City Council - Regular Meeting

Great. Good evening, everyone, and welcome to the regular meeting of the Larkspur City Council. It's Wednesday, May 20th, 6 o'clock p.m., and I will call the meeting to order. Can we get a roll call, please?

Council Member Kandel. I am here. Council Member Markleys.

I am here.

Council Member Way. Here. Vice Mayor Paulson. Here. Mayor Andre.

Here. If you're able, please rise and join us in the Pledge of Allegiance. wonderful thank you now we'll move on to public comment this is the time for members of the public to address the council on matters and issues that are not on tonight's agenda. So if anyone would like to make a public comment, please come forward to the podium. Please give us your name. And if you so wish, you know, which part of Luxor you're from. Thank you.

My name is Brenda McCowan, and I've lived for 40 years at 27 Myrtle Avenue. And tonight I'd like to address the council. I've already talked to Mayor Andre and Matthew in the planning department about the situation of the, I guess it's an awning or something downtown in the business district that's been there since November. Nothing has been done to it since November, just the temporary scaffolding and stuff. Recently, I saw a blind man walking through there having terrible difficulty because it was jamming up in all the plywood and stuff. And I was starting to help him, and someone came out of the store and helped him. But he was very gracious. He knows our downtown, but that has become a problem for him. And I think for a lot of other people, we're looking forward to our 4th of July, and there'll be a lot of people here. And sometimes that blue awning is blown out in the street. Nothing is being done. The owner, Mr. Ependemio, I'm probably pronouncing his name wrong, he says it's the city, but Mayor Andre and Matthew have told me that he, I think, tells them that it's his architect and contractor. So I was wondering what the city can do in making him to move forward. The Silver Peso, the restaurant, they even have workmen on weekends on Saturday because he still gets his rent from his merchants and his tenants above. So he's not losing any money, not going forward with this. And I would like to ask the city council to maybe put this on the next agenda. And we will have more people here because a lot of people in town and residents are complaining about it. So thank you very much.

Great. Thank you for your comments. And we will reach back out to you. Thank you.

Hi, my name is Alex Beresov and I own Folios right downtown. And I'm here for the same reason. As a merchant, we really need to have that street open. Not only, I'm not in that building. I used to be in that building for eight years. They look closed and it doesn't do anything for the rest of us. It impedes the light. And my question is, do we even need an awning? Because I know the building, Dennis Gilardi, who remodeled my building, his is also a historic building, and he wasn't required to put up an awning to replace it. Or it could be a canvas awning. Why does it have to be this monstrosity? And why does it have to be for so long? That's my question. And also, is there an encroachment permit? I remember when I wanted to put up my sign basically on a stepping stool, I was required to get an encroachment permit. I had to get plans drawn up. It was very involved for me to just hang my sign. I can only imagine what this guy must be, I hope, is under the same restrictions that I was under. And it's just an eyesore, and it doesn't do anything for the merchants downtown. Customers are not happy. Looks like those businesses are closed. I would be furious if I was in that building. I really would be. So I don't understand what the holdup is. There's no workers there, not since for months. You know? So I hope you guys represent us because that part of the town or the whole town is so charming and we work so hard and at great expense to make that downtown charming for the residents and for people that come into town. And it's ongoing hard work. And I did not feel represented or just to see this eyesore is... And, you know, I remember when we were... We had COVID and there were those parklets and that was a big thing. And they were such an eyesore to the council, et cetera. And you were going back and forth. What about this? Well, I mean, how can that, how can that guy get away? There's caution tape there. And also when you're turning into the alley there, when I, for my back parking lot, you can't see anybody there. He could seriously injure somebody that's walking through because you cannot see it's obstructed the vision. Anyway, enough about that. But I just think that you guys need to hear what it feels like to be on that street every day. And I'm hoping that you would put it on the agenda and we could get something done. You know, thank you.

Thank you, Alex, for your public comments. So we are aware of the situation, and we can't formally respond to public comments during public open time, but I will reach out to you both, and we will continue to have the conversations with the city and also the property owner. Great. Thank you for coming. Is there anyone else who would like to make a public comment? Yes, please come forward.

Good evening, council members. My name is Kristen Abbott, and I'm a Larkspur resident for 20 some odd years, but I'm here tonight to speak on behalf of the Larkspur Community Foundation. We wanted to give you a little update on what we've been doing around town. And so to start off with, we are the sponsor once again this summer for Music in the Park, which starts Friday night. So we have about five Fridays lined up until about mid-June and 6 to 8 p.m., Piper Park, some great bands. And I don't think I saw Nick here, but thank you, Nick, for continuing to coordinate and put this together every summer because it's a really, really nice little event. The foundation is also continuing our beautification efforts around town. So we have two more utility boxes that are about to get wrapped with art. And we got great reviews on our first one. So the next two, there's one by Mount Tamracket Center and then further down at Bonaire Road and Magnolia. So somewhere in the next few weeks, we should start seeing that happening. And thank you, Julian, for helping us move that along. That's been in the works for a bit. We are also the sponsor this year of the Fourth of July Parade, and we're going to be in the parade in an old fire truck promoting the Rose Bowl dance, which is September 19th at Eskow Winery. We have a really great band called Tainted Love, which many people probably know. It'll be a super fun evening. Tickets go on sale June 2nd, and you'll be getting more information in your mailbox soon, so look for that. The monies that we raise at the Rose Bowl this year, we are planning to use in our next project, which is the Arch Street Mini Park. We just received word from Julian this week that the engineering survey was good. We've got the green light to work with the city on this, and so we look forward to kind of next steps to get that going and rolling. Also, appreciate, Julian, your efforts getting us on that unfunded project list for the capital improvement plan here in town, too. And lastly, before I wrap up, I just wanted to say that for the last two months, we as a foundation have been meeting at the new space at the library in one of the conference rooms, which has been so nice to have a consistent space for all of us to meet. We don't have to meet at someone's house. And just a great space. So what a gift for the town. So I hope people are aware that they can use that space. It's really good. So before I wrap up, I just wanted to say that I feel like over the last year, year and a half, the Larkspur Community Foundation has really increased our visibility in town. We're becoming more known. People have heard of us. And while we do great things, and they should have heard of us, I really attribute a lot of that to the newest member of our board, which is Marianne Thompson. My moral support over there. She is an excellent and talented communicator and writer. And so she's dealing with the social media beast for us. And we're on Instagram and Nextdoor, Facebook. And Marianne also publishes a really great Larkspur News newsletter once a month that, while talking about Larkspur Community Foundation, it really talks about anything going on in town, other groups, and just really what's happening. So if you haven't subscribed, you should. So thank you for your time.

Thank you so much, Kristen and Marianne. All right, anyone else with public comments? Yes, please come forward to the podium. Thank you.

Hi. My name is Sarah Harrison, and I am the owner of Exelon's at 483 Magnolia Boulevard. And I understand from Alex, who just left, that some of this has been discussed. I... I need to talk about it because it is really impacting my business. And I am concerned about going forward. Obviously, the lack of visibility because of the scaffolding in front of my store. I am the only business out of the four that is completely dependent on walk-ins. And I don't have them. because currently between the signage and the scaffolding and the encroachment on my space and the darkness and the complete blockage of my front window, I have no visibility. And the overall aesthetic of the building is impacting my very expensive, absolutely fabulous store that I've had for 30 years. And my concern at this point is, is if I don't say anything, I'm going to go out of business having said nothing. And I don't have the Epidendio's ear, who are the owner of the building, and I don't know how to get it. There is a lot of finger pointing where they're saying the city is responsible. I've been told to speak to... The planning commission and the planning that I've been told to speak to the building permits because of the encroachment permit. I'm only seeing messages about the construction permits. I... it's been going on too long and I need some movement. I have, I spend most of my day trying to explain why it is the same that it has been for the last six and a half months. And those few minutes that I potentially have a client in my store are being wasted explaining something that I don't have an answer for. And I'm looking for you to help me improve the situation. I have to believe that this is costing you tax dollars because if I'm not making money, you're not getting my money. And I also have to believe that as we go into tourist season and how it reflects on Larkspur is pretty cruddy. The building is terribly run down and I'm a new tenant there. I've only been here since 2022. Having had my business for the last 25 years before at the town center where obviously everything was beautifully maintained because I was in a mall. This has been really discouraging. I live here in Larkspur. I wanted to support my community, so I came here. And this has been a really challenging few years. And this is just adding to my stress. And it is obviously impacting my life. And it doesn't reflect well on Larkspur. It doesn't reflect well on me. I will own that. But it doesn't reflect well on Larkspur. And I'm hoping that somehow by talking to you and asking for your help, there's some help that can be given. And that's all I've got to say.

Well, thank you for coming to council and expressing your concerns. We take them seriously. And a member of staff and I will reach back out to you. We can't respond formally from the dais like this, but we will reach out.

As I said, I'm at 483 Magnolia Avenue. I'm there Tuesday through Saturday, 10 to 6. Thank you.

Thank you. OK, anyone else have public comments to address items that are not on the agenda? OK, seeing none in the chamber, anybody online?

I'm looking for any raised hands from the Zoom audience members. And there's no public comment.

OK, great. So we will close public comments. And we'll move on to, oh, I'm sorry. Please come forward. Yeah, please come to the microphone so we can hear you.

Okay. I've been in that building since 1984. So a long time walks for a person.

I know that everybody's already said everything that I want to say.

I'm going to be another head to be counted in how this is impacting us. I'm trying to grow my business still, even at this stage. And my new staff is having a really hard time. So I could get into the history of being in that building and the owners of the building, but that's, I think, something for a private conversation, not to be put out in public. So I would love to express that, but not here, not in this environment. But I just wanted my head counted. So that's it. Great. Thank you so much.

Great. Thank you. Thank you for raising your concerns. Great. All right. So we'll close public comments and we'll move on to item number three, which are presentations of which there are none. And we'll move to the consent calendar. Are there any council members or members of the public who wish to remove an item off of consent for discussion? Yes.

I don't want to remove for discussion. I just want to thank Julian for 4.4 getting done. Thank you.

Great. And we did get some public comments on certain items on the consent calendar. Okay. So, Sarah, do you want to remove any item off of consent for discussion? Okay. So can I get a motion?

I'll move the consent calendar.

I'll second that.

Okay, great. Madam Clerk, can we get a roll call, please?

Council Member Kandel? Yes. Council Member Markleys?

Yes.

Council Member Way? Yes. Vice Mayor Paulson? Yes. Mayor Andre?

Yes. Great. Consent calendar passes. Yes.

One moment. Council Member Margulies, could you just note for the record whether there's anybody over the age of 18 in the room with you? It's one of the Brown Act requirements for remote participation.

Yes. My apologies. There is nobody in the room over 18 with me. Thank you. Skye.

Great. Thank you. Okay. So we'll move on to city manager's report.

Thank you, Madam Mayor. I'm going to start with, if I can, just address something that was said by the Larkspur Community Foundation, because I want to be clear with folks. We're all really excited about the community rooms, too. The Larkspur Community Foundation is one of a handful of partner agencies that have been specially invited during a testing period. There are still hiccups to work out. I hosted a meeting on Monday. It was actually very uncomfortable toward the end of the meeting because the air wasn't working correctly. So those are the types of things we're trying to work out. We are getting called almost every day. When are you going to make the rooms available? And so I didn't want there to anybody see what was said earlier and think there's an open call yet. Our anticipation is that on June 3rd, the council will be presented for the first time with policies to guide open use of the room, we think by then these last few hiccups and kinks will be out of the system and we'll be able to open up the rooms more broadly. So June 3rd will be the discussion.

So can I ask you that? If somebody calls and says, how do we get on the wait list or whatever, should we tell them?

There is no wait list. Okay. So the council sets parameters for uses of the room.

Should they contact the library director just to get in?

I would ask them not to. But if they do, the library director is making note of it. But it's just my request is that people be patient. Let the council establish some rules about uses and priorities and how we go through the process. And more than one entity wants to use the room on the same night. We're going to have to sort all of those things out. And we are working on it to bring you that information. proposal good to know so but you know you it's a new building we first had to fix computer problems we're still fixing some issues around the doors and like i said we discovered the other night that the programming for the air is wrong so we don't want any of those things to make an unpleasant experience once we open it up to the community um so other than that i had a couple of just housekeeping items madam mayor council members the um council has a longstanding tradition of taking some breaks during the summer so that, uh, you have your opportunity to enjoy the summer as well as the community. And so this year, after checking everybody's calendar and looking at our staff workload, uh, we are going to be dark, meaning we're not going to hold council meetings on July 15 and August 5th. So, um, that means for folks who want to speak to the council, I encourage you to be focusing on the two meetings in June or that there is a meeting scheduled for July 1st. Um, And the other thing I just wanted to let folks know, we've had a lot of interest in the community about what do we do about vacant properties and what are the options for the city? And I've talked with staff and we're going to facilitate a workshop for you on June 17 to just talk about what the tools are that are out there that you might consider and decide what would be useful and comfortable for Larkspur. So, just be a workshop we won't be making decisions that night but i know there's been a lot of interest so we'll we'll do that on june 17. um other than that madam mayor i'll turn it back to you great thank you for the update um i'll open up to the council members for their reports anybody sure

Just two short things. Saturday, the Bonaire Center held their spring fair, and it was packed. It was a really great day. It's organized by the Bonaire Center's marketing department and also Mike Stone from Molly Stone. They have a tremendous amount of their vendors there, and then a whole lot of community groups were represented. Larkspur Community Foundation had a great representation for us, and I thought it was a really successful event. The second thing is I sort of sit on this little bit of an ad hoc committee with Corte Madera to create the 4th of July Parade, reimagine the 4th of July Parade. So that material promotion is going to come out soon, but the interest is really in getting a lot more local groups to participate in the 4th of July parade, small groups that are Boy Scouts or dance companies or soccer teams or book groups or whoever is interested, they're welcome to participate. And the parade information will be available soon to fill out a parade form. So if anybody's listening online that has a group that is interested in being in the parade this year, they are opening the doors to all sorts of groups. That's all.

Great.

Thanks for that update. Anybody else?

Yeah, I'll go real quick. I just got back from the SMART meeting, and it seems that they're every time we break another record. So the ridership in May, I think, is the highest ever, 150,000 riders, I believe. Or no, not May. I'm sorry. Yeah, there was. Anyway, the I think April was 133. And I believe up to now may is 150. But the increase they think is partly from that mascots app, which is the coordination of all the transit services. And I would imagine gas prices might have something to do with it, too. But it's good news that more and more people are using it. And we're in budget season, so they're kind of moving into the stage of operations. There's still some more extensions to the rail service, but a lot of it will be to just have more people get use out of it. So it's positive news for now.

That's it. Great. Thank you.

Just quickly, Central Marin Police, everything is going smoothly. They now are fully staffed and they're transitioning to electric vehicles. I think they said they are at 50% electric at this point. They just had the new chargers installed, so everything's going smoothly there. The fire as well, everything seems to be going smoothly. They had a good budget that they gave us, so that'll reflect nicely. And RVPA is also positive in this point. We restructured and in the process of redoing everything from the bylaws, which are a little bit more favorable to Larkspur than they were. So that's good news as well.

Thank you. Thank you for your work on those counsels. I just have a short update. We launched a community survey for a farmer's market, and so I wanted to let everyone know that we will be bringing a farmer's market to downtown Larkspur in the city parking lot across from the Legion of Honor. We're still working out the final details, but we are hoping to launch... in mid-June. So more details to come, but just wanted to let everyone know that we are working on that with the city staff and hopefully we'll have more information to come soon. Sarah, do you have any updates for us? No, I don't. Thank you. Okay, great. Thanks. All right. So with that, we will move to public hearings, which is we are going to discuss a resolution confirming the record of costs and setting a special assessment and lien against the following properties for outstanding code enforcement violations. um we'll have our community development director provide us with a presentation i just wanted to before we begin just give everyone an overview of how the public hearings normally work we're going to have a presentation by staff and then the city council will be able to ask questions of staff we've been provided with materials for all of the cases People can find them online. But, you know, as council members, we've all read the information and we will be asking questions of staff. And then the individual property owners, if they so wish, will have time to present and make comments to the council. And then we'll bring it back to council for deliberations. So with that, Mr. Mogenson, if you'd like to take it.

Just a question. Since we are postponing 7.2, do we need to announce that in advance or just in case there's somebody who's here who wants to speak on 7.2?

I think it's fine. Okay. You did. I just announced that we're postponing 7.2. But I think it is worthwhile in case somebody's waiting to let them know that 7.2 has been continued. Great. Okay.

Thanks. Thank you, Catherine. Okay, great. Take it away, Mr. Mogenson.

Madam Mayor, members of the City Council, so this is a public hearing on a resolution confirming the record of costs and setting a special assessment and lien against certain properties for unpaid code enforcement penalties. We do this in community development from time to time. We had a few last fall. We're going to be trying to bring these forward on a routine annual basis once a year to put them all together rather than bringing them forward individually or in clumps, so. Um, so the, um, this, uh, hearing was continued from April 15th, 2026. Um, we did provide, um, updated notices for all of the parties involved. Um, we posted serve notice on the subject properties again, um, both mailed. and certified mail to the owner owner's record of address via the county records both certified and regular mail we also sent it to any addresses that the affected parties requested one of the reasons this item was concerned was continued was we received a concern from one of the property owners about an error on their on their citation, and also the methodology based on the municipal code. I'll touch on that in just a little bit. But since that prior meeting, we did reassess everyone, and everyone who was affected received an updated amount. So next slide. Our code enforcement division is responsible for preventing, investigating, and facilitating compliance pertaining to public health, safety, and public welfare, land use, and building codes. Of course, the goal for every enforcement action that we review is compliance and correction. We have to follow the procedures and due process that are specified in the municipal code. Just to give you an overview of how the code enforcement process works, we issue multiple pre-citation notices and corrective actions with those notices well in advance of getting to the penalty phase. So there's really four... There's at least four... notices that a property owner receives prior to actually getting a fine. That starts with a courtesy notice. We will provide as many courtesy notices as necessary to make them aware of the violation, and then it goes to a formal notice of violation. Again, steps one through four on this list in the PowerPoint, courtesy notice, notice of violation, final notice of violation, and notice of violation with intent to cite. None of them have a financial penalty. All of them can be challenged. They all come with directions to the affected party on how to correct the citation. And then finally, the last step in that is to actually issue the administrative citation, which is the penalty, and then that penalty increases with successive administrative citations. It is ultimately the property owner's responsibility to initiate compliance when notice is received, and we try to give them as much direction and guidance to come into compliance because, again, that is our goal. So for building code violations, we have three different types of administrative citations in the municipal code for as far as fines are concerned. But when it comes to a building code violation, we pause enforcement when a resident is actively pursuing a building permit to correct and observe building code violation. Because when you have that permit application in and you're actively working to do that construction, of course it wouldn't make sense to show up and write a citation when they're actively working to address that. Building code violations take a very long time. They get six months when they apply for a building permit. If that building permit expires after that period, if they don't keep it going, if they don't demonstrate that they're actively making progress towards the permit, if they abandon that permanent expires and no progress is made, then we return and we continue our enforcement. So they do have a lot of time. Once that building permit is active, we do not enforce building code violations. And so I mentioned the different types of citations and the rates in the municipal code. And I'm going to touch on one of the items that we continued this for. So as you can see, there's a general category. There's a building and safety category. And then there's a category for short-term rentals. There is, in building and safety, a separate citation for residential and commercial. So in the fourth and subsequent citation, It actually is a higher penalty for a commercial property. And so we identified that some of the affected parties had been assessed a commercial rate rather than a residential one. And so that was the correction that we did for the parties that were assessed that there weren't very many. When you do receive a citation, each time you get an administrative citation, you have 30 days to appeal that citation. So every time you get one, you have a 30-day period where you can respond to that. We don't write you another administrative citation until that appeal period is up. And so you can challenge that. You can reach out. You can work with us to correct whatever the situation is. And it doesn't matter if it's your first one or your sixth one, you still get that 30-day period to file an appeal, so that's the due process involved. If you fail to pay your citation, it is subject to additional late fees per the code. We noted that some of the, what we did was we compounded the late charges and we went back and looked at our records because it was asked, is that standard practice? Well, the municipal code doesn't say if you compound late fees. And we did some research and we found out that historically we have not compounded late fees. We don't often issue late fees because we don't see a lot of citations get to this point. We have five on our list tonight. We started out with more and they were erroneously assessed a compounded late fee. So we did remove that. And we based that on the historical practice and we identified that it was done in error. And so we have corrected that, and we issued refunds to the affected parties. We sent a refund check already to two parties that were affected. The other parties that were affected, they had not paid their fees yet. So that was what was done since the last hearing. go on just to summarize. So we're here tonight to collect on unpaid penalties. The municipal code allows for a lien or a special assessment on a property to collect past due fines and late payment charges. That is the methodology that cities use to collect unpaid fines and penalties. It's a standard practice of government agencies. A lien or a special assessment is the final step in the process as a means to collect these unpaid fines and charges. It is part of the property owner's due process. This process occurs only after the responsible party has been provided opportunity to contest their citations. All of the people here this evening have had multiple opportunities to file an appeal to contest their citations, and they have not done so. The purpose of this lean hearing is to determine the validity of the debt and authorized collection of the debt that has been incurred. A lean hearing, as I said, it's not a substitute for an appeal hearing, but it is part of the due process. So I expect that the affected parties will be present tonight and will speak to their individual cases. Staff are not able to waive delinquent fines and penalties. Only the city council can waive a fine or a penalty. And so I want to make that clear and make that clear to everyone in the city. Our code enforcement officers make that clear that only the council can waive those penalties. They cannot be done by staff. The properties that are listed for lien this evening have been brought forward because they failed to remedy their violations. They did not challenge their citations through the appeal process, and they failed to pay their outstanding fines within the required timeframes. Each of the property owners on the list have an attachment to the staff report that lays out the individual details of their circumstances. The Dillington property owners can still avoid a lien if payment is received within 30 days of resolution adoption. After that point, the county tax assessor takes responsibility for the collection of those liens, and they would collect those liens through the property tax process. And so with that, we are recommending approval of a resolution at the close of the hearing to place delinquent charges for any unpaid code enforcement penalties, late fees, and administrative costs on the Marin County secured property tax bills. There are a number of parties here this evening I'd like to speak. I have heard and spoken to each of the five parties that are affected. I know one of them just sent me a voicemail message at the beginning of the hearing this evening and said he was sick. So I'm not sure if he's going to call in and speak, but we certainly will have some public comment this evening. With that, I'll take questions.

