bay Wave looked at residential units. It looked at businesses. It looked at infrastructure. It looked at agriculture. It looked at natural preserves. It looked at the impact on a whole bunch of different items. It's about a 420-page item. It has a first section that's kind of countywide that talks about what this study did and how it did it. And then it has individual chapters for each one of the jurisdictions. So you don't have to read all 420 pages unless you want to know what's going on in Sausalito and Tiburon, but you can look at the first section that's more general. And then there is a specific Larkspur section. chapter in that um the tam study did it a little differently it combined some of those areas so for example um the bay wave looked at larkspur separately from cordomadera uh whereas for the tam study they combined cordomadera and larkspur because it's primarily the the same issue So the Bay wave again this was a vulnerability assessment so it was an initial effort to look at the risk exposure from sea level rise. So there's no solutions in this document, it's the first step in looking at sea level rise it looked at a handful of scenarios. from low to moderate to long-term, up to almost 100 inches of sea level rise. They looked at different projections of sea level rise, and then they looked at storm surges on top of sea level rise. They ran these six scenarios through each of the communities, and they produced a list of vulnerabilities. And again, they had ones for transportation. They had ones for infrastructure. The one I've highlighted here just shows properties. And I've just highlighted in blue arrow here just the areas that are coincident in the Bay Wave vulnerability assessment with the areas that we noticed were underwater with the last flooding event. And so they Do coincide they they highlight the large for Plaza drive the industrial area and the Riviera circle and they've got different color codes for which of those six scenarios. Each of those areas would become vulnerable. The TAM sea level rise, which is more recent, took it a step further and actually looked at addressing potential ways to address some of these issues. But it was done by the Transportation Authority of Marin, so it's focused on the transportation issues. and the impacts to the transportation facilities. It looked at physical infrastructure improvements to address these issues. It looked at nature-based strategies, so not necessarily just building walls everywhere, but things that were environmentally friendly with the shoreline. And then it also talked somewhat to policy and governance initiatives with moving sea level issues forward. This is one of the slides from that study that kind of looks at some of the vulnerability areas. Again, it's hard to see, but if you look at this report, they've got color codes for streets and whether they would be permanently or temporarily impacted by sea level rise. And again, purple is permanent impact, and so you can see from this that Larkspur Plaza Drive, Riviera Circle, and The area east of Redwood Highway are all shown in purple here as anticipated permanent impacts to the transportation network with sea level rise. They did provide some potential strategies for how to address these. One, which they called 1A, was building a series of levees. So basically, if you follow the creek and all of the offshoots of the creek and you build levees or you build walls up to an elevation that would keep the creek waters out, then you would protect the land behind those walls or levees from inundation. In conjunction with this, and again, this is a planning effort, none of this has been engineered, and this is conceptual, so the levees or walls wouldn't go exactly where they show up on this level of detail. But these would require additional pump stations built behind the levees because then we would have areas that would need additional means to get them out to the creek. We couldn't rely on overland runoff from land anymore. If we built levees and we built walls to keep the creek out, we may need to add pump stations to them when it rains, be able to pump those areas out. Um, so you can see, uh, on the one on the left that shows the levees, basically it's showing a levy following the north and the south shores of, um, quarter Madera Creek, all the way back to Kent field and beyond. And then it comes in and it follows some of those side channels that go around, um, Piper park. And then also a levy would be, um, required, um, along the railway, uh, berm on the other side of, um, one-on-one. So that would essentially create a barrier. between the incoming waters and the land behind it. The other option that was identified as a potential strategy was rather than building levees or walls all the way around all the waterways was what if you just shut off the water? So like a tide gate at Corto Madera Creek at the 101. then that would stop the water from getting in and then you wouldn't necessarily need to build as many levees or walls behind it because you would be shutting the water off. You would still need the berm along the railroad track for that and probably for a little bit on either side to stop the water from overtopping and going around the tide gate. And then a third scenario that they looked at for potential implementation was raising infrastructure. So this would be raising 101. So it's up out of whatever the new sea level would be. And then raising our major corridors so that they would be available for evacuations. So that's Doherty, parts of Magnolia, Tamal Vista, raising those streets up so that if we had an event with a significant sea level rise and a storm surge, that at least evacuation routes would be available. This also would go hand in hand with some green infrastructure that would look at elongated berms out in the marshland to help protect against wave run up and the increased tide levels you get when you get wave and wind action. um and again this would protect the transportation assets but it wouldn't necessarily protect um the lands behind them as much as the ele the options 1a and 1b uh would um Again, this is a planning exercise. There is a cost that's shown for the entirety of Marin County that's based on the level of detail that was put into this. So countywide, it's about $17 billion to address the issues in all of Marin's neighborhoods. And then further, if you look in the TAM study, there is a chart that shows, based on projections, when some of these projects may need to move forward, given that if you're looking at tide gates or you're looking at significant walls and levees, you're looking at a lot of public outreach, You're looking at a lot of engineering studies, a lot of planning. So some of these projects have 15 to 20 year implementation lead times before you would actually start to see improvements. And so that the, tam study doesn't include a graph that shows uh like trigger points for when you might want to start looking at those efforts and then tipping points which is when you would actually need some of those improvements to be completed i did want to list here some of the other efforts that are underway i did mention the bay wave that's what the marin county effort was called when it was looking at the vulnerability now that they're morphing into next steps they've rebranded as marin slr so the county is continuing to look at next steps and how to address sea level rise there's also the county's leading governance component to sea level rise with All of the different jurisdictions. So it's not just the Marin County towns and cities, but it's also Caltrans, all the other agencies that will be impacted by sea level rise. And so this governance project is looking at how should we handle these big projects moving forward? What should be the mechanism to look for funding, to do the outreach, to start having community conversations about what these projects should be, and then ultimately down the road implementation. And then I think most of you are aware of Senate Bill 272 that requires I was as part of the BCDC area to have a regional shoreline adaptation plan by 2034. And so a lot of the work that went into the TAM study and the Bay wave before that will help us to generate those plans by 2034. They've done a lot of the groundwork for us and for all the other Marin County agencies. um in order to move forward uh with plans by that deadline and then caltrans is also um undertaking an effort as they are on all of their impacted areas to look at primarily look at their 101 corridor and what improvements they may need to undertake to protect the freeway in the future caltrans is involved in the marin county efforts that we're undertaking they are they do have a seat at the table so we are aware of things that they're looking at and we're not working in vacuums and they're working on their project to fix a freeway and we're looking at things to protect the community. I think we understand that we're probably all going to land on a lot of the same things and there may be opportunities to work together and have projects that we're able to share across jurisdictions and have mutual benefit versus working in silos. So I think that's the last of the slides. I'm available for any questions.

Great. Thank you, Mr. Skinner. Very thorough presentation. I'll open up to the council members first for any questions.

Yeah, good. Well, I said a few. Julian, thanks a lot. That was helpful. For the Larkspur residents who had damage, can you advise or is the city, you know, advising any way for them to document the damage or to, you know, qualify for disaster related tax relief or coordinate with the county assessors? Do we have anything like that? Any guidance for Riviera Circle for others?

So at this point, the city doesn't have knowledge if there's going to be any declared disaster, either by the state or by the federal government. We understand a request has been made by Marin County on behalf of all jurisdictions in Marin. So that process has to go through its course. Primarily when those disasters are declared, it opens up local agencies to request reimbursement. I'm not sure what the trigger is for private damage reimbursement. It hasn't been included on any of the previous FEMA disasters that I've been involved with. I would advise anybody that has damage or has issues to contact their insurance provider who may have more information about what other avenues may be available to them.

Okay. And then the other – in the staff report, I think one of the things we know is this January 3rd king tide was a surprise. And it's sort of a compound event. So we know at the end of 26 when there's going to be a high tide. We don't know – if there's going to be atmospheric rivers, if there's going to be low pressure, if there's going to be offshore winds and all that stuff. But I'm wondering, what is the criteria? So I think we have a significant flooding criteria, and that was not used. What is that criteria?

