City Council - Regular Meeting

Good evening everyone and welcome to the March 18th, 2026 meeting of the Larkspur City Council. I appreciate you all joining us. I am the Mayor Stephanie Andre and it is 6 30 and I will call the meeting to order. Can we get a roll call please?

Council Member Margulies? Here. Vice Mayor Paulson?

Here.

Mayor Andre?

Here. If you're able please rise and join us in the Pledge of Allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Thank you. Now we are going to move into public comment. But before we do, I just want to recognize and welcome Boy Scout Troop 43 for joining us tonight. A special welcome to our local Boy Scouts. All right. So we're going to move on to public comment. This is for matters that are not on the agenda. If you would like to address the council, please come forward to the podium. You'll have three minutes. And because this is public comment, council is not permitted to take any action or have or engage in lengthy discussion on any of these matters. So if anybody would like to make a public comment, please step forward to the podium. Welcome. And please give us your name and which city you're from.

Thank you. Good evening. My name is Jo Farns. I'm with the Small Business Administration. I'm here to encourage the city of Larkspur to apply for disaster assistance if they were affected by the early January storms that happened December 31st through January 5th. Although the disaster loan outreach centers have closed in Marin County, residents, businesses, and private nonprofits may still submit applications online at sba.gov slash disasters. We encourage anyone who experienced any physical disaster damage to apply before the April 6th deadline that's coming up. Also, there is economic injury disaster loan assistance available for businesses and nonprofits. And this can help during that time businesses were closed. And a lot of times businesses do not see the effects of disasters affecting their businesses if they can't see the physical damage. So that line to apply for economic injury disaster loans is extended until November 3rd. It gives them the business time to see the difference in their books and that assistance is available. Also, if there's any questions, applicants can email disastercustomerservice at sba.gov. Just to give a reminder, because a colleague was here at the last council meeting, the disaster loan assistance is available for residents and businesses and nonprofits, even homeowners and renters. For homeowners and renters, the loan assistance The loans are as low as 2.875%, for businesses as low as 4%, and for nonprofits as low as 3.625%. It helps businesses and homeowners and renters because for the first 12 months, there is no payment due, and there is no interest incurred during those first 12 months. And so again, if there's any questions, you can email disastercustomerservice at sba.gov. And don't forget that that deadline is coming up April 6th for physical disaster assistance.

Thank you. Great. Thank you, Joe. All right. Anyone else next for public comments? Yes, please step forward. Please come to the podium and speak into the microphone so everyone can hear you.

Thank you. I didn't get an agenda, so I'm not sure this may be on the agenda. It's not? I see you shaking no. Okay. Well, then it is important to be here. This is regarding the Nevin Park neighborhood, which is in... Actually, it's right next to... Well, we're from Greenbrae, and it's right down... I'm having a hard time explaining it.

It's okay. Please proceed. Yeah, we know.

There has been signs all over all the benches in the last week about this meeting to be held, so I thought it was on the agenda, and there were issues that needed... to be discussed or there appear to be issues. But it's not on the agenda and no one has actually brought anything up that needed to be discussed. Is that what I'm understanding?

You're correct. It's not on the agenda and people are welcome to come and address the council. And if we will discuss in, you know, we can't have a discussion right now, but we can decide to put it on a future agenda.

Okay. That's great. That's all we need. Thank you.

Thank you.

Hello, my name is Fran Farmer, and I live in San Anselmo, and I usually take my dog to Archie Williams High School. And I've come to Nevin Park a couple of times, but I've driven past your park numerous times over the years, and I've always seen kids, adults, dogs off-leash enjoying the park. I was at Nevin Park on Friday, February 13th, and Sergeant Heaps gave me a dog off-leash ticket, not a warning, a ticket for $192. The only people on the central grass area were myself and another woman, and we both got tickets. Our dogs were not creating a disturbance, and they were both under voice control. I walked in from parking next to Bon Air and there's no sign where I walked in. I walked all the way to the middle of the park and I never saw a sign. The other lady asked the officer if she could play with her dog off leash on the grass that was adjacent to the homes. And he said, yes, that area was okay. So you have some grass areas that are restricted and some areas that are okay. So I came back another day to look for the signs because I didn't see any signs. For me, the signage was very bad. And there's no map that is designating what areas constitute the park where dogs can't be off leash and the areas that are okay. So I found that not just myself, but other people were confused. So I did some research and back in 2013, the Larkspur City Council decided that As a follow-up to the complaints, officers were instructed to increase daily foot patrol of the public parks throughout the city, placing an emphasis on Nevin Park. If violations were observed, officers would make contact and give verbal warnings. These warnings were then recorded into the authority's record database. If it was learned that several warnings had been given to the same violator and still there was a refusal to comply with the ordinance, officers were given the discretion to issue a citation for the violation. And in my research, I did not see an update to that decision. So Sergeant Heaps did not ask if either the other lady or myself had ever had a warning prior to this contact. In 2013, only two citations were given. In 2026, two citations were issued in less than 30 minutes. I have to say, I don't even live here in Larkspur, but that's a really nice park. And this ticketing campaign is really ruining the whole energy of the park. Your signage is vague. You don't have a detailed map. It does, for me, it felt like entrapment. There is an abundance of crime happening in Central Marin that would be more beneficial to the community for the police to be focused on. E-bikes, red light runners, speeding, texting while driving, theft. There is crime in Marin that is endangering residents, homes, and businesses. Dog off-leash ticketing is a misuse of police resources. Let's get the priorities straight. It's time to update this 2013 ruling. Thank you for hearing me.

Thank you for your public comment. Next person, please step forward to the podium. Thank you.

Good evening, honorable mayor, council members, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Laksh Sampath. I'm here today to respectfully present a community petition that was turned in regarding on-leash dog areas at Nevin Park. Same topic. First, I want to acknowledge and appreciate the city's investment in improving the Neyman Park. especially the new children's playground, which has added a great deal of value to families in our community. At the same time, Nevin Park has long served many different groups, children, walkers, seniors, dog owners. And our request is simply to preserve the balance, nothing else. The petition we submitted reflects a support from residents, 58 of them that I got signatures from, and I could have easily got another 10 more in the last three days. Regular park users have asked for a very modest adjustment, relocating the existing off-leash or on-leash signs slightly closer to the area where old children's playground structure, which is there now, which is now starting to be covered with graffiti, is still there, right? Right by that. The section, that part is not actively used to play because the kids are all playing in the newly constructed area and the piece of area that we're asking for dogs to be playing in is adjacent to the path, which is an off-leash area. As the lady previous to me said, there's not enough signs that demarcates that that particular area, for example, has got to be on-leash. Because we can't tell the difference between county property, city property, and HOA property. We're not requesting a new dog park at all in that area. So don't get me wrong. Don't let some people mislead you into thinking that way. Not for an expansion of the on-leash activities. It's simply a request to better define a small portion of the park far away from the new children's play area so that responsible dog owners can continue to use it safely while keeping clear separation from the new playground. And it's really early in the mornings and late in the evenings when people are off work or before going to work is when that area is being used. We also understand and fully appreciate that 30 to 40 years ago, there were fewer dogs, fewer people using this park. But our community has grown just as the vehicle usage patterns throughout Larkspur has changed over time. Residents living along Magnolia Avenue have experienced a major increase in traffic over the same period, yet we do not respond by limiting the number of cars that drive on Magnolia. Instead, we adapt shared public spaces to reflect current realities while balancing the need for everyone. Many residents, including seniors and families, rely on nearby open spaces for daily exercise and social connection. For dog owners, this is also an important part of responsible pet care and community life. We believe this proposal is practical, low cost, and respectful of all park users. It preserves shared access while addressing concerns about safety and compatibility. We respectfully ask the council to consider this petition and support relocating the signs as proposed in the petition. Thank you very much for your time and consideration.

Thank you for your public comment. I'm assuming many of you are here to speak about this same issue. Is there anyone who has, and thank you, Mr. Sampath, you know, for your letter. We also read all the public comment letters that have been sent in and we have seen your letter. Is there anyone else with a different opinion who would like to speak or feel that they want to add to what the other two speakers have already? Okay, please come forward and then.

When I saw these signs on the various, they were mostly on, sorry.

We need some identification by the speaker.

That's Barbie. Thank you. When I first saw the signs, I said, what is happening here? And this is one of the best places to ever take your dog or to walk or walk. and you it there's actually two parks there's the park that is encompassed by uh residential uh and uh and then the the main larkspur i think it's larkspur property uh going all the way from the tamil pious the big huge tamil pious a walkway all the way to the ferry that your dogs are allowed not to be unleashed there. So I thought, what has happened here that has caused this problem, which this is... Did something happen with a dog that sued, you know, an owner sued someone and it cost a lot of money, etc.? Or are the property owners or they're having to maybe... you know, mow the lawn more often because there's so many dogs and people there. But the main issue is this is one of the few places I've ever seen in Marin County or anywhere where people are happy. They're walking. Their dogs have encouraged. There are no problems with dogs, for one thing. Everyone is friendly. It's the only place you can see people walking and talking to each other and not listening to their phones. or walking with their phones. It is absolutely not there. And new people that come say, oh, my God, what a wonderful place this is. And it's inconsistent with the policemen that come up to start a period of, you know, Checking to see if everybody has their dog on the leash. And so it is a wonderful, very unusual situation where there is a park that is so well used. And so has something happened yet? that has caused this big change in how it's presented and a more fervent police presence to give tickets for the dog, for not having your dog on the leash. So that's it. Thank you.

Thank you for your comments. Anyone else? Please come forward and identify yourself. You have three minutes.

My name is Roseanne DelBello. You're supposed to say where you're from, aren't you? Anyway, sorry. I just got a ticket, and I was shocked that it is from the Marin County Superior Court. And I was kind of asking, well, what kind of ticket is this? And they said it's an infraction. And I said, well, I was looking at this paperwork, and I can enroll in traffic school. to get rid of this ticket. And I was like, who came, I'm sorry, who designated, I had no warning. I had not been there in a very long time. Who would designate this as an infraction? And so I went, I, because I hadn't gotten this yet in my mail, I went up with the pink slip to Marin County courts. And I just, you know, they said it's $192 and, It seemed like a lot, but I was like, okay, I'll just pay it. And they said, okay, now there's $3 fee for using a credit card. Okay, I said, give me a court date. Anyway, here's my admit into the record. That is a photo of the way I entered. And I have a client that's in this room right now. And I entered through the back door of her gate. off the park.

So I'll show you this.

It's just basically, it's a 4x4 with nothing on it. So if you want to give speeding tickets, then identify where the people are. And I like the idea of the warning ticket, and it did seem like it was really good. Just to shout out or whatever, the community officer from the Central Marin Police was very kind. I felt actually kind of sorry for her. It was a drizzling rain, and it was kind of at twice, you know, that... kind of dusky time in the rain and there's no public restroom there. And so we had a nice conversation. And when she left, when I left, she said, I wish I would have met you under different circumstances.

I was like, yeah, I did too.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Anyone else who would like to speak, please come forward, state your name and where you're from. Thank you.

Ms. Mayor, Ronald Davidian, I don't have that much to say, except I've been governor there for almost 20 years. And one of the things that stood out is the irony. I'll explain. It is a community of people of all ages. I'm in my mid 80s. One of the things about older people like me, all my close friends have passed away. And I'm lonely. I don't have a family. I have my dog. And we go there because we have acquaintances we've been talking to, our dogs and everything. It was lively. I've taken pictures. It's empty. A park is for the use, for the people to enjoy. But nobody's there because they're afraid of getting a ticket. We really don't know if it was just the law that was the problem or if somebody made a complaint. And one of the things from the people that live there saying most of the people are elderly, they sleep late, and the dogs bark. I looked it up. Dogs bark on leash, not off leash. It's a fight or flight. So if it's a complaint about barking, it's not... leash also i find it ironic that the community police which is for our benefit has destroyed a community of dog people i talked to an elderly woman she said i am so sad i have nobody to talk to and my friends don't come here anymore it is empty there's nobody there you couldn't find a parking spot before The only cars now are the families that bring the children to the playground. It's empty, like a bomb was there. That's all I have to say.

Thank you for your public comments. You want to step forward?

Madam Mayor?

Yeah.