Thank you, Mr. Mogenson. Yes, I'll open up to cancel for questions.

I have a question for our esteemed attorney. I'm not sure I understand our role here. So my understanding is this is not an appeal, but we're being asked to determine the validity of the debt. So are we making factual findings here? What exactly are we doing here on this process?

Formally, you are being asked to review staff's calculations of the costs and summary of the total amount of fines and expenses that the city has incurred and engaged in these enforcement actions, determining that the amounts that are stated in the staff report and the resolution are correct. And if you determine that they are correct, you have the authority to adopt the resolution and have those amounts recorded against the properties as a lien and a special assessment. As a special assessment, they would be put onto the next property tax bill and made a collectible item. Informally, well, this is both formally and informally. Because of the property implications, this is a final opportunity as a due process issue for the property owners to address the City Council. to identify any errors and to make any special arguments that they have about why the amount should be reduced. Council does have the discretion, even if the amounts are correct, to reduce or waive any of the amounts. That is your authority as an adjudicatory body in the interest of fairness or any other reasonable basis that you determine to adjust the amounts or to waive them completely. So that's the informal piece of this, but the formal piece is because of the property interest we do want, the state law requires that there be one more opportunity for the property owners to be heard on this. in the event that there are any actual errors in the amount, but also to address the council on the matter as a whole. But it is not, I guess, even though the community development director spoke to this quite clearly, I do want to emphasize this is not an opportunity for the property owners to... Turn this hearing into a substantive appeal of the underlying violations. The opportunity to appeal has expired. They failed to take the opportunity to do that. While some issues of the substance of the violations is within their purview to address the counsel about you are not being called upon. to adjudicate whether or not the violations actually existed and remained uncorrected. Formally, the only role is to evaluate whether or not the fines and costs to the city have been accurately reflected.

Okay, let me just make sure that was a mouthful. Yes. So basically, our job is to say whether the calculations were correct, whether the number at the end of the day, the math was right. Correct. However, the extraneous information could be used to potentially waive part or all of any penalty if we feel that's appropriate.

That is also correct.

But we are not to say, oh, this shouldn't have been issued or anything like that. That is correct. Okay. Well, thank you for explaining that. I appreciate it. Thank you, Madam Mayor.

All up on his same question. So when the property owners received many of these multiple violations, with each of those violations, they had the opportunity to appeal the issue and actually asked for a formal appeal hearing to us to discuss sort of the specifics of what they were being asked to modify or correct. But nobody in this list of five did that. So we are now to this point. Hypothetically, if we agree and pass this resolution, is there another step for an appeal of the homeowners or is this the final determination?

This is the final administrative appellate step. Okay. There would be the opportunity to file litigation and have a court review it, but this would be the last step for a review process by the city.

Okay.

That's clear. We don't do these very often, so thank you for clarifying that.

That's why we wanted to make sure we gave you all the information about it.

Yeah.

Okay. Council member Margulies, I see your hands raised.

Thank you, Madam Mayor. Yeah, I have a question for staff. Thank you for the report. I understand that the goal of code enforcement is to gain compliance and correction. This is hypothetical. If we pass this resolution tonight and these homeowners then have a lien placed on their property, what tool in our toolbox do we have to actually still have the corrections made? Or can they actually then be recited if they don't correct the problem?

They can be recited if they don't take action. We would just continue with an additional citation. We're here this evening because the citations are past due that they've already amassed.

i'll just confirm that that as long as the violations remain in place the city has all of its tools uh available to it for code enforcement to obtain correction of those violations including the issuance of citations and the application of additional fines ultimately the goal as you stated is to gain compliance and and have these issues corrected but as the community director said the These fines have remained unpaid for quite some time. The goal was to have these addressed, but they do not actually, the application of these to the property through the lien and special assessment do not clear the record of the violations themselves. Those remain in place and the city has all of its available tools to continue to gain compliance.

Okay, thank you.

I'm sorry, could you help us understand? So we have five violations here. Have any of them been corrected at this point or all of them or what is the status on that?

Well, we started this process with quite a few more. I think we said 11 or 12 when we began noticing many of the properties have paid already their fines.

But I'm not talking about the paying of the fines.

that paid, they also came in for building permits or at least reached out. I can say that all of the parties here did reach out. Not all of these parties are necessarily related, however, to a building permit. We have one that's related to a short-term rental violation. So each time we have a complaint about a short-term rental, for example, you would be issued a new citation. because the goal is to, because we don't allow short-term rentals to stop that. So it depends on the type of violation, but as far as a building permit goes, if it hasn't been resolved, we will stop that enforcement during the effort to work on the building permit once it's applied for and until it's completed or expired, we will not issue an administrative citation, but in the case of a public nuisance or a short-term rental, yes, we would continue to cite them on a case-by-case basis.

Let me just see if I can translate that. So out of the five that we're hearing tonight, none of them have actually corrected the violation. Is that what I'm, that they're still outstanding? No, not about the fines. I'm talking about whatever the underlying reason for the fine has not been corrected yet. Is that accurate?

For the ones that are building permits, I would say that every one of four of the five are related to a building code violation. They have at least contacted us, but they have not necessarily pulled a building permit yet.

Okay. Thank you.

Great. Any more questions?

I think Sarah's got her hand up too, but let me finish this one. Skye, the resolution has Exhibit A, which has all five of the properties. So once we... we've listened and heard everything and we make a decision. Do we, can we parse out individual properties out of the exhibit a, or do we have to have resolutions for each separate one?

No, we can. If you were, for example, to decide to completely waive whatever. Yeah. Then I would, my recommendation would be to adopt the resolution with all references to that, including an exhibit a removed from the resolution. Yeah. If you wanted to reduce the amount of the fines to be placed as a lien in special assessment, then the motion could be to adopt it with that dollar value stated in the resolution. But everything else in the exhibit would remain the same because that's the basis for the factual foundation for it. Got it.

Okay.

Okay. Council Member Margulies? Thank you. Yes, one other question that I had was with regards to liability. If hypothetically these fees were waived, in any way with that put the city on the hook potentially for liability if something happened at one of these properties where we did go out and move forward with code enforcement and notices of violations and citations and then During this hearing, let's just say hypothetically, we waived and the property owner did not make the corrective actions and something happened as a result that was related to this. Would the city be liable in any way?

Short answer is no. If the city council waived any of the fines and costs, that does not have any reflection legally on the underlying violations. It would be reflected in the record that that is a discretionary action of the council. solely on that issue. At this point, the evidence would be clear that the city has established the basis for the violations and the property owner has not appealed those. As to the hypothetically situation with unpermitted construction, to say if something happened and a person were injured or property were damaged, the city has statutory immunities from liability for situations in which a property owner has maintained the property in a manner that is in violation of the municipal code and state law. There are some cases in which there have been attempts when the injured person tries to shift liability to the city. But as long as the city has made a good faith effort to continue to engage in the code enforcement process and bring the property into compliance, the city's immunity has generally withstood that kind of attempt to shift liability to the city.

Thank you.

Any other questions?

Okay. I guess I have one on process. So are we going to go through each of these individually or do we just invite people up to, do we invite property owners up to speak about their specific case?

I'm not sure. I would just, there could be people here from the public who want to speak. I would just take it as normal public comment.

Okay, great. We'll do that. Thank you. Okay, so we'll open it up now to public comments. If you would like to address the city council, you will have three minutes. Please come forward to the podium. Please state your name and we'll open up for public comments. Yes, please come forward. Please come to the mic so we can all hear you, including people online. Thank you.

I'm sorry, Sky, just a procedural question for a hearing like this. Is there a back and forth? I mean, this is different than public comment, so can you kind of help us with that?

So this is a variation on a... on a process where we have a little bit more of a standing process where some of you have been party to an appeal where it's as to a specific property and there is a substantive appeal being heard on the underlying property issues. This is slightly different. I do think, though, that if the council wishes to If the representative of a property is here, the property owner or the representative is present and they wish to address the council and the council has questions for that individual, I think that that is fine. The council can gain a better understanding of the information that they're attempting to present. But otherwise, it's slightly different from normal public comment, but But again, the goal here is first to ascertain whether or not the fines and costs have been calculated correctly and then to hear any other arguments that property owners might have as to why the council should reduce or waive those costs and fines.

Thank you.

Again, thank you for hearing me this evening. I am a property owner around the corner. I have a historical house at 11 Locust Avenue. And I'm here really because I did hear the gentleman speak that a... An employee of the city cannot waive citations, but that is exactly what happened last August. I came to a city council meeting. I met with Elise in the hallway. She said, I'm working on trying to forgive your citations. I have an email trail that is for your review there with her where she did review. say i'm going to waive the citations so in my mind as of last august this was all done and taken care of and the fact that it's compounded to such a degree over time um was a huge surprise to me when i was um when something was posted on my door um so i'm not listed on any sites i um The code enforcement officer, when he came to my home, which is a very peaceful place that has a fountain, bird life, my tenant, a long-term tenant was there and he asked her, what site did you reserve this on? And she said, I didn't reserve it on a site. So it just is, there's a misconception about the use of my property. This has had such financial impact on me that I had to take a job, a full-time job. I was a consultant with social impact entrepreneurs and And now I'm working full time. I've lived at this property for nearly 20 years. And I have to say that there's a multi-use rental property alongside my property line. And it's been a problem since I bought my house. In the beginning, when I was a single mom, I had to deal with people that they were renting to that were drug addicts. And now there is a woman who repeatedly calls When I'm using my property in a very good way, she lives at Unit 1, 17 Locust. I am pursuing. I did talk with an officer who came to my property when I was having a nine-person lunch last Saturday. He said, I don't see a violation here. He said, if I were you, I'd pull the call log and you can think about getting a restraining order. I feel like I am being harassed by a renter next door when I am a property owner. I would like to request that Elise's paper trail be at least read and honored and that she had the intent to forgive my citations. Apparently she wasn't allowed to do that, but I did not know that last year when I actually came to the city council meeting. You can see the copies there and then also a very nice note from a neighbor Um, so that's really my, my, um, plead is that you reread what she wrote and that, um, and that you understand that the, the complaints are coming from somebody that's a renter next door that even when I'm enjoying my property, there's no Airbnb involvement, no rental, having a small luncheon that I'm getting, the police are being called to my home. And they don't have it there. They have comments. If you'd like to read on May 9th, the comments from Officer Allen, I'd love for you to share that with everyone here. Thank you.

Okay, great. Thank you. Any questions for? Yeah.

All right, first of all, thank you for that presentation.

My first question is, as you heard, the first thing we have to decide if the calculations were done right. Is there anything about the calculations that you think were not done correctly?

Well, yes. I didn't think there were any calculations on my – I thought everything was waived and that my account was at zero with the city.

Okay. And that was – August 25th. As of the date of this letter.

Yes. Okay. And you can read – it's highlighted.

I had to get my old man glasses.

To read it from my computer.

Oh, good. That was my question. Thank you.

Okay.

Council Member Wade, do you have questions? So it is tiny print and I'm old. So I mean, it's the first we've seen this. So it's always hard when somebody comes in with trying to bring information that wasn't available before.

But actually, it was sent to him in April.

actually. Okay.

I didn't see it in the staff report, but... Elise's replacement did receive, and I did not receive any comments back from him.

So her last line is stay in touch and can submit applications or correct the violations. And you have 30 days. Our staff is available to assist you at the front counter Monday through Friday. Did you do any of that follow-up?

Those were for... She liked... She wanted me to clear my driveway. My driveway had two raised beds in it from COVID.

So I don't want to, I don't want to hypothesize what she wanted to do. I just, my question was really the administrative, the request was for you to approach the city and solve this administratively with it.

And that was on the building side, actually, because I had had some issues on that side and I have remedied those.

So that was, in your opinion, accomplished in August of last year.

Yeah, I sent her emails of pictures of my driveway and then also.

Okay, well, when we come kind of bring it back, I'll see if that's what we are clear on.

And so don't sit down yet.

All right. No, I don't. Thank you.

Council Member Margulies, do you have any questions?

No, unfortunately, I just don't have the benefit of having that letter. So I don't know what's being discussed with regards to whatever she has provided as evidence to her conversations with Elise. So

no i don't have any further questions but just feel okay i i do have oh i also have questions go ahead no i i was going to just ask uh for uh councilman margulis's benefit if i could just read those two lines for her they're gonna we're gonna we're gonna send her a copy send it to her right now okay um okay um okay okay

Okay, so if I understand correctly, though, while there are some maybe driveway cleanup matters here, I think from what I read in the file, the main violation was operating a short-term rental, which is not permissible under our code. Okay. Did you appeal any of the previous citations?

I think you should call her back up. Okay.

Could you please come to the podium? So did you appeal any of the previous citations pertaining to operation of a short-term rental?

No, I did not, to answer your question. And I do go into the letter that I sent to Elise that when I got my first citation, I was dealing with my son's double jaw surgery in Los Angeles and working with him and in dealing with his whole healing process. If you read the first letter that I wrote to Elise sort of capturing the whole process, I just, I didn't, I was, I sort of put my head in the sand, didn't really understand. And it was just, it was very, very stressful time.

Okay. But at the time, were you operating or were you renting out your unit or your home? Yes. A short-term rental? Yes. When I was first sighted, yes. Okay. And- every subsequent time, because I think you have to be cited four times. So this, this case has been outstanding for 931 days. So it's been like three years. Um, right. So I guess the question is during that period, were these proper citations because you didn't appeal them?

I didn't know that. I didn't know about the appeal process. And so that was one of the things I addressed in the letter. And that's what she said. She said, you could have appealed these. And so, um, I'm not, and I also didn't understand the requirement, whether it was 30 days or not, and being in the apps and being confused. So those were my reasons. It has been corrected, and I would very much love you to consider, you know, my communication with Elise last summer to some degree in this process.

Okay. Any other questions?

Not for the speaker. Okay. So question for staff, for the individual items, are we better off saving our questions till the end or should we try to talk about them as we're hearing the information?

I think since we're in the public comment period, it would be better if you can to hold your questions about each of these until we finish with public comments, and then we can take them property by property. You got it.

So just to clarify, Andrew, when every public notice of a code violation gives the property owner the code that's been violated, and then on the third page or second page, there's a full list of an appeal process. Okay. So there is a note for every time an appeal, I mean, every time a notice goes to someone, they're also included in appeal process.

That's correct. We use the same language.

The same language and form. Okay. Okay. see that form here i just yes and that sorry and that applies not just to a building permit or construction violation but also our ordinance is prohibiting short-term rentals that is correct okay okay great um is there another member of the public who would like to address the city council if so please approach the podium

All right, seeing none, are there any public commenters online?

Looking for any raised hands from the Zoom audience and first public commenter.

Hello, are you able to hear me? Yes, thank you so much. So my name is Josh Goslinger. I live at 75 Via Barranca. And first off, thank you for taking the time this evening. I'll just state up front, I do not dispute that there is a building code violation in my property. Part of the argument I've heard is that I've failed to dispute this. It's because I don't dispute that there is a building code violation. And why I'm here this evening is because of the fact that from the very beginning of this matter, I have sought to remedy this issue through the administrative means, and through dealing with the building department, as well as with code enforcement. So I was aware of the issue at the time at which we purchased the property back in January of 2024. At that time, I have been writing from the building department that no... no enforcement would take place because of the fact that we were going to be working towards a building permit for remodel. I then did not move into the property until November of 2024, of which you've been run through all of the various sort of timelines for when notices and fines are issued. So at the time of which I moved into the house, December 1st of that year, $2,800 in fines had already been assessed. And this was the first time that I became aware of that. I believe that was a Saturday or a Sunday. On the Monday, I was in contact with the building department and was told in writing that enforcement would be suspended thereafter. Then without notice months later, the... Penalties were resumed. I then immediately went into the building department and under the guidance of the chief building officer filed for a permit for and was told that I would not need plans in order to do this because it was an as is situation. I then have in writing from the chief building officer, I believe two days later, reversing this position and saying that I would need a full set of plans in order to do so. Then, months later, I filed for a permit to install solar on my roof. I was informed that the permit would not be issued due to the code enforcement, at which time we took the existing permit that I had filed for and revised it to become a demolition permit so that I would demolish the kitchen that had been built in the basement of the house. It was not the desired remedy. However, I, throughout this process, have sought remedy. And the solar permit was issued. Since that reworked permit was submitted and additional fees were paid for that, the permit was never reviewed. and at which time it expired. And so we're talking about a situation which fines were assessed after multiple attempts to resolve, after multiple items of contact, of which I have in writing, saying that code enforcement would be suspended, and after being given information that was then refuted in writing with apologies. So at this point, My goal here is not to complain, but to get to a remedy. I've offered up two options in terms of a remedy. I do have a full set of plans ready for a full remodel. And my preferred option is that we are able to submit those and I'm given relief in order for that full set of plans to be reviewed and for us to complete the project as initially planned. Option B is to simply process the demolition permit that was never reviewed. And then my other ask of the council is to eliminate the fines and fees. The record very clearly shows my intent to resolve the issue from day one. I'm not a scofflaw. I am a mere citizen who... firmly believes in adherence to the building code and have made every attempt to try to do so. Thank you.