So typically what the criteria is during the winter months for a king tide is if we have a king tide approaching, we have areas that we know are low lying and we may have some minor street flooding, which is I think you saw that like around 7.5. If we have a king tide that's forecast to be about seven, then we stage our flooded signs in our neighborhoods. And we have some neighbors that say we know the road's going to flood, but there's also, you know, there could be visitors to the area. There could be delivery drivers that are new to the area. And it's also to remind folks that we want them to drive slowly through those flooded areas because if the street's flooded in front of a property and a car drives through at speed, it can push waves up onto property. So That's our first kind of rollout is if we see that there's just a king tide, but there's no real rain event forecast with it. We'll just put out flooded signs. If there's a rain event forecast, we know there's typically a little bit of a surge in the tide level with a rain event. And it typically has to be. either a really significant storm or a series of back to back to back, like atmospheric rivers. Like a few years ago, we had three atmospheric rivers back to back to back and the creek level really never had a chance to recover and the ground was super saturated and we had some high tides. And so in those events, or if we have a significant amount of rain, and so for example, this last rain event, I think we got about maybe, around two inches in 24 hours. If you look at some of the data for 98 and 72, was it there, there you've got 12, 13, 14 inches of rain in a day. Um, so if we had a significant event where there was, um, a lot of rain forecasts more than just a couple of inches a day, or we had a series of storms back to back and we had a King tide, Then we'd probably be at the point where we'd be staging road closed signs and we'd be looking at putting out messaging. Again, from the time I've been here, we've had two or three events, I think, where I've seen water come over the creek banks at Puerto Madera Creek, at Riviera Circle, and we've had to close the street down. I think, you know, there's a question of if it's just tidal and it's just, street flooding, it's an inconvenience to the point where people have other ways to get out. I think if you have prolonged street flooding, then you start to get into occasions of people may get stranded in their home. And that's when we would look at doing something like maybe considering preemptive evacuations or things like that. But typically not for anything that you see run of the mill. I think you'd have to see something close to 12 inches of rain forecast in 24 hours and a king tide. Or You know, maybe we find out from National Weather Service that things are occurring differently these days. And what happened a few weeks ago is, you know, something that's new and different and is going to be part of the routine moving forward that we'll have to take into account. But for what was forecast for last weekend or the January 2nd to 5th with the king tide elevation and the amount of rain that came in, We've had those a handful of times and it's never resulted in anything like this.

Okay, great. And then, thank you. And then last question was, I'm thinking about this storm drain master plan and it seems that most of this is out of scope, but I'm wondering, in your opinion, if any of this should be considered Excuse me, in a re-scoping. One thought I had was I don't know the technology very well, but I know the storm drains don't really do much good if there's back pressure on the other side. The water can't go out. But the idea of one-way valves or something, is there some way – thinking, you know, to me, this is just a fire drill. You know, I don't want to overreact to an event that may not occur for 10 years. But I do think we anticipate that, you know, that this will trend up and we're building infrastructure that will be around for 2034 when we need our planned and beyond. So again, to repeat the question, is it worth, you know, revisiting Measure G and how we're using that 20 million or the 20 million need, I should say?

Yeah, so there are some, again, yeah, so the storm drains and the pump stations primarily are designed for rain events, but like you mentioned, they do drain out to the creek, and so there is some connectivity there. Some of our pipes that drain out to the creek do have flap valves or gate valves or check valves on the end of them, and In theory, what they do is when the creek rises, it stops the water from coming back through those pipes coming up through the catch basins. They're not 100% foolproof and part of the issue is they're susceptible to debris, landscaping bark or sticks can get in them. And if a flat valve is open just a little bit and it allows the creek water to get behind it, then the pressure equilibrates and the valve opens. So even a flat valve that can close 95% of the way isn't of much help. So we do have a handful of locations where we have those. It is good practice to put them in. As part of the storm drain master plan, we did identify doing an inspection program on all of our pipes, including the ones that go out to the creeks, and we did identify A number of locations where flat valves were old and not working properly or the pipe that was directly behind the flat valve had holes in it. And so the flat valve would close, but then the water would just get in the holes behind the pipe. And so those are actively being addressed as part of our 2024 storm drain project. At the moment, there's a number of flat valves. Most of those pipes have been relined and the flat valves are on order now and they'll come in. And so what they will do is they will stop the creek water from coming back up into the street. So they'll help to a certain degree. They won't really do anything once the creek level gets up to the point where it's coming over land and it's flowing onto the street directly. And then... In looking at the Larkspur Plaza Drive pump station that I mentioned before, again, that pump station is being designed to handle a 25-year storm and pump that water out to the creek. And as part of that, because Larkspur Plaza Drive is so low, we're looking at reinforcing the wall, the perimeter wall that goes around Larkspur Plaza Drive. With a newer wall. And so part of that evaluation, we're going to be spending that much money on that infrastructure will be an analysis of does it make sense to make that wall a little bit higher to help some of these issues? Because right now it's only up to elevation about nine and a half. And it's the wall has some breaches in it. But when you get to the end of the wall, the pathway and some of the properties there are down in elevation eight. And so the water may come just around it anyway. But we'll certainly look at it, see if there's any value adds to that project above and beyond handling a 25 year storm. when we're doing it. Again, we can't size that pump station to pump out the creek once it comes over the wall. That would be too big and it would be used once in every 20 years, maybe. But the pump definitely needs to be upsized from what's there now, which will help get the water out of Larkspur Drive quicker. Because what happens now is the creek comes up, it spills into Larkspur Plaza Drive and it sits there while the pump station slowly pumps it out. So a bigger pump station will help pump that water out and it'll keep the street closed or flooded for a shorter period of time. So there is some overlap between the storm drains and what's going on in the creeks.

Great. I'm glad you're thinking about it. Thanks so much.

Just a couple of quick questions. First of all, do we have any kind of estimates on the damage from this yet?

So as far as from city property, we haven't identified any significant damage yet. We haven't done a thorough assessment. We haven't gone and reclaimed all of our pipes out, but none of our city buildings sustained any damage. And I don't have any information from any private damages.

So do we normally collect information about private damage? I mean, if we want that at some point, figure out what the cost was to the city of Larkspur, meaning including all the citizens of the city of Larkspur. Is there some way to do that?

We have not in the past. The form that was submitted to the county asked for it as an estimate, but it was basically just based on a nominal number times a number of properties that we know are around Revere Circle and Industrial, but there was no, there's no estimates have been provided by any third parties or private property owners or anything.

All right. Next question is, hypothetically, if we as a city council decided that for our infrastructure projects that we're working on, we wanted to put this on the top of the list as far as making our community safe from future storms. What would you and your expert opinion be that we could do to protect our city so we are prepared for the next time this happens? I mean, you know, earthquakes don't happen very often. All of our buildings are earthquake safe. And, you know, I understand this isn't an everyday event, but it would be. So I think as far as so one.

One pathway to follow is to continue the efforts that have been started with all of the sea level rise studies. There's different components to that. And I think there are some stakeholder groups that elected officials are part of. So to stay engaged in that and then staff is continuing to work with some of the ongoing studies. And then as far as, you know, moving forward before we have whatever tens or hundreds of millions of dollars it is to actually do improvements, is that also what you're...

What would be the most bang for our buck that we could do as a city council and say, hey, let's do this, which would help prevent future problems?

Well, I don't have an answer for you today, but what I can do is I attend these meetings moving forward and see where the efforts are going. We can come back and report to you and let you know what the county and the Bay Area is looking at. There's definitely going to be some outreach. And, you know, I think engineering studies and things are a little bit down the road. But I can come back and report and let you know what efforts are moving forward and where things are at and what other jurisdictions are doing in the short term. You know, whether it's more messaging for the community, more information or things like that.