I'm sorry to be the callous city manager. I'd ask the audience to stop clapping. There may be speakers here who have an opposite opinion, and it's generally been the council's position that it can be rather intimidating for applause to be occurring when we have a, we know from the public record, we have people with opposite points of view.

Okay, great. Point taken. So if I could please respect all viewpoints and let's not applaud after speakers. Okay, please go ahead.

Hi, my name is Conrad Gann. I live on Cedar Avenue and I've sent a letter in to the council regarding the Lucky Market and what's going on there. I was put the same letter up on Nextdoor about 23 hours ago and locally I've gotten 100 favorable responses, 25 comments. What I think is important is that the city council take a more proactive view to solving this with specific ideas and feedback. It begins by getting it on the agenda and getting feedback in the next meeting. I provided some things that you can specifically do now. We all know it's complicated. That's not a reason to wait any further. The market closed 1,068 days ago, and there have been roughly 70 city council meetings since then. Without it, other than the housing plan, to my searches, there's been no dedicated effort to go and do more. So I'm going to give you some solutions that you can directly respond to. The first is mobile market food trucks. The city should work with the property owner, Safeway Albertson's, to authorize mobile markets, such as fresh cargo, fresh wheels, fresh trucks, to operate in the former site. This location is the most logical and accessible place for residents. Look, we've got to be able to buy vegetables in Larkspur. This problem must be solved. And it's the most logical site to get vegetables back into Larkspur. If they're unwilling, then there's nearby public space for vegetable trucks and food trucks. OK, that's point one. Point two. leverage commercial vacancy tax. This has been used effectively in other cities, San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley. A commercial vacancy tax would encourage the property owners to bring vacant sites back into use, offset loss tax revenue and so forth that you're not getting from the site currently. And it can be defined in such a way that it really only applies in extraordinary situations like this. So it's not going to be viewed as really burdensome to the average commercial property owner. The property is, if you go to the website, they're not even listing a price for what they would rent it out at. And we do have an unusual situation where the owner has an incentive due to a nearby market to slow ball any kind of discussions or activities that come along. So then the final thing is, that you should get public engagement going. We should have active comments on what to do at the site. And then the city should have a business development focus towards finding and attracting merchants to come in and set up markets on food trucks or in the space itself. The vacancy tax will push the Albertsons landowner to work with you. Just the threat of the vacancy tax, just having a meeting on it, just doing something will create the kind of movement we need. Whatever you do, just please don't do nothing. And I understand and appreciate the work that you've done on the housing plan, but it's not enough. So I really do ask that this gets on the agenda for the next meeting. Thank you.

Great. Thank you for your public comments. Anyone else? Yes, please come forward.

Hi, my name is Margaret Bolenbacher. I live in San Rafael and I frequent, I'm back to the park, Devon Park. The whole purpose of bringing your dog off leash is for running because they need it badly and for fetching and they need big areas for that. And sure they can run in the other path area, but the motorbikes are more dangerous than the dogs for running into people. So it gets a little, gets a little congested there, but the big meadow, next to the children's play area is not used by children. It's not used by adults. It's used by dogs because it's big, it's open. Nobody goes there to sit. It's for dogs to run around. And it's different than being on a path because they could go in circles. So my whole preference would be to make that area off leash and even fence it if necessary. I don't see why that big meadow has to remain empty when dogs could be running because nobody else is running in. Thank you.

Thank you. All right. Yes.

Steve Stern just recently moved into 33 Elizabeth Court Circle, which is right off the park, right behind the park. You can't get closer to the you know, to the kids' play area. We are right there. We have a dog. It was really nice going out into the meadow and meeting with all these new people because there's no other area that's, you know, a congregation area. I've never seen any problem there. I have heard that some people were a little annoyed that there was noise in the morning at 6.30. I don't know. We're not up till 7.30, 8 o'clock. So I think everybody has covered everything. I really want to thank these two guys for, you know, talking about everything I wanted to talk about. And I understand about the loneliness, not for my wife or I, but there's a lot of older people there that are really sweet and are lonely. So that's it. Thank you.

Great. Thank you very much. All right. Any other public comments? Okay, great. Well, do we... Okay, yes, please come forward.

Hi, my name is Robert Zaglin. I live in the 300 block of William Avenue, and I addressed the council about a month and a half or two ago about the... uh, the degradation and the tearing up of the, uh, bike and pedestrian path. Uh, I believe the, the city manager, uh, said that that was looked at by members of the council and gave me a response and very much appreciated. However, nothing's been done and, uh, digging and the destruction has escalated. So I'm asking two things. One is that if it could be, I tried to find out how to get something on the agenda and I didn't see a way to do that. So I'm asking if that could be done. And in the interim, while that's happening, I'm pleading that if a simple sign could be posted there, I'll give this to Mrs. And I'll read it, and it's just a very simple sign stating the facts, which is, digging destruction of vegetation or altering turf is a violation of Larsberg Municipal Code 9.32.50 and will be cited and fined. If a simple sign could be simply placed right in that spot, it would curtail so much of this and at least give those of us who care enough about it to address it to these children something to point. So I'm asking if at the very least, if a sign could be posted there. So thank you.

Great. Thank you. All right. Any more public comment in the chamber? Yes, please come forward.

Hello. My name is Liam McMillan. I'd just like to, on behalf of Troop 43, thank the Larkspur Council for allowing us to sit in on your meeting for our community or our citizenship in the community merit badge. Thank you.

Thank you. Welcome. It's a pleasure to have you here. Wonderful. And Madam Corker, are there any public comments online?

There are. I'm looking for race hands in our Zoom audience and the first caller ending in 1402. You may unmute.

James Holmes, Larkspur. I'd like to offer a postscript to the discussion at the last meeting regarding bouncy houses at Piper Park. If I understand what was said then, and please interrupt and correct me if I misunderstood, but my understanding is that it was decided that bouncy customers would have to use a single vendor for efficiency and staff convenience. Well, thinking about that after the fact and recalling that monopolies are disfavored in the law and policy and that when monopolies are necessary, then price controls have to be used, It occurs to me that maybe it would be better to have a list of requirements for vendors that they have to comply with rather than require a single vendor. I'm not sure how other cities handle this, but if others have lists rather than a monopoly, then maybe Larkspur could follow the same approach. At a minimum, if it turns out that the vendor is not price competitive or is otherwise abusing its monopoly status, I think complaints will likely arise and then the idea of a single vendor should be revisited because otherwise there will be all sorts of questions raised about the propriety of this approach. I stress I have sub-zero personal interest in bouncy houses, but I mention this as a matter of public interest. Thanks very much.

Great. Thank you, Mr. Holmes. Anyone else online with public comment?

I'm looking for any additional race fans in our Zoom audience members, and there's no further public comment.

Okay, great.

All right, well, I want to thank the public for coming. It's always great to hear what our residents have to say. So I think with respect to the Niven Park off-leash dogs and also the commercial vacancy tax, we will look to schedule those two items at a future council meeting for discussion. And we will get back to the gentleman on the William bike path and also on the bouncy house. all right so um at this point i will close public comment and we'll move on to presentations um of which there are none and then yes we we're going to request that you use the presentation period for something that arose after the agenda was published oh oh yes yeah exactly thank you for reminding me All right. Well, we have the pleasure of, first of all, is Jay Ferreira here today? Wonderful. Thank you, Jay, for joining us. Well, we have a very special honoree tonight. We are going to read off a proclamation honoring Jason Ferreira upon his retirement from the city of Larkspur. Whereas, let me close. Thank you. Great. All right, so I will read a proclamation honoring Jason Ferreira. Whereas maintenance worker Jason J. Ferreira is retiring after nearly 35 years of dedicated service to the Larkspur community. Whereas in September 1991, Jason joined the city as an assistant teacher with the Twin Cities Child Care Center. Whereas Jason worked for TCCC from 1991 until the center closed in 2020, taking on progressively more responsible roles that concluded with senior lead teacher. Whereas when TCC closed, Jay was offered an opportunity to work in a limited term maintenance helper position for Larkspur Public Works. In short order, Jason proved his value in his new role and was made a full-time maintenance worker in November 2020. And whereas Jason will be greatly missed as he embarks on this new journey. So on behalf of the Larkspur City Council, I, the mayor, Stephanie Andre, do proclaim our deepest appreciation and gratitude to Jason Ferreira for his exceptional service and enduring contributions to the city of Larkspur. Thank you so much, Jay.

Right.

All right.

Thank you. All right. So.

All right. So now we'll move on to approval of the consent calendar. Would any member of council or the public like to remove any item off the consent calendar for discussion? All right. Seeing none, can I get a motion to move the consent calendar? I'll move to approve the consent calendar.

I'll second that.

Okay. All those in favor, say aye.

Aye.

Any opposed? Any abstain? All right. The consent calendar is approved. All right. And next will be the city manager's report.

Well, we have this little event that's happening on March 28th. I want to reiterate for the community that we're super duper duper excited that the Larkspur Library at the Commons is going to open for business on March 28th. We will have a grand opening ceremony at 1030. followed at the end of that ceremony by ribbon cutting, and then we will be open. You can go in and check out materials. We're turning it into a day to celebrate the library, celebrate the commons, celebrate the partners that support the city. We'll have some activities for kids. We're gonna have a lot of food, so come have something to eat. And then beforehand, one of our partners, the Friends of the Library, have set up a special event to symbolically move from this building to the library. So from 8.30 to 10, they'll be creating a book brigade, as they call it. And what they're planning on doing is lining folks up between here and the new library. And they're going to symbolically pass some of the books from the old facility down the line to the new library. And you can go to friendsofthelibrary, larkspurlibrary.org, I think it is, and you can sign up if you'd like to be part of that process. So for early risers in the morning, that's an opportunity to get involved. I do have one request. I know the community is also really excited. It is still a construction zone. We've had an uptick in folks seeing a break in the gate or the gate open and wandering in. And while we appreciate the enthusiasm, First of all, the city doesn't actually own the property until next week. So you're creating a problem for the contractor. And also it is still an active construction area. There's still equipment out there. So we would just ask people to please be respectful of the gates till we take them down. I'm going to leave it at that for this week.

Great. Very exciting. So thank you very much for that update. Do any of the council members have any reports?

Sure. Um, so yeah, I was at the smart meeting this afternoon and, um, just a few stats. I think they're interesting because we know the smart, uh, tax measure will be on the ballot and I think it's always good to see if we're getting our value. So our ridership goal is 1.4 million. We just broke through 1 million, and we're 70% through the year, and we have 70% of that accomplished. A kind of exciting thing is Giants season is starting. So there are 36 games, and the first one is on the 27th, the day before the library opens. And so the ferries that go to the Oracle Stadium and to the Embarcadero will be hopefully full of smart people. So that's a kind of good use. Also, I found it interesting that they are projecting 176,000 bike rides in a year. So the biking part is really a huge component. And we were talking today about more storage. And for the month of February, 85,000 people were walking the paths. I think the numbers are pretty promising. What's coming is this program that I'll report out through TAM as well as Mascot, where they take six transit agencies and they really try to coordinate them and up the services. The only other thing is one big discussion was we have been providing seniors and youth no charge, and now they're 43% of our ridership. And the economic question is like, do we start, you know, charging? We get more fare bucks, but it actually turned out we thought we would lose 160,000 and we gained 160,000 because those older people and youth often bring the parents. So the net ridership went up. But the thought is, you know, once we reach capacity, you know, just to have them put some skin in the game, maybe a low monthly pass. But the idea now is just get more people to ride, get it to 1.4 million, keep it going up. And then at some point, you know, a better revenue model will come. But, you know, we know that after COVID, the big fear was that transportation was, you know, not going to rebound. And, you know, Smart has been leading partly because they started with the lower baseline. But anyway, it's all pretty good news today. So that's my report.

great sarah yeah thank you um so on the uh note of transportation i had the opportunity today to take a ride on the redwood bike shares um this is a program that was sponsored by tam and we took a group of people out from the ferry to the smart train hub and then went out along the court of madera creek path to the south alicio hub And I want to encourage everybody to try this great program. It's a wonderful way to get from point A to B in our community. It's relatively cheap and easy to use. And I learned that Larkspur Smart Station is the second most used hub in this system. So this system has, I believe, 56 hubs built. throughout Marin and Sonoma. And our smart station is the second most used hub. Oh, I'm sorry. We have 170 hubs. I apologize. I misspoke. And then the Larkspur Smart and Golden Gate Ferry hubs are the top hubs in Marin County. So overall, the fleet utilization has more than doubled also this first quarter. They do rely on grants. The original grant they got was a two-year grant, which is going to take them through the middle of October. So they're working closely with TAM, which is the Transportation Authority of Marin, as well as TAM's counterpart for Sonoma County to find more funding because it's considered a public transportation as opposed to a private business. And I just want to encourage everybody to participate and try it out. Also, I just wanted to give kudos to Richard Cho, who is a city engineer here in Larkspur. He got high regards from Mark Acevedo, who runs the program from the bike share side, saying he's helped him a number of times, suggested sites for him to expand the system, and is always interested and engaged in their quarterly stakeholder meetings. And then the only other thing I want to talk about is climate. I feel like I'm always talking about climate, but, you know, having just learned about the EPA revoking the endangerment finding, you know, which legally recognized the danger climate changes and poses to our health. I really want to encourage everybody to get involved in any small way they can. One program that I found really useful in my home was Resilient Neighborhoods. They have two new cohorts coming up in March and April. And, you know, one of the things they say here, did you know approximately 55 percent of Marin's greenhouse gas emissions come from its residents? So although the city has a climate action plan and we're doing all that we can from the city's perspective to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, a large proportion. proportion of our greenhouse gas emissions come from our residents. So this is a free online session. There are five sessions. Each are an hour and a half long. And so you join by Zoom and you join up with a team and you learn a lot of different ways that you can control your impact through your household and make some changes, simple changes to lower your impact on carbon. So if you'd like some more information, please come grab a brochure. And I found it really helpful. I loved the program. And they're there to help and full of resources and it's free. So that's it for me. Great.