Okay, great. Thank you for your public comment. Any questions for Mr. Goslinger?

Yes, thank you.

I have a question, sir. So why haven't you submitted your plans if you say that they're ready to go?

So over the past couple of days, we have been in communication with both the building officer as well as the planning officer trying to determine whether this is a submission for a building permit or it requires a planning permit. I mean, that was something of which we were in email contact in the last two days. And the, you know, there's a set of, the plans have been sent over with the request that

we get feedback on whether it requires a planning or a building permit okay um can i ask a question of staff okay so can you please confirm um that information or not yes

Been in touch with our staff in the last few weeks. He reached out to me in April when he received the original notice. But yes, he has been speaking to our staff about the building permit process, and his statement is correct.

But has he submitted plans?

I don't believe he's submitted a permit application yet.

He has not. Okay. And second question is, Mr. Goslinger said that the city did not review his demolition permit. Is that true?

I can't speak to what happened prior to my time here. We've documented everything we could in the log that's attached with this.

So we issued a solar permit. I mean, I guess I find it difficult to believe that the city issued him a solar permit, but we did not review his demolition permit. I mean, I just feel like that's a very strange... If both of them were being simultaneously submitted to the city, like the city responded to one but not the other, is that...

Sorry to interrupt, Madam Mayor. I do want to point out, you want to make sure you treat every property the same. And at the council's advice to Councilmember Kandel, you didn't do this Q&A with staff on the prior property because you have an open public comment period. Having Q&A with staff means you're affording this person more opportunity. Got it. Okay.

Got it. Thank you. Any further questions for the property owner? No? Okay. Okay, Mr. Goslinger, your hand's raised.

Would you like to unmute him again? Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, sorry. I simply wanted to clarify the point that, yes, we did resubmit the building permit in November. I can tell you, you can look at e-track it. It has not even been looked at. I even paid additional fees at that time. The demolition permit, that's correct. And to answer your question, the full set of plans has not yet been submitted. Again, we are in communication with both the building and planning departments. We have a full set of plans. We are simply trying to understand which is the path that needs to go planning or building.

Okay, so I guess last November, when you did not get a response on the demolition permit, why did you not come back to the city and ask what the status was, why you didn't get a response? I mean, if you were trying to rectify or correct the code violation, did you follow up on the demolition permit?

No. I mean, I know that there are backups in departments and sometimes reviews can take time. I was unaware that we were at a state at which, I just assumed we were in waiting in order for this to be reviewed. So only when fines began to be reassessed was I even aware that this was something that had not and was not going to be reviewed.

Okay, thank you.

Thank you.

All right, anyone else in the public, in the chambers who would like to make a public comment? Otherwise, I'm going to close the public comment, period. Okay, seeing none. All right, we'll close public comment and we'll bring it back to the council members to... I think they're confused, Becky. Do they? I'm sorry. Yes. Do you have a public comment? Okay, please come forward. Otherwise, I'm going to close public comment and council is going to deliberate. Are you here for the archaeology? I'm sorry. Okay.

I think you might want to ask him specifically why he's here. So I think there may be confusion. If he's here for one of these liens, he needs to come.

Yeah. Are you here for one of the properties? Okay. So please come to the podium. Yes.

Good evening, Mayor and Council Members. My name is David Pinkasoff, and I'm speaking on behalf of my mother, who's here with me, but regarding case CE23-0140. First, I do want to acknowledge that...

I'm sorry, just to clarify, is this 10 Post Street? Yes.

Okay, thank you. So I did want to acknowledge, firstly, that the city's concerns and to make clear that we're not trying to avoid any responsibility. Our goal is to fully resolve the remaining permit and compliance issues properly and cooperatively with the city. Over the past year, we have actively worked toward compliance. Permits have already been applied for. Plan check fees have recently been paid for. We have retained an engineer and multiple people helping us that are working with the city as well, who is currently on standby waiting for city approvals. so the remaining work can move forward immediately. Several permits have already been issued and finalized and the remaining permits are actively in process. um well we respectfully request additional time approximately 60 to 90 days to complete the remaining permitting and corrective work even an additional initial 30-day extension would greatly help while the current reviews continue through the city process we are also requesting this additional time so we can continue gathering and supporting documentation and information relevant to the remaining fines and assessments while continuing to move the project towards full compliance. My mother's a widow and after my father passed away, many of the responsibilities kind of became me and my brothers and we've all tried to do the best we can. It's been a little bit difficult to manage and I'm new to the whole event here, so I'm Definitely going to be much as opposed to the last few years, what's been happening. Anyways, since becoming more directly involved myself, making sure this matter is fully resolved has become one of my top priorities. And we are committed to working cooperatively with the city, completing everything properly moving forward. We also respectfully do ask the council to consider maybe reducing and waiving the accumulated late fees and penalty portions of the assessment. We understand and accept responsibility for the legitimate staff and processing costs incurred by the city. However, the total balance has grown substantially due to penalties and late fees. The city's own report notes that certain penalties have already been revised because some fines were previously applied incorrectly. Yeah, our family is just one left now because I moved out. But we have very limited financial resources. We really do. And we're trying to direct the money we do have towards like the engineering, the permits, the corrective construction and bringing the property into compliance as quickly as possible, really. If the late fees and additional penalties can be reduced, we would be prepared to immediately address and pay the remaining core costs owed to the city. So we are able to do the immediate payment for the cost that's owed. Most importantly, we're definitely not here, not ignoring this matter. We are engaged and cooperating, committed to resolving it properly. We respectfully ask the council to allow us the opportunity and time to finish the process that is already underway. And, you know, if I can just get that extension, I could come better prepared with a timeline of our events and how things happen and, you know, from the COVID days and working with the city and so on and so forth. If there's any questions, if there's something you guys have any questions?

Yeah, I had a quick question. So I'm just going over the file here. And so you guys had built elevated parking, right?

No, we literally took an as-is structure that's been there from They won since we bought it and it was just sinking. And we literally just got, we actually, I came to the city and I asked what to do. And they said to hire an engineer, get the paperwork, get the plans. And cause you guys were closed down at the time. So he said, go ahead and start it. Do your thing, bring in the engineering paper and we'll get it all approved. But we weren't doing anything. We weren't adding anything. We weren't changing anything. It was an existing driveway that we bought the house with. It was actually sinking and the concrete was falling apart. So we were really just repairing it originally. And...

So are you disputing the fines? I'm not clear now.

Well... Absolutely. If that's an option or if there's anything to reduce the fines or because it's it's the fines a little bit are there's multiple fines for multiple parts. Like, for example, one of them is on the public right away where the staircases that connects on Post Street. And it's really just it was a retaining wall that we maintain for the public right away. We've been you know, working on it and maintaining it every five, six years. It bends down from all the weight and the rain. And this last time we were doing this remodel for the retaining wall, which we were doing it completely legal because it was as-is replacement. It was short. We checked in. However, one of the neighbors complained. And because of that, we had to work with the city and get it inspected. And then it just turned into a trail of events of, that it didn't get finalized. So now we're getting kind of fined for trying to maintain the public street, the retaining wall that's on the street. And really, if we would have just finished it properly legally and paid for it, and there wouldn't have been no issue if we just would have had that opportunity from the get-go.

Okay, thank you. Okay, I'm trying to follow you here. So first of all, the work is not done now, is that right? It has not been completed.

There's not all of it, not the retaining wall on the public right away. Some of it has been completed, so it's secured.

What do we need to get this completed? What still has to be done?

Well, we just applied for a permit this week. We actually had a permit that got applied in February, but there was miscommunication and it didn't get approved. And now we reapplied. We paid for the plan check fees. We just need to pay the, we're waiting for you guys to approve it so we can pay the remainder. And that will be that. So, yeah. And, you know, for the electrical, I think there's like fees here and late fees for the electrical permits as well that we did get completed. or EV charger. However, it's just, I guess what it comes down to is I know her finances very well and the amount that is being requested for the fees is just unmanageable for us right now. And if we did have that money, which we will borrow whatever it takes and we won't make it happen, but that money would really, really need to go into the actual construction and the remodeling of the retaining walls and whatever else that you guys ask for to be actually compliant, that's where the money would go.

And last question is, during which, when you were speaking, you asked basically for more time. Are you asking for us to give you more time to dispute the calculations? Or do you want more time to complete the project? What are you actually asking for?

Both, actually.

Because there are some things we can do and some things that we can't do. So I'm just trying to understand what you're asking us to do.

Both. Ideally, I was asking for more time so that I can gather the information needed because it's been a long timeline of events. And, you know, obviously there's been issues on our end, but also it hasn't been completely smooth sailing working with the city. And they've been completely helpful and they're there to help. But just I wasn't even there for most of it. I just know. So it would just be nice to if I got some time, I can put that information on paper and then show you guys why uh you would maybe consider getting the fines reduced and that's kind of why i was buying myself some time but if also the time would help with the actual permits in the construction as well but you know we're doing that as soon as we can i'm i'm prioritizing it before my personal job and life itself so i'm uh i'm pretty confident we're gonna get it knocked out uh fairly soon thank you appreciate that thank you guys

Hold on. You know, part of what's hard about these kind of things is as public policymakers, we have to look out for the best of not just the individual homeowners, but the whole community, right? So we set up rules to make sure that we have clear standards for buildings and clear standards for review and inspections and everything. And we have timelines else it just can go on forever. And that's not a good situation for the rest of the neighborhood or the community. So what I struggle with with this is your first contact with one of our individuals was September of 23. So almost three years ago. And there were several in the track here of contacts that that property owner and her son came to the counter to discuss the case. I think it might be you.

No, it's my other son.

And that dates back to May 24. So that's two years ago. And yet every single notification had a process in which you could come forward and say, look, we're doing all this, we're doing all that, and we're appeal. But then another contact and nothing's done, and another contact and nothing is done. And it kind of puts... You know, the process is important because it keeps The city's safe. It keeps property owners safe. It keeps contractors safe. That's the idea. So I know life comes up. I mean, I'm a widow too. I know life comes up and changes direction. Just letting you know that that's what we have to struggle with is our city staff work hard to try to get collaboration and cooperation with homeowners, but we only have a certain amount of patience and time for the safety factors.

Okay.

And I just want to make clear that this wasn't a violation that happened last month. It was over three years ago the process started. And it all adds up.

You're very valid. It did start a few years ago. My brother was involved originally, but in that context, time we've still been very very in touch with the city working on whether it's a different property with other violations that I had to work with Thomas and I you know did all above and beyond for that it Fixed it and did it in a timely fashion. And it was a different property. Well, that's good.

That's good news. That's the whole process.

And, you know, besides working with, you know, I worked with the public works with Scott Mitchell for a while. And in general, I've just, I live farther away. I'm moving back to San Francisco to literally get this actually figured out. So that way she can rest and sleep at night. Because unfortunately, besides this, she has a lot of other stress. Yeah. And my brothers, unfortunately, who were helping, they have kids and now, sadly, they're divorced. It's been a tough ride, but I have been, if you do look through the time, there's probably contact every two to three months between through emails or phone calls. I've worked with Enrique for a while. I feel like I'm a friendly face in the office when I see you, or at least voice. I don't know. Yeah. But you are more than correct. It's kind of too late for improvement. It's been such a, the hole got a little bit too deep where it's kind of hard to come out of. That's why I am kind of.

I might add like, yes, I might add five, five, six words.

So just lower it so we can hear you better. Thank you.

Um, Me and my husband and my family, we moved in Luxor. We immigrated in 95. And then we moved in Luxor in 2003. We bought fixer-ups, which was 100 years old. And three of my sons and my husband, my husband was in a construction building. So, and we were doing with the help of the city, everything. I was living here, and me and my husband, everyone who was working here, they knew. So, and everything we were doing by foot and with the help, with your help. So, but then... When my husband passed away in 2010, I was left in the middle of construction. The house is very, very, very old and everything is cracking and whatever we were able to fix at that time, but something left over. And basically the structure you mentioned, it's a carport. It was like you could see stars inside, like, you know, you could see the stars. starts in the nighttime because it was cold and leaf and everything. It was animals inside. And I was like, I couldn't do anything because I was laid off. And I'm a medical doctor, and I'm working in the science here. I don't have anything, any experience. It's a building block. when the 2023 happened and it was heavy, heavy storm. And the retaining wall on the public stairs, have like two stairs, one of ours and the other one of the public. It started falling down, was a very unsafe and critical situation. And I was finding that I didn't know what to do. I called a professional to help me with this. And I was told playing the kite, it was okay to fix. I tried to do my best. I was, I'm still doing whatever I can and using my creative parts. And I can't like, you know, with the help of Thomas, I keep bothering him, asking what is it and what do I do with this? Because I feel like I'm not doing anything wrong, but basically I admit that I did something not in a proper way, but I'm willing to fix everything, make it proper, safe. I raised, we raised three kids there. They were all in a box, but and College of Marine and all middle school and everything. They were raised here. Now I have four grandkids. I want them to continue living here and be happy and living in a safe house. And I'm doing my best. I really want us to do what's possible. And then I can, there's a help of my son. We've got a precaution as well. We hired.

I have a gift from God and he's been really helping us, guiding us through the process. All right.

Thank you. Hi, my name is Charles Bond and, uh,

I've been engaged by Dave and his mom to get the construction documents pulled together so we can get a permit, and they have been submitted. In the process, I started working with them in late November, but their permit had been pulled, like, I think in May of 2025, and so it expired in February as I was responding to comments from the original permit application. We're now on a good track and the documents are submitted. I have an engineer that I'm working with so that we can make sure that the work that was done without a permit was done correctly and that any additional work that needs to be done to correct any work that had been done will be done based on the permit documents that I've identified certain issues that need to be corrected. So anyhow, thank you all for being here and doing your job. And I'm just hoping to help them as best I can. Thank you.

Great. Thank you very much. Okay. Thank you. Anyone have questions for the property owners? None, I see none. Okay, thank you very much.

Thank you so much for you guys' time. I really appreciate it.

Okay, do you have a public comment?

Yes, please come forward, yeah.

Hi. I want to start out. My name is Wallace Baldwin, and this is Minhee. Our property address is 259 Madrone in Larkspur. My mailing address, is this recorded and we're doing minutes and everything? Good. So my address for any mailing is 117 North Ellsworth Avenue, San Mateo, 94401. My email is wbaldwin at citybuilding.com. And my phone number is 415-716-0232. And, uh, I'm available 24, 7, 365. So, um, what I want to do is kind of, it would probably take an hour. We've got, I think the largest docket of the day, but, uh, so I'll try to minimize it, uh, with kind of an overview and, uh, kind of an executive summary of what's happened over the years. So, um, We purchased this property, Min and I, in April 2014. And at that time, part of the process before you close escrow is filling out an application for resale. I don't know if you're familiar with this document. May I give you it? So... This document, prior to closing escrow, is a town requirement or whatever reason to meet with a building official. His name was Douglas Archer. He signed that document. And if you go to page two of that document, it shows the garage conversion to a second unit was an existing non-component. non existing non conforming piece of real estate that was a looks like it was built probably in the 60s. So also, it mentions that it had, you know, kitchen and electrical. And then if you refer to page three, that same document, construction performed without permits, conversion of the garage to the second unit, and also the detached buildings, which Tom has referred to as accessory structures in the violations, had electrical in them at that time when we purchased the property. I just want to make everybody aware of that. So this molehill has turned into a mountain over the time. So when we bought the property, uh, uh, you know, uh, Doug explained to us about that, uh, you know, we're buying a property with an existing nonconforming, uh, unit. Um, so, and then, uh, uh, you know, we, uh, went into, uh, COVID, um, which according to my regulations, uh, ended around five of, uh, 2023. Uh, so we had this request for inspection from, uh, I think one of your previous inspectors, uh, Sarah Patton, that ring a bell to anybody. Uh, so, uh, she came out cause men had put up by a carport and, uh, without a permit. And, uh, so she came out and she looked at the property and, uh, you know, we agreed to tear it down, which we have done. And, uh, uh, she stated that, uh, uh, she would get back to us if there's any other issues to, uh, bring to the table. She never got back to us again. Uh, so then two years later, we get a notice of violation. So we just assumed everything was copacetic, you know, and the town was satisfied. So, uh, I just want to explain that's why this thing looks like so delinquent. We thought the thing was done. Uh, so then we get a notice of violation about a short-term rental. It all started out with a short-term rental and, uh, men wasn't aware, uh, She hired a real estate agent and they posted online. Evidently, the town or the city has somebody that watches online advertisement and wrote this citation. So she never did rent it short term. She ended up renting it long term to a tenant that's there now. In fact, Tom and the building official walked through there not too long ago and met the tenant and looked at that space and everything. So, uh, um, and that was, uh, when was that walkthrough? I think it was in, uh, August. Well, let me just continue here. Uh, Yeah, then from 6-4-24 till 3-19-25, a series of administrative citations came out. I live down in the peninsula, and I've never seen these documents until recently when they had this hearing scheduled for back, I believe it was March or April. So... I got the letter from, uh, the, the previous planner.

Sir, I don't mean to interrupt, but you could, um, wrap up your comments soon.

Okay. Uh, so, uh, so what I'm hoping you guys will do is, uh, is to, uh, uh, wave these fines and, and, uh, give me time. Cause we had this thing worked out. I met with, uh, Tom and the chief building official there. What was his name? Yeah.

it's okay. Yeah. We, we have the chief building officials name.

Yeah. Okay. So he, so we had to say worked up between the, uh, the planner who's no longer working there. Tom and I, and the chief building official walk, we had a meeting at, uh, September 9th, I believe it was at this building. And, uh, we talked about the whole thing and, and then, uh, we actually left the meeting, walked the site and, uh, we had a pretty good understanding because, uh, The planner was saying that we could legalize the garage into an ADU and that would help the city with their goals of meeting the state mandates. That would be a simple process. And then, so all these other code violations come out after and started out as this, just the rental thing. Then when Tom came to the property, found something else. So there's some accessory structures that were on property line. They were there when we bought the property. Men built one in the back. And all the stuff on these violations were taken care of. The electrical was taken out. Even though it was there when we bought the property, the plumbing was taken out. There was a deck that they called a deck. It was actually a child's treehouse. We built that tree house and we bought the property, but only after talking to the city, the city told us if it was less than 12 feet tall and not in the setbacks that we could do that. So we built it. But because of the citations, we just, to try to cooperate with the city, we just tore it down. So there's no deck. There's no electrical. There's no plumbing to the sheds. The sheds have been moved over off the property line six feet. I think the code's five feet, so they're all aware of that. Mr. Hanson, is that his name? Hanson. I think it was Hanson. So we had it pretty much worked out. And then he said he's going to give me a letter in writing with his findings because we pretty much said, okay, I'll go down and get a permit, get an architect and get that ADU legalized, a get a permit for tearing the shit, the carport down, which was already torn down when they were there. It's been torn down for a long time. And, uh, and the deck and everything, all that's torn down. So all the, all the, uh, things have been, uh, all the violations have been taken care of. So, uh, so these fines just, you know, they say they can't adjust the fines, but, uh, A month ago, the fire was 135,000 and today it's 85,000. And so for them to say they can't adjust fines, you know, I highly recommend the council make a resolution, allow staff to do that because most code enforcement allow that staff. In fact, most cities have a code enforcement panel. status council. And so, uh, allow them to do that would be great thing. So you guys don't get drug into it.