And I think my question is more for the specific topography that we have. I mean, other jurisdictions may be doing things that are right for their jurisdiction, which may not be right for our jurisdiction. So I'm just curious, and I don't need an answer now, but just something to think about moving forward. if at some future date you could come to us and say, hey, listen, we thought about it. We've listened to what other jurisdictions are doing. For Larkspur, the best bang for your buck would be to do this based on our specific low-lying areas at the creek, the things that we have in our jurisdiction, if that makes sense.

It does. And again, it's going to require some of the feedback from the efforts that are moving forward because if Um, a lot of the levies or gates or whatever that, um, or other improvements that may be needed. Some of these efforts may need to take place on private property. Uh, not necessarily on public property, and some of them could have significant. Impacts I mean. The TAM report talks about, it's fine to draw a gate in the creek on a piece of paper, but the environmental impacts of putting a gate in a waterway you know, that has habitat are significant. And there's, you know, we're going to hear from the public on their thoughts of, you know, flood protection versus the environment. And there's going to be aesthetics involved with whether we're raising roads or whether we're adding levees or walls. It's going to be really hard to say what the best bang for the buck is because there's going to be a lot of, I believe, public interest and feedback, not just in the protecting from the flood, but what the other effects might be of protecting us from the flood and making sure we evaluate all of the options.

Thank you. I appreciate that.

Thank you, Julian, for this presentation. The question I had was regarding communications in this last event. What is the best way for people to know about the road closures and the situations? Because I know I'm signed up for Alert Marin and Nixle, and I didn't receive any kind of text messages about road closures and such, and I did hear from other people they weren't aware of the situation and, of course, were traveling and then got caught in the snare. What is your suggestion for our community? What should they do to make sure that they can be getting and receiving communications

Well, I believe those are the appropriate messaging platforms. And again, Central Mormon Police handles communications during these events. As part of the debriefs that we're going to be having moving forward with the county, one of the topics that's highlighted is communication and how to improve on that or identify if there were any gaps or lapses and what happened with the last event. So So communication is part of our upcoming meetings that we'll debrief on the past event and kind of figure out what may have happened or identify ways to move forward. And then if there's different messages we have to push out to the public as far as make sure you're signed up or things like that, then we can look at that. Jane has anything to add?

No, just that next week, the OES is hosting the after action conversation. So multiple city staff will be in attendance. I'll be in attendance of that meeting. Chief Norton at Central Marine Police Authority will also be in attendance of that meeting. And a big component of that will be both what worked in a gap analysis on the communications front. OK, that's what we can do better next time.

Great. And I just had a couple of questions. One about street closures. So who determines closing down 101? Like when it was flooded and there were cars just lined up, is that Caltrans' decision to close it, the sheriff?

It's either Caltrans or CHP. I don't know specifically who actually made the call.

Okay. But in the city of Larkspur, we or somebody, you know, I'm thinking... City Manager Schwartz, or you, or is it Mike Chief Norton who makes the call, who's like, we're going to shut down this street. And CMPD, Central Marin Police actually did a very good job. I would encourage everyone who wants alerts, like Central Marin Police actually did put out alerts, real-time alerts, telling people that certain streets were closed and to stay away from certain areas. So Alert Marin, unfortunately, I'm signing up for Alert Marin too, but there were no communications coming from... but I think CMP did a good job. So within Larkspur, Chief Norton or city manager Schwartz can determine when it's appropriate to shut down streets and notify people to stay away from certain areas.

So it's technically the police that have the authority to shut the street down due to an unsafe condition. They were coordinating throughout the weekend with both fire and public works. And so we went out based on calls that we received about flooding and would go to an area to put, because initially we went out and we put flooded barricades up everywhere. And then reports came in that the water was deep and cars were getting stuck and the public work staff or fire go out and look at an intersection or look at a stretch. And if we deem that it's deep enough that it could be a public hazard, then we let police know that we've identified it. But then it's up to police to say, yes, that needs to be closed or no, it's fine. Keep it open. People need to get through there. So. It's all of kind of the public safety agencies working together, but it's ultimately that decision is funneled to central Marin police. So there's one body that's actually deciding which are closed. So there's a running tally of where streets are actually closed and it's not them not knowing because public works may have gone out and closed the street.

And what is your recommendation for members of the public who want to report significant flooding on a street? Do they call the police number or 911? How does the public let us know? that there's problems and that, you know, someone from the city needs to go and check out this area?

Yeah. So if it's, so first of all, if it's a life safety issue, you should always call 911. So if you see somebody drowning or you see electrical wires in water, call 911. If it's not a life safety issue, but you just see street flooding or flooding, some damage occurring and you're concerned about it and you think it needs a response by the city, then contact Public Works first if it's street or drainage related. If it's during business hours, our phone number's on the website. 927-5017. If it's after hours, there's an after hours phone number that's on the Public Works website that folks can call for such an event if they need a Public Works action after hours. That actually goes to police dispatch. And then if the caller identifies that there's a public works need after hours, then they call our on-call staff and they will go out there. If it's during an active event, say it's been flooding for three days or something like that, and it's just somebody, it's not the first time. somebody wants to report something, but they just want to add it to the log of things for us to look at, then they can either call the phone number or they can email public works at cityoflarkspur.org and we make our way through those throughout the course of the event.

Great. I mean, maybe I can make a suggestion that on our website somewhere that this contact information is easy to find in the event of an emergency. If we can put that somewhere for people so that if people try to, if they want to report something or after hours or, you know, it's easy for people to get that information and they can notify the city.

Yeah, I believe the... that Shannon's office is working on an updated flood page for the city website that will have all that information.

Yep.

And does the city have a way to notify people who are signed up? Like, do we have ways to push out communication and alerts or is that, or is that something that we should just direct people to sign up for CMPD alerts?

Yeah. So we've historically relied on CMPA because they do have the authority to actually make the call. Again, this, the ground happens in conjunction with the city manager's office and public works 99.9 of the time but we we allow that messaging to go through cmpa um throughout the years the city has looked at different opportunities available to do um pushing of text messages for communications to to residents and how you get that information etc um there are some at the time there was some concern around privacy for opting people in to push text messages, as well as the cost associated with those platforms. But it's certainly something we could revisit. I've looked at it throughout the years on what would be available to us to be that. But particularly for street closures, et cetera, I do want to drive home that redundant messaging in times like this is not a bad thing, but it is good that the ultimate power and authority lie with the Central Marin police because they are responsible for road closures.

But great. Thank you. OK. All right. Those are all of my questions. Let's open it now for public comment. If members of the public wish to comment, please come to the podium and identify yourself. Please give your name and your city. And you have three minutes. Thank you. Thank you.

Hi, my name is Marla Victor. I live in Larkspur and I live in one of the two cul-de-sacs neighborhoods. off of Riviera Circle. And what I didn't hear in the overview, and thank you so much for that overview, was the role that the lagoon plays in dealing with stormwater and and how the lagoon is managed in terms of draining it. So what we experienced was our cul-de-sac, our street off Riviera Circle, flooded right at the beginning on the first day and never cleared. Even at low tide, when I would hear from others—we couldn't get out— when I'd hear from others that the creek had fallen— The water in our street and the water in the lagoon never went down. So it just continued to increase. And so our flooding increased each day. And we were flooded from both the street side and from the lagoon side. So is there a plan to improve the ability of the lagoon to drain? Because my understanding is that Riviera Circle stormwater drains into the lagoon, not out to the creek. But maybe that's incorrect. So that's sort of my question. And is there a pump station that addresses lowering the level of the lagoon when it is breaching its banks? Thank you.

Great. Thank you. Do we have any more public comment in the chamber? Can you get a response to our questions, or are we just telling her questions?