Great. Thank you. And just a very quick update for me on marine clean energy. Last month, the board did vote to reduce rates by two point six seven cents per kilowatt hour. Most of Marin, including myself, advocated for an even larger rate reduction. But the majority of the board voted for the 2.67 cent per kilowatt hour reduction. And so two cents of that will be a long-term reduction in your rate and 0.67 cents will be temporary, meaning it is available until the end of this year in December. And after that, this 0.67 cent rate decrease will go away. Tomorrow night, there's an MCE budget meeting where we will be discussing the budget. I am looking to trim expenses. So maybe we can reduce rates even more later in the year. But again, it's a very large board. You know, you can advocate for these things and it's never certain that these things will pass. And so but I am continuing to advocate on behalf of ratepayers so that, look, you know, these are difficult times. We've got the war in Iran. Energy prices are going to be volatile. I think that to the extent that we can, I think affordability is a big issue. And to the extent that we can extend rate decreases for our customers, I think that's something that I'm working on with MCE. All right. So after this, council members' reports will go to public hearings, of which there are none. And that moves us to business items. 8.1, the annual progress report on the housing elements of the Larkspur General Plan. Our new Community Development Director, Andy Mogeson, is here with us. So thank you, Andy, and I look forward to your report.

Thank you. So this is a state-mandated annual review. Every city and county in California is doing it this month. It's something that in Larkspur we bring to both Planning Commission and Council. So the Planning Commission heard this at their meeting on the 10th. And what this does is the annual report is the number of building permits issued for new housing production in Larkspur, and it shows the state our progress towards meeting our regional housing needs allocation goals. It's required to be submitted to HCD every year by April 1st. And it basically follows the progress of our housing element as we go through our cycle, which is an eight-year period. As you know, the housing element was certified by HCD on October 8th, 2024. This year's progress report is the third in the sixth cycle which runs between 2023 and 2031 HCD requires cities to report on the pipeline of permits from entitlement to certificate of occupancy but for purposes of RHNA numbers they calculate it based on the number of permitted housing units and so Our numbers this year were pretty small. We had 10 new housing units built in 2025. All of them consisted of accessory dwelling units. No single family, no multifamily units were constructed. So it was a pretty quiet year for us. It's certainly less than the last two years in the cycle, 2023, where we had 16 units. Last year, we were at 21, and this year, 10. We typically see quite a few accessory dwelling units in Larkspur. Our number of ADUs are, I would say, a little higher than most cities in California based on a per capita level. So that's our housing progress for the year. You can see how it applies towards our goal. Our housing goal is 979 units in this cycle. This brings us to 96 units constructed, so we still have 883 remaining. And just one note about the methodology. The affordability levels of ADUs have a set allocation method. So when you see it allocated to low, very low, moderate, it's actually a formula that we randomly allocate to all ADUs. So it's a 30-30-30-10 allocation. And that applies everywhere. That's a standard ABAG policy. So sometimes people say, well, why is my ADU cataloged or classified that way? It's just a random allocation. And then in addition, the Housing Element Progress Report talks about the programs and how we're progressing on those programs. You might have identified it in spreadsheet tab D. This is one heck of a spreadsheet. There's lots and lots of tabs, of course. We only fill out about four of those tabs. that are pertinent to the city. In this year's Housing Element program, there's two specific programs that are called out. There's a horizon for a lot of these programs. Some of them are continuing. Some of them are, you know, the goal is to achieve it by a certain date. And this year, the Housing Element calls for us to work on floor area ratio limits, which we've already started. We met with Planning Commission in a few meetings already to discuss that. The housing element specifically focuses on floor area ratio limits for multifamily development so as to reduce the burden. And then there's another one that's related to the aging in place topic that I think the council discussed at their retreat or workshop this year for their annual meeting. and universal design is related to aging in place. It's not that we have to necessarily do it, but we do have to talk about it this year, so we'll have a study session or some kind of meeting down the road, and what that is is it requires structures to be designed for usability by all people regardless of their age, ability, or mobility without needing adaptation, and sometimes people assume that that's the same as ADA, but this applies to single-family homes, this applies to townhomes, ADA is a commercial. So if you have like a multifamily project, it would certainly apply for the common areas, but it's inside of those individual units. So like the cost, what would the design be? What would it be involved? So we would talk about the pros and cons at some point in a future meeting, and it's related to the whole aging in place. So that's something down the road. We won't cover it tonight, obviously. Okay. And then we have a number of projects that are either already under construction or we expect to start construction in this year In 2026 and then we also have some applications that we expect to see this year As you know Magnolia village is already under construction That's 20 units. We also have 1000 Drake's landing which is 19 units that that item is Uh, is going to be coming back to counsel to future meeting for discussion about their, um, uh, affordable housing, um, agreement and, um, their, their density bonus, uh, uh, agreement. Um, we also are expecting 2 major applications and, you know. You know, it's hard to say, oh, gosh, we did 10 units this year. You know, that's not what we'd like to see. But the weird thing about it is, you know, when it rains, it pours. So in this coming year, we expect to see 2,000 larks per landing. That's the Ross Valley Sewer District site, which is 320 units. Right now, as we speak at this very moment, there is an exclusive negotiating agreement on the agenda with Ross Valley to enter into negotiations with Brookfield Residential Carmel Partners. Um, as the firm to, to, uh, to get to win that, uh, award. So, uh, that's actually tonight's agenda there. Uh. They're meeting some, they're probably talking about it right now. Um. So, yeah, that's I'm assuming, you know, that they'll move forward with that and that'll get approved at their meeting tonight. We'll keep you posted as that goes on. But that's so they could start negotiations with that partnership of Brookfield Residential and Carmel Partners. And then the other project that we're expecting to see is it's a parking lot above the existing office building called the Exchange. It's 700 to 900 blocks per landing. It's a piece of property that's identified in our housing element. It's one of our... one of our sites, and it's basically putting 235 units on the upper parking lot at the existing property. So they would keep the office building in place, but they would add that additional 230 units, and that's already specified in the housing elements. And with that, I mentioned earlier the Planning Commission chimed in on this at their March 10th meeting. We received one written public comment from, I think it's Caldmore and Holm. They provided effectively the same comment for Planning Commission and City Council. And that was the only public comment we received. And the Planning Commission's recommendation was for the council to accept um the uh annual progress report and direct staff to submit um i should point out that we uh we'll we'll clean up some of the um table d is really long and there's some some links in there that i i noticed we're we're cutting pasting correctly um but we'll we have to clean that up before we actually transmit it to hcd before uh april 1st so there's a couple of little typos in the web addresses. But with that, I'm happy to answer your questions and if you have any details you'd like to know. Thank you.

Great. Thank you. I'll open it up to council members for any questions.

Sure. I had a few. Andrew, thanks for the report. One question. So I'm curious, have you been communicating with HCD? I mean, the number looks pretty bad, but I looked it up and I think we're the best in Marin. So 9.3% compliance, San Rafael is 5.3%, Nevada is 5.3%.

Would it be all right if I comment on that for a moment? Because there have been two articles which I felt were unfair to neighboring cities saying we're not meeting our numbers. And there will probably be an article about us. You have to remember that most developers were waiting for the housing elements to be approved by HCD. So they were certain they had buy right entitlement to their property. For most of the Marin cities that happened in 2024 and 2025. So most developers haven't really been sitting down saying, okay, now I know what the rules are that apply to all the sites. until within the last six months. So I think it's a little unfair to say the marine agencies are already behind schedule when I think we're probably right about where HCD would expect us to be when you think about when the housing elements were actually approved by HCD.

Okay. And that's sort of where I was going with the question. I'm just looking at it at first glance and the numbers are low. But the question is, in addition to what the city manager just said, I imagine interest rates and whatnot. So the report that you're submitting, I think probably we want to... list the extenuating circumstances, which they may or may not know. And I'm curious, you know, what, what your, you know, approach has been to this.

Well, HCD wants raw data. They don't ask for extenuating circumstances or a narrative. It is literally data. And so that's what we, that's the format that they have. And that's what we provide. This actually is a really common topic. A lot of cities wish they could explain that, but when it gets down to it, you know, that's not part of the reporting. So.

Okay. Okay. Great. Thank you.

Sarah, do you have any questions?

No, just thank you so much, Andrew, for your report. And I did try to go through this report, fine tooth comb, just because it's my first time ever reviewing one. And I am really interested in bringing affordable housing to Larkspur. You mentioned though, and then you said that there are only four columns that we complete in here. Did I? Yeah. Oh, okay, as in tabs meaning tables. Yes. Okay, okay.

This is an enormous spreadsheet with lots of tabs, and it's not something, that's really the sausage making behind the scenes. What we bring to the public is the numbers.

Okay, okay.

By the way, those are printed in the back of the room if anybody would like to review them, and they're also attached to the report.

Okay. And then I just, I did notice one area where it, and now of course I can't find it, but where it says that we'd already completed it, or maybe you can explain to me, there's the column that says the projected completion date. Is that something we fill out or is that like a recommended completion date by the state?

No, the recommended or the completion dates actually already identified in our housing element.

Okay.

But when we adopted the housing element, you will see those dates already printed. They've already been established. And so we're just repeating what's in our housing element.

Okay. Okay.

And that's from table. D. Well, yeah, in the tab it's D, but in the housing element, it's table two to our implementation programs.

Okay. Okay. Thank you. Okay, any other questions, Sarah? I want to find what I need to reference, so I'm not right this minute.

Okay.

Thank you.

Andy, I guess, you know, I am focused on the forward pipeline, and it looks like there's about 600 units, if you count up what you have under construction and potential applications. And so what's the risk of this, the Larkspur landing, the exchange, that parking lot? Do we feel like that's pretty... Pretty solid?

I've had two meetings with them, and they've indicated they're putting together their materials right now. So I expect them to walk in the door any day, but they haven't given me any timeline.

Okay. And any other sites where people have expressed interest, where you've had inquiries or inbound inquiries from developers?

Just the four that I've identified in this slide.

Okay, great. Thank you.

If I may, I found what I was looking for, Andrew. Thank you. So it was specific to the H1D objective design standards for electrification and air quality. And I think the table, let me just go back to the table, but it says in one column that it's in progress, but it said the expected completion date was December of 24. So do we not update those dates then?

Because they're already memorialized in our housing element. So when we adopted the housing element, that indicated the date.

Okay. Yeah.

And it's not unusual to go past that. So it it's there. So.