Thank you, sir, for your comments.

Um, so anyway, I'd like to, uh, uh, see if they would, uh, let, let us, uh, if you, uh, wave the fines, I'll go in and get all the permits for the, uh, make it legal. And, uh, we're, I was waiting for his letter. He never came. He said he was going to write me a letter within two weeks.

Okay.

Then I found out he quit. Okay. So we never heard back from him.

But you've received several citations.

Since then.

Yeah.

I just recently got the citation. I'm talking about the meeting. Okay. We met, and we pretty much had a handshake agreement. He was going to write a letter with the findings, and I was going to come down to the permanent application. I had an architect hired already.

Yeah.

and get the ADU legalized and everything else has been done.

Thank you, sir. Thank you. All right. Any questions from council members or the property owner?

Yeah, just a quick one. So the staff report says to date, the property owner has failed to correct the violations, did not appeal the citation, has not applied for permits to legalize the unpermitted modifications. Is that true?

No. So I was told I could appeal it. I tried to appeal it. This was all during COVID back in the beginning and Tom gave me the, because he doesn't have a direct number. It just says code enforcement.com or whatever. You can't communicate directly with them. So they instructed me to write the email to the clerk, which I did. Clerk never, there's an application for appeal. They never got back to me. I came down to city hall several times and they're always closed. Even when they are open, the door's locked. I come here a couple times, the door's locked, people are in there knocking on the door, they won't even answer. It's very frustrating trying to get something.

Did you ever mail them or communicate another way? Because I think I'm looking at your log, you've been communicated with at least 40 or 50 times, and COVID was a minor part of it.

I was communicated 50 times, that's not true. Yeah, yeah.

Not me. Well, deliveries of certified mail.

I never received one. That address, I told them. That's why I gave my address first thing. That address, I left there three years ago. That's where I used to work. I told them my new address. I told them my email, my phone number. I didn't get this until the end from her husband. When I went to city council here, that's when I got involved. Okay, so you're 212 San Mateo Drive? That's where I was three years ago. No, I haven't been there in three years. Okay. And if you find any document where I signed for those, I'll write you a check. But I never received any of them.

So the staff report also has that on July 29, 2024, there was a phone call from property owner Wallace Baldwin who wanted to know all the details of the violations. When advised about violations, he said he had no knowledge of them and had not been on the property for six years. He further stated that all violations were already there when he bought the property, which you said. So you had knowledge of the violations when you bought the property.

Correct.

And then acknowledging and... We didn't know the letter was a violation. July 24, you were made aware of that they had not been resolved. So that's more than two years, almost two years ago.

Yeah, but we had...

But claiming you didn't have notice.

No, we had notice. But then when we were this close to resolving the issue and waiting for the letter... from Mr. Hanson, I believe it was, the chief billing official that we sat down with on September 9th, I think it was. And then nothing happened. So we just thought, well, after the meeting, he was happy with what we did. The stairs were down. All the code violations were fixed. I just assumed that he was happy because he never wrote me a letter. Then when I get this new notice for the meeting last month, that's when I started digging into it. I found out he was gone. He left the department about a week after we had the site meeting with Tom. So why did anybody ever call me? Nothing happened. So I just assumed that Tom was...

But you're co-owners with Ms. Min, right? Correct. So who occupied... Also received notice of the property.

She rents it out.

Yeah.

She's not there.

So that's all we can do is the people who are part of the owners.

But I give them my address. I give them my phone or my email several times. Yeah. And they say the only time we can only serve what it says on the records. Right. Well, if somebody moves and notifies you they move, why don't you put that in your computer?

Well, we follow what the county's property tax address notification is. But Ms. Min also had notification.

well, I'll get past her, but, uh, you know, you got these registered letters. I mean, you see one of them that was signed by me. I'd be the first one to, um, cave in, but I, I never seen any of this stuff to the 11th hour. And I, we thought I went away. The first guy was satisfied. Sarah back in 22, nothing happened. All of a sudden 24 pops up again. And then, and then the, uh, uh, Tell me they can't reduce it. Only you guys, the council, can reduce it. I was on code enforcement in Hillsborough for nine years. We let staff adjust the fees. Someone on the monitor just said they adjusted. Your planner adjusted it. And then he just adjusted it from $835,080. How does he do that? Without counsel's approval.

Well, I think he mentioned that there was a calculational error. That's why, you know, the amounts were adjusted. But I just want to remind everyone that, you know, we're not here to make findings on the actual, you know, what the facts are. It's really just, is the math correct? And, you know.

My town, Hillsboro, we never, ever did a tax lien, ever. Nine years that I was on there. So, you know, you got to, You've got to get somebody like, you know, a code enforcement hearing panel. We have professionals that, you know, like we had architects, engineers, contractors on that panel, all the stuff. And then we had city attorney, clerk, and city manager. But we squashed all the problems right there and never had to go to council and never was a tax lien. I think it opened the door for huge litigation problems if you start doing tax liens.

I appreciate the advice. A question I have for you. When most people move, they have a forwarding address they give to the post office. Are you telling me you haven't gotten any mail from anybody since you moved who are sending it to your old address? You didn't have any kind of forwarding?

I would get it from her secondhand. I lived down in San Mateo. We very rarely talked.

No, no, no. I'm saying things that were sent to your old San Mateo address.

No, I never got any of that sent.

Nothing was ever forwarded to you is what you're saying?

No.

Okay.

No, I never got it. If I had it, I would have put the fire out. When I found out about the carport, it was down instantly. That's all it was. And it started out as the carport. Actually, it started out as a short-term rental. And then it just evolved. And every time Tom comes out, he says something else, even though it's not on the document.

You answered my question.

Thank you. Is there any other questions? What I like to do here today is waive these fees. Let me sit down with staff. We could get this thing, put the bed in probably two weeks. I got architect ready to roll. We could legalize that unit. Otherwise, we're just going to get in a big litigation problem.

Thank you very much, sir. All right. Thank you. All right. So we will, at least I can see, we're going to close the public comment period and then we're going to bring it back to council where we can discuss.

Did you find these today or is it done in the mail?

Yeah, we're going to make a decision tonight. Yeah.

Thank you.

Thank you. Yes.

received a message from Joseph Seidler on 212 Riviera Circle. He said he is sick and he is unable to provide public comment. And he has requested that I relay the message to the council that if he could be put on a June calendar or a separate calendar and continue his item. That's the message that I was asked to convey to the council.

Okay, thank you.

We will discuss that.

Okay, so I, you know, I think when we bring it back here, I think it's probably easiest to take. Do people want to Okay, first of all, do people do council members have additional questions for staff?

Yeah. Let's just close public comment first.

Yeah. I've closed public comment. Yes. So we're going to bring it back to council for deliberations. And so first item is, do we have any further questions of staff of what we heard?

I do, but can we do it by property? Cause they're kind of property specific. I mean, for me anyway.

Yeah. Does that work for everyone? If we go by property or do we want to make overall, um, Comments.

Before we go further, since we do have on the agenda this item, a resident who is unable to attend, do we need to have a motion to remove that and extend it?

If council wants to do that, you could make that motion, but it's not required.

Okay. So we can just bypass him and put him on a different, if we decide, put him on a different agenda? Yes.

Yes.

All right, so why don't we talk about him when we go property by property, and then we can discuss what we want to do. Okay, so the first one is 259 Madrone Avenue. Okay, so anybody have questions at this point for staff, additional questions?

A question for staff about notice. Do we have records of any documents? I mean, the property owner said he had no knowledge of this for the past two-plus years.

So by law, when we post a notice, we post it on the subject property. We mail it to the subject property as well, both certified and regular mail. And if the subject property is different from that identified with the Marin County tax assessor, we also do the same. We send it by certified mail and regular mail to the property address identified at the county. In this case, it was 49 Castle Rock Drive in Mill Valley.

in addition we also mailed it to the address that mr baldwin noted in san mateo county okay thank you and you do have on in the staff report for instance i received a signed proof of certified mail delivered and the signature appears to be vince baldwin and multiple times that's indicated in here and one being

the receipts for certified mail with every citation as well. I didn't put them in the packet. It would be even longer, but we do keep those.

But March, 2025, there was a signed September, 2025. I mean, it looks like multiple times there was a return signed delivery notification. Okay.

Okay. And can you remind us of to, Having gotten to this point, so has the homeowner or the property owner rectified any of the violations that they have been cited for?

There are so many violations over the years.

I couldn't be able to answer that question. As you noticed on the list of the list that's identified here, they have not been rectified. There may have been. And most of these cases, they're obviously these are ongoing projects. Some of them have rectified some of their violations. some aspects of the building codes that they may have been deficient in. With this one, there's a substantial number of items on the list. This is a combination of short-term rental and building code violations. These are life safety. These are life safety violations. When we see a life safety violation, we have to act on it as a public agency. We are required to do so. Sometimes those involve tenants and that puts the landlord in a difficult position. But again, we have a substantial number on this one and I'm not sure where to start.

Okay, but the citations that you've shown us in the packet here, those are still... Those are all outstanding. Those are all outstanding still.

Yeah, this is by far the most we have of the... you know, the items before you tonight. And it's also one that's been the longest. Um, the last time we've wrote a citation was March, 2025. So it actually, my predecessor spent a lot of time working with them. Um, obviously it's clear, uh, if they didn't, they would have continued writing citations, but, um, there's just a lot here okay i'm not sure where to start okay thank you again i'm i can't speak to the the details about what happened before but um i'm here to you know we're here to collect unpaid debts uh that have not been appealed and in this instance this instance i have 10 opportunities for them to have appealed each citation and we did not receive an appeal so okay yes and i also see that it's been outstanding for

1,532 days.

And Mr. Morgan said, has it been in your practice if there are code violations and a property owner attempts to mitigate them by applying for permits, et cetera, it sounds like then if the process is rolling forward to rectify them, not that the previous violations go away, but they don't accrue anymore. Yes.

We do not write a citation while you have an active building permit in progress. If it expires, then you will receive a citation. And even if you pay those citations... If you don't correct the building code violation, it does not go away. We do have instances where we have residents who receive a citation for a building code violation. They may pay that, and then they carry on with their building permit. Maybe they get another one. you know down the road but they may pay that again the reason we're here tonight is that the citations have not been paid um these have continued these are these are the these are our most complicated code enforcement cases um as you've heard right so um you know it's a matter of process and like i said we're here to collect the debt okay any questions

for this property there's just one thing that i wanted to note about the record this this relates to the um 2014 resale inspection report that was submitted um i just wanted to note for the record because i that it states that um under um notes conversion of garage second unit um not authorized violation of zoning um different use something I can't read and parking electrical, something in parking standards subject to code enforcement and then it also states under construction performed without permits conversion of garage second unit with kitchen also detached building with electrical and there is a note at the bottom of this form that the city uses that says this report shall not be construed as authority to violate alter set aside or cancel any of the provisions or requirements of any laws or ordinances of the city of larkspur nor shall issuance thereafter prevent requiring corrections for errors, violations, or any applicable law ordinance of the City of Lawrenceburg. Basically, it is a report intended to inform buyers about both minor issues that need to be addressed, like smoke detectors, but also to inform buyers about code violations that will ultimately need to be corrected.

In 2014? Yes. Got it.

Okay. Okay. I'll open up for discussion in terms of how council wants to deal with this particular case. Anybody want to start?

You know, I'm really – this is a dense document that has taken a lot of staff time to engage with the property owner and to engage with the multiple owners, it appears, who don't sound like they communicate as well with each other about important things about their property. But that's a responsibility of property ownership. I'm particularly concerned with this one because the outlined – um, violations or health and safety violations. There's unpermitted, um, water heaters, electrical plumbing, um, all sorts of things that are, um, could be extremely hazardous in Madrone Canyon to tell you the truth or anywhere. And I appreciate that our staff has, it looks like it's been how many hours, more than 25 hours of time working on this, um, with multiple attempts to contact multiple owners here. And I don't see since 2014 that they've done any mitigation or any attempt to work with staff. And there's only so much we can say, okay, there's only so much we can say, okay, we'll give you a second chance. This record shows there were, had it 45 different interactions? 45 different attempts to get compliance? So I appreciate that. I feel like our staff has gone to a tremendous amount to try to get compliance and have received no assistance from the property owners. So I think that their numbers are justified.

Okay, great. Thank you for those comments. Anyone else have anything they'd like to add or comments?

Yeah, I just wanted to echo the safety concern. I mean, Madrone is, you know, as we know, it's one of the, you know, most important to protect from fire hazard and whatnot. I don't see any miscalculation. I think I appreciate that staff caught the calculation error and adjusted that. But, you know, running over the numbers, it seems like they were added properly.

Okay.

I would just add that, as was explained at the beginning, we're supposed to determine the validity of the debt based on the calculation. I think the calculations are correct.

Okay, great. Council Member Margulies, do you have anything you want to add? No.

Okay.

All right. So I agree with the comments. And so I think for 259 Madrone Ave, we will just keep them fine. As staff has calculated in the staff memo. Okay, so moving on to 10 Post Street. That's the property with the elevated garage. And they're no longer here, but the widow and her son, that's 10 Post Street. They asked for a waiver of the late charges, which... Let's see, it's on page 135 of our packet. So, yes.

Mayor, a question for staff. Is it permissible for us to give a contingency waiver based on correcting violations by a certain time?

You can, yes. You could basically confirm the amount and... give the property owner some additional amount of time before staff records the lien and assessment.

Can I ask staff for this particular property, how long does staff believe is a reasonable time for a property owner moving diligently to complete the work and to correct any violations?

So when you apply for a building permit, you get 180 days by law. So when you discuss about giving people time, that building permit can stay valid for longer than 180 days if they are making progress on that building permit. This applies to everyone all over the city, anywhere. And it is possible for someone to keep a building permit open for many years. We do not do enforcement against a building code violation if a building permit is in progress. And so in some instances we may have people resolve these, but it may take a very long time. In this instance, the property has to construct significant retaining walls. They have to be engineered. They have to be done by a civil engineer. It is on the side of a hill. I'm sure you're familiar with the properties that, you know, down Locust Street, they do go down the hill towards Magnolia. And this is a very steep site. It is a double fronting site. So I couldn't speak to how long it would take for them to have an engineer work on this or the process. But once they apply for that building permit, it could be open for a year. It could be open for more. It just depends on how long it takes for them to apply. get the work completed. And I can't speak to the amount of time that a contractor would take or an engineer would take to put all of those pieces together. Because as you know, building projects can take, you know, quite a bit of time, sometimes years to finish. So I can't really speak to how long it would take in this instance.

So can you make a suggestion or anyone actually, if we wanted to motivate people a homeowner to complete the work, and we had a portion of, let's say, late fees that we were willing to waive contingent upon them acting diligently, is there some... milestone that we can say if they have done this by this date it will show they're moving forward in good faith and we would waive those fees and if they don't those fees would become active is that is it possible for us to do that um i'm running through some scenarios so why don't you make your suggestion um i think

You might want to give discretion to the community development director to determine if good faith progress is continuing throughout the building permit rather than try to pick a milestone and a date because it's hard to predict. Right. Yeah. They might open something up or try to fix something and then they find out, oh, wow, this wasn't done correctly. So you do have professionals who can go out in the field and say, this person's acting in good faith to reach the goal. And so you could consider some language along those lines.

But how would that be consistent with the previous decision we made? We didn't give that option to the previous property owner to remedy the situation because these violations have continued, have existed, and they've had notice of the violations for multiple, multiple years. Unless there's an extenuating circumstance that differentiates this from the other one we just ruled on, I don't know how we justify it.

Well, let me ask our legal counsel. My understanding was we were taking these individually. We were doing two things. One thing is we were determining if the calculation was correct. And the second is, are there any mitigating factors? in each particular case that would warrant some adjustment. And for that, it was my understanding that we look at the totality of the circumstances, whether there's a death in the family or whatever it happens to be, something in the totality of the circumstances that would let us feel comfortable with some type of adjustment. And that we are not, as these are unique situations, they're all being treated as a one-off as opposed to a policy that we're going to do this for these types of cases. Am I misreading that?

I think that that's an accurate statement. And so the way I would try to reconcile Council Member Way's question with your response is if two property owners are not similarly situated and council believes that there are mitigating circumstances based on the totality of information to make an adjustment based on the individual circumstances that council has that discretion having determined that although some aspects of the two cases are similar, there may be some circumstances that suggest they're not exactly similarly situated.

But we're not required to say the exact facts that we are relying on to say they're not similarly situated. Is that right?

You're not required to make findings in this case. I do think it helps support the record if there's some basis that you think to treat one property different from another.

So were you persuaded by the owners of 10 Post Street who brought their, I believe it was a contractor or somebody who's helping them now that they've hired to work through the process, the gentleman who spoke third? Were you persuaded by that?

I felt that certain speakers or certain property owners were exhibiting different levels of good faith and different... you know, had different circumstances. You know, I mean, if one is outstanding since 2014, that's a little bit of a different situation than maybe somebody who is more recent and has some events happen that, you know... So in my mind, it seems like we have the discretion to treat these individual cases uniquely, as opposed to... I mean, I think it's pretty clear for all of them the calculations were done correctly. So if we're just going to do that, we just say, okay, we just keep all the same. But my understanding is the reason that we're here is two part. One is to say the calculations are correct. And the second is to treat each individual case uniquely based on what we've heard and to see if there's a reason to make an adjustment. But again, that's just my interpretation of this. And we don't have to do that. That's just my thought. But I'm happy to hear other people and be convinced otherwise. Yeah.

So is it logical to you then for that assumption? Let's take the citation in 10 Post Street. The late fees, would you, or the... Because the cost of the staff is the same.

Right. I wouldn't, yeah, it would be the late fees. It doesn't even have to be all the late fees. I think we have an opportunity to also provide additional motivation, right, for people to do things in good faith. And maybe this is an opportunity, like a win-win situation, because it's in the city's best interest to have these violations corrected. And it would be in the property owner's best interest to have some of the late fees waived. So maybe it's a way to move forward in the best interest of the community.

A quick question for staff. I guess on the last property, you, I think, said that there were 10 opportunities to appeal citations. And what about on this property? Because...

This one had seven opportunities with the administrative citation. That's not including any prior notices of violation.

Okay. I'm close. And then the other is the last property had not applied for permits to legalize anything unpermitted here. It looks like there were some and they expired and there was another one that expired. So there is a little bit of a difference of effort to Council Member Kandel's point. And have they corrected any of the violations to date?

Well, they've done some individual building permits over time, but they have not corrected the violations that were listed here. All of the parties that we have here this evening that are building code violations have not corrected them. They have not paid their outstanding debts. They have, if some of them have had building permits, but they didn't finish them, they expired and they just walked away forever. And we had to start enforcement again. So, you know, and again, we've also had a number of properties out there that have been in situations like this, but they're not here tonight because they paid their citations. And so what you're not seeing tonight are all of those code enforcement cases that have received citations that have paid those citations and may or may not have followed up with the building permit. Like I said, we're here simply to collect a debt.

And I think that speaks to a very important public policy is that there are maybe a dozen others. Let's just say, hypothetically, there's 10 more property owners who realized that they had not met their obligation. They had not paid their fine. They didn't appeal either. But then they recognize that this is the process we put forward and they paid their fine. So, I mean, I think we need to be consistent, too. that those property owners didn't have a chance for us to debate whether their late fees or their other fees for extenuating circumstances would be removed.

So, I mean, and the others have paid.