Oh, sure. So under the Brown Act, The time for public comments is an opportunity for the public to address the city council. If the city council is interested in hearing from the public works director or other staff about any of the questions that have been asked, the council can ask for responses. But ultimately, public comment time is an opportunity for the public to direct comments to the city council.

Great. Okay. So why don't we have public comment? I will make a note of your questions and then we can discuss them with the public works director afterwards. So if there's anyone else who would like to make a public comment, please come forward.

Hello, my name is Ted Wilson. I'm a resident on Riviera Circle and we've been there about 10 years and this high water and these water events are a part of living here. I think we understand that. In previous years, we had these weather events. we were able to have the lagoon level pump down. The city put two big pumps over on the western edge, the western street of Riviera Circle. And what I think needs to be addressed is the issue of being able to proactively pump down the lagoon level, when we see a big event like these atmospheric rivers coming in, coinciding with the King Tides. King Tides this year were really bad in January. As we know, it was a supermoon. It was once, as I understand it, once in about a four-decade bad event. However, it doesn't seem the city's been at all proactive this year in pumping that down. And so we have another event coming. It's going to be, I reckon, about five Maybe 5% lower water levels, but it'd be nice to know what our plan is for being able to those water levels down before that event happens. The other thing that I think needs to happen is, we need to see some street cleaning from this sweeping coming through because there's a lot of twigs and a ton of debris in the street that's been there for. since that happened. So those are my two questions. And I think that it would be great if the city council would take this as a highly urgent thing. It's an emergency for people that live there that we know that the city's being proactive in helping us deal with this in the way that we've dealt with these weather events before. Okay.

Great. Thank you very much for your comment.

John Thornton. I'm also a resident of Riviera Circle, and I echo Ted's comments. The other question I had is, in front of our house and a lot of the houses where you have the sewer cleanouts, we had raw sewage bubbling up in the streets. And there was a lot of sewage. You could see bits of toilet paper. There was a lot of sewage. And I talked to the sanitary department. They were blaming the city for, oh, they weren't proactive, you know, to the point of not pumping out the lagoon they said well the reason why is the storm waters overwhelming our sanitary sort of substations because the lagoon level wasn't lowered so they're kind of pointing fingers and and here we are in another week coming up and i hope there's some something being addressed so there's not raw sewage flowing in the street again next week thank you thank you very much

Hello, my name is Cindy Morgan, also resident not on Riviera Circle, but the other cul-de-sac. And, you know, I had at least eight inches of water in my garage for several days because nothing drained. So, Mr. Skinner, thank you for your report. But I think one of the key things to note. When you talk about all the drainage, as you pointed out, stuff came up from the storm drains, but you also indicated that things drain into the lagoon. And the lagoon floods all the time. It is never lowered, really. And so the lagoon was... The event was... Monday through, you know, the lagoon had flooded for four or five days before the big event came on Saturday. You know, we had 20 feet of water into our backyard that was many inches deep. And so when there's no efforts to kind of lower what's designed to be the drainage system for the area, it just floods into the street, into people's yards and contains sewage. So The key thing that's missing is that lagoon is not being drained and it is not able to take whether it's rain, whether it's storm surges whether it is. Because it's too it's too full there's no proactive way to lower it, whereas quarter madera and other lagoons also have that where they proactively lower it and they don't have the flooding that we do. Great Thank you very much for your comments.

My name is Chris Hillard. I live on Via La Brisa, which is in the Riviera Circle area. And I have to say in the past, I have to compliment Julian because he would anticipate these storms and he dropped the level of our lagoon a foot maybe prior to the storm or the tide, and then we would be fine. This year, my wife called and actually talked to Julian. She got through to his number and said, you know, we got this big storm. Can you pump out the lagoon? His comment was, I'll probably get to it tomorrow. And our thought was, let's get to it right now. So that was kind of a dead end. He finally put some pumps in, and I suggest you get some larger pumps. If it wasn't for Gelati, they brought in like five large pumps and lowered our lagoon and did a terrific job. You'd have to admit, Julian, they really helped out. So I think we have to be a little more proactive and recognize that – This lagoon is very volatile, and we've all lost assets because of this flood. We've lived here 25 years. We've never seen like it. But I suggest we be more proactive and maybe look at the opportunity to get some larger pumps, which might help. Thanks.

Okay, great. Thank you for your comment.

I'm just going to take a second to just remind everybody, the point of public comment is to comment to City Council. Please don't talk directly to staff. We will address staff when we're done and try to make sure all your questions get answered, but the purpose of this is just to address Council. Thank you.

My name is John Quigley. I live at 258 Riviera Circle, right next to the outlet pipe. I've lived there since 1983, so I have a little bit of experience with the flooding. Back in 1988, we had a severe high tide, the highest we have ever seen there. I put a mark on the fence at that time where it came to. On Friday, the first day of our seven-foot king tide, the elevation, let me rephrase that. Over the 40 years or so, it's never gotten to that height before. But on Friday, the 2nd of January, which was the first day of the seven-foot tides, it got within a quarter inch of that. There was one big difference. Back in 1988, when that tide gets to that level with the storm surge, south wind, all the things are raising it up to the higher level, it flows over in a number of areas in there. And that is why the lagoon always used to be lowered by a foot to 15 inches. If they lower the lagoon by a foot, That's over 4 million gallons of capacity. When the tides come up like they do every year, every January and February, you're going to get close to a seven-foot tide. When it tops over and starts flowing into the street, you can't stop that. But if the lagoon has been lowered enough, then the street drains, which nearly all flow into the lagoon, will take that water and it'll rush into those drains out to the lagoon. That's a lot of capacity. What it does is it buys us time. This time the street started filling up immediately because the lagoon was so high, the drains could not flow into the lagoon because the water in the lagoon was too high. So that's a number one thing we have to address and that's really the only thing we can do. The other solutions are 10, 20, 30 years down the line. That's not what we're looking for. We need to address what we can address now. And that worked for all the years, was lowering in advance of a, you know, we know when the tides are. We know what the weather is going to be. That's when we have to lower it. There are other things we need to maintain. Our storm drains, we need to maintain the outlet pipe and the inlet pipes. As part of the project they're doing, they had to cut off out a section of one of the inlet pipes. And it was out in the street in front of my house. If you look at it, it was about a 15-inch pipe. It was reduced down to about six inches in the middle because of all the muscles in there. It hadn't been cleaned in years, it looks like.

Okay. Thank you, sir, for your public comment. Thank you very much.

Hello, my name is Hannah Fleagle and Mr. Quigley is my neighbor. We're on each side of the easement. So Larkspur Public Works has put gravel in that easement and during the storm it all came into the street and plugged a drain and so i during the storm got out with my shovel and rake and i scraped off all the gravel and then it slowly started to drain And in a presentation I heard tonight, it was said that there was a grant in 2024 for pipes being replaced in the Larkspur Marina. So now that it's 2026, I'm hoping that the pipes will actually get installed and repaired and cleaned this year because a lot of the reason that the water was pooling in the two cul-de-sacs and other places in the marina was because of debris, mussels, mulch, bark, all those kinds of things. And someone made the comment that the street sweeper is not coming around consistently. And so there's a few things that can be done and should be done immediately before the next storm. Thank you.

Great. Thank you for your comments. Anyone else in the chamber like to provide comments? Okay, let's go online.

First comment will come from caller ending 1402.

James Holmes-Larkspur. It looks like we will need eventually a lot of money, including federal money, to address the flooding problems. So if we want any federal funds, at least in the next three years, then we might want to think about how we, on our end, can cooperate with federal initiatives and avoid resisting flooding federal initiatives or conditions to federal funding, all to the end that we can present ourselves in the most favorable light for federal grant funding. Thank you.

Great. Thank you, Mr. Holmes.

Looking for our next comment will come from Natasha.