OK, thank you. And then just just to clarify, it just seemed like a really low number to me based on the adoption of the electrification plan. Where do we come up with that number of, you know, the objective being only one hundred and ninety six?

I researched that and I was not able to find where the number came from. It obviously happened during the housing element production when it was being prepared.

Okay.

But I can say that, you know, just one of the two projects in the coming year have enough units. And if the project's all electric, you've just hit that goal.

Okay. Okay. Thank you for your help. Great.

Sorry, Andy, one last question. On this universal design where we're talking about the aging in place, I guess, is that something where if you change it in the housing elements plan, I guess, is there some sort of review process where we can get feedback from developers whether what we're trying to implement is... how that's going to change the calculus on the cost for some of these developers.

That's what we have to bring to you to talk about. It actually says in the housing element a bit about it in the implementation program. But effectively, if the council chooses not to adopt universal design amendments, the city will continue to providing information on an annual basis to keep the council informed on the topic. So it is not a mandatory program, but it is mandatory in that we have to bring it up for discussion and talk about those pros and cons and seriously consider it.

Okay, great. Thank you. All right. Is there anyone in the public chambers who would like to make a public comment on this topic? Thank you for your presentation, Andy. That was very helpful. Madam Clerk, anybody online who would like to speak?

First speaker, you may unmute yourself now.

Hello, city council members. My name is Carmela Davis. I'm the housing specialist with Call Marin Home. I know that you received our letter that we submitted, but I wanted to speak to you today regarding the APR. Call Marin Home is formerly the Marin Environmental Housing Collaborative, and we are a housing coalition of organizations in Marin that dedicated to improving housing affordability, and we advocate for more affordable housing in Marin. And as you are aware, Larkspur permitted 10 units in 2025, bringing the total to 96 for this housing cycle. There are still 883 units remaining that are needed to meet the requirements. We would like to see the city of Larkspur work more aggressively to achieve this RENA goal. All the 10 units this year were ADUs, and while they can be designated for affordable, that's not guaranteed to provide housing for non-family members or non-friends of those building the ADUs. We were dismayed to note that no new major projects have been proposed since the inception of the housing element. The only major one in the pipeline was what was referred to earlier in partnership with the Ross Sanitation District. And even with that built, there would still be roughly 300 units left to build. So we would encourage that there are many tactics that Larkspur can undertake to generate more housing proposals instead of waiting around for them. such as extending ministerial housing approvals, upzoning more land, or increasing allowable densities, or working directly with developers and land owners to learn what obstacles are preventing them from submitting additional proposals. None of these actions would cost money, we really urge you to take action. It's not only necessary in order to meet these housing targets, but also to address the existing housing crisis and bring more economic activity to Larkspur's downtown. And although all of Larkspur's rezonings were completed on time, They've not generated any proposals since then. And this is despite having a highly attractive area for development. The downtown plan does call for more housing in the area around Larkspur Landing is an ideal transportation standpoint where housing would be able to be walkable neighborhoods. Larkspur's neighboring towns, Corte Madera and San Rafael, have both attracted an increased amount of proposals. Larkspur can do this as well. The housing crisis is only worsening. We really encourage you to address this proactively. Thank you for your time.

Great. Thank you, Carmela. Madam Kirk, anybody else?

There are no additional public comments.

Okay, great. Thank you. And I'll close public comment at this time. All right. Well, I'll bring it back to council. I don't think you're asking... Oh, you are asking for us, actually, to... approve this, right? So you can submit it to HCD. All right. So can I get a motion?

So moved.

And I'll second it. I, you know, per your comments with updates to corrections and links that are broken. Okay, great.

All right. So all those in favor of passing the annual progress report on the housing elements plan? All in favor say aye. Aye. Okay. Any opposed? No. Any abstentions? All right. Motion passes. Thank you, Andy. All right. Now we'll move on to item 8.2, establishing a fee structure and operating policy for city-owned electric vehicle charging stations. And can I get a staff report?

You're getting a staff report from me tonight. It's actually been a little bit since I've done one. Kudos to the staff. Actually, could I just take a moment to celebrate? On the consent calendar, you had two items from our relatively new human resources analyst, Jennifer Alcantara, and tonight, while I'm going to make the presentation, one of our analysts, Colby Gleason, prepared most of the material in this report. That's a first for both of them, so I want to acknowledge that we now have some of our Newer staff members producing material for you.

Great.

Is there a way to turn that view off? So it's just a slide? I guess we could just roll it, but we can't. Okay. All right, thank you. So we're here this evening because we have for quite a while figured we would tackle the topic of getting policy direction from you on our EV charging practices for how we charge and encourage people to use city-owned EV chargers. when we were on the precipice of bringing new chargers online, which we are about to do at the library. So this is like a lot of city operations where we need some policy guidance from you and then the administrative part we can handle afterward. We never got to have this conversation when we put in the first round of EV chargers because At that time, they were coming in through a grant and everybody was sort of doing it the same way back then and all the way back in 2017 and 2018. Now, everyone's learned a lot. We're going to talk about that this evening and offer up some policy questions for you to give us some guidance on. So the first thing I want to point out to the council is the role of level two public chargers. And that's what we're talking about. So these are not the slowest chargers. Those of us who have EVs call them trickle chargers. That's not what these are. These are level two. They're very similar in terms of power output to what people have in their homes. But unlike at your home, where your goal is to charge up your car usually overnight, Level two chargers provided by the public are intended to really fill one of three needs. One is destination charging. So I've arrived at a destination and I'd like to have some more comfort that I can move on to my next destination. So if I plug in, I can get a certain amount of range. For most cars on the market today with the chargers that are prevalent in government circles, the level twos that most of us use, you can probably get yourself about 20 miles of range in an hour or two, depending on how well your car and how fast your car charges. The second is access charging. So that's, even though these charges are slow, we have a lot of members of our community, particularly renters and multifamily residents where they don't have access to charging, but they have chosen to take on the challenge of owning an EV without having an option to charge in their home. So that's, We provide one of those possibilities that they could leave their vehicle if they're comfortable overnight at one of our public chargers to pick up that longer charge for the day. And then there's the philosophy of a lot of EV owners, which is anywhere you go, if there's a charger, you ought to always be charging, so you ought to plug in. So you'll hear a lot of EV owners talk about the ABC principle. And so we fill a little bit of that need as well. Currently, the city's offering six charging opportunities. We have units at Piper Park and we have a unit in front of the Central and Police Authorities building. In total, we have three dual head units, meaning each one of those has two plugs. So up to six cars could be charging at once on our current infrastructure. When the commons opens, we'll actually be adding eight new charging opportunities. We'll have three dual head units. So again, two cars plugging into one unit. We're also, we have two spots that are designed to be, to facilitate people who have ADA parking needs. And so those stalls are a little bigger. And so they only have one charging head associated with them. And they actually went active today. I saw them show up in the system. Thank you to Julian Skinner. I think he's in the back. Finally, we got through some red tape of PG&E and ChargePoint. So we will be ready to go when the library opens, provided we have a policy on what to charge. It's tough to see maybe on those screens, but there are pictures of what I'm talking about for people who haven't seen our units. If you've driven an EV, you've seen a ChargePoint unit at some point, I suspect. Pretty common in a lot of public garages, a lot of public parking lots. This is going to be the first part of what we need to think about this evening. So what's the output on these units and how do we charge for them? A dual head unit, this particular dual head unit, its total power output is 6.6 kilowatts per hour. We're going to do a little bit of math, so I know Vice Mayor Paulson will be excited. So that is important. Keep that in mind when we get to the next slide. For whatever reason, a mystery I do not know about, the single heads put out 7 kilowatt hours. So I don't know why they put out 0.4 more than the dual head. This is important as we go through this discussion and we talk about one of the first policy questions. If two cars plug into, or two vehicles plug into the dual head, they split the 6.6 kilowatts per hour. So they each can only draw up to 3.3. And that's important for policy change that's occurring and is actually mandated now to occur by 2031. And the mandate that's been put in place is that everyone in the public arena is supposed to move off of charging by time. We charge by time now. So if I went out to Piper Park and I plug in, I get charged a dollar an hour for my power. And That model has been mandated to go away by 2031. And there's a couple of key reasons for that. One of them is there's an equity issue. Different cars charge at different rates. EVs charge at different rates than plug-in hybrid cars. And so one of the issues is that dollar is buying different amounts of power for different customers. And so that was deemed unfair that we shouldn't be charging a fixed rate where different people are getting a different amount of energy back. That's part of this slide too. And then the other issue is PG&E in particular has been a strong advocate. I think so have some of the other larger utilities that you should be charging the amount that the energy costs so that that way the consumer really understands the cost of power. And so part of this is also a cost recovery issue for us. Right now, we're going to talk about this during this presentation. There's a subsidy built in to the current model. And one of the questions for the council is, should we be at full cost recovery? Should we be at some level of cost recovery where we're allowing some amount of subsidy provided by the taxpayer? So we have to talk about that this evening. And just so you understand, I thought it was a simple thing when I went down this path to just find out how much it actually costs us. To provide a kilowatt hour is not a simple thing because this is the basic formula that you have to use. The MCA's generation rate, easy to find out. It's on your bill. PG&E's delivery charge, easy to find out. It's on your bill. Not so clear on your bill is the number of fees that are tacked on, regardless of whether you're an MCE or PG&E. And it gets a lot more fun. I can let you know when you have a business account, the business account has even more fees packed onto it. And if you're providing EV charging, there's even more mysterious fees buried all throughout the system. We thought we could just call MCE and say, can you tell us how much this is? And they said, actually, we don't do that because not only is it complicated, complicated, but some of these things shift so frequently that we actually have a third party to do this who has access to PG&E's inner workings to kind of try to help you figure this out. So that's the level of complexity even MCE was unable to just tell us exactly why we're getting charged for one kilowatt hour. So we took our best stab and we looked at what some of our neighboring agencies had commissioned and some deeper analyses because we wanted to try to make this cost effective to figure out. So we have a pretty good idea of what it costs in Piper Park today. And there's a reason we have a pretty good idea. When we put in those chargers, we did what a lot of agencies did. We just said, well, where should we put them? And a bunch of folks at Piper Park and we picked two parking spots and we put them in. And you connected them to the nearest power line, and they got added to the nearest meter. Well, so that means that a meter in Piper Park that's on our bathroom that's in the proximity to the chargers and is the meter for that quadrant of Piper Park is the meter that's registering those chargers. So they're not on an EV race. They're not on a pricing system for EV charging. They are on a full business account. So it makes it a little easier for me to figure out how much we're paying for that kilowatt hour. But this is another thing PG&E has said has to stop. So when you build new chargers like we just put into the library, they've been put on a separate meter so they can be put on an EV pricing schedule. So this, I want to acknowledge, As we go through this and we talk about how much we've been subsidizing, this number is higher than what we will pay when we are on an EV rate. And the council has given us direction to work on expanding charging options at Piper Park. And when we do that, we will switch to a meter for those chargers. And at that time, those meters will go on that EV charging system. So we'll have a lower cost. Our cost for electricity charge point takes 10% of the revenue. So that's another part of our cost is that whatever revenue we're generating our contract, we pay them, they take 10% before they pass on to us the remaining 90%. So we consider that part of our costs. So what does that mean for the service we're delivering right now? That means that for every hour that we sell 6.6 kilowatts hours of power at that machine, we're paying roughly $3 and 72 cents and we're getting 90 cents back. So we have a pretty sizable Seth subsidy going on. And you might say, good God, why are you bringing this to us now? How come you didn't realize this is happening? Um, This subsidy has grown substantially in the last few years. When we put the charger in, it was late 2018 before we had it flowing online. Electricity actually cost quite a bit less in 2018 than it costs now. consumption was a lot lower. We didn't have as many users. So our subsidy really wasn't running where we were overly concerned about. The council at that time said, hey, we want to build out this infrastructure, encourage people to buy EVs. We want them to become more familiar. EVs were not as prevalent in 2018 as they are on ruined streets today. The other thing that's really taken off now, not only is the cost of that electricity gone up, but we can see in our data that the usage of some of our tractors is just pretty much nonstop during certain parts of the year. So we're just selling a lot more power than we used to sell. So the subsidy is growing because every time we do that, can see that we're subsidizing we're paying three cents to somebody's mindset basically um okay so what should we do so we uh we didn't want to necessarily have the money spent to commission a full analysis of what our cost is. So we took Corta Madera's commissioned study, which has basically all the same variables we have. We took what we know from the billing rates that have been presented to us, and we created an estimated cost of what we think power on the EV charging schedule will be for us. We did some weighted averaging because the cost is different at different times of the day when you go into an EV charging system. And we landed around $0.36 on this analysis. Corta Madera's consultant landed on $0.38. So we're pretty close based on what we've calculated. So now we can start to see that that's bringing our cost down. If we were to charge a rate that more reflected what we're paying, we could offset that amount. So in the staff report, and we'll talk more about this as we go through the PowerPoint, we had used the idea of charging $0.42 a kilowatt hour. And you can see that that effectively lines up pretty well with what our analysis said, and at least for some margin of error. What we put in the report is we expect there to be some margin of error as we start this system out, so we really need to come back in three or six months with some real-world data, and then we can refine our numbers. You might say, hey, I've got a charger at home. I'm on a time-of-use plan. If you're going to be on one too, how come we're not just accounting for that and passing along the exact cost at that time of day?