Yeah. I just think consistency is a key with variations depending upon certain circumstances. But I think for our staff, And consistency in application of the ordinances that we create and the citations that we create and the policies that we create, they're valid for a reason. And we have to support the staff's interest in being consistent to the public. And not showing up and I think that makes our staff's job, we're supporting the role that they have, which is often pretty contentious with some people, that we created these rules, we created these policies, we created these fine structures, we created the process. And they need to know that we're consistent, too. So putting that forward.

And just two points. I mean, I wanted to add on to what you were saying, Council Member Way. I mean, we had a Madrone Canyon hearing for quite a lot of money for a tree removal. And I felt, you know, it was kind of... You know, I think it would be inconsistent. We voted unanimously. The other thing is, I believe in second chances, but not third chances or fourth. And in this case, I'm reading, you know, for 128 Locust, September 12th, you know, there was... you know, a violation on the elevated parking deck, but then, you know, right away, a few months later, another violation. So it's almost like, you know, how much can I get away with? And then, you know, there's another one. So to me, that's not, there's the good faith now and the incentive I agree with, but there's also something to be said with rules are rules. So I, you know, I really want people to feel the city supports them. But it sounds to me when you have seven appeal chances and you didn't show up, you know, coming at the 11th hour seems a little disingenuous.

And I think just one more thing about public policy, because I'm operating on that a lot lately, is that we want people, we want homeowners to come forward to the city and get permits. We want them to not to to not try to do something on the side, to put in a tankless water heater or whatever they did or a driveway or whatever without following the process. Because we set that process up not only because all the other homeowners around them deserve to have consistent process, but for health and safety purposes too. And it's how a city maintains It's building integrity structure, too, is that we don't want people to say, oh, well, I'm just going to slide it by because we're just going to get away with it anyway. We want them to come forward so that we can help them create a really good product, which is a safe home for themselves and for the community. I hear you, Gabe, because 10 notices, 7 notices, it's not like it's one parking ticket and you forgot it in your glove box and then you get a second and you're like, oh, shoot, I forgot to pay that. These are our staff who go time and time and time and time again. And they get rebuffed. They get misled sometimes. I'm not saying any of these homeowners did that. They get a story told to them sometimes. Our staff has to know that we are interested in making sure that their work is valued for what we've asked them to do. So I think the numbers are okay. But if you want to do an extraordinary circumstances, I'll hear you.

No, I made my kids.

Okay. Council Member Margulies, do you have anything to add to the discussion?

I think that Councilmember Way and Councilmember Paulson have really laid out very clearly the need to enforce our policies to support our staff. it would be different if it was a second or third notice, but the fact that seven, 10 notices are being issued and the numbers are validated, we fortunately went back and corrected them, staff did. Yeah, I'm in agreement with Council Member Way and Paulson on this.

Okay. Okay, great. Thank you. Yeah, I, you know, look, I mean, these are, first of all, these are difficult cases. So for members of the public, we, I certainly don't feel great having to sit up here and, you know, make these determinations. I mean, you certainly agree that, you know, our property owners have different difficult circumstances and, you know, figuring out how to do things can be a bit of a challenge. I mean, you know, it's not easy trying to navigate the city's code, figure out how to do things properly. It does take a lot of time and money and energy. I mean, that's... So, look, these are difficult cases. I do think, you know, I think at the end of the day, these are sort of the most... these are the cases where we've provided the most notice. These people have had a very long time to try and remedy whatever the situation was. And so I do think in fairness to all the other property owners who have paid their fines and remedied whatever the violations were, I I guess I'm coming down on the side of, yes, the calculations are correct. We should probably go ahead and assess them. I think even if we waived the late fees in this instance where I also felt a lot of compassion for these property owners, I mean, it's a small amount in comparison to the amount that it's going to take to remedy you know, all, all the violations. I mean, they, they've got a retaining wall. They have other very serious, um, work that they have to do on their property. And I also was very concerned about the EV charger, uh, on an extension cord. That was very scary to see. So I hope that's been fixed. That's okay. Good. Okay. Great. Cause that was, uh, very concerning and alarming for me to see. Um, OK, so I guess, you know, in light of things, I mean, I I would have been open to perhaps, you know, granting some relief of waiving the late fees. But in reality, that's ten thousand dollars. And I think.

Well, if we're going to wait, if you want to waive late fees, I mean, I'm negotiable for that, but I think we have to be consistent. And if we're not consistent, I don't think we're fair to the rest of the community who pays their late fees.

Yeah, I think you're right. I think you're right. So I am, I think we stick with the number.

Do you want to keep taking individual properties?

Yeah. Do we want to keep going? I want to make a special case for one of the other properties.

Yeah. There's a special case, I think, for the 11 Locust property. If we can talk about that. Do you want me to explain my perspective on that? I did see the letter, the email that was sent from staff. Yeah. It did give the impression that this was going to be taken care of. I understand the property owner's reliance on that letter to think that there were not going to be penalties from that point on. I think the right thing to do would be to waive late fees from that date. That date was August 28th, 25. When I look at the citations, I see the last citation was June 3rd, 2025. I'm on page 200 of the report. And then below that, it has late fees for 31 days, 60 days, and 90 days or more. I could probably use some help from staff. My assumption is August 28th would probably only affect the 91 days or more category. Am I wrong? correct in that assumption that basically the way the late fees are calculated, are they calculated for each of the citations or is it from the date of the last citation? How does that work?

Was from the date of the last citation. And you're referring to the email that the applicant provided? Yes. Did I say?

Do we have public record of that?

I have sufficient records in my notes and emails with Ms. Simonian to believe the veracity of that email, but I cannot attest to being able to verify it due to a technical error by our IT people, Ms. Simonian's emails were lost. So I don't have the ability to tell you today that I could verify that. I believe based on my own notes, it's probably legitimate. I'm not disputing it in any way. For context, I suspect, because I don't want to besmirch what was an excellent community development director. I don't think she was confused. I think her verbiage was poor in that email. At that time, Ms. Simonian was reviewing multiple code enforcement cases and looking for potential errors in administrative process. And so I suspect... her email may have been the result of something she was concerned about.

And unfortunately, we don't have the way to find out.

I just wanted to let you know because I'm on the record. Right.

And just to be clear, I'm not faulting anybody for making a mistake. I'm just looking at it from the eyes of a homeowner. If I were to receive that email, regardless of why it was sent or anything like that, I could see relying on that to think that I didn't. have to do anything or pay anything. And from that date on, I don't think it would be fair to have late fees after that. So I guess my only question is trying to figure out what the late fees after that day would be. The last... The way I'm reading this is the last citation was June 3rd, 2025. This email was sent August 28th, which is between 60 and 90 days later. So it seems like the late fees up until that point, meaning the 30 day late fees and the 60 day late fees would be valid. And I would be asking to waive the late fees for the 90 days or more.

So I hear you, but look, if you follow the record, so this is dated 8-25-28-2025, there are 10 more complaints of Airbnb noticed after that in the record. October 13th, 2025, October 20th, 2025, 12-1-2025. So January 2026, another complaint about Using it as an Airbnb.

Wow.

So it didn't get remediated.

I'm not 100% sure that's a correct statement. That's page 208. It counts my way up. Oh. The complaint that you're referencing, I'm not sure we were able to verify. I see. There's complaints and there's verification.

There's verification. Okay. Yeah.

I want to be fair to the property owner.

Thank you for collecting that, correcting that.

I do not have a current business license. I have a request for the council. I don't believe that this property owner has a business license and is operating a business. If you are going to make any waivers, I'd ask you to consider making it contingent on proper filing for a business license for a home occupied business.

Okay. That's a fair request.

So, Council Member Kandel, just to be clear, looking at the total fines, it's $24,124. I'm sorry, the total amount and total load. And so you're recommending removing the $91,000 or more of $2,900?

Yes. Okay. A reduction of $2,900 contingent on obtaining a business permit as required by the city.

Okay. Okay. So to $21,000 and some $200 some bucks. Okay.

Thank you. And you're making that assertion based on the submitted email?

Based on the submitted email. For me, it is irrelevant whether what's written in the email is true or false. It's the effect that it has on the person receiving the email and what a reasonable person would think after receiving an email like that.

All right. I can go along with that. All right.

Okay, and can we, and Ms. Barad, is it Barad? Thanks for staying. Um, I mean, I think for, for us, you know, we are trying to clear up these fines, but also seeking, you know, remedy of the code violation. And so, you know, we are, I will ask you as a member of council to please file for a business license. If you are running a business out of your home and to, um, you know, cease the short-term rentals. I think the definition of a short-term rental is under 30 days. So if you can get a longer-term tenant That would be permissible under the code. Okay, great. Perfect.

Just to clarify, the long-term rental is also a business that requires a business code.

Oh, it does? Okay.

And I'd just supplement the city manager's request to give a deadline, 30 days, to obtain the business license.

30 days. Okay. I'm sorry. And is short-term rental 30 days or six months?

Short-term rental is less than 30.

Okay, great. So I didn't give you wrong information there. Okay. Well, I would support your... your motion or your, your recommendation council member Kandel. I don't know how other council members feel. Council member Margulies, do you have, do you want to chime in here?

Council member Margulies, did you get a chance to receive a copy of the email that we're discussing? Yeah. Okay.

Yes, thanks, Scott. I would support Scott's finding, too. I do feel that if I received a letter that told me that my fees and citations would be relieved, I forget the exact words that were used, that I would also not make any further comments. Inquiries into it and assume that what I read is is accurate. And so I do think that it warrants removing the fine for the 90 days, which would be, you know, the time afterwards and But per the resolution, if we pass it, it does suggest that all of these homeowners have 30 days to remediate the situation in order to avoid the tax lien. So under the same 30-day time limit, I would suggest that the $2,900 would not be applied to the lien if the business license was acquired or yeah, sorry. If the business license was gotten from the city prior to the 30 days in that time period. So yes.

Okay, great. So does staff have sufficient direction there? So we are going to waive a contingent waiver of the $2,900 contingent upon the property owner filing or applying for a business license within the next 30 days. Does that work? Okay, great. All right. So we'll move on to 212 Riviera Circle. This gentleman was sick, requested an extension. Do we want to do that or do we just want to?

Well, I think we give him a chance to speak in public.

Okay. Okay. So we will. defer to a future meeting. What do you think?

I would recommend continuing it to the June 17 meeting. The agenda is a little lighter that night than the June 3rd meeting.

Okay. And just him, nobody else, or just that property owner, nobody else. Okay.

So if that becomes part of the recommendation, then we'll just pull all reference to 212 for VR out of the resolution as what council can move for approval with the removal of everything related to 212 for VR.

Okay, so we'll move that to the June 17 meeting. Okay. All right, and the last property is 75 via Barranco. And that was the gentleman who was on wine. And seems like he went through multiple permit. He was the gentleman who asked for the demo permit and said that the city did not respond to his demolition permit. but we issued a permit for him to install solar on his property.

So he applied for a permit on April 2, 2025. That permit expired on February 2, 2026.

A demolition permit?

The demolition permit, correct.

So it was issued?

No, it was not. He didn't follow through. It was never issued, and it expired for failure to... follow up with response to plan checks or the comments that they received. So they failed to respond and take action meant that expired.

I see. So it was not due to lack of city action.

Yeah. It said they had an incomplete submittal in April 3rd and they were notified and we heard nothing back since that time, according to our record. And then it expired six months later. No, it expired on February 2nd. So they must have done something in the meantime. I'm sorry. I'm reading this right off the bat. So yes, but it expired because they did not follow up.

And that's what it says.

Okay, so this oh, I see why they made their paint. They paid their fees. Uh, later on. Uh, and then it expired 6 months after that. That's why it expired in February. Paying the fees kept it open.

And just to be clear. 1 of the things that was added to the municipal code several years ago was a provision that, um. building permit applications will expire after six months of inactivity because there had been a recurrence of permit applications basically being left open for years with no activity. And so city council at the time adopted a rule that they would expire automatically after six months of inactivity by the applicant.

Okay, great. Thank you. This one I had kind of a harder time with, and I know, Andrew, this was all being done prior to your arrival. So just the record that the homeowner provided to us has, to me, a very detailed attempt to try to get final and firm answers from the city. And these are just his quotes, so I have no direct knowledge if Mr. Hansel said these things, but it From his record, from the homeowners, he appears to be really diligently trying to work with the city and getting answers sort of like, it doesn't appear you need a floor plan. I'll issue this permit shortly. I'm sorry, but I gave you outdated information. I have to walk back my allowance. If that's correct, and that isn't necessarily what has been recorded in our tracking device, I think this person may have really relied upon some information that was inconsistent and unclear. This is a very detailed assessment that he wrote to us to show what he tried to do. And I feel like he stands out in his attempt to, differently than some of the other property owners who didn't document their assertive attempts to get their permits worked out. If you want to refute that, go ahead.

I would say that most of the citations happened in 2024. Okay. There are seven that were issued in 2024. There were only two issued in 2025 and then one in 2026, which was right after the permit expired. So the April 2nd, 2025 citation happened at the time they applied for that.

Probably let me pull up my building permit.

They applied for the demolition permit on April 2nd. That was the same day that the citation was issued that's identified in the record. On November 3rd, 2025 was the date that the citation would have expired six months later. They received a citation because it was about to expire or it expired. It was obviously kept open and then it expired again on February 2nd, 2026. which was also when we've issued the citations. So the citations that were issued on April 2nd, 2025, November 3rd, 2025, and February 2nd, 2026 were directly correlated to the expiration date of the building permit.

And that's $1,500. $500. $402. 11-3 and 2-2, $500 each, so that's $1,500. Oh, correct, yes.

Yeah. So that's why the dates line up that way. So as I said, we don't issue citations as long as your building permit is active. Those dates correlate with the date when the building permit was expired. Okay. Okay.

Yeah, I mean, look, these are tough cases. I think, again, you know, the gentleman came on and did say that he knew when he bought the house that he knew that it had code violations that he needed to remedy. And so I think he purchased the house in, is it 2024?

December 1st, 2024. They moved onto the property.

Right. Right. They moved December 1st?

He writes he moved onto the property December 1st, 2020. But I think he bought it before that.

I think he bought it in the spring of 2024. Again, I just... Anyways, it did seem like he was trying to do things and move things along. But again, I just feel that if he had plans, why didn't he submit them? And he still hasn't submitted them, right? Because he's... I asked him that question. He still hasn't submitted it because he hasn't figured out if he needs a planning permit or a building permit or something.

He's been meeting with staff about his plans. Has he filed for a building permit yet? It doesn't show that on our reference. He has not applied yet. And again, we've been consistent with our policy. We did not cite him while his... Building permit was in that six month validity period. It was when the day they expired. That's when he received those citations and he immediately acted literally on the same day, according to our- So it looks like, yeah. So we were consistent with our policy to not cite during the active building permit period. And that's why the dates line up the way they do.

Which is why I'm struggling with this particular property is because it looks like he's really tried to be engaged. And I mean, obviously he- filed a permit the day he gets a notice, a violation notice. It didn't set latent. So just putting that forward.

Hi, Sarah. I just wanted to reiterate what Andrew said about the fact that seven of the citations were issued in 2024. which means that he did receive several notices and he did know upon purchasing the home that the ADU was illegal and it needed to be demolished. And so it sounds to me like this person may have been just trying to buy time because they knew they wanted to do something ultimately. And in the end... They submitted the permit to do the demolition, which didn't happen, and then it expired, and somehow it got extended for another six months, but still they haven't done the demolition of the ADU yet. So I just would say that it sounds to me like they, I understand that they were trying to work with the city, but I also feel that they knew very clearly up front that the demolition needed to take place and they didn't want to do it until they had their final plans, which they sound like they do have plans in place for a remodel, but are still going between whether or not they need a building permit or review by the planning commission. So, and I'm in favor of being consistent here with how we have also approached the first two owners who also received, you know, numerous notices and alerting them to their violation.

Okay. You're up, Scott.

I agree with you, but I'm having trouble balancing it with your statement earlier. So I agree that, you know, somebody who's trying, it would be in everybody's best interest to waive certain late fees contingent upon doing what we would like them to do. And again, I would be in favor of it, but I'm not sure how we...

reconcile it yep so again i i would do it if you if you wanted to but just with that understanding i'm not not not sure how uh how that works i just i think i put it forward because i just wanted to acknowledge that i thought um mr goss gossliner gossiner sorry if i say it wrong um I want to encourage that we have property owners who really still consistently want to engage with staff and are doing their hardest. But to your point, consistency is a very important part of what we do as policymakers. I hear you that we can't give exceptions to rules.

I think we can actually, but I'm okay. I think we're here in order to make exceptions and treat each case uniquely. And if somebody is in a unique situation to treat them differently, if they deserve it. So I don't have a problem giving certain benefits to certain people based on their behavior. which is kind of my position earlier, I'm okay with it, but I just didn't think anybody else was. But again, I agree on this person also that they've shown effort and it would be okay if we waive some fees contingent upon them doing what they're supposed to do, But as Sarah pointed out, that wouldn't be consistent at this point. So I'm not sure how people feel about that.

Yeah. And I mean, the only waving we've done tonight was for, you know, as you said, something that staff communicated that led to an impression, which a reasonable person would, you know, act differently. And I don't think I see that here. So, yeah.

Okay. All right. So I agree. I think that he has shown, you know, good faith efforts, but it's always been like you got to send him a citation and then he kind of gets on it and then he kind of, you know. So I do feel that, you know, just to be consistent with all of these cases, we should go ahead and just assess the amount that staff has calculated. Okay. So with that, do you need us to make a motion to

And I'm happy to help with the motion. Okay, great. It would be a... Actually, let me... What's the resolution number for this one?

It says A. Resolution number...

Okay, so it would be approval of Resolution 2126 with the following changes. For 11 locusts, reduce the total amount by $2,900 contingent on the property owner obtaining a business license within 30 days from the date of the resolution and for 212 Riviera to continue the hearing until June 17. And so all reference to that property would be removed from the resolution.

Great. Can we get a motion?

I'll make that motion. I'll second.

Adam Clark, can we get a roll call, please?

Council Member Kandel?

Yes.

Council Member Margulies? Yes.

Yes. Do I need to repeat that there is nobody over the age of 18?

Yes, and you just did.

Okay, good.

Council Member Way? Yes. Vice Mayor Paulson? Yes. Mayor Andre?

Yes. Great. Thank you. All right. Thank you, Council Members. All right. It's 845. Why don't we take a five-minute bio break, and we will reassess for five minutes, and we will readjourn in five minutes. Thank you. Hello, welcome back. It's 8.54. We are on the May 20th, 2026, Luxor City Council regular meeting. We are reconvening and we are postponing item 7.2 to a future council meeting. So we will move on to business item 8.1, which is discussion of the preliminary budget for fiscal 2026-2027.

Thank you, Madam Mayor and council members. As you know, we do our budgetary process over four or five council meetings so that we can give it to you in chunks rather than in one big hit. But tonight is the heavy lift. Tonight is the preliminary budget where we dive into the numbers and take your feedback before we produce a final budget. So we have two department presentations left. We started the department presentations at the last meeting. So we're going to hear from community development and from public works tonight. And then in addition, your staff, all your senior staff is here to answer questions about the entire preliminary budget. We will have a presentation. about the preliminary budget itself. So we're going to have some slideshows, and I know it's already a little later than we thought it would be, so we'll hopefully be able to go through pretty efficiently, and I will turn it over to Mr. Munson to start with community development.

It's his night, man.