Yes, hello, this is Natasha Chalmers, Luxburgh Marina. Well, first of all, thank you so much to Julian Skinner for your really thorough report. And it was very helpful to hear that and hear what the initiatives are for the whole of the county. I wanted to reiterate what Council Member Candell was saying about what can... What can his department recommend for our city? I think that's really important. And if there's a way we could get some kind of timeline on that feedback, I think that would be helpful. And more specifically, I wanted to follow up on Ted Wilson's comments about when we could have the streets cleaned on Riviera Circle and down the cul-de-sacs. There is a lot of wood chips, debris, just twigs, as they were saying, and also having the storm drains cleaned. If we can get that at least cleaned out before the next storm comes in and next high tide, I think that would be really helpful. Thank you. Thank you, Natasha.

Looking for any additional raised hands from the Zoom audience members. And there's no further public comment.

Okay, great. All right. Well, I thank everyone for your public comments. Let's bring it back here to council. All right. So I wrote down some questions. If I miss any, feel free to chime in here. OK, so the number one thing that I heard was that the lagoon was not draining, even though the creek level had receded. And that may have been due to not proactively pumping down the lagoon prior to the storm. So, Mr. Skinner, could you just please comment or educate us on that, please? Thank you.

Sure. So the Marina Lagoon is a passive water conveyance body, which means there's no pumps. There's no permanent pumps out there. It has two inlet pipes and it has one outlet pipe. Um, under normal conditions, what happens is the creek water flows in through the inlet pipes. It gradually makes its way over to, um, the east end of the lagoon and it goes out of the outlet pipes. And then there are weir boards, um, that control the level of the water in the lagoon. So it doesn't go up and down with the Creek, uh, cause the pipes that come in are small. So when the Creek goes down, it doesn't drain the lagoon. It empties a small amount of water. And then when the Creek comes back up a small amount of water, relatively speaking, compared with a, overall size of the lagoon comes in. So the idea is it circulates water so that the water stays healthy, whatever the appropriate word is for healthy water. So it passively passes creek water through it. There are a number of storm drains, inlets and pipes around Riviera Circle and the various cul-de-sacs. Some of them drain directly out to the creek. Some of them do drain into the lagoon. So not only does creek water from the inlet pipes come into the lagoon, but water that falls on the street in the areas of those streets where the catch bases are connected to the lagoon, that rainfall runoff goes from the street into the storm drains and goes into the lagoon. In previous years, I was asked earlier what our preparation is when we have these events coming up and we have high tides and rain events. One of the things we do is we look at the lagoon. If we have a high tide coming in and we have a significant amount of rain coming in or we have back to back to back atmospheric rivers coming in, then we have in the past proactively rented a pump and pumped down the water level in the lagoon so that when all the rain runoff from the streets that goes into the storm drains and goes into the lagoon, plus the elevated creek levels come in to the lagoon, we've got a little bit of a buffer. Because if we get a whole lot of rain coming in, then there's more water coming into the lagoon between the rain and the inlet pipes than there is going through the outlet pipe and the level of the lagoon raises up. So that's our normal protocol and that's what we've done in the past. We haven't done it often because there's not often the criteria of big atmospheric river and high tides coming in. This year, there is an active project that the HOA is undertaking where they're replacing their bulkhead wall that's around the back of all the properties that back onto the lagoon. As part of that project, there's a number of impacts it's had on the lagoon. And there was a request made by the contractor and the HOA that we not lower the lagoon level this winter because the equipment that they're using for the bulkhead project performs better with an elevated water level. In addition, there are several areas of the older bulkhead that's being replaced that are in deteriorating condition and a lower lagoon level impacts the safety of those walls. They basically The bulkhead wall needs the soil on one side and the water on the other to keep it up. So if you drain the lagoon down, then the stability of the old bulkhead wall is compromised. And so collectively, we decided we would not lower the lagoon for the project this year. So there are weir boards in there. The lagoon started out six inches higher than it normally would in any winter because we intentionally kept the lagoon level higher. Um, and then again, if we had known that the tide elevation was going to come in 18 inches higher than it did, then we would have talked to the contractor. We would have talked to the HOA and said. We understand that you want the lagoon level higher because of your project, but there's a big system coming in and high tides. We want to lower the lagoon. We didn't have that forecast. We had a 7.2 tide forecast with no significant atmospheric river. We did not have the forecast that we needed to go and lower tides. the lagoon so the impacts in the neighborhood were compounded by a the high tide level plus yes the lagoon started at a higher level um than normal but that was uh not a not an oversight that was by choice and that was not having the information that we were going to get an 8.7 tide

OK, thank you for that explanation. And so by the time then that the creek rose and the king tides rose and the creek came over, would it have made sense to pump then or was it just that was just too late? We had just missed the window of opportunity.

No. So we brought we arranged for a pump to come in. So the major flooding started on on Friday. And then the tide went down, but the lagoon did not go down. And again, it took on so much water from the creek overflowing that that one little outlet pipe that's discharging water wasn't able to get rid of the water in time. And so The streets whose storm drains drain to the lagoon and the lagoon, the water levels actually stayed high while the creek was going down. And that's when I actually got the most phone calls. I got a few calls earlier in the day when the water level was really high, but my phone was ringing off the hook when... the Corta Madera Creek was going low, but the lagoon was staying where it was. And so that's, we were also talking with Ross Valley because they have pump stations out there and the high level water, high water level was getting into their system and they were having to run pumps to pump their sewer through the force main across the Creek. And they said, Hey, the street's not draining. We're running pumps like 24 seven to get our system working or you should come and look at whether you need to pump out the lagoon. And so we arranged for a pump to come in first thing in the morning. And then this was a pump that we rented. It's a six inch pump. which is the same size pump we've always brought in before. And then later on that day, we realized that the water level in the lagoon just was not dropping significantly enough. So we reached out to County of Marin flood control, asked them if they had more pumps. They said they had a six, they had three six inches like ours, and they also had some eight inches that they had already staged down in Marin City in anticipation of a flooding event down there. But they advised that the eight inch pumps are not very mobile. Everything is bigger. The hoses are bigger and they're not really set up for emergency response to move in and move out. So they recommended a six inch. So we got another six inch from Marin County Flood Control and we set that up. And so we had two pumps running. And then we got into the next, the high tide. So by that point, we pumped the lagoon down a little bit. And then we got to the high tide on Saturday and the lagoon filled right back up again because the creek came over the banks and it refilled the lagoon. And so at that point, we decided we need to get as many pumps as we can out here. We've only got three places that we can pump water out. There's the two inlet pipes and the one outlet pipe. And so we worked with Gelati Construction, who were the contractors that were doing the bulkhead project, and let them know what the issue was and that we were having a significant lagoon level water issue. And so they brought out an additional six inch pump. So the same size pump that we had. the same size pump that we bought from Marin County Flood Control. And then they also brought out a handful of smaller four-inch pumps that they put into the catch basins and the cul-de-sacs to help. But there's really three primary locations to pump out the lagoon, and we had a six-inch pump in each of those. And with the three pumps running, we were able to get the creek down overnight. And then Sunday and Monday, again, we had creek breach and we had water coming back into the lagoon. And I think this event was a Friday through Monday of high tides. It took until Thursday to get the lagoon back down with the three pumps we had out there. And then, so we have been talking with the HOA. We have been talking with the contractor about what happened and how not to have it happen again. And, you know, looking at the next King tides coming in, I haven't seen the forecast out that far yet to see if there's any rain coming in. Haven't got any feedback yet from our operational partners on why this event was different than every other one, but. We have time to make that determination about whether we want to lower that lagoon down and work with the HOA and their contractor to understand the impacts to that project if we do so.

Great. Thank you for, again, that explanation.