I was surprised to discover there aren't a lot of agencies that do that.

Actually, there's not a lot of private providers that do that either. There's several reasons why. The pro is you'd be passing on exactly what you're paying for that kilowatt hour at that moment, but it does create some price confusion. There's a lot of literature saying most charging systems, whether it's government or private tend to charge one rate throughout the day. I'm going to set aside Tesla's peak demand charging, if you're familiar with that. But the other thing is at peak hours, we'd be way out of market.

Our charge at that time of day would be really high.

And so we might be creating a disincentive for the very reasons that we want to have chargers out there. So We think a blended rate that smooths the cost across all users and all times is a better approach. And lastly, we noted, it's more of a question for you, but the purpose of time of use charging is to push use of the electricity into the nighttime, basically. And the question is, is that really what we want to accomplish at a library? Is that really what we want to do? Or do we want to make sure our users who come to a program at 11 AM feel great about being able to plug in and they're paying roughly what they'd pay anywhere else in town for that kilowatt hour. That's something we'll be talking about and getting feedback from you. Also reasonable to say, well, what's going on around Marin? What other agencies have made this switch already? So we've provided some of these. We used PlugShare plus staff reports to try to confirm some of this. I apologize if you know that some of this is wrong. Sometimes data shifts. pretty quickly in this world in terms of what people are charging. But you'll see that Corda Madera, which of course we based a lot of our analysis on, so it's not surprising we're proposing right along the lines of what they proposed. Sausalito's charging 42 cents a kilowatt hour. San Anselmo's at 45 cents for their public chargers. But Ross and Belvedere are offering subsidized rates of 30 cents a kilowatt hour in Ross and 25 cents a kilowatt hour in Belvedere. So you can see you have neighbors that have made the choice that they're going to subsidize some of the costs. And that certainly is something that you can talk about. A lot of the other agencies are right where we are. They're starting to expand their systems, and they're starting to look at what their new charging setup should be, but they're still on a fixed, you're here an hour, this is what we're going to charge you rate. That includes most of the county system, and they have quite a few chargers throughout the county. But what about other costs? Electricity is not the only thing that's involved with offering power to people. There's the parts that ChargePoint needs to provide to us when something breaks. You have one of your comment letters was complaining to you about when things are broken, it can take a while. Was pleased to see ChargePoint through the staff under the bus and said, well, we've been pinging them and nobody's responding. I could tell you most of the delays are because we contact ChargePoint and whatever we need, there's pipeline problems with getting it. And I don't think it's supply chain. I think there's a lot of ChargePoint chargers out there. They are the main provider. Back when grants were available, they were the main system that everybody bought. And I just think there's a huge demand because these things are breaking a little more frequently than we would like. And then they do charge us for some of their support costs, depending on what it is that we need them to, if they need to help us fix the problem. We can't do it ourselves. There's just general maintenance, which isn't a lot. Machines tend to take care of themselves, but if you've ever gone, sometimes something gets out of whack out there and we've got to go reset the system or we've got to see if something has damaged it that we're not seeing when we look on the cloud at the dashboard. Sometimes you have to physically touch the unit to figure out why it's not working correctly. And then there's administrative costs, and we're including here, there's a license fee of, I think it's currently $120 a month for each unit that ChargePoint collects from us for the right to have the unit. So I'd kind of call it a software subscription fee probably is really what they're doing. Because remember, we don't have to deal with anything. We don't deal with charging. We don't deal with collecting. We don't deal with The back end, it's all provided to us. So that's their going license fee per unit. So one of the questions that you'll need some policy guidance with you, there's sort of two philosophies on how to include those costs and what we charge. So some agencies build it into the rate. That's what Corda Madera's been trying to do. And we had some conversations with them and I would not be surprised if in another six months or so, they have enough data that they're gonna adjust their rate because they're trying to capture all their costs in that kilowatt hour billing rate. And then the other thing is to charge a session fee. So basically I plug in my car Council Member Margulies plugs in her car, we both get charged just for the act of plugging in and then we get charged on top of that for the energy use. And so a lot of entities have chosen to do that because whether or not Council Member Margulies is there for three hours and I'm there for one hour, the impact to the charger, a lot of the impact is just the plugging in and the pulling the plug back out. So the session fee sort of represents that how long you're there, the duration. there is some flat amount that's the same regardless of how long we're there. So you might then say, well, OK, we're going to have a session fee. How many sessions do we have? This is the last six months we've been running in a little over 300 sessions. at our current units so at our six current units total we're generating about uh a little over 300 however i want you to look at march we're we're barely halfway through march and i actually checked that number it's 275 as of today real time so we're going to blow past What we've been doing for the last several months.

And that's for, we have 50 chargers, right? Or what was the number again?

Well, we have six, six units. So session is each time somebody plugs in. Okay. So cross our six units, we've been averaging 300 a month, give or take. But this month, I don't know what's driving that. It could be the two big factors for driving sessions for us. The units are actually all functional, which I believe they all are right now, which is great. No one was down for a little while. And then the other thing is that demand. I just think demand is up. And then lastly... Those park units are super popular with parents while they're waiting for their kids to finish youth sports. We know anecdotally that's one of our biggest users in the spring. So I do think softball just started. I think some of the spring soccer leagues are still going on. So we're probably just seeing an uptick because there's a lot of parents in the parking lot waiting and they like to plug in. I just put this up here to sort of talk about, well, what would revenue look like on a session fee basis? So if you just assume that each unit was going to generate roughly 100, this would be conservative in my mind, but a reasonable starting point for discussion purposes. You know, we probably would generate across all these units right now, $700. I think it'd be fair to say it's 700 to 1,000, depending on how busy the month is. So one of the things to keep in mind, though, is those other costs, that license fee and the admin costs, we think that will cost us about $1,000 a month. So our session fee isn't actually fully capturing for us what we think our costs would be. But at the same time, we may end up where our per kilowatt hours making up the difference. So it's another reason as we're kind of going through this, we're looking for some guidance from you about what you want our targets to be for cost recovery. Another issue for us to discuss a little bit today and get some direction from you is the concept of charging a fee if people stay past a certain point. We think this is particularly relevant in the library because, as you know, the council's direction, the community's interest was to dedicate a significant portion of that parking lot to EV charging. And so in doing so, we want to have some sort of system that encourages people to turn over the spaces. We wouldn't want a car there all day long. We don't currently do that in Piper Park. We go on the honor system that we help people. move on in a reasonable amount of time. And so we have to talk about first what's the reasonable amount of time. We've suggested in the staff report two hours. And then what would we charge somebody if they stay past two hours? In the report, we did what a lot of cities have done in their reports, is identify an hourly rate. So throughout the idea of $5 an hour, we saw that in a lot of staff reports with other cities. The system actually prorates that by the minute. It's like $0.08 a minute when you prorate out $5 an hour. And again, those are amounts we can discuss. Maybe that fee's too high, maybe it's too low, but try and incentivize somebody to be, hey, you ought to come out and move your car. So for discussion this evening, first, you know, is full cost recovery the goal? Is Partial cost recovery, the goal. What's the council's general feeling about that? Bear in mind that after you kind of give me that policy direction, we've crafted the reso so we don't have to come back to you as electricity prices move. We'll be able to just adjust the chargers administratively to reflect shifts in the cost of electricity. How much maintenance and admin costs should we recover with the session fee? Or not at all. And there are agencies that don't charge a session fee and just view that as their contribution to the EV charging network. Should there be an overstay fee and how much should it be? And also, I didn't note, we're proposing the overstay fee gets turned off at night so that those users that are comfortable leaving their car overnight could do that. We set the start time at 5 a.m. That actually means the person has to get their car by 7 a.m. because that first two hours, the overstay fee, the clock would start. But that can be adjusted if you think that's too early in the morning or too late. I know the speaker or the written comment had suggested that was too early. And then we did propose, we saw several cities were offering incentive to their employees by offering a discount. 50% was a common number that we saw in several cities, so we put it in there. The council could say, let's wait on that. You could say that's a good idea, but that percentage seems wrong. The goal though was to potentially offer some incentive that might motivate some of our employees to shift and that's consistent with your climate action plan because as Councilman Margulies was speaking earlier tonight, there's a lot that our residents can do but our plan is really about what we can do to reduce the city's impact when the reality is the nature of what it costs to live in Larkspur. A lot of our employees can't live here and they are commuting. And so they are creating an impact on the environment that we'd like to deter by encouraging them to think about an EV or at least a plug-in hybrid with their next car. So I think that's it. So I'm going to leave this slide up. So Madam Mayor, that's the food for thought. The report has more details. As I said, we thought in the report, we'd kind of lay out the framework of what you could approve for us this evening. The chargers don't need to really go live until March 31st, because that'll be the first... After the grand opening, we'll be open on Tuesday that week. So that we could... We'd love to get direction tonight and finish this conversation. If we need to go to March 30, we can do that.

Great. Well, thank you for the very thorough presentation. Lots of things to discuss and think about. I'll open up to my colleagues with any questions of staff.

Why don't you start off?

Well, I unfortunately got a little bit lost in the cost recovery for the session fees, Dan. I wasn't clear. You mentioned, you know, this report shows that we're having, you know, north of 300 sessions today based on three chargers. Is that?

Well, we have six heads at once. So it's possible that we have six active sessions at once.

Okay. So that 300 number, though, is based on six heads. And so if we were theoretically charging this session fee today, we would be bringing in enough money to cover the cost. Because it's not per head, we're paying it per unit, right? The $120 that you're saying we get charged as a subscription fee? Yes. It's per unit.

We're being charged $120. Right.

Okay. So essentially, are we being charged that today?

Yes.

Okay. So per unit, then we're being charged what equates to $360 a month for the three units that we have.

Right. And we're generating approximately on average $100 if we had the session fee in place. So we're short $20 right there. Okay. The session fee is not covering the license fee, let alone any of the other.

Understood. Okay. But, but, but those numbers were specific. If you had, if you were to go back to the slide where you had, you know, I think you said we could generate $700 at 50.

Being conservative and just saying, what if there was 50 sessions a month per machine?

Okay.

I think in the spring, that number is going to be higher in the winter. It's probably about right.

Okay, but you're also talking about having eight, I'm sorry, four, now I'm getting confused because the library is going to be able to support eight charging, but it's actually five units? Yeah.

Yeah, we'll have eight online units at that point across our network. Eight units.

Okay.

Right? But we'll have 14 charging opportunities.

Okay, okay. But we are paying per unit. Okay. Yeah. Sorry, I was just trying to make sure I understood the math there. I guess, you know, my question would be, Well, I have several, but one of the questions is, should we be incentivizing our employees to drive plug-in vehicles or electric vehicles? And by doing that, by offering some kind of discount on the fee, I would be curious as to whether or not there's a way to do that for residents as well. Do we capture information about the vehicle? And would that be something we could consider, that we were subsidizing our LARCs for residents? Because per my point, in order to reach our climate goals, we do need to incentivize our residents to be driving LARCs. either plug-in vehicles or fully electric vehicles. And I'm curious if there is the capacity to do something like that.