So I guess I'll dive right into it. I'm going to give you an overview of our department and community development, what we do, who we are, why we do it. All the good stuff. So you have seen this slide last council meeting about levels of service. This is consistent with every department's presentation about the different five levels. So I won't repeat that. But I'll dive into what we do. Building, planning, code enforcement is community development. And within those three categories, we also are responsible for housing. So we are responsible for monitoring affordable housing, for processing affordable housing agreements. enforcing the city's inclusionary housing ordinance, the housing element. So housing is a big part of what we do. We do that under the wing of planning. And then we're also responsible for a lot of things that are tangential to community development. We do get a lot of questions about economic development and other topics that we don't have departments for. We're kind of a catch-all for many different things. You know, there are different levels of what service levels of what a community development department should be. Ideally, you want to have a department that has a full service on-site staff, real-time online support. I mean, this is kind of a dream for any agency that I'm kind of responding, talking about here. You want to have staffing levels that can accommodate both a proactive and personalized customer service, whether it's planning, building, code enforcement, ideally. You want to have all your staff to possess all the necessary certifications and are fully trained. That's something that I think a lot of folks forget about is that all of our building inspectors, our plans examiners, our building official, you know, whoever you have that work in building and planning, they have certifications. They require training. You have to keep those up regularly. You have to keep taking those exams because they're only good for a certain amount of time. Those are necessary to be able to do your job. You have a full range. Ideally, a building department will have a full range of daily walk-in counter services. They'll be offering same-day and even weekend inspections. Some rock star cities out there, I don't know of any in Marin County, and I haven't seen one in a long time, but You know, a good building division can have weekend inspections available. We can do that ourselves. Of course, we'd have to have a prior arrangement. We have to find a consultant to do it. But, you know, this is the kind of service that businesses would absolutely adore is if they could just call us, you'd get an inspection, you know, for a big project and that kind of thing. Ideally, you would have the staffing to be able to do these kinds of things.

Your slides aren't going along with.

Oh, I'm sorry. I've got two on my screen.

Just so the community is watching.

My apologies. Gosh, thanks for pointing that out. It's been a long night, as you can tell. Okay, so it's opening soon.

I'm listening intently to everything. Yeah, but I just wanted the community to see it. Thank you.

I'm going to put my glasses on and just talk to the screen. So, you know, in planning, you know, ideally you'll have a dedicated planning manager. staff available to cover all the different programs of your division. And when I say covered all the programs, planning does a lot. They do historic preservation, tree preservation, parking transportation, current planning, long-range planning, housing services, economic development, you know, just so many, many different things that we do. You'd have full service specialized staff. You'd have staff who are dedicated to serve a city's range of boards and commissions. So You know, a lot of cities have just lots and lots, you know, bigger cities especially have more, they have lots of boards and commissions. And, you know, ideally, if you want to have boards and commissions, you also have to have the staffing to support those boards and commissions because there's a direct correlation. With code enforcement, ideally, you'd have, you know, for a city of our population, you'd have, you know, maybe up to two full-time officers with support staff. You might offer additional services that you might not normally do, ideally, like mediation services. You'd have a proactive and responsive daily service program and you'd have the capacity to handle after hours and weekend services. But that's like I said, this is like a dream department. So, you know, and you'd have the administrative support staff to back you up on that. Advanced departments, hypothetically, would be all of that that you just heard with just kind of a little bit less. On-site staff able to provide plan checks, ideally a wide range of walk-in plan review services without need for an appointment. You could offer daily walk-in over-the-counter services. So if somebody needs that approval over-the-counter, you could do that. You know, you would have next day inspections with online self-scheduling. We actually provide that right now. I think that's pretty cool. We do give all of our applicants that service. That's actually not that common, you know, from cities that I've worked for in the past, the ability for, you know, contractors to get a next day inspection and do it themselves online. Most places I've been, you know, you call the building department and you want to get an inspection and they may be booked up for the week. But we're very fortunate that we're able to work with contractors and we have an online system that enables this. So I'm pretty proud of that. You know, an advanced department would do plan check reviews really fast, two to three days and not the same day, obviously, for small projects, less than two week turnaround for larger projects. The turnaround time, you know, the state sets the cap. I'll talk about this later on what the maximum amount of time is, but this is an ideal advanced department. For planning, you still have dedicated staff for current planning, long-range planning and housing. You've got staff specialists dedicated to boards and commissions. You have ample capacity to routinely undertake, you know, whatever special projects and major planning initiatives that you need done. You know, a good planning department would have that capacity to take that on. And in code enforcement, they'd have dedicated officers with a proactive service program rather than a reactive service program. But, you know, by and large, the average standard, you know, community development department, you know, they might have an on-site plan checker available by appointment for routine walk-in services. Your standard usual planning department or community development department might have, well, they'll have in-house staff with an ICC certification for most situations. But for specialized, kind of unusual, rare things, they might contract that out. or be able to have somebody on call to help with those kind of unusual certifications that may be less common. Most departments have at least a four-day walk-in counter service in the Bay Area. That's pretty common. If they don't have five, they'll have at least four. Fridays, a lot of cities tend to be closed. Your kind of standard practice is a two to three day advanced scheduling for inspections. I said we're really proud that we can do next day and we can do it online. You don't have to call somebody and make an appointment. You can just do it yourself. I think that's pretty cool. Typically community development departments can do a five day plan review for a small project, a 10 day response for bigger ones. Planning departments, planning divisions in your typical planning department has a staff capacity able to meet the most common long-range planning needs in special projects. They have an ample capacity to manage their current planning pipeline. They can handle the routine things that come in the door. And most cities of our size have one full-time dedicated code enforcement officer. The standard is one officer per 10,000 by and large. I mean, that's kind of the rule of thumb that a lot of agencies use. You know, when you get down to a tighter staffing level, whether your budget or other reasons, you would cut that down a little bit more. You'd rely more on a remote plan checker because you have less capacity. Services require prior appointments. You might have only a two- or three-day-a-week counter service at the permit counter. For walk-ins, you might need up to a week advance scheduling for inspections. I've worked in cities where they're so busy and they may have a whole panel of inspectors, but they're so booked up you've got to call a week in advance. That can be frustrating for contractors when they're in a hurry and they want to get it done today or they want to pour or something like that. You know, a limited response, of course, obviously, like I said, we have a pretty quick response for that. Limited, you know, you might need more than a week review for small projects. You might not have somebody in-house to do it. You might not have the capacity to do as many quickly because you've got fewer staff, so it'd take longer to do those. Same thing with larger projects. If you have fewer staff capacity, you know, it might take longer to get those done. Um, for planning, you know, if you have a limited planning program, you're really just focusing on, on your current planning pipeline with support, uh, from contract firms. You might have, um, you know, you, you will, you won't have capacity for a lot of long range planning or special projects. You're really just limited to what's required by state law. And, you know, a city with a limited program would have, uh, you know, just one, uh, part-time code enforcement officer, maybe two, two days a week. Um, and, and, and This is where we're at right now. I'm going to talk a little bit about this, but right now we are in the limited category in our office. It's me and Matthew Avila, our building official, and Alex Othon, our senior planner. Right now, that's it. I've got two vacancies we're working to fill for Permit Tech and administrative analysts. So we're a department of five. We're really in the we're really in the limited category right now. And so, you know, we rely very heavily on contracts. staff for our building inspections, for our plan checks, and to some degree for planning. But, you know, at the end of the day, you know, we do a lot of air traffic control. Because when you get to the limited, you know...

In a hard place.

Yeah. Yeah. And then, you know, when you get down to basic, that means you're really like... you're really thinly staffed. You may very well contract everything out. You might not have counter service. There are some cities out there that are having some very difficult budget challenges where they've thinned out as much as they can. And this is where you might be when you hit that kind of dire straits and you've got to cut all of the available services. You might end having advanced scheduling, or you might require advanced scheduling for all inspections. Your turnaround times are just basically maxing out whatever's the cap from state law. So if state law says you've got 30 days to do this, you're probably doing it in 30 days. You're not doing it in 10 days or 15 days. As far as planning goes, if you're in a basic level, you're just doing staff capacity limited to those applications that are in the door. You're just focusing on complying with mandatory requirements and timeframes, just what the state mandates you do. You're only providing the services necessary to comply with state law. When somebody comes in and wants to walk through something, you just can't do it. That capacity is gone. You know, customer service is really limited to the application in front of you. You know, there's really no capacity to get people hand-holding or kind of meet with them and kind of guide them. And the more capacity you have, the more you can provide that customer service to folks. And then when you do long-range planning, you're literally limited to doing what's required by state law. You're probably... contracting out as much as you can. And worst case scenario, you don't have any code enforcement services at all. You're just limiting your response to life safety, what you have to respond to. I have in the next slide kind of an idea of what the staffing levels are like for each of these categories, ideal, advanced, standard, limited, and basic. I mentioned earlier we just have five full-time employees in community development. We're very tight. We rely very heavily on contract staff for everything. Even that's difficult because when you use contractors, they don't work for the city, they don't know the ins and outs, you spend a lot of time giving them direction. The focus tends to be on the very routine things that they can do. The more complicated it is, the less likely you're going to use contract staff. So like for planning, you know, we could assign a project to a contract staffer that's more simple. But if it's something that's kind of more complicated, more involved, more time consuming, maybe the level of assistance, we'd have to do that ourselves. And we do. And, you know, ideally, you might have, you know, 15 full time employees or a combination of full time and contract staff, if you had a full service department, all the way down to the basic where you're just literally providing minimum staffing required by law. So just to kind of give you an overview, like I said, we are really, we're in the limited category. We're very, very tight. It's just where we're at. And I want to give you an example of staffing levels, you know, how we stand with our other communities. And again, this is based on their budget. These are their full-time employees and their population. I'm going to, oh, I forgot to do the slide again.

I'm sorry.

So like I said, we're in the limited category. This is the comparison to other communities in Marin County that are similar to us. Obviously, I left out the really little ones like Belvedere. They don't have a population even close to ours. Um, and you know, we're in the limited category. We have, you know, we have the lowest number of full-time employees of our comparables. Um, we have half the staff level of, um, of, um, our neighboring city in Corte Madera. They have 10, uh, staff in community development. We have five, um, you know, uh, guess I'll leave it at that I mean this just kind of shows you what our current capacity is at our current level with our budget and this is what we do so we do as much as we can with what we have but it's it's tight you know we're providing limited services right now in our department We've done a lot over the last year. Obviously, I came on board in January, so a lot of this was from my predecessor. Last year, we updated our code to comply with Senate Bill 9, which is lot splits for single-family parcels to subdivide those. That was a state mandate. new fire protection impact fee to collect development impact fees in conjunction with Central Marin Fire. We updated our ADU accessory dwelling unit ordinance. My gosh, I think every city in California updates their ADU ordinances annually because the state legislature loves changing it on an annual basis. I'm sure we will next year again, too. I could put money on that.

Okay, with your slides.

Oh, I'm sorry.

Damn it.

I got to do this again. We responded to 85 cases last year. We closed 92. That's in the calendar year. The building permits, I've got a more updated table on that. I'm just going to jump ahead because there's a lot. This is the current fiscal year over fiscal year comparison. So the reason I'm showing you this slide, and I want to show you what one of the challenges of community development is that things are never consistent. The amount of work that comes into our office fluctuates widely year to year. And it doesn't necessarily correlate to the number of building permits you get. The best indicator is what's the valuation of those permits? What are your building permit fees? So year over year, you can see, you know, 23, 24, 24, 25 was pretty consistent. But then just this fiscal year, you know, July 1st, 2025 to two days ago, You know, we've had $84,667,495 of permit valuation going through our door. That's the valuation of construction that we've had just this fiscal year. We've collected so far this fiscal year $3.1 million in permit fees, building permit fees. We've issued so far up to the 18th, 945 building permits. That's not a huge number over the prior two years. But the reason why is that the projects that we've taken in have been much bigger, much more complicated, more plans to review, but not necessarily the volume of individual permits. So you have to remember, we're bundling in the bathroom kitchen remodel with the you know, new building getting constructed, you know, like, like, you know, Magnolia village or, or something or thousand larks per landing. So those projects are pretty big and they have a high valuation. So they've certainly pushed up our numbers. This also includes the Mount Tam window replacement, which is a pretty big project. I think that was, That was like $130,000 roughly of building permit fees in that project. So like I said, my point is that what we do year to year fluctuates widely. In a slow economy, we tend to have fewer permits. In a busy economy, when the housing market's booming, you get a lot. So the community development department has to be scalable. It has to be flexible. You have to have those consultants on call when things get really, really busy because we have state mandated timelines that we have to hit in order to get those permits reviewed. I'm going to talk a little bit more about that, but that's the goal of a community development department is to have a baseline of in-house staff who can handle the vast majority of the routine work, but then you've got that scalability with consultants. And so that's how we structure our department and that's how we operate. So our goals for the coming year in this budget, we have identified these, I'll just kind of rush through them really quick. You know, we want to keep expanding our improvements to customer service. We want to do what we can, where we can, if that means being open a little bit more, we did, we opened the permit center this winter, an extra half day. I'd love it if we could open more, but you know, with the few staff that we have, when the permit counters open, there's usually somebody at the counter who, I'd say one person every hour so that pulls you away from what it is you're working on and so that's why it's harder to with five staff you know you've got to um you know you to to keep that up we do not have dedicated staff to the permit counter so we're all doing our you know our our day job I you know all of us come up to the counter I do too um you know whoever's around um I had a date last week or the week before where Matthew and Alex were sick, and so I just was at the counter all day. But that happens. But we're always trying to improve our customer experience and our customer service however we can. We've got people working every day. Even on a Friday, they may not be here in the office. I usually am. We help them anyway. I find people sometimes outside of City Hall, like, looking for help. I said, well, I'm here. Come on in. That happens. Right now, all the projects we're working on, we're studying a new park impact fee that is in progress right now. Harrison Associates are working with us to establish a park development impact fee so that new development in the city will help pay for the cost and the improvements that we want to see to our park infrastructure in town. Um, that's on that's going on right now. Um, we're also working with fair and peers on a new parking management study that we're hoping will lead to a new parking ordinance. Um, so that's already underway. Um. Those 2 firms are currently working on those 2 big projects for for us here in community development. We are expecting some pretty big residential projects, including 2000 Larkspur Landing. They're already meeting with us even though they don't have even a pre-application in yet, but we're still actively helping them prepare for their application when they do come in. We do a lot of work for folks, even if you don't have an application in, we do spend a lot of time on helping people get ready for that application and planning. We've been working on the floor area ratio with the planning commission. We had another meeting just last week. They gave us some direction. They really liked Corte Madera's. We did an analysis of their ordinance with ours, and they thought that that was a good role model. So we'll be crafting internally. Alex and I will be writing up a new floor area ratio ordinance and bringing that back to the planning commission for discussion. We're doing that right now. And then one of the housing element programs were identified for this fiscal year was universal design and I think I mentioned that when I did the housing annual report back in March. So we exist. Most of what we do is regulated by state law. We have to have a planning department. Government code requires us to have a planning department, to have some type of planning commission. So that is required. We have to have and maintain a general plan. We are required to do that. Yeah.

I didn't have a question.

Oh, I'm sorry. I thought you were going to say something.

No.

We are required to have a building department to enforce housing and building safety standards in the health and safety code. We are responsible for reviewing those permits, ensuring structural safety and inspecting construction. That is our responsibility and we have to have the staff able to do that. As you know, we have to maintain and annually report on our housing element. The state has imposed many, many responsibilities on our department to further housing in our community and to ensure that we're implementing the state's housing goals and housing laws. including fair housing. And most importantly, we have deadlines for everything, whether it's a building permit, a planning entitlement, the permit streamlining act exists. We have to respond within, if you have a planning application, I've got to get back to you in 30 days. I have a drop dead date with everything. Many of these things are deemed approved. If I don't get back to you, you can go to court and say, Hey, They didn't get back to me and I was like, okay, yeah, it's deemed approved. That would be awful. I mean, I can't allow that to happen. So we've got to be on these projects when they come in and we have to have the scalability and the capacity with our staff to respond to everything. And then the federal government also throws stuff at us. They have the same thing for wireless facilities. They have, we are very limited in our review of what we can do, but when they come in the door, we have to get them processed and reviewed very quickly within their federal guidelines. So to my last slide, which is my fun slide of all of our challenges, and I want to touch on this, people are always concerned about the cost of construction in our community. Everybody is. Every contractor, every builder, every homeowner, Our labor and construction costs are among the highest in the country. I'm not sure where Marin stands. I know that San Mateo County, when I was there, was the second highest labor market for cost in the entire country after the Hamptons on Long Island. So Marin County, I'm sure, is probably up there in the top 10, I would imagine. And we base those permit fees on labor costs. So when we do a fee study for our building permits fee schedule, our consultant looks at what it costs for staffing and for staff costs to review those permits. What does it cost for the review time? How much time does it take? What does it cost for that employee plus overhead? And when you have such high labor costs, it affects the permit fees. And our fees are based on our labor costs. Our operations are focused on cost recovery. In the building division, it's the only department that can strive for 100% cost recovery. I mean, everything that they do can be fully paid for through permit applications. Obviously, we subsidize things. We have to subsidize things. Hot water heaters is the best example. You don't want to charge somebody too much money for a hot water heater. You want to keep that permit fee fixed. That way, they'll actually come in and get a building permit for a hot water heater because you don't want to see somebody have carbon monoxide problems or something along those lines. There is some subsidy for solar and certain types of hot water heat pumps now that the state mandates cities eat that cost. But our goal is 100% cost recovery and building. In planning, the goal is 50% cost recovery. We strive for that. Planning will never get, you know, you can't possibly get, it's hard to get over 50% cost recovery for a planning department because there's so many things that you have to do that you can't apply to an applicant or the public. You know, so that's our goal. You know, that's what we try to recover. And that's how we pay for our department to operate. And we try to keep our costs as low as possible. So the benefit for the public when we have such a staffing level that we do is we can keep our costs a little bit lower. We do have to hire consultants. We have to pass through their costs to our applicants. But I think right now we're providing a good value to our community because we are doing things as efficiently as and cheaply as we can. If we find a place where we can do some cost savings, we will do that. And that's what helps fund our department. And again, it also depends on what comes in the door. So if it's a busy year, you're going to get more permit fees. In a slower year, you're going to get fewer. So that's just how it is. It's got to be scalable. As I mentioned, a lot of what we do is shaped by state law. We have mandatory permit processing time frames. I use the shot clock example. Baseball now has a pitch clock, so I can use a baseball example instead of basketball, but it's the same thing. If I don't get that permit approved on time, That runner's going to first base, so I've got to do that. I've got to make sure that I get that pitch off the mound for every application that comes in, whether it's planning or building, and that's our responsibility. Many laws require annual reporting. We spend an awful lot of time filling out annual reports. I have to report how much You know what our water calculations are to the state water resources board every January or December. Obviously, we've got our housing report. We have to report. You have to report your building permit numbers is an awful lot of record keeping that we have to do. A big part of our job is a lot like a city clerk. We have to keep records of all of these permits and applications, and we have to keep them on file. You know, if you're a building, if you're a commercial building permit, we've got to keep that on record in perpetuity. So we're also record keepers here. That is another responsibility that we have. And we also, like I said, we have to report to all these state agencies. So there's a lot of things that we do in the background that you don't ever hear about. It's not glamorous, but we do it. on top of that, we have to maintain our certifications. You know, my building official has to keep up all his certifications. Otherwise he can't go out and do your inspection for whatever it is you're going to do. And that's why we rely on consultants because their costs also involves making sure that their inspectors are up to date because we can't have an inspector do a plan check or an inspection that they're not certified to do. So You know, we got to make sure that the people we hire and the people that we have internally are certified to do the work that they have. For planners, I'm a certified planner. I have to spend 16 hours a year doing training. It's a lot like attorneys. Building staff have it the worst. They have just they joke that I spend half their time doing training for the exams to be certified and the other half doing their job. So. That's a big part of our department. And finally, I have two city councils. You're one of them. The other one's in Sacramento. The state of California has, you know, they legislate like they are a city council. They really get into the weeds. whether it's the SB9 ordinance we did last year or ADUs, objective design criteria. Sacramento over the last 25 years of my career has become more and more almost like a city council. And so it's the best example I've got, but it's true. There are hundreds of annual bills related just to planning alone. Building gets them as well. We have to implement those bills. We have to make sure our codes are up to date. That's a big part of our department. We have lots of unfunded mandates. There's frequent regulatory changes. Sometimes they happen mid-year. You know, whatever the governor signs, if it's related to our department, we've got to do it. There's always something new that we need to do. So this is what we do. This is who we are. And we're doing it, you know, we've got a good team. Yeah, so... That's where we're at. You know, we could certainly use all the help we can get. But at the same time, we have to, between that rock and a hard place, we have to find that sweet spot where we're given the best service we can with the resources we have. And that's our goal. I'll leave it at that.