Okay, so the second- Before you change topics, you'll get a follow-up on that just real quick. Okay, thank you, Julian. I completely understand now. It was a conscious choice because of the bulkhead project not to lower the lagoon. I get that hindsight. We didn't know it was going to be this big of a storm. My question is, normally we lower the creek. It sounds like when we expect there to be an issue. Are we comfortable having our plan being when that happens, we're going to rent the pump and, you know, and then have one six-inch pump and that's enough to lower the creek for future storms? Or do you think it would make sense for the council to consider lowering I don't know, having a more permanent structure on the creek because this seems to be kind of a relatively common place where we do have to pump water out or having our own pump or having a bigger pump. Looking back now, trying to look into the future, is there something you would recommend we could do to – better prepare? So if we say, hey, there's going to be a big storm coming in next week, you know, we're ready for it and we don't have to scramble, if that makes sense. Or do you think we're okay with the way we are for future storms?

So a couple of phases in my answer. The first phase is in a budget cycle prior, you have authorized us to purchase a six-inch pump so we don't have to rent one every time. So we're working on purchasing one that we could have in the yard. And then it would be easier to stage beforehand and not rely on having to rent one every time. As far as going with a bigger or a more permanent pump, I think we would really need to have a look at the neighborhood in its entirety and how all the storm drains work and how the lagoon works and have conversations with the neighborhood about what their expectations are. I mean, there's a number of different things that you could do, and I wouldn't say necessarily just putting a big pump in. Is is the answer. There may be other things that could be could be considered.

OK, so if we wanted to go down that path. And hypothetically, we want to say six months from now, we would like to have that conversation of what is the best long-term situation for that neighborhood. What would you recommend we do in this six months to prepare for that conversation? Is it something we should put on the agenda and have the neighborhood invited here and have that conversation? Is it more of a public works with the neighborhood? What are the next steps?

Yeah, so I'm actually sitting down with a member of the HOA board this week to chat about what happened and what to look for, A, for the upcoming January 30th event, but then also to talk about more overall about how the lagoon functions and what their expectations are. And if there's some things we should think about doing differently. So I think as a, as a staff to HOA level, we'll come away with that with what their thoughts are. And then, you know, if there's operational or cost impacts that come out of that, that they have an expectation from the city, then we would come back and report that to you.

Okay. Thank you. I appreciate that.

Great. And also, when this bulkhead project is done, will that help the flooding issue? Or are we just in this period where we're in the middle of this project and we're not able to proactively pump out the water out of the lagoon? Once that project is finished, are things going to improve? Are we still going to have the same problem and going to have to pump water?

in the water before it'll help to a degree one thing the new bulkhead project will do is the existing bulkhead as it is now um has sunk in a lot of locations so people get water in their backyards ordinarily because of the existing bulkhead assault sunk they won't get that with the new bulkhead, so it won't appear as flooding to them. But the new bulkhead will be stronger and it will be able to withstand being drawn down, whereas it's a little touch and go, drawing down the existing bulkhead It's a little touch and go drawing down the lagoon now with the existing bulkhead due to its condition, but with a brand new bulkhead design there, we will be able to draw down the lagoon in the future if needed. I don't think it'll stop at another 8.7% overtopping from coming in and flooding. And again, that's a lot of water when you look at the perimeter of Riviera Circle and the water six inches to eight inches deep in some places, sheet flowing into the lagoon, it fills up really quick. You know, like I said, we were pumping it out and it was taking, you know, 12, 14 hours to see the water level go out. The high tide's there for like an hour and it's all back again. It's a lot of water. So, yeah, the bulkhead will help to a degree. It'll allow some more flexibility there. but it's not ultimately going to address the issue of the creek water over the popping. It just may give us some more tools to work with as we evaluate how to deal with that.

Julian, do you have an opinion, you know, if hypothetically the bulkhead project was not going on and if we had lowered the creek level of foot or whatever we normally do when we're anticipating a storm, would that have prevented what happened? Would it have... Had any effect? I mean, I know this was kind of an overwhelming storm. I don't want to blame the whole flooding on not lowering the creek if it really wouldn't, lowering the lagoon, I mean, if it really wouldn't have made that much of a difference.

Yeah, so I haven't done those calculations, but based on my conversations with the engineers that are working on the bulkhead project, it doesn't. And they were out there during the event. They witnessed how much water was coming from the creek to the lagoon. If that if we had lowered the lagoon by two feet, I think it would have ended up in exactly the same place based on the amount of water that came in. Basically, the water came in from the creek. It flowed to the street. It got to the lagoon. And everything was the same level. It doesn't matter whether the lagoon started three feet lower or six inches lower. The lagoon was going to end up the same level as the creek. So. And again, I haven't done those calculations. That's just my and other engineers observations from being out there and seeing the real world conditions of how much water was flowing into the lagoon.

Okay, great. Thank you, Julian. All right, so the other questions that I had from public comment. Okay, so several comments about street cleaning, clearing away debris after the storm, clearing out the storm drains. Do we have a schedule for that, or can we commit to doing that before the next storm?

Yeah, we will contact our provider for street sweeping and see if we can. If it's not on the regular schedule between now and the next event, we'll see if we can add one in. That is dependent somewhat on cars being parked on the street. So I think if folks know what the regular schedule is and they don't park on the street to accommodate that, if we end up that we have to add a day and it's a different day, we'll try and get some noticing out to the HOA. Folks know to the extent possible they can park their car off the street, which will really help the cleaning process. And then the storm drains, yeah, we're going around and pulling debris out of catch basins and pipes to the degree we can. A lot of landscape bark, a lot of landscape materials ended up in the pipes and the pumps over the event.

Julian, I'm sorry. Some of the comments were also about maybe the streets could be swept either more often beforehand, that there was some dissatisfaction with the prior street sweeping, that there was so much debris that ended up in the drains, that maybe if the streets could have been swept more often beforehand. It would have prevented some of those issues. Do you know how often those streets are swept? And is it an adequate amount in your opinion? I mean, how is that? Because I'm just not aware.

Yeah. So the schedule is on our website and the city is split up into different zones. And there's actually more frequent sweeping over the winter months. And that's based on our clean water storm. I believe it's every other week, but it is available and folks can get on the city website and the street sweeping schedule is available. It's all color coded and they can actually see the day that their street gets sweeped. And there is a summer schedule and there's a winter schedule. So it is more frequent in the winter.

Thank you. And you think that the schedule as it is is sufficient for keeping that streets clean enough so that if there's a storm, it's not going to back up the storm drains? Or do you think no matter what it's going to have, it's going to back up the storm drains because stuff is coming off of people's yards and things like that?

Yeah. Other than this event, I haven't had any comments about street sweeping.

Perfect. Thank you.

Okay, great. All right. So one comment about raw sewage. Is that... Just because there was so much water and there was debris and the drains or what was going on there? Or is that Ross Valley's?

Yeah, I'm not sure. I mean, I know we know Ross Valley. We're out there pumping. So they have a pump station there. So the area has sewer pipes under the street that drain to their pump station and it gets pumped. by pipes elsewhere. And from my understanding that they were getting a lot of inflow into their system from the rainwater or from the street water. And so their pumps were just continually going and they couldn't keep up with the extra water. So they were having to bring in extra pumps and they were concerned about all the pumping they would have to do I don't have any reports of raw sewage. I think if people have concerns about that and if it's a concern, then yeah, Ross Valley would be the appropriate agency to reach out to to get more information.

Okay. Well, I think public comment period is over. Sorry. Well, let's, yeah, let's, we're going to ask the questions and then, yeah, thank you.

So, Julian, as a follow-up, hypothetically, if there were sewage issues. Uh, is there anything we as Lorsper can do to help Ross Valley be more successful or is it really out of our hands? Um, I mean, we would, would, uh, I don't, I don't know what we could do, but, but I'm just from your perspective, is there something we can do to prevent that type of thing from happening again? Or do we really just defer people to, to Ross Valley?

I would defer people to Ross Valley. The only thing I can say from the event is they did ask us what our schedule was for pumping it out. And we said, we're pumping the lagoon and the street out now. And they said, thank you. Okay. Thank you.