Yeah, so the way ChargePoint has their system set up, the station operator, that's their terminology for us, station operator, We have the option to define a group. And then within that system, we create an approval process for somebody to be allowed into the group. So just to make sure I understood how this worked, we created an employee group and we put one of the employees' cars in it or employees in it. It's based on an app on your phone.

Okay.

And we tested it and it worked correctly. So to answer your question, if you said you want a resident rate, we could set that up and we could have some system to verify somebody was a resident and then we would enroll them in the group. The question we'd have to decide is, Are we okay with once we've enrolled them, they're in the resident group forever and ever, or would we want to do annual or some sort of periodic check? That's all just administrative costs, right? So it's just what you would want to see done. So the answer is it's quite possible.

Okay.

It's just a question of how you'd want to set it up and what the administrative burden associated with that would be.

Okay. Okay. I'll pass over to you guys. I'm sure you have some questions.

Yeah, let me just piggyback off what you're asking. So Dan, it wasn't clear to me, you know, with all the different, you know, charging heads and stations and whatnot, roughly what would a session fee add to the cost? So when you plug in, how much more are you paying now? What was that number again?

Well, in the report, we suggested a dollar. Most agencies seem to be charging one or two dollars. Okay, got it, got it.

And then another, I mean, I think... You know, so the three questions were, you know, about the overhead fee by session or inter-rate, the overstay and the employee discount or Larkspur discount. I'll kind of work backwards. I think generally, and I'm wondering if Sarah and Stephanie feel the same, you know, I think... given the size, the amounts of money here, our first goal should just be to prioritize charging. So a success metric for me would be full-time use. And I would almost think about offering it for free at nighttime or something where we pay for it. If I saw someone plugged in all the time using it, that would be a good thing. And as you know, capacity is challenged, you could raise the price, because then you know that you have more demand than you have supply. So I guess I'm, you know, the general objective is to try to get people to use this as much as possible. So I wouldn't, you know, that's just my own thing, you know, over cost recovery. I think it's just important to have the use of and to bring it as close to cost recovery as possible. I think the employee discount is a great idea. There's just the whole HR benefit. We just went through negotiations, and I think offering that up just shows that we are looking out for our employees. I'm not so sure about the Larkspur discount. It sounds a little bit complicated to enforce. The overstay fee, I think, would be important to have. I go to the Bon Air charger a lot, and people in a library or who are just coming and visiting, I can see them leaving it in. And then we lose what I see as the primary goal, which is 100% utilization, or as high as utilization as possible. So I'd be for the overstay fee. And then the overhead, it sounds pretty modest. And I don't think it's going to take away from people using the charger. So a buck is... So, yeah, I mean, those are just sort of my general impressions from this.

Great. I guess my questions were around the total sessions, so I was confused as well. So the 300, is that for the six total chargers that we're talking about?

The current act is six charging heads at the three units, right? So we have three posts and six actual charging heads are generating during the winter months about 300 sessions a month between all six. You know, there's down times when some of the units are active. So that might explain a little bit of the variance in that chart. I think because we're now in the springtime and the use of the park has spiked, the sessions are spiking. So I think we'll probably clear 400 sessions this month.

Okay, so if it's 300 sessions divided by six total chargers, that's 50 sessions per day, right? Or is that per month?

No, that's per month.

But there's only 30 days in a month, so we're only getting like 1.8 sessions a day?

Well, so when you look at our usage, we have high usage at the park in the mid part of the day, which makes a lot of sense if you think that a vast majority of people are going to the park for another reason and they're plugging in while they're there. I don't think those particular chargers are drawing a lot of traffic. And the data seems to suggest that the usage rate drops dramatically in the later part of the day and in the very early morning and in the night to one user, two users. And they're there for a long time. So that's only one session over several hours. And I think that's because there's What those particular two chargers are doing is they're serving a destination purpose. You have to be a user of Piper Park or a user of certain apps to even know they're there. We don't advertise them heavily. We just tell people where they are. And a lot of savvy users now have apps that tell them exactly where all the different chargers are. Larkspur has several high-speed charging opportunities in Larkspur and Corte Madera. So you are also... Our job is not to compete with them, so that's where I think a lot of people are going when they really want to charge up their car. They're not coming to Piper Park to do that. That's why at the beginning I was opening, we're serving that, hey, I need to get 20 miles right now. I'm willing to sit here and get 20 miles in my car over an hour, or I'm willing to go entertain myself for an hour to do that. I don't want to go to the supercharger for some reason. We're serving that need of, thank goodness there's something that I can walk home from that's relatively close and I feel safe enough to leave my car there overnight and walk home and do that. We're serving that need for a small number of users. And then we're just serving that need of, I like to always plug in my car when it's sitting idle. So I'm just in So those are our users. And so that's why we're not generating massive charging numbers. The library may generate more, especially put an overstay fee because we don't have one in our chargers now.

Okay, so that was my other question is, are we charging overstay fees? Because I can definitely see how if someone's just there for a very long time taking up or only paying a dollar for the entire session.

Our average session is almost three hours. That's our average. That's across the whole day. But the dashboard's telling me that that's our average. Okay. That means we've got people staying longer than three hours and we've got people staying a lot less than three hours.

Right. And are we able to get the kilowatt hour usage, the actual energy that's being used in these sessions? Because it would be helpful to see.

I have to do some digging about per session.

Okay.

But I can tell you that we're selling about 6%. megawatts of energy per month so okay that's pretty run that number yeah i ran it you know we're In recent months where we've been hitting that number, we're spending $3,000 to $3,500 a month on power across our current stations. We're recouping about $900 to $1,100 in revenue. So our net subsidy for the last six months has been about $2,000 a month.

Okay. Okay, yeah. So you said

when you're charging at one head, it's six, roughly 6.6 kilowatt hours. And the monthly is a thousand times that. So, I mean, that says that we're getting about a thousand charging hours in a month.

Yeah. And, you know, the data... I didn't dig into in the back end, you know, there's privacy protections, but I can kind of dig in and start to see without knowing that it's, you know, Vice Mayor Paulson, I can see there's some car that's consistently charging up overnight. And, you know, car A is charging up a lot. We do have clearly a couple of people who are charging overnight regularly. It's pretty obvious in the data. So that's driving some of that constant consumption of energy. And then the CMPA charger is quite popular on a short-term basis. I think people are there for meetings. They plug in. Then anecdotally, I've been told there's probably a few teachers at home middle school that leave their cars for half a day or more at the chargers because it's an opportunity for them.

Right. So just given what you just said, right. I mean, that, that just seems to me that there is full utilization right now. The cars are plugged in, even though the session, these sessions look low. I mean, just on what you just said about the electricity usage, I mean, it suggests more than full utilization of all of these chargers.

I think we're using them... I think it depends on what you mean by full utilization. I think we are fulfilling the model that... We essentially put in place. And if that's the definition of full utilization, yes, I think Vice Mayor Paulson was sort of more going to, if I understood his comments, we're not selling 6.6 per unit per hour constantly. Like that would be true full utilization if we were just constantly selling.

It sounds like we're getting five hours a day. five out of 24.

That's probably about right.

So it's, I mean, it's good. I'm surprised, but you know, I would say eight or 12 or something is, you know, I mean, what's for me, you know, but the goal is the more, the more, the better, I think.

And the subsidy we just said was 2000 bucks.

You know, I mean, to me, this is, Like I feel the same smart, you know, we lose a lot of money, but we're trying to get people on the train for the future. So to me, it's a it's a it's a loss leader. That's that's why that's what I'm trying to make. So, yeah, I mean, but that's great. Five hours a day across six stations is 30 a day times.

You know, that's especially when you factor in again what what needs we're trying to fill. Yeah. Another variable in here is for the first time in the Twin Cities, we're going to have a completely open supercharger center. The new one in Larkspur Landing by Iona, there's no restrictions. For the Tesla machines, the older ones that are behind Bonaire, those are still only available to Teslas because they're the early generation units and only the later ones are open to more cars. The Rivian setup, the fat superchargers are still restricted on who gets to use them. So my point with that is we may start to see our residents have an option that's convenient to them where they don't have to join a closed network or pay a substantial fee beyond the power setup. And so we may see some consumer interest move over there now that it's convenient. I know as somebody who has always driven bars that are not in those networks, It's actually really hard in Marin. The charging centers that are completely open to all cars are not as many as you'd think, given the number of EVs on the road here. And so I'll be curious what all this data looks like in a year or two.

Okay. So I guess my main thing is I would like to increase the turnover and reduce the plug it in and leave it for five hours unless it's an overnight type of situation. So I would like to implement some overstay fees. It seems to me that the 41 cents or the 42 cents that it looked in line with other jurisdictions, 42 cents per kilowatt hour. I think that probably makes sense. And then we probably revisit and see what our actual energy cost is versus the estimated, the blended rate of 42 cents per kilowatt hour. I will say that just being on the MCE board like that sounds low. The average residential customer gets charged about 48 point something cents per kilowatt hour.

At certain times of the day, that is much lower than what will be charged. But at other parts of the day, it's much higher than what we could charge. Yeah.

And I do think we do have to factor in all the PCIA and the franchise fees and all the other PG&E delivery fees as well. Otherwise, it's a pretty substantial subsidy if you don't factor those in. And I am for the employee discount. I think that that makes good sense to me. So I think it's just the session fee and the overstay fee. And what was the proposal on the overstay fee?

$5. $5 an hour. And like I said, the system will prorate that down by the minute. It's just when we were looking at most cities, I think it's easier for people to digest some number per hour. Sounds more imposing, $5 an hour than $0.08 a minute, but that's essentially what would happen.

And so the overstay fee would not be in place during the 10 to 7, was it 10 p.m.?

I think that's what we had proposed. I've seen different hour blocks in different schedules that we were looking at. We were trying to keep in mind, let's just say there's three really dedicated people who are excited that they now have an overnight charging option, but we need that parking lot to clear out once the library's going to open up. And sometimes the library, the way we've built it, as you all know, we've built it so those community rooms can be accessed when the library's not open. So we felt like sort of triggering people that they should move on by 7 a.m. seemed reasonable because we may have some morning programs occurring in our community rooms.

Yeah, or maybe we should extend the overstay fees to midnight in case we have, I don't know how frequently we're going to have evening shifts. I don't know.

Yeah. And those are totally adjustable. We could we could decide it's not working and change them. It's really easy in the system. So this is really a policy and operational question. So we could like I said, I think we should be coming back to you at three or six months time and saying this is working. This is not working. Now we actually have some data around this new charging system. Now we've got a few bills from MCE and PG&E so we can actually see what they're charging us to run the system.

Sorry, Dan, can you clarify the last point? So for library operations, we need the parking lot cleared at night? Some days or all days or?

No. Well, in my mind, we could see an interest from some community groups in morning use of the community rooms. And so I think we need the parking lot to clear out of overnight chargers. at like seven in the morning. So the system we proposed, the overstay fee would start being charged at seven in the morning for somebody who left their car overnight. So the incentive we're proposing is come get your car by seven so you don't pay that fee. Yeah.

And I'm curious how you guys feel about lowering the fear or, you know, just because I'm thinking who would leave their car there overnight. It would have to be an apartment dweller because the rate, you know, you know, at your home with a plug in and anybody can use a 110 volt is probably lower. So you have no option. And that's a community we've been trying to serve. So again, as a loss leader, as a subsidy, it's something for consideration.

Which fee are we talking about? Sorry.

The fee for if someone were to charge overnight. So the fee that we've been tossing around was $0.34 per kilowatt hour. And I'm thinking at night, maybe it could be half that, $0.17, because it will be lower anyway. I think we would still have to subsidize it, but I'm interested in encouraging people to do nighttime use because I think that is, I'm under the assumption that it's an underserved, you know, people who don't have charging options, you know, who else would do this? If you have your home, you can plug in there. Why would you leave it in the parking lot? Probably means you're living in one of the apartment units that don't have it.

So you're talking the electricity rate?

Yeah, dropping the rate to encourage that usage. And then having the library allow for the thing to be cleared with the overstay charge so it doesn't get in the way of a 7 a.m. program or something. Yeah. But I, you know, just that's something that's appealing because, you know, Sarah, you and I have struggled with how do we deal with, you know, we have 5,000 plus apartment dwellers and, you know, there just aren't many good options for them to charge. And if this is one, you know, it's going to have to be fairly close to Doherty. But, you know, so be it if someone's willing to walk 15 minutes and, you know, and, you know, then they get a good rate on the electricity. It's the little things and maybe that encourages that usage. So anyway, that's just I don't know if that's significant. Oh, yeah. We should go to public comment.