Thank you. That's exhausting.

Yes. In addition to all the leans and everything else. Yes.

Well, thank you for the very thorough presentation. Any questions from council?

That's exhausting.

Yeah.

I'd love to get us up to the middle line.

Yeah. I hope when we talk about the budget, you've got some requests in the budget, hopefully, to get us up to a standard level.

Yeah. And you know, I'm new. So as time goes on, I'll be coming forward. I've only had four or five months to kind of analyze where we're at. Um, and I'm conservative. I don't want to jump into something right off the bat. Um, and I think, you know, come the mid-year, I'm sure I'll have something to say, but at this current budget, we're really kind of moving forward. Okay.

I mean, I thought it was very helpful to see what some of our neighboring jurisdictions, what their staffing is. So I think that's very helpful. I mean, it definitely feels like we're very lean. And I think we have to anticipate that we're going to get a lot more activity with the housing elements. more complicated and larger projects, which could probably take more staff time.

Yeah, I wonder if I could chime in, though. And I... We talked about putting the slide with the comparison, but I want you to be aware that's not a great apples to apples comparison. I know a lot about each of those departments. Some of them have bodies doing stuff that we do differently. Corta Madera in particular, three of those FTE, we're covering those functions in other ways. I do want to remind the council as we go into the budget discussion, We always have to think about peaks and valleys, right? So we program our staff versus consulting work somewhere in the middle, because we don't want to always staff long-term liability commitments to the peak because there are those valleys and you don't want to be carrying in-house staff if we're going to go in a prolonged period of a valley. I do think we're probably on the cusp of a five plus year peak. So we probably, it's time to look at whether we can afford to bring more in-house. But remember, the other thing is the more you bring in-house staff, the more challenging cost recovery gets for the internal operation. It's really clear when you hire a consultant for a specific project to say you want things to go faster, you have to pay for the consultant. So it's just something to keep in mind because it's all part of that time versus money question that we wrestle with all the time.

Quick question. I'm, you know, I was, you know, it was eye opening that Corte Madera has 10, we have five and Mill Valley is 15. And, you know, I understand their commercial footprint and Mill Valley's property values, but I'm curious about pooling resources. You know, I think that, you know, Central Marin Police, Central Marin Fire are classic examples, but here, you know, like a shared pool of inspectors or anyway, you know, thoughts on that? Yeah.

Yes, there's been a long effort to try to do that without a lot of traction. And I would sum it up as a lot of Marin is like Larkspur, where the level of an intensity of touch between a building permit project And the building staff is very high and the sentiment has consistently been. We need that person here to deal with the intensity of the complaints and it's not. I've always instinctively thought 5 cities in this county could probably easily share building official, but then I sort of watched these rather intense conversations take place and I realized. Every community is probably experiencing that. I do think the one on Andy's chart that we're making headway on is housing. You saw he said in a higher level department, you'd have a housing specialist. I think with the sea change that's going on at the county, I think the county wants to play a bigger role in providing housing specialist services out to the cities. That would be fantastic because it would be an invested local person. But we'd be sharing them. And I think that is ripe for an opportunity. And then I do think if we could find a way to at least backstop our inspectors with other jurisdictions, that would help a lot.

Something MCCMC can work.

And then the other thing to be aware of is code enforcement is different in every city. So let's use Corte Madera as an example. Their code enforcement officers do a lot of the things that we've chosen to pay Central Wind Police to do. And so we pay for a body at Central Wind Police that I could argue belongs on Andy's chart because... one of the bodies in Corte Madera's community development department is doing what we pay that person over in central and police to do.

Okay. And one more question I, you know, have to ask on the technology front, like our permitting tracking, you know, I think, you know, there's a bit of hype about, you know, in planning, I think you need a person, you know, I don't know the automations there yet, but do you feel we're, you know, utilizing that, especially, you know, with the lean staff we have, you know, utilizing all the different automation possibilities,

Yes. Um, We use the same permit software as a lot of the other cities do in Marin County. It's pretty common. I mean, when it comes to automation, our, you know, our chief building officials always looking for ways to do what we can. I think that the software we have is really kind of a cornerstone of that. And we try to get the most out of it that we can, but at the end of the day, people still need handholding. You know, we still have folks who, You know, they still have trouble with online doing business online. So, you know, that's the permit tech. They do a lot of customer service to that regard. And I think no matter what, as a public agency, you have to have your technology be, you know, eight to 80. In other words, an eight year old should be able to use it and an 80 year old should be able to use it because as a public agency, you have to make it accessible to everyone. So that's a challenge that we always have.

All right, any questions? Any other questions? Thank you.

All right, so we're going to have Mr. Skinner do his department presentation, but he's going to suffer for having to go on last because I'm asking him to go a little faster.

He's good at that.

Because he has a bunch of other presentations that I know you want to dig into. But I know there's an important theme in the public works presentation that should be brought out.

Okay, good evening.

Good evening.

Julian Skinner, Public Works Director. So I have an overview tonight of the Public Works Department. We're split into two divisions. We operate out of the Corporation Yard over at 325 Doherty Drive. One half of our operation is maintenance, which is our kind of routine operations. That's the crews you see out on the street. The other half of our operation is engineering and administration. So that's our licensed engineers. And we have a public works inspector, an analyst and a tech. And we work on engineering. a lot of things, but most of what you see here is our interaction with the public on their permits, incursion permits, and then all of our capital programs run through the engineering division. And so you see the FTEs here, all those positions are filled, except for we're at five out of six maintenance workers at the moment. We actually had the second round of interviews today to fill our last vacant maintenance position. This is the same chart that you've seen in the other department's presentation, starting at the top with ideal down to basic. I filled in here how that relates to a public works operation starting at I've split this into maintenance and engineering because we do different things. Like I mentioned, the maintenance crew has a lot of routine activities, whereas the engineering has a lot of planned out activities. So I've separated the two divisions to look at our levels of service. The first one we're looking at here is maintenance. Starting out with a basic level where you're basically taking care of those safety-oriented issues only. This is basic maintenance needs. For example, a stop sign gets run over. That's a liability issue. That's something that goes out and gets replaced as part of your routine maintenance operations. And then a step up of that would be limited where you're doing your priority maintenance activities. And so this is still mostly health and safety related, but you're not really doing any proactive maintenance. You're not looking into ways to be more efficient. You're basically dealing with things as they come up and as they arise. The grass is super high. You go and you cut the grass, things like that. Standard is a level where you've got a system down where you've mapped out the routine maintenance. You know what it is. You've got crews assigned so that you can take care of the normal kind of activities. But we don't always deal with normal activities in maintenance where a lot of what we do is heavily dependent on the weather. So, for example, we just went through a spring pattern where it rained a lot and then it got really hot and then it rained a lot and it got really hot. And so we went through it. an exceptional period of weed growth and we've done a lot more weed abatement over the last two months than we've done in the 10 years that I've been here. And so what you see with a standard polar birch maintenance operation is that you're staffed to handle the routines. And when you get things that are out of the normal like that, the public will notice. The weeds will shoot up faster. It'll take us a little longer to get back to them because we're still doing our first round on some of the other areas. So an advanced level of maintenance service would be where you've still got all those routine maintenance planned out. They're kind of running like clockwork. And you've got some forward planning. You've done some mapping out so that you have... You have methods in place to handle some of those extreme conditions. The other extreme condition I mentioned before was the weeds in the spring. The other, obviously, we deal with is storms in the winter. Trees, big branches falling in the street that have to be cleaned up. Storm events that clog storm drains where we have to go and clean out storm drains, storm response, putting out sandbags, things like that. So, you know, routine operations, we get rainstorms every now and then throughout the winter we go out and we have crews that can accommodate that. We get a couple of back-to-back atmospheric rivers over three days of continuous rain. That's kind of an extreme condition. that as you get higher up into advanced and ideal, you've got some measures in place where you can handle those without the public seeing a whole lot of impact. An ideal really means that, again, your routine maintenance is running like clockwork. And you've got staff and you've got contingencies in place so that if you get a big spring weather pattern like we had on the weeds are shooting up everywhere. We've got a plan in place to address that may only happen once every 10 years, but You know, we've got the staff in place that we've got things that are set in motion so that when we have those spikes that we can get out there and handle them as though they were routine. I put the blue dot here, which indicates where I think we are right now. I think we're kind of in the standard area. A little bit on the lower side of standard. It's one of those things where I never like to put something exactly in a category. It's always... a little bit higher or low, but... I think that for the most part, our routine maintenance is very well taken care of. We've got everything planned out. We've got the maintenance superintendent's been here 10 years. So he's certainly had an opportunity to go through many cycles of what that looks like and assign the crews. The reason that it's dipping and it's getting lower is we still have the same staffing and budget levels adjusted for inflation. um that we've had 10 years ago and so you look at all of these great projects in the next presentation i'm going to give which is the cip those are great improvements for the community but they also come with maintenance needs so over time we're adding to our maintenance needs we've got a wonderful new library an expansive landscape and outdoor space that is all going to need to get maintained some of that will fall on maintenance some of it will have to be contracted, but every little project that you see that we celebrate finishing a capital improvement program, it's another thing that's going to have to be maintained. And so the reason we're at the lower end of standard and creeping a little bit lower every year is because the things that we're maintaining are getting, are increasing over time. It's hard to put numbers of bodies to what each one of these would be. But I think, you know, we're not a huge crew. We've got six workers plus a superintendent. I kind of started at the top. I think what would be ideal here is we're all kind of working together. uh managers and our public works superintendent does a lot of paperwork but he does a lot of out in the field supervising too and so ideally what we would look at is a structure where he does a little bit more management and the supervisory role is assigned to two new staff so You would have the superintendent focus more on the management duties that are part of his work now, and the supervisory work would be handled by a supervisor in parks and a supervisor in streets. And they would be working supervisors, so they would be boots on the ground to assist the maintenance worker once and two in their activities also.

Can I just chime in really quickly, Julian?

Yep.

I want to give the council perspective because I struggle. I would say I probably struggle the most with the maintenance staffing. If we had another six-figure chunk of money that we could spend, I think about this a lot and don't let this go to their heads. But, you know, for a second, the library staff deals with the community a lot. But if you ask the community, they work for the library. The people that work as maintenance workers, they are the people that everybody in Larkspur knows works for the city. And they see them out there, and if they have a smile on their face, I guarantee you it made a positive impression about the city. if they didn't get the weeds done one day it made a negative impression about the city and um so it's it goes beyond just the hard work they're doing i often remind everybody they're probably our main ambassadors because they are those workers that are out there every day that everybody goes that's a city employee just something to keep in mind uh because i'm really proud of the fact they get a lot done for six people

The next is just a list of their typical responsibilities. Again, there's two main divisions within the maintenance division. One is streets and buildings that kind of work together and then parks. Most of what you see here is routine stuff. I'm not going to read them all, but just as just streets is not just streets. Streets is everything associated with the streets. So these are the medians. These are the traffic signals. These are all the signs, the red curb painting and things like that. And again, in the parks, it's not just mowing the lawn. There's benches, there's barbecues, volleyball courts, and all of these things need maintenance. When we think about levels of service, I think maintenance is one of the areas where there are actually some good visuals that you can use. I remember doing a presentation a while ago, and somebody chose medians in different cities to show levels of service. In that one, they showed Corte Madera as ideal. I did not show Corte Madera. I picked this out of Google. I don't know where it is. But this is an example of ideal level of service for, and I'm showing medians, but this could apply to everything, streets, anywhere in a park. And again, it doesn't mean that everything has to be lush and we have to spend thousands and thousands of dollars on watering. It's basically, is it well manicured? Are the plants the appropriate size? And does it look like somebody is paying attention to what's going on in the median and it's not overgrowing out in the street? So just something that looks like it's well kept and like it's a homeowner that's proud of their front yard and that's how they present their home to the community. That's what an ideal landscape medium would look like. This one I do have a real example. And again, I think we're kind of in that standard area. This is one of the mediums on Bonaire. So it was recently replanted with the Bonaire bridge project. So these are drought tolerant plants, well spaced out. And this does get manicured and maintained by our crew. Most of the year it looks pretty good, but we're not out there every day. We're not even out there every week. It has a cycle where it gets attended to. And so just before the crew gets there to do their maintenance, there are definitely weeds here and it definitely gets a little bit overgrown. So, you know, you could probably take a picture of this median depending on where the cycle is in maintenance and call it ideal standard or poor. But the goal in the standard is you never actually let it get to that poor level where the grass is up high and it becomes an issue for motorist visibility. So again, it's well planted, but you can tell there's a few weeds there and it needs a little bit of attention. This is poor. This is basically what happens when you don't have enough person power to deal with your maintenance needs. You can't even see the median here. It's just all grass. So it's growing up to a certain height. This is when if you had a really basic program, you would get out there whenever you could to cut the grass down, at least for driver visibility. So that is down to a height of three feet. So you probably cut it down to two feet so it wouldn't be above the three feet the next day. But you're basically looking at intersections and things like that where your primary concerns are driver and pedestrian visibility at sidewalks. But other than that, it's green and it grows. And then just a couple of notes on the levels of service. So obviously it's one of the things that our citizens notice and they comment on is how well-maintained or not well-maintained things are, but other things to think about is maintenance is not just about appearance. Maintenance is done for the overall good of the improvement. So think of it as the best analogy I always use is if you have a house and let's say it has wood siding on it and you look after the wood siding by filling in any areas that split and you paint it or you stain it when it needs to be painted or stained and that way it prolongs the life of it. And then it takes longer for you to have to replace that wood siding. So good maintenance can lead to the longer life of your improvements and putting off costly replacements. The other thing is it can help with avoiding failures. So for example, if we have a traffic signal that has a component that just goes bad because it wasn't maintained properly, that signal could be out for, some amount of time. So that's an issue for traffic and congestion and potentially liability for collisions until the traffic signal is put back into operation. So these are part of the reasons why we do the maintenance. It's not just because we want things to look good. It's so that they last longer and so that we can minimize the occurrences of failures. And then the other thing to think about with the number of maintenance worker positions we have is one of their core duties is storm response during the winter. So when we get those storm events that last multiple days or their effects last multiple days, we often have crews working around the clock. And so we split them up into teams of three workers and they each work 12 hour shifts. Once you start getting below six people, it's awfully hard to split into shifts. You know, let's say somebody's on vacation or somebody's sick. You really need a team or two agreed to do some of these emergency responses because you're out in traffic. Somebody's got to be watching your back when you're moving logs from the from the street or you're getting down in a storm drain, somebody needs to make sure you're doing it safely.

I think we're going to have to factor that in because this super El Nino that's anticipated, I just read a report on it, huge super El Nino arriving this summer is going to increase flooding in Marin County. It's anticipated with these storm surges like we had in January, but worse than that.

Yeah. So the more bodies you have in your public works crew, the better ability you have to adapt to some of these occasions where you may need to work around the clock. You just have more flexibility with staffing. Some of the mandates we have in public works and maintenance, you don't technically need. We don't have all the government codes that require a public works department. But there are things that we do that are mandated that if you didn't have a public works department, somebody else would have to do. Most of that has to do with storm drains. So there's a, it's called an NPDES stormwater permit. Every municipality in California has one. It's the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System. And basically the goal of it is to reduce the amount of pollutants that get into our bodies of water, into our creeks and our bays. And so there are a number of mandates, reporting, inspection, cataloging, assessing, inspecting that we have to do that are associated with our NPDES stormwater permit. This is not a permit that we applied for because we did a project. This is a permit we have to have because we have storm drains under our streets. We're mandated to do that NPDES work. Some of our engineering staff helps out with some of these tasks. It's not all maintenance, so there is some crossover. The other thing that we're mandated to do is not quite. but there have been longstanding requirements for retro reflectivity of traffic signs and markings that Caltrans and FHW have been working on for some time. It initially came out about 15 years ago. There's a lot of backlash because it was an unfunded mandate. And so the agencies have been working back and forth about what this means, but essentially what it will mean for us is We will need a program in place where we're cataloging the reflectiveness of our signs for traffic safety. And we have a program to replace them when they start losing their efficiency. So most traffic signs are made out of a reflective material so that when your headlights hit them at night, you can see them better. Traffic striping and marking to some degree is also, and that's also mandated, but we're exempt from most of the markings because we have streetlights. So a lot of counties where they have county roads and there's no streetlights, they also have to be concerned with the markings on the street. But for us, it's mainly going to be signs. So this is going to see a real uptick on our sign replacement. We're going to have to be inspecting them and replacing them a lot more frequently. We don't have pavement inspections mandated per se, but if we don't do those inspections, then we won't get any street funding for paving projects in the future. So to the extent we want to keep paving our streets, we have to do our street inspections and we have to log them with MTC. And again, I mentioned the primary impact I think most of the public sees is the aesthetics of our maintenance and then the mandated items that I noted. There are some other side of impacts that if we don't maintain things, storm drains can lead to flooding and Sinkholes, if they're not well maintained. Landscaping, if we don't maintain our landscaping, can lead to sight distance issues for vehicles and also, depending on where it is, can become fire hazards. Signs and striping, if they're not properly maintained, can lead to traffic congestion and even traffic collisions. The pavement, we don't keep our pavement intact. It can lead to potholes, which can lead to vehicle damage. Also, potholes are especially impactful for bicyclists. A lot of cars just kind of will shudder when they go over a pothole and maybe they'll pop a tire. But a cyclist going at 20 miles an hour on a street that hits a pothole can do some serious damage to themselves and their bike. And then trees, impacts of falling tree limbs. So this is not just the big trees that can fall. There are tree limbs that can be big enough that they can damage property or persons if they fall. So these are the reasons why we maintain all of these items. Impacts of lower maintenance service. A lot of this is kind of what kind of things we'll be looking at if we went down to basic. These are things that, you know, every time there's an issue with the economy and cities start looking at what can we do, these are kind of the things that they look through. Some of them are pretty drastic and some of them have actually been implemented by agencies. You can eliminate your median landscaping so you don't have to mow it or trim it anymore. You can put something hardscape in there. It's a little trickier to do now with all the stormwater regulations. It's harder to take things from green to gray, but there are ways to do it. Some places turn off their streetlights. Streetlights are not actually mandated. There's nothing that says you have to have streetlights out on your street. It's just something that we choose to choose to do. Converting traffic signals to always stop signs. Traffic signals don't actually use a whole lot of power now where everything's LED. But back in the day, this was a big energy consumption and something a lot of agencies did. Removing park amenities. So playground equipment gets expensive to maintain and repair. You simply remove it. Same with, you know, benches, water fountains. You start closing those in the parks and then Even drastically beyond that, some agencies have closed parks before. They've started with the smaller pocket parks and closed them and just maintained bigger regional parks. And then bike paths are another thing that we maintain, both the landscaping around them and the pavement. Quickly going to engineering. Do you want me to pause for any maintenance questions before I go into engineering? Okay, all right. Engineering's a little bit like planning and building, whereas there's ebbs and flows in the work. And so again, going from ideal down to basic, I think here we're in the standard, but we're a little bit lower than standard. And part of that is just the volume of work that we've had recently with the big library project. um and then obviously uh recently we we had uh the big bridge project the mitigation project and we had all the um all the paving uh program work too um did i skip okay i think it's on the next slide um and so this is based on where we're in the current staffing and so um we're down a position from where we were a couple of years ago um if you remember that first slide uh we actually had two analysts a few years ago and we were fortunate that that one analyst um had great experience with park projects and they worked on a lot of park projects But they were also our special projects person. So we have a handful of projects that come through that typically they would handle. And we don't have that body at the moment. So it's been shared amongst the other staffing. And for the most part, everything's getting processed. We're getting our CIP projects done. um done we're addressing our private projects we work with planning and building on private projects we do an engineering review on them and we deal with citizen requests and encroachment permits grading permits on a priority basis If you work down from there, limited, I think you'd see a reduced capital improvement program. That's one of my next presentations. You'd see lesser projects to some degree. You can use consultants to accommodate some of the ebbs and flows. in this work, but even when we use consultants, we have a staff managing the consultants, so it's not able to completely replace staff with consultants, but we do use them if we have an expertise level we don't have on staff, like we don't have an electrical engineer on staff, we don't have a geotechnical engineer, so that gets handled by consultants. And then if we have a real increase in workload, then we'll use a general consultant to help out with project management. I think as you go down to the bottom here, if you were doing basic, what the residents might see is in addition to less projects, you'll probably see less response to citizen requests. We deal with a lot of requests for maintenance needs or engineering concerns, or people wonder if a traffic sign is right in a certain location. You would just see a delayed response. And again, we'll be dealing with most of what we would consider health and safety concerns first, and then other issues would have to wait until staff time was available. I think as you move up the chart, one thing that you'll see is the citizen requests response will increase. The other thing is that you'll see some more turnover in our CIP projects. You'll see us do a little bit more forward planning, maybe have an opportunity to seek out more grants for some of these projects, and then also do what's known as shovel-ready projects, which We're not doing now. We don't have the staff capacity where we are to do shovel ready. But this is one of the things that can help you get more outside funding is if you have already done some work on some projects. And then, again, this is just I've kind of talked through this as I've gone through the previous slides, but we work on the capital improvement program. We handle citizen requests. We do the admin work, which is we work with finance to make sure that our public works tracking of the bills we pay matches what's coming in and out of finance. And we review both the operating and the capital budget with admin each year, finance staff. And then private project, we work with building and planning to do the engineering reviews. Some of the mandates here, again, we assist maintenance with NPDES. building and planning applications that come in. As Andrew mentioned, there's a lot of mandates with response to that. So engineering is also part of those reviews. And we provide comments and conditions, including some of those projects, private projects will have mandated compliance with ADA and PDS, all of the regulatory agencies that we review when we're reviewing building and planning. Should we choose to implement capital projects, then we have to go all of those regulatory agencies that I mentioned before for private projects, and we're subject to those in delivering the capital projects. I guess that was my last slide. I didn't go into goals here, because I'm going to present the CIP later, and that has a lot of goals in it. But I should mention, because it won't be captured in the CIP, that one of the goals of the maintenance department this year is really to do a deeper dive into our computerized maintenance management software that we've invested in so that a lot of the things that we perform maintenance duties on are cataloged now, and we're going to be starting to draw up some plans to help us better manage how we maintain and replace, if need be, all of those improvements that we maintain. So I will pause there for questions.