So it would be appropriate, though, for residents, if they are seeing raw sewage in the streets, to reach out directly to Ross Valley Sanitary and make them aware of That there's a problem and there needs to be cleanup or remediation immediately.

Yeah. Ross Valley know all the protocols for dealing with bills and everything that goes along with that. If we were notified, we would notify Ross Valley.

Okay. All right. Thank you. And then one comment about the gravel issue. Is there a way to, I don't know, shore up the gravel so it's not spilling into the drains or what?

Yeah, I'm not sure exactly where the location was. We have three easements over there. I heard it was on an easement. So if that person wants to send an email to publicworks at cityoflarkspur.org. or wait for me after the meeting and give me the exact location. I can have somebody go out and address it.

Okay, great. Thank you. And then last question was just a timeline on receiving feedback from you after you've had a chance to talk to residents and maybe think about what the city can do or options for the city to help prepare for future flooding events like this. Is that, you know, let's just maybe we could work and, you know, figure out a time where we could just bring this back to council when you're ready to, you know, present some options and maybe some cost estimates so that council can discuss what can be done.

Okay. Yeah, I mean, I'll know more after my meeting with the county and our partners next week. I don't anticipate having all the answers then. So, yeah, I can chat with the city manager when he returns and we can kind of put something together schedule wise.

And we're talking short term solutions, right? I mean, we nobody has funding. I mean, just to be clear with the public, we we. The longer-term permanent solutions, if there are permanent solutions and there may not be permanent solutions, those will cost a lot of money. And so we will need federal or state funding for building new levees, gates, raising roads. Those type of projects are long-term and we will have to find external funding for that. But to the extent that there are things that the city of Larkspur can do in the short-term, To help alleviate some of these issues. That's what I'm talking about. So I'm not expecting you to fix. I'm not expecting, you know, longer term solutions that that will take coordination with many agencies in the county. And, you know, a lot of a lot of it's not in our jurisdiction, but just what can the city council do in the short term? Thank you. Okay, I was just told that I can reopen public comments if people do have comments. So that's the end of my questions in terms of what I wrote down.

Well, I was just going to say, I heard something about a pipe replacement project, which was awarded, grants were awarded in 2024. And I don't know which pipes those are, but can you comment on that?

Yes. So after we adopted our storm drain master plan in 2019, you authorized Measure B, Measure G, and some ARPA funds towards two storm drain projects. One was called the 2023 Storm Drain Replacement Project, and one was called the 2024. It happened in subsequent years. And they included a handful of pipes that following our video inspection and investigation of pipes, we had identified needed to be lined or fixed or replaced. The scope for the 2023 project included two pipes on Riviera Circle at the far east and the far west corners of that neighborhood that were both lined. They both have flat valves that are scheduled but haven't been installed yet. And then there was a couple of pipes at Riviera and Doherty that were included in that scope. So those pipes have been rehabilitated, lined, and they're scheduled for flat valves as part of the 2023 project.

Okay, so is there a timeline for the replacement?

Yeah, the valves, they're about a three-month period. lead time. And so all the pipes had to be fixed first and then they have to take exact measurements for the flat valves to work properly. So we had to wait for all of the pipe replacements to be completed and then the flat valves can be ordered. And so they were about a three month lead time and they were ordered just before the end of the calendar year. So we're probably still a couple of months out before we'll have valves at those locations.

Okay. And has there been any assessment of the inlet and outlet pipes for the lagoon? I mean, I heard people mentioning.

Yeah. So the outlet pipe and structure were all replaced a few years ago. That was a city project that the One of the CFDs out in the marina paid for. And then the two inlet pipes were replaced about 25 years ago, plus minus. They were lined. And they get cleaned every few years. They were scheduled to be cleaned a few years ago. But around the same time, none of the... waste centers or dumps in Marin County or in the immediate area would any longer take sludge material from storm drains. So if material is wet and it comes from a construction site, the waste haulers receivers won't take it anymore. So pretty much countywide, everybody has really truncated their storm drain cleaning program because it's hard to get rid of the material that you pull out of the storm drain. You should just take it with regular waste material and take it to the dump and pay for it, get rid of it, but they won't take it anymore. So you have a couple of choices. So where we've had to do it because we've had ongoing projects and we needed to replace the pipe, We've either had to pay a lot of money to truck the waste material far away, or we've had to pay to set it out somewhere and let it dry and test it until it's in a condition where we can take it to a local dump site. So our pipe cleaning program has gone way down over the last few years based on that disposal so that. The inlet pipes are actually probably overdue for a cleaning. But again, in the grand scheme of things, they're a miniature component of what happens in the lagoon.

Okay. But those are not used as part of the pump, the procedure to pump the water out?

No, we bypass. Where those inlet pipes are, they connect to a manhole out in the street we put a pump right next to that manhole and we take the water out of that manhole so it doesn't go through the inlet pipe and then pump it over through hoses into the creek. So we essentially bypass that pipe when we do our pumping.

Okay, thank you.

Okay, great. Any other questions from council?

All right, I will open it up for public comments if anyone else has any other public comment at this time.

I'm Leanne Warner. I'm at 315 Riviera Circle. So the sewer system, the sewage system, what happened when I was walking through the water and one of the guys from Ross Valley said, you shouldn't be walking through the water because we just had to let the state know that we had a breach in the sewer line. So my question would be, if Ross Valley had to let the state know, how come Larkspur doesn't know about that? Wouldn't that be something that the city of Larkspur should be aware of? made aware of if that was in fact something that did happen. Now, granted, it's a worker who's out on the street that I'm talking to, not necessarily a head person. But I would think that Larkspur would know. And then the other thing that I just wanted to mention was the water that came in when it was mentioned that if we were to have lowered the lagoon two feet, that we would have the same situation happen. logistically that doesn't make sense to me because if if all that cubic water was gone and we were able to get that much more water in the lagoon i think that most of the homes that were on the lagoon because most of the water came from the creek into the lagoon into all those garages out to the lagoon and sat there our houses were like we were like a moat around our houses completely surrounded by water If there was two feet in that lagoon that was completely empty and that water came through even on that first day, there would have been some significant difference. There just would have to have been. The water's not, it wasn't like a level creek thing that was described. In watching it happen, the water was coming through filling the lagoon, and then having nowhere to go, sitting there and every day just getting higher and higher. So I disagree with that analysis. The Pumping really didn't start till Sunday that we noticed. I don't know if there was other pumps out, maybe Saturday there was the one pump, but Sunday was the day that we had three pumps on the street. So it took three days for something to actually happen. That seems like a really long time, in a disaster situation. There's 200 homes along the lagoon. I don't know how many other properties were impacted, the Larkspur Plaza neighborhood and the industrial neighborhood, because we have friends that had some businesses that were impacted. But 200 houses in Larkspur that are all impacted by this one event, by something that actually could be somewhat controlled a little bit, even though I know it was an extraordinary event. It feels like there should be a little more proactiveness for this sort of a thing every single year. Not just because maybe it's gonna happen and maybe it's not, it should be every year, in my opinion. And I've been there for 12 years now.

Okay, thank you for your public comment. I mean, first of all, you know, let me just acknowledge that our public works director, I mean, look, you know, this was an extraordinary event. It wasn't forecasted. I think people did the best that they could. And I think, you know, we are definitely trying to, we appreciate the public comments and we hope to do better next time. But I think, you know, it's, it's, hindsight's always 20-20. And so I don't think it's really fair to say that, you know, we we should have done all of this. I think people during the event were doing the best that they could and trying to make the best decisions that they could with whatever resources we had at the time. I mean, I think it was clear our public works director was trying to get pumps that the city of Larkspur didn't have enough. And we put resources to your neighborhood and there were other areas in Larkspur that were flooded as well. I think the whole point of this is, again, really appreciate you all coming out to let us know what your experience was on the ground. And we will definitely try to, to the extent that we can, prepare for the next storm. But I don't think it's fair to just... Our staff did the best they could at the time. All of us were caught off guard with the forecast and with what was happening in real time. But I do want to address just the whole sewage problem. Look, again, this impacted a lot of different jurisdictions. I certainly am concerned about raw sewage in the streets. And I think we probably need to reach out to Ross Valley Sanitary just to figure out what was happening at the time, to my knowledge. I don't know, Mr. Skinner, did you get any alerts from Ross Valley that... This was happening, that something had been breached, that their systems had been breached and that, you know, there's people should stay out of the streets because there's raw sewage and it was dangerous.