Oh, right. Yes. Yes, please.

I'm Jonathan Howard, and I submitted the thing online because when I talk, it would have taken 10 minutes. My background, I have an MBA. I've done a lot with activity-based costing. I worked for energy forecasting for a large utility. I did HR accounting and finance for a Fortune 50. Maybe not today, but they used to be. And I did a lot of research. I'm not a good public speaker, as you can tell. Okay, the employee thing, I looked at de minimis. It does fall under de minimis, so you're okay. Chart of accounts, you have this initiative, clean air initiative. So in my view, all the costs should be borne, but then you should have a chart of accounts to put the subsidy. So then that's transparent, people see it. One thing you're missing, forgive me, I'm really bad at this, I've been using it for, as it said in my thing, seven years. And I love it. Living here is a privilege. I love Larkspur. My husband does too. He commutes every day, well, except for one, to the city over the Golden Gate Bridge in an electric car. We charge it at night. I can't get it at seven in the morning. And this is at Piper. Piper has... Jewel had stations. It has two. There's one at the police station. Those are all over six kilowatt hours. They're not split in two. So the new ones at the library are split in two. And that is a choice that you make. Like the ones that are at the post office at Ross, they're split in two. So you get half the power. Why would you use it? You would want to use a single head where you get the seven. The cost is the same, but you get more for the time. And those are the ADA ones. Are they ADA exclusively or not? So that's a pain point. What it really comes down to is I wish you would ask users because here you're doing a lot of analysis and it's good. It's earnest, but you're not asking users. The reason the appointments have gone up when you park there during high peak times, there's a lot. Piper's a great park. There's a lot of users there. they're ice all the time. They're blocked. And so people with Teslas, mostly, they'll sit there and they don't charge. But now they're charging. So if you're going there, your kids are playing soccer, you get the best parking spots. All you have to do is plug it in. You're not really incented because of the program. You want parking. That's what's going on. That's seasonal with people playing sports. Anyway, I think it's great. Whatever you do is fine. But if you change it too much, we're going to get rid of our ICE cars. I mean, our EVs are going to go ICE because it doesn't work for us anymore because we've been doing it for seven years. We're very happy. Actually, we're busted because we're only paying 15 cents a kilowatt hour. So the halcyon days behind us. But with this cost and everything, I really think if you have some workshops, talk to users, you get an idea of what works to incent behavior, capital investments for apartment dwellers, which were condos, same thing. Um, you visited me once when you were, um, doing your thing. Anyway, um, I love Larkspur. I want this to work, but I think there's, and you're all earnest. I watch you. You're doing a good job, but you're not talking to users. And I think that's a missed opportunity. That's it.

Thank you. Great. Thank you for your public comment. Okay. Madam clerk, anybody online who wants to comment?

I'm looking for any race hands for resume audience members. There's no public comment.

Okay, great.

Thank you.

Okay, I thought that was a good point. But how are we going to engage the community on this? And also, it's interesting that the Tesla owners are plugging in just for the parking. So how do you design?

We don't know that for sure, though.

Right. So how do we... It seems to me that I don't know. I feel like the overstay fee is kind of where you get people to move, I guess, right? And can we design the overstay fee where you can see that if someone stops charging? Because like a Tesla charger, if you don't come get your car and your car has stopped charging, they do start charging you by the minute, pretty steep fees. And so that's really to not have people just sit there for hours when their car is no longer charging. Right.

So what we're proposing is essentially you pay per minute that additional cost. You'd still be plugged in, but your cost is spiking. So are you willing to keep paying that cost? I guess if you are, you could stay. So you want to set the fee so it's so painful somebody wants to move, right? Yeah. Can I speak a little bit about holding a forum?

Yeah.

You have to decide what your policy goal is. And if your policy goal is to provide affordable or cheap or subsidized pricing to members of the community who can't install a charger in their home, that should be a different discussion than the one we're having today. That was never any intent. That may be an unintended consequence of the current setup, but it wasn't the intent of the setup. And I think you need to have that policy discussion because quite frankly, I don't think the current model is actually the right one either. There's no means testing going on. And if that's some of your goal to Council Member Margulies point, we should be exploring how to do a system where we are targeting who pays what and We can do that, just a lot of administration involved with something like that. So I think that is a separate conversation that you want to engage users on. And as I've tried to emphasize several times, what we charge is not written in stone because you control how much you're willing to subsidize. you know, we could put something in place for the library on day one, and then we could have different policy discussions and say, we want different pricing schemes based on new policy objectives. Um, and that's all doable, but, um, Okay.

Um, I, I, yeah, I hear what you said. And I also heard the public comment. I do think that, um, I do think that the current system doesn't work. Whatever dollar per hour, whatever we were charging per session on a time basis, I don't think that's a good model.

And it's outlawed.

Right. I think we have to go to a dollar per kilowatt hour charging scheme. So I do think we have to move in that direction. I am comfortable just on the generation rate, just charging what our neighboring jurisdictions are charging, like Sausalito and Cormadera. And it seems like other jurisdictions are also reviewing this and potentially moving to this type of scheme. So I think I'm okay with that. Yeah, I mean, to Sarah and Gabe's points, I mean, my thing is I think we should charge a higher overstay fee to get people to move and not stay there so long and to waive those fees in the evening so that if people from nearby condos or multifamily – EV owners want to charge overnight, I think we waive the overstay fees. And then if we want to consider a reduced fee or reduced rate, I'm sorry, overnight. Although I have to point out, though, that there's been a lot of discussion about this at MCE and For the climate, actually, it's because there's so much more energy, there's so much more renewable energy during the day. They are now trying to get people to charge during the day because at night it's fossil energy. And so they're actually trying to... they're increasing the rates at night so that they're trying to get people to charge more during the day just because of overall emissions on the grid. So, you know, I, I mean, I get the affordability point, but also from just a greater climate emissions standpoint, the utility providers are, are changing the rates to try and incentivize people to charge their cars during the day when we have a lot of renewable energy coming on the grid. So, you know, I'm, I don't know. That's something up for discussion. It's just there are climate goals, and then we also have affordability goals that we're trying to balance. So I think that's just something that we have to factor into in terms of policies.

Right. That's sort of why I was going down the road of subsidies to our residents. Right. Because I was thinking the same as you are, is that, you know, the nighttime charging overnight is not as great for the climate. I know that. But this is a way to provide our residents with a benefit of charging during the day or night at a reduced charge. It would also hopefully optimize use of the charger so that they are being used. not just at night, but all day. And, you know, it also helps us reach our goals for the city, for the climate action plan in incentivizing drivers to consider using EVs and plug-ins. So that's where I was going with that. You know, could we consider subsidizing our residents? but it does have obviously more administrative fees associated with it, and there would need to be some way to annually check to ensure that these people are still residents if they're still getting that rate. But I think overall, I mean, I am in favor of the cost recovery. So... We don't have the data. We don't know.

It is difficult because we haven't had charters on the EV rate system to fully understand. I did want to put a food for thought about your idea about residence. A slight tweak I might recommend is discounts for EVs registered at time of purchase in Larkspur because that means that we received Measure B and Measure G sales tax for that car purchase. And so in a sense, you'd be rewarding cars that actually got registered here and taxes did flow. So you're kind of saying, well, in recognition of that, we would provide a subsidy potentially to those drivers rather than residents, because it's just a slightly different universe.

yeah interesting well I just feel like right now that would be just administratively difficult I mean maybe we should think about getting some data and then trying to figure out like whether we want to go down trying to track people's I mean I don't know we would have to have people show documentation I mean it just feels like it's

Yeah, I mean, when you get into the world of subsidies, the first question really should be, what is the behavior we're trying to incentivize and what's the group we're trying to target? So that's not what we put in front of you this evening. So I definitely think if this interests you, this conversation about a subsidized rate should come back. at like a special rate for a certain group. Cause you need time to chew on what is, what is it I want to accomplish and who is it that I want to benefit from that.

Okay.

And I do want to caution you. I was thinking about the rate you threw out, Vice Mayor Paulson. That rate's so low, if I lived in Rose Lane, I'd probably charge at the chargers rather than at my house because that would be considerably lower than what somebody's paying in their house, even at night. So I wouldn't necessarily recommend the rate drop below the time of use charge.

Right.

So we'd have to figure out what that is.

But I will caution the costs.

I totally get it. I totally get it. But I, you know, I'm that frugal. If I lived there and you made the cost that much lower, I'd be like, well, I'll just park right there.

Okay, so I don't know. Are we going to – do you think we can come to a consensus here and make a decision now, or do we want to postpone this to March 30th, which would be – it would be the same three people because I think Catherine is still going to be out of town and also Scott is going to be out of town. So we can postpone this to March 30th if people want more time to talk about it and think about it. Or if you just need more time to think about it, or do we want to just –

I'm okay with that. I just, you know, I'm curious to, you know, summarize the last, you know, 45 minutes or more. You know, it seems like we have a reasonable consensus, but I just want to see, Dan, from your point of view, what guidance you're hearing from us and, you know, what the fuzziness is. Because I thought we were kind of coming together on most of these points.

I think I think probably you need to go down the list as a three and make sure you all agree on what you're saying. And I do think, again, you could approve something tonight or tell us how to massage it and bring it back on the 30th so that there's something in place so we can launch the chargers. on March 31st. And then you could continue the discussion of whether you want to target certain groups or you're willing to take on more subsidy. If you're trying to think about I'm okay with the subsidy right now. My recommendation would be not to charge a session fee and to just do the rate because we can always just build our costs into the rate. That's just a little bit more volatile model, but we could do that, right?

Sorry, but it just occurred to me that the EV charging rates are specific to the new EV chargers, not the ones in Piper Park. So maybe we consider leaving Piper Park as is and getting the data from I don't know. I was just thinking that seems to be an option because we're not going to be signing up for EV charging in Piper. We're still using the same meter that we're attached to. But obviously, one policy that is consistent across the city makes sense. But that way we could be gathering data on two separate systems.

Yeah, I think the only question there is, you know, if our current subsidy is roughly $2,000 a month, are you okay with that continuing for another year and a half until we have a meter out there for the chargers? So that's a question you have to be comfortable with. Because that number will change a little bit because some of those users will probably move over to the library chargers. Yeah. it's just, you know, could we do the way you just said? Yes. But that's what you, as a brass tax kind of contemplation is whether you're okay with that subsidy staying in place on those machines.

All right. Yeah. I was just thinking.

Okay.

Um, all right. Well, why don't we go through each of these and just see where we're at and see if, you know, we, we have any consensus here on, um, Here, let me see. Sorry. Okay, so here let's talk about the, let's talk first about the dollar per kilowatt hour. So right now the proposal is 42 cents per kilowatt hour at all times. So we're not going to vary it. We're not going to vary it during the day.

Was it 42 or 36?

42. 42. That's what Corda Madera is doing. Okay. And they're telling us they think that's probably a tiny bit low and there is a subsidy as a result that they're okay with right now. Like I said, everybody's going to get in this pattern of periodically revisiting the numbers.

Right. I mean, I'm okay with that. I think that our neighboring jurisdictions are doing it and we'll probably just gather information and just see whether that actually covers the cost of, in my opinion, I think that number looks low just for what I know. But anyways, we should.

And that's without the session fee? Yeah. Well, that's a separate question, whether you want to charge the session fee or not.

So what do you think? Are we thinking $0.42? I'm just going through the list here.

Okay.

All right. So the session fee, the proposal is $1 per session. And this was to try and recoup the administrative fee and the maintenance and the charge point parts and support. And the 10% charge point?

The license. Oh, the license. $120.

Yeah, the $120.

That's a fixed cost we know is there.

Okay.

Yeah.

And the maintenance we're not sure of?

It varies. Some months there's no maintenance. Other months we're out there a couple times making sure we reset things. But quite frankly, the Piper Park, and I think the biggest reason we're out there is those things trip the breakers a lot, and somebody's got to go reset them.