Wonderful. Thank you. All right. Any questions?

Yes. Go back to slide number two, and I want to talk to you about point four. Just kidding.

All right. Well, it is 10.02. Do we have to take a vote to continue past 10 o'clock? 10.30. All right. Sorry. Okay. All right. Well, thank you, Mr. Skinner, for your presentation. All right. Let's move on quickly to a review of the preliminary budget. And Ms. Gabriel, I mean, okay, so can I just ask a question of the council members? Have you all read the packet for this? So is it okay if we just ask you questions?

Yeah, that's fine.

I mean, and then we can go to the CIP. We're going to get this done before 1030. I don't know if we're going to be able to.

Wait, this requires a vote, doesn't it? No.

to ask us not to do a presentation.

No, no, no. I thought there was a request. No, we're not approving the budget tonight, right?

Tonight is direction.

Okay.

So that if there are changes to be made, we can bring them to you at the actual hearing.

So are there specific things you want us to focus on? Why don't you, and then we can ask our questions. Yes. I don't want to change.

I think that's what I meant, not a vote, but direction is kind of the last two slides. Okay. Although she really did a lot of work on that. I know she did.

I'm so sorry. Kathy's slide is a slide that I'd like to go over. So for fiscal year 25-26, we have 30 CFP from our full staff. We have 200 positions in planning and public works. And we have a 100 position in library. The proposal this year is to add a library. That unfreeze the library. Yes. So that's, I think that's an important part of this conversation. Okay.

Okay, so I'm sorry. But for planning, I'm sorry, go back. So Are we going to add someone in planning and public?

So there are three frozen positions in the current year budget. In the budget, preliminary budget in front of you, I'm recommending unfreezing position in the library.

Got it.

And leaving the other two frozen. That said, you certainly heard from community development that they are struggling.

Mm-hmm.

I've softened my position that I could be convinced that they're about to enter a sustained peak period. So I could certainly be convinced to bring the final budget with an unfrozen position for the planning division. That's one of the discussion points.

Okay, great. Thank you. Do you know what that dollar amount roughly would be?

It'll depend because then usually the department head and I sit down and we zero in on exactly which position it would be. But I think the entry-level planner, I think, with benefits is around $100,000. For an entry-level planner?

Yes.

Yeah, he's nodding his head over there. Right.

Okay. Yeah. So that's assuming that.

I think we might have a difference of opinion about which planning position we're talking about, but I'll go with your number.

But I think that's important information for us because I think it's true. We're about to get a ramp up in applications. So at least.

I think we should put a placeholder on the budget for that. But anyways, we'll discuss it. I mean, you know, this is good practice for us.

That was slide seven, right? Yeah.

This is the general fund slide. There's a couple of things I want to go over. One is the property tax to achieve an estimated deduction of $200,000 associated with the stellar compartment reassessment. In the proposal in this budget, there's an addition of a one-time expense of $50,000 for a consultant and a community outreach. HAB-Masyn Moyer- I believe manager, you know.

HAB-Masyn Moyer- I'm asking for a one time allocation, because I want to bring somebody and I mentioned last meeting to do some more structured. HAB-Masyn Moyer- engagement with the Community to figure out if we're going to upscale in the library and potentially in recreation, how do we most wisely spend those dollars. Right now, we're getting a lot of loud noise from people who have a lot of contact with us. And I think it's important that we find out from our whole user base what they really desire short and long term. That's a placeholder. It might be less than that, depending on when we actually go shopping for the work.

There's also the addition of a one-time expense of $30,000 to purchase a lawnmower. HAB-Masyn Moyer- And then I think the last that mentioned that the two positions, there are two position on funded endless budget on on the next slide. HAB-Masyn Moyer- Additional expenses for the new library, so I think I mentioned that earlier in April of 2026 when I did a presentation on that we need to have any additional cost. HAB-Masyn Moyer- The one time librarian position with salary and benefits $133,000 that's an estimated amount. We also have $29,000 in part-time staff salary. There's an additional amount of $45,000 in expense for e-books, children's books, and printed photographic. And this is funded by the Commons Foundation. We received the funding from them. And then we also have additional expense for utilities and building maintenance. The EOP fund.

Well, it's an annual question of the council. Do you want $50,000 allocated in the transient occupancy tax fund, hotel tax fund for the Chamber of Commerce? They plan on coming to speak to you about that at the June 3rd hearing. But that's sort of your annual question you wrestle with.

Do you want to wrestle with it now?

The Chamber's coming to do a presentation. Okay. Yeah, on June 3rd. You're going to be here?

So for sales tax measure funds recommendation for measure B. So we're recommending expenditure of $2.01 million. That is including $1.6 million for deaf service. There was also $166,000 for the fire truck leases, and this is included in the amount that will be paid to CMFA. And we also are proposing $75,000 of fire vehicle purchase to be paid with Measure B and the police vehicle purchase of $160,000 to be paid with Measure B. And then for Special Fund Measure B, again, we're proposing to assign dollars to anticipated future costs. Trash capture equipment for the storm drain, $3 million. PB, Lupita D Montoya, i'm stationed replacement at the cost plus pass plaza 2 million and then also having $500,000 for shovel ready projects to accelerate grant eligible projects. PB, Lupita D Montoya, So is there anything here, would you like to add. PB, Lupita D Montoya, them.

Okay.

And then for measure G, street sweeping, $31,000 would go towards that. Tree services would like to set aside $30,000. And then the mini grant program for the neighborhood response group, $15,000. And this is the last slide that I'd like to present. So we are proposing to assign a general fund balance for new capital projects. The recommendation is to have ADA transition implementation update of $40,000 and sustainability and capital implementation $50,000. So Julian Skinner, will have this in this presentation as part of the CIP so that completes what I wanted to talk about if there are any questions uh we're ready to take those questions city manager and myself wonderful thank you Miss Gabrielle for going through that quickly excellent presentation by the way um okay

Tax reduction of $200,000 with Skylark Apartments. That's just our share, right? That's not the county's share and state's share?

Correct. Ms. Gabrielle and I are trying to get an explanation from the assessor of exactly how these appeal assessments trickle down. The hit that we actually realized for the first year that they got their appeal approved was smaller than we thought it would be. So we're just... It's a very, I don't mean this to say there's anything untoward happening, but it's a very opaque process. And so I'm trying to just sort out how this actually turns into tax dollars so I can report that out to you.

And would that be the same information from Serenity's coming back on the books? Yes.

Yeah, so Serenity, well, Serenity will be a little different, right? We now know what the purchase price is. We can kind of guesstimate from that what the realized tax value is. What we don't know is the actual first day that the assessor's calculating for the transaction in this year because you won't realize the full amount in the first year. Got it. Okay. What we tend to do with those big types of swings on a particular property is true up the number at the mid-year when we actually start to get revenues in and we can see what happened. Okay.

Okay, so any other, let's go for Council Member questions.

I think those recommendations sound very thoughtful.

Dan?

City Manager, could you just explain quickly, I think there was an adjustment in the fire budget. And is that reflected in here? And how is that reflected? And can you just explain that to us?

This actually reflects the budgets that were adopted by the fire council and the police council last week. So... Because we, Larkspur, asked the Ross Valley Paramedic Authority to revisit the way paramedic costs and ambulance costs are being distributed within the Ross Valley and how the revenues are moving around within that organization, it led to a reevaluation of how Central Wind Fire was calculates its ambulance costs. And as a result, we were able to identify that there are specific costs that should be absorbed by the ambulance that in the past were being absorbed in what I would call the general fund of Central Marine Fire. And when you make this change, it brings the costs that Larkspur and Um, and for Larkspur that proved significant because, um, We weren't realizing revenues from the ambulance operation. Cora Madera had been in the past. So that's why you're seeing what looks like a big drop. It's because a methodological change was agreed to at the fire authority.

So that's reflected in that, like if we look at the pie chart, where 24% of the budget is the fire budget, that's reflected in that number? That number reflects the share, correct?

Yes, this number reflects the reduction. So in April of 2026, the amount that was presented was $7.3 million for CMFA, and it's currently at $6.1 million. So it's a reduction of $1.2 million compared to the original forecast that were given by CMFA at the time.

And that went back into our general fund to be used for other places.

Is that accurate? Basically, expenditures are lower.

When we showed you numbers last month, we had the higher number.

Right.

And now you're seeing the lower number. That's why that's changed. So in a sense, yes, the general fund has realized a savings that can be spent elsewhere. Okay. Hence my comfort in unfreezing a library position and talking about unfreezing a planning position.

Okay. Thank you for explaining that.

Great. We'll go to Council Member Bargulies with questions.

Yeah, hi, thank you. I just wanted to ask a quick question about the sales tax measure funds recommendations. Just for my edification, we want to spend $2.1 million, of which several expenditures or the few three expenditures go towards fire truck leases, fire vehicle purchases, and police vehicle purchases. So is that matched by our other partners in the JPA or is this our own expense separate from what they're doing? How does that work?

Yeah. So these are our shares of these purchases. So the total cost within those JPAs is much higher. So in the case of fire, this is half of the cost. And in the case of police, this is one third of the cost.

Okay, that's what I was wanting to understand. Thank you.

Council member Paulson, do you have any questions? Okay, no questions. Okay, great. All right. So, yeah, a couple of things that I want to point out. One, the incremental increase from Serenity is not in this budget. So, you know, that's additional. I had asked in advance this $250,000 contribution to the OPEB trust fund. It sounds like we have like $1.5 million already in the trust, which would cover our annual expenses. I would be in favor of unfreezing the community development position and postponing the contribution to the OPEB trust.

I offer an alternative suggestion. We actually are still projecting room within the fund balance, like a surplus at the end of the year. We can unfund the planning position and we typically don't Put money into the OPEB trust until the end of the fiscal year, just in case things went awry. So you could give us direction that you specifically want us to check in with you and say March or April of next year about the OPEB trust contribution so we could talk about it then.

Okay, perfect. I think that makes sense. I'd rather, yeah, I'd rather fund a position and...

That would allow us to park it there in the budget so it's a placeholder, but we wouldn't actually send it into the trust.

Okay, great. Are we okay with that?

Well, I have a question about the roller coaster that we talked about or the ups and downs and the benefits of a full-time position versus contracting. I'm assuming that when the full-time position is needed, it's more economical to have somebody full-time than contracting out. And I'm assuming when the work comes low, you're paying somebody, there's not that much to do, so you're overpaying. I also heard you, I thought I heard you say predicting we're in a high... We're entering a peak. A peak, which we expect to be relatively sustained.

I would say probably based on conversations with community development department and just what I know in terms of development discussions, yes, I think they're going into a period of several years. And if you think about the attrition rate of, so planning, we currently have a senior planner. There are two positions, classifications below senior planner. That's what I mean when I need to sit down with Mr. Mogensen and say, what is the right position to fund? In the past, We have a new director, but in the past, previous directors have funded one, asked to fund one of those two classifications with the ultimate goal that you train that person to handle a lot of the single family homework so that your higher level planners can do the larger projects and the advanced planning. Instinctively, I suspect that's the conversation we would end up having here or something similar. And that workload changes. should be sustained long enough. The attrition rate on those entry level to position classification is about three to five years, because either they grow into one of our better, one of our higher positions, or they outgrow us. And we have talked to you before We've kind of rebuilt our reputation here as a place where you can grow and we'll help you find somewhere else if we can't keep you here. Because we want them to then sing our praises so we keep getting talent in our stream. So I'd be comfortable in freezing a planning position and working with their mugs to decide what that would be.

And then if we, three to five years, things slow down, we could always just not fill that position again, if that's what we chose. That makes sense. Okay, thank you.

Okay, and then one other question on this $30,000 lawnmower purchase. Is that gas or electric?

That's a good question. I think maybe... Mr. Skinner might have talked about that, but I'll go ahead and say it. So Assistant City Manager Shannon O'Hare had worked with Council Member Margulies. They held a Climate Action Forum discussion on Monday, and this was the topic. We've been trying to find a city that's already put into their fleet a high utility industrial size lawnmower. There is one out on the market that's electric and we would love to get some real world feedback, but we're finding out it's such a new product that nobody's put one into their fleet yet. So one of the discussions that the forum had that I think they would recommend to you is maybe we end up being the guinea pig

And we get a free one.

And we buy one. We can probably, our mechanics, our mechanic feels we can probably limp our current gas one along. So we had a backup. And maybe we're one of the first cities and we test out this new electric equipment. This is the big riding one that spreads out the arms and it can cut a lot of grass. So you're taking out the piper and you're doing a lot of grass at once. This isn't the John Deere that, you know, Not a lot of people in Larkspur own a John Deere riding mower, but in some parts of the North Bay, people do. It's bigger than that. But to answer your question, we may be coming to you with a budget change where rather than allocating $30,000, which is a gas mower, we'd actually allocate more. And we've used some of the money parked for climate initiatives to make this purchase.

Do we know how much more we're talking about?

I believe the mower gets closer to $40,000 when you're talking about it. That's okay. I'll look over to Mr. Skinner. He's nodding his head. And the CAF did want us to try to negotiate, get a better price, and maybe go in bulk purchasing and encourage some other Marin cities to join us.

We'll advertise for them. Host your child.

Get some good PR.

All right, great. Yeah, with the cost of gas, I mean, you know, there could be some good savings.

Yeah, I feel some comfort because the mechanics feel we could keep our current gas one as a backup. It's definitely toward end of life, but if its purpose was, hey, the electric one's not working right today, we at least could finish the job. Yeah.

Okay, and then my last question is on this $50,000 expense for the consultant to do community outreach. I mean, do we have funds? Like what kind of, I guess, are we in search of projects? Because I feel like our budget really doesn't have much latitude or room for extra projects. So are we hiring a consultant to give us ideas for new projects? Like what exactly is this for? It's for City Hall.

No, this is... Primarily about the library, but I think it works hand in hand with recreation. My fear is if we just let this room fill up with the loudest library advocates and they tell you everything we're doing wrong at the new building because we're hearing it every day. We love the building, but you're not doing this. We love the building, but you're not doing that. you're going to get like a million dollars worth of requests, whether it's more hours, whether it's being open more days, whether it's having two librarians in the children's room that only stay in the children's room. I can tell you from the list we're building, you can't afford it. We can't afford it. We need to figure out what people's real priorities are. And council chamber is not the forum to have people speak honestly about if they have to pick this dollar versus that dollar, what they want. And so I'm talking about bringing a consultant and doing focus groups and targeted surveys and actually making sure we've set a priority list to recommend to you that makes sense given the limited dollars that we have. Are there other approaches? Yes. Right now, your staff doesn't have the capacity to do this level of intense community outreach. And I fear we don't have the time. But people really love it. The building's awesome. They want to be in there more, and they're frustrated they can't be.

Okay. And can I ask a question? Because, you know, Damon, he put us on, like, the real basic – level of service. But he has a lot of experience. I mean, he probably kind of knows what we need to just get it up to limited or standard. I mean, could we rely on Damon to kind of In conjunction with our library board to help.

My answer is yes. You'll back us up when people are upset because we didn't do it the way they really want it.

Okay.

Because that's my fear. Damon's vision may not be what people really want it.

Okay.

I know it's a leap of faith, but we've, and we haven't done this a lot in Larkspur, but a lot of communities use these tools to make sure the silent majority is heard.

Yeah. And, you know, I hear your point, Stephanie, but I think we've used it before in a way that's been helpful for the council. We had a consultant that did the whole road pavement work, and everybody wanted their pavement done first. Everybody thought their road was the worst. But we could rely on the data that the pavement consultant used gave to us, which he studied the pavement and told us which one fit into a category of decrepitness versus more. And then as policymakers, like we could say to the community, you know, we know that your road's pretty bad, but we have a plan and our plan is based on the research and the data. And I think it helped us. Is that a good analogy? Maybe I'm just too tired. Because then we could just, we could say, look, we're going to do this programming because this is what our outreach found was the most imperative for the community.

Yeah, I mean, so...