I didn't. I was talking to the field rep from Ross Valley on and off and updating him when we were getting new pumps in and letting him know what was happening with the lagoon. And he didn't report back to me that he had any reportable occurrences or anything throughout the event. Anybody at Ross Valley?

Julian, can I ask if there is an event, you know, a sewage breach, something like that, is there a procedure by which Ross Valley is supposed to notify us so that we can notify, you know, citizens who are in the area or, you know, take whatever precautions we need to take? Are we in that loop or is it just they find out about it and they deal with it and there's not really a procedure to notify us?

Um, I don't know exactly. I know we have been notified in past events, but I think those may have been because the breaches were close to a creek or a city infrastructure and it may have come out of their process that they were required to notify us because of that proximity. But I don't know explicitly what their reporting requirements are. I just know in past events we have been notified.

Would it be possible to follow up on that and figure out, first of all, if there was a sewage breach? Second of all, if there's a way for us to be notified if there is a sewage breach moving forward so that we're just in the loop? Because I feel like as a city, we should know if there's an issue. Is that fair?

So Julian, correct me if I'm wrong. In general, staff has a close working relationship with Ross Valley Sanitary when there are incidents that happen. So I am not an expert in sewage spills and all of the different reporting requirements, but I do know enough to know that they're required to report to a number of regulatory agencies. The one I'm most familiar with is the State Water Board about an incident spill. So I was just in real time pulling this up because we hadn't heard about anything. I don't know about any kind of lag time there might be about an incident, but we're pretty far out in terms of reporting something. The State Water Resources Control Board has an interactive map of spills that happen across the state when it was reported what the amount that was spilled was and what the agency is. So I just pulled it up and pulled up Larkspur. And over the years, there have been a number of spills reported. And I'm not seeing anything that was associated with this storm event that was reported. So again, we'll follow up with staff. Again, this map may not be updated in real time, etc. But if you go to that site, you see... Like the reason, the responsible agency, the collection system, and exactly where it was in the volume of accounts.

My concern is not looking backwards. My concern is more looking forwards, and I just want to make sure there's some system in place so if there is a problem, we're notified about it so we can take whatever precautions we think are necessary. That's all. Okay.

City Attorney Two Miles, I believe there's no legal requirement that they directly have to notify us as part of their legal duty to report a spill.

So my general understanding is that the entities that are in control, the public agencies in control of a sewage system, if there is a spill or a leak, have a legal obligation to report to the permitting agencies, the regulatory agencies that control them. They may optionally report to other public agencies that have an interest in it, but there's no mandatory reporting. If this Ross Valley worker in the field was correct and the district had been required to report it to the state, that would have been an understandable procedure. There isn't a similar mandate to report to sort of lateral public agencies that have no oversight over them. That's different though from your point of going forward, can we set up a better protocol for voluntary reporting so that other – But they could just say –

So, I mean, yes, we could say, pretty please, if there's a problem, let us know. And they'd say, yeah, yeah, we're not going to do that. And we don't really have any power to require them to notify us. Okay. Thank you for explaining that. I appreciate it.

Great. I'm sorry. Please approach the podium if you're going to be speaking.

So, hang on. Just so you know, because we're on Zoom... It is being recorded. They can't hear you unless you have the mic.

I guess I'm struggling with that as someone who clearly has toilet paper all over my driveway that I was picking up and the we as residents were receiving notifications from the HOA about sanitary, stay out of it, go to the doctor if you have XYZ symptoms. There's also a different, for those of us that were flooded in parts of our home, that's raw sewage in your home, which is a totally different decontamination. You can't just like hose out your garage or just sweep out the water. So I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around this lack of, reporting that's required. And I understand websites might not be updated in real time, but it's a huge health risk to have raw sewage, especially when you're talking about children that were out playing in the streets, in puddles and things like that. So I guess what I would love to hear is how can this communication, who do we believe? We have a lot of important agencies here that are saying, nope, never heard anything. And then we're hearing stuff from workers on the boots on the ground, as well as from our own governing agency that are saying, yes, there was sewage. And I don't know who to believe because there's a lot of expense that goes into decontaminating a home that's been infected and a yard and a driveway and a garage that's been exposed to raw sewage and for people that have been exposed to raw sewage. And I don't know who to believe. And that's what I'm really struggling with.

Thank you for that comment, by the way, Madam Mayor, if I may. What I am going to suggest is that the city reach out to the state agency and find out if their website is updated, find out if there was any report that there was contamination. And if there was, if there is some way that we can reach out to the people in the neighborhood, and I don't know the best communication method for that, but to let people know. Because I agree that if there's a problem, people should know. Now, I don't know how to inform them. if we just put it on our website or somehow let people know how they can find out. But I think it would be a good idea if we can just verify one way or another and put it on some public, you know, communication forum so people could find out. Does that sound reasonable? And I'm going to ask if people have concerns to please give the city a day or two to try to figure it out and then reach out. Who should they reach out to?

Me.

Okay. So if you could reach out to the Public Works Department, they will have the answers for you. Okay, thank you so much.

In addition, it's a general public, we won't speak directly to this, but there's different thresholds for spills, et cetera. It's always a good practice when there's a storm event, even if it doesn't reach the threshold of a sewage event, to stay out of floodwater. It is always dirty enough to where, unless you have to wade through it, et cetera, it's best idea to stay away from it, even if it doesn't meet these regulatory thresholds.

Okay, fair.

Well, I just wanted to make one more comment is to the lady who spoke last. I don't think any of us doubt that you experience what you experience, that you had sewage in your home. I think what we're trying to figure out is What's the right level of communication between all these agencies? And how do we communicate with you all? And also, how can you all – who should you all be notifying? I mean, you know, what I'm hearing is if you were seeing this, you know – Could you have reported it to public works? Our public works director was working or speaking to his counterpart at Ross Valley Sanitary. Should you have reported it to Ross Valley Sanitary directly? Not just the worker that you saw, but to the people at command center at Ross Valley Sanitary so they knew. I mean, I think this is what we're trying to figure out. I don't think anyone is doubting the veracity of what you all said happened. I think we're trying to figure out, you know, what's the right communication protocols and how can we improve that going forward so that we know that if there are situations like this, we can actually notify residents, but also understand that the raw sewage part is not within our jurisdiction, like that is another agency. And so, you know, we need to be communicating with other agencies. and if you're experiencing this real time to report it also to the agency that has jurisdiction over that. Okay, are there any other public comments here in the chamber? And what about online? Okay, great. All right, bring it back to council. Any other last comments or thoughts?

Yeah, just I was mostly listening tonight, but I really appreciate the community coming out and staff. I think this was a very informative dialogue. You know, I've had NRG and Flood Zone 9 and other community members wonder. And, you know, we had the IJ last week. And to me, this was a very worthwhile conversation. So thank you, Julie, and thank you, public.

I agree. I do appreciate all the members of the public who came and, you know, express and hold us what you all experience. I think that's very valuable for us. And hopefully, you know, we will take your feedback and hopefully be more prepared for the next storm event or the next tidal flooding event. All right. And with that, I will, so we will close 8.2 and the next item is adjourned. So It is 8.57. I will adjourn this meeting to our next meeting on February 4th, 2026. Thank you all.