Okay, so we'll say that's pretty small. And then what about the charge point parts and support, the braking?

When stuff breaks, it's expensive. I checked with Mr. Skinner. I'm going to jinx it. We're in a period now where nobody's broken anything for a little bit. But the most common thing... if you care, is the latch. And I'm looking at some Tesla drivers up at the dais. It's our Tesla drivers who seem to be the hardest on it because their adapter and the latch don't always play nicely together. So all you Tesla viewers out there, please be gentle. But it's that latch that makes a click when the gun plug actually locks into place. Council Member Margulies, I don't do that.

So she's shaking her head over there.

So when those break, it's pretty pricey. And we have to get the part.

But how, okay. Is that like tens of thousands or what are we talking about?

No, no. The part's like $70. Oh, okay.

All right. Okay. Okay. All right. I had no idea.

It really is. I think at one point we ordered extra ones because they were breaking pretty frequently. But that was hard to do because, uh, harsh points, you know, if every city's got the same problem, they can only make these things so fast.

Okay. All right. Well, I don't know. I think a dollar a session. I mean, that, that sounded fine to me too. I, I'm not, um, I, I, I, you know, just to recoup some of these other costs, um, But I mean, I don't know. What are people thinking? I think a dollar session, it sounds like it's market consistent with what some of the other jurisdictions are charging.

Yeah, I think that's kind of our, you know, in the absence of like the public comment, you know, having a big session group, which I don't know how much input we get. We're kind of going by norms and what Court of Madera is doing, what the other others.

Yeah, I do want to be transparent here. There aren't a lot of session fees being charged by the government agencies in Marin. But if you look in the broader Bay Area, they're very common. So for whatever reason, a lot of the Marin agencies that have made the switch are choosing to just use the rate to either recoup their costs or provide.

Yeah.

I mean, my only devil's advocate point is, again, I just really want people to use this.

And, you know, we're not talking like we just...

put in, what is the price? Was it 150 or 250,000 for the sign in front of the library? So, you know, this is not a big budget item, 2000 a year. And, and I think this is really about changing behaviors, encouraging habits, you know, accepting a loss. So, so I'm, I'm, okay to go without it, but it's not a deal breaker to me. I mean, if you guys feel strongly, it's, it's, it's just, I'm, you know, and then additionally, like for the overstay to wave it at night, yes, there may be someone from Rose lane who wants to save two or whatever it is. But I, I feel if I see someone that's, it kind of, you know, puzzles me, like when I drive by Redwood and I drive by college and we're in, there's so many stations are not being used at night. And then we have all these, you know, the 5,000 apartment dwellers, where I'm like, how do we get those two to meet? So that's my impetus. I don't know if I'm looking at the right tool in the policy box, but that's kind of my intention, at least.

The stations at Redwood are really slow. They're basically in the trickle gap.

Oh, okay. Yeah. Okay. And that's because, so they're not even level two, are they?

No, they're, they're very basic level two chargers. And it has something to do with the way they're tied to this. And I actually wonder if we had level three, you know, what that, or any higher, what that would do to our overall, we can't install level three chargers in this corridor because the con the, the main line's not designed to carry it. Um, Maybe you missed it, but there was a point when Rivian dug up the street outside the mall, and that's because they were paying to have enhanced conduit put in so that they could carry enough charge to their superchargers. Luckily, Larkspur Landing already has that infrastructure. That's why the new setup that Iona is putting in is easy because the power was already out there. There's a pretty substantial run of power along 101 on the east side, I'm told. And so it's a little easier to tap in over there. I've learned a lot of stuff about eCharging recently. Yeah.

My thought on it is similar to Gabe, is that we want to promote the charging. And I'm also thinking, you know, in this initial stage, I think what we want to do is just capture some very basic data, which is what are the kilowatt hours being used and how much are we paying for those charges? So we know from a very basic standpoint, what are we subsidizing or are we subsidizing? And that this one dollar fee maybe is something we consider adding later if we need it to recover our costs. And I also just feel like for those people who are using the chargers right now, like this is a pretty significant jump. I mean, sure, they've been getting a great deal, but it also helps take the sting out of the jump for our current users. So I would be inclined to skip the session fee, at least for the interim. And I would absolutely think we need to reconsider. We need to gather the data and reconsider this discussion. this policy, you know, six months down the road. And also, as per the public comment, talk to the users and get some feedback from them and understand. And there are, you know, larger problems about, you know, getting iced out or people parking just because it's a convenient parking spot and not really needing it. the charge i mean those are those are bigger problems to solve and and things we really need to figure out how can we make this um equitable for everybody to leverage these spaces because we don't have that many and certainly our goals are to drive our residents in the direction of using evs and plug-in vehicles right

Okay. All right. So why don't we skip the session fee for six months? And I mean, it sounds like, you know, um, so why don't we skip the session fee and then let's talk about the overstay fees, um, Again, I think that we got to charge overstay fees just to keep people from taking up a spot when they're not charging and, you know, for just staying for too long. I mean, waiving it at night because obviously, you know, whoever wants to charge at night, I think that's fine. But I just think during the day we want people to not be sitting there.

Yeah. And I'm curious, in terms of an overstay fee, I definitely agree. I think it's a good idea. We need to make sure that there's rotation at these spots, excluding nighttime stays. But is there a way, like when somebody plugs into these charge point chargers, does it know what percentage charge they already have?

I have to double check. I'm not certain. That's a common feature in the supercharger network. But again, a big part of the supercharger network is it actually recognizes individual cars. So I'll have to check. I don't know the answer for our setup. The other thing I can check, I would encourage you to make a decision tonight so we move forward since it sounds like you're there. Yeah. We could also take a look in the back end. I'm not sure if I could set... a different parameter for an individual charger, because maybe a broader window for the Piper Park chargers would be appropriate, versus the 7 AM, we were really driven by, well, we might need those parking spaces for morning activities at the library. But maybe Piper Park could be later. And I have to make sure whether the system will accommodate that. In terms of a global setting versus individual. So I could look at that and report back to you at the next meeting. That might be a compromise solution on that issue. Yep.

And here's a really naive question. The overstay can only be monitored if it's plugged in.

Yes.

Okay, so if someone happens to go in the spot and doesn't plug in, you almost need a CSO to figure that out, right?

Yeah, so Sausalito actually is, I think, the first city in Marin to adopt regulations about parking in their EV charging spots. They just did it, so we don't have any regulations. We don't have the ability to say how's that actually working out for you, but you can modify the municipal code to make that a penalty, but then you have to go enforce it. You have to decide again if that's part of the model you want to create. We're trying some new signage at the commons to really emphasize that these spots are for EVs, but we aren't putting anything up that says we're going to come issue a ticket or anything like that.

Are we putting any wording on it about a minimum two-hour stay?

That's based on this conversation. There definitely will, and the unit itself will tell the user. I have used the same unit at San Rafael City Hall. It's very clear. It tells you in the app and on the unit itself, if you're here after two hours, we're going to start hitting you with this extra fee. So that's how we set it up.

Do we want to consider something more extreme, like $1? Yes, absolutely. I think a more extreme overstay fee would be... I kind of think too. I mean, $5, and if it's prorated on the hour, I almost think you want to do it by the minute.

Yeah, I think you got to do it by the minute. And we're, I don't know, what do you think? 25 cents a minute? No, no.

I was even thinking a dollar, a dollar a minute. Yeah.

All right. But I agree. I think, I think it's gotta be faster because otherwise people will be in the library and be like, Oh, $5 an hour. I'm just going to sit in the library for three hours.

And yeah, you know, I don't think it, yeah.

I don't think $5 is a deterrent. Yeah.

It doesn't burn enough.

I don't think either.

I mean, some people I'm sure it will, but I don't think it will.

Yeah. So I think, I don't know what, what do you, I think a dollar is a lot, but I don't know. Maybe that's the idea. Yeah.

That becomes like a parking ticket. I mean, I think a parking meter is about what that charges. Um, Yeah, and I guess, I mean, again, what guidance can we get? You know, who's doing it this way is the first question. I mean, you know, I would split the difference, like, you know, a dollar a minute is 60 bucks, you know, for a $60 ticket for an hour or so. That's not parking fees. No, that's a ticket already.

Yeah, but then you don't have to have a community officer, but the other problem is people who are parking. Well, people just won't plug in. Yeah, that's a problem.

All right. So are you?

I think, you know, so it sounds I agree. I'd like to, you know, give Dan something tonight and then we can revisit it. And we're on this last issue. And so we'll actually employee discount. But on the overstay, clearly we want it. You know, if I were to throw a number out there. You know, I think a dollar is a bit high, but but I would go over eight cents, you know, why don't we split, you know, see something that that amounts to, you know, I don't know, I'm not going to be able to come up with a number, but yeah.

50 cents? I don't know, 50 cents a minute?

Okay, call it 50. All right, okay. I mean, that's $30 an hour. That seems to be painful enough. It sends out the message.

All right.

And again, this is all a work in progress. We just need to have a starting point here. This is not something that I know is well-founded on parking policies.

Well, I mean, Tesla starts to... I mean, theirs is like a dump. I think theirs is a dump.

Yeah, theirs is quite high.

They have a great security. And if you aren't unplugged by the end of the grace period, they start to hit you with a pretty heavy fee. Yeah, that's true. That's pretty common in the supercharger world.

Yeah.

So maybe half that, maybe 50 cents. Yeah. Is that what we said?

Yeah, is that good? 50 cents.

That sounds fair to me. I mean, as a guest from the dais, yeah, it sounds pretty good.

Okay, so we got overstay fees. We're going to waive them at night from 10 to 5 a.m. Right. As recommended?

Yeah, we can revisit that. And in the meantime, I'll come back if I can set a differential.

Between Piper Park and the...

If that's feasible, I'll bring that back.

But when you say 10 to 5, you're saying that we want to free up the spots by 7 a.m. Yeah. Are you likely to have programs in the library as early as 7 a.m.?

Not in the library itself, but we've designed the building so that community groups can request to use the community rooms outside the hours of the operation of the library.

Okay.

And I know instinctively a lot of us think after hours, but we know from rec, there's quite a few groups that like to meet it at gate in the morning who might be very interested. Because remember, we're going to have an electronic system where we can give a code and say, okay, you can use this code on Monday and it'll open the door for you so you can go in the room. And so we could see groups that want to meet in those rooms in the mornings.

And that's where I was going. I was thinking that maybe eight is more reasonable. Ten to six.

Yeah, five is, you know, I don't know who's going to set their alarm, especially for charging 50 cents.

Well, again, let's get a two-hour period.

Whatever you set that start point to, they get the two hours before they're going to be penalized. So it's really whatever we say it is plus two hours is the true come-get-your-car time. So if you want to set it at six, we can give that a try. I mean, again, part of this is let's see if it's working and what's not working. And if we have to change that particular one is pretty straightforward. Hey, it's not working. We've got demands for the parking lot earlier than we thought.

Yeah.

Yeah.

OK, so overstay fees, 50 cents a minute starting after two hours. We are to waive the overstay fees from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. OK. All right. And then the employee discount, 50 cents, or I'm sorry, 50%, sorry, for city employees, which I think is fine.

Yeah.

Good. That's fine. Okay.

Anything else? There's enough changes here just to clean it up. Why don't we bring the cleaned up resolution on the 30th with all of the direction you gave us?

Okay. Great. So are we, do you have any other questions for us?

I think I got all the direction to do that. And there's some questions I've made note of. So we'll bring back some answers on the 30th as well.

Great. Okay, great. All right. So that concludes item 8.2. And we are going to adjourn. But before we adjourn, I just wanted to say a few words for the families and the victims of those who were impacted by the avalanche earlier in last month. I just... As a community, we lost one of our community members, and she was very active in our community. Danielle Keatley, I don't know if you all know her. But just, it's so tragic. And our hearts go out to their families. And these were all moms of young children. And I think it's just incredibly sad that that these were women in the prime of their lives. They have so much more to give. And unfortunately, their lives were cut short. And so we grieve with their families. And we hope that wherever they are, that their spirits are at peace. Okay. And with that, we are going to adjourn to our special meeting on Monday, March 30th. And we are canceling our regular meeting on Wednesday, April 1st. So we will see you all on Monday, March 30th. Thank you. And we're adjourned. Thank you.