City Council - Regular Meeting

Good evening everyone. I'll call the council meeting to order for 05/12/2026. Madam Clerk.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Good evening, and welcome to the City Of Lincoln's regular meeting of the City Council. Tonight's meeting will be televised and available on cable channel eighteen, YouTube, and Zoom. Those wishing to address City Council Council on either a non agenda or agenda item will be called upon at the appropriate time. Those who submitted a speaker card will be called first, followed by those in the audience, and finally, those attending through Zoom. For those participating through Zoom that wish to provide public comment, please use the raise your hand feature or press 9 if you are calling in. Once public comment is open, please wait to be unmuted by the city clerk. Once unmuted, your name will be called and you may proceed in making your public comment. This evening's invocation will be given by Rabbi Hecht from the Shabbat Lincoln Jewish Center.

Once the invocation has concluded, Mayor Pearl will call the meeting to order.

Good evening. May it be your will, almighty god, to bless this gathering and all those entrusted with serving the people of Lincoln. As we gather during the season of spring, when the world around us renews itself with growth, light, and possibility, may we also renew our commitment to building a community rooted in kindness, integrity and responsibility. Just as the earth brings forth new life after months of stillness, may this season inspire fresh wisdom, cooperation and hope in the work of this Council. The rabbi, Rabbi Menachem Shneurysen, taught that every person has the ability and obligation to illuminate their corner of the world with goodness and purpose.

Public service is one of the greatest expressions of that calling. We pray that the members of this council be blessed with clarity of judgment, compassion for all residents, and the courage to pursue what is right even when it is difficult. May the city continue to be a place where families thrive, where neighbors care for one another, where differences are met with respect and where every resident feels valued and heard. Bless the first responders, educators, business owners, volunteers and all who contribute to the well-being of this community. And may the work done here tonight bring peace, prosperity, and unity to the people of Lincoln. And let us say amen.

Thank you, rabbi. Okay, we called the meeting to order. Roll call please on a clerk.

Thank you, Council Member Andreada. Present. Council Member Reedy. Here. Council Member Brown. Here. Mayor Pro Tem Eklund. Mayor Pearl.

Here. Hey, very good. We're good on that report from closed session. Don't have any reports, I don't think.

No reportable action direction was provided staff.

Oh, yes. Feel like I'm all right. Evan, would you lead us in the pledge? And a very good suggestion. Thank you, Holly. Welcome to the meeting, Evan.

Yeah, it's great to have you.

Agenda modifications, Is anyone who wants to amend anything? We will be making a correction to the to the, item for Ben. Yes. But if you, before we get into that, I just wanted to ask if there's any other modifications that anyone knows about. If not, we'll move the information item from the back to the front over It really gives, especially the downtown area,

a bucket of money every year and I think Anita mentioned it. I don't love this because I'd like to bank those dollars for a couple of years and do like a bigger project. But in a sense having the requirement that you kind of use it or lose it every year will put the organization in this place where we have to do even if they're smaller scale projects every year to make sure they dated last week, what they're gonna do next week. And that actually ends up becoming really useful because you get to a place where you start once you know the person then what's the likelihood that we might be able to lift them out of this or would they be interested in services? And so that sort of was our foundation for services.

Then former city attorney and I and Matta Bass three or four years ago, we got into a car we drove around Lincoln and I said, where can we stand up some kind of program that might at least start something here. We have very little money to do it. Unfortunately, we connected with a church that's in downtown who were interested in hosting some trailers that we had received from Placer County free that they received and no longer needed. And they were relatively good shape and public works kind of gave them a little shine and we brought them down. The council at that time funded about $70,000 in site improvements to site all of these three trailer locations there, create kind of a safe environment.

We went and spoke with the community that lived in the immediate area to make sure that everybody was going to be okay with this concept created a process. So we wanted this, if you wanted to be admitted to this program and get the opportunity to live in these trails for a period of time until you found permanent housing, still have to go through a pretty rigid process. You apply just like you'd apply to live in an apartment for example, you agree to different kinds of monitoring rules, there's drug testing, there's services that are associated with it. And then a committee that I'm not part of that is part of the nonprofit that was later stood up decides who the best applicants are that have the highest likelihood of success. So once that was up and running and we were learning as we were going, nobody that's been part of this process, nobody is a homeless services expert or professional.

These are just people like you and me that wanted to find a way to be, give people a pathway out. And eventually it became, it was clear that this could have legs, it could work. And so we encouraged the group to go fund and thanks to Lincoln Community Foundation who helped with this. They've formed their own nonprofit which is called Lincoln CA cares and they have their own board and the city is a participant on that board. And we make business decisions about how to move forward with the program.

So today, if you are accepted into the program, at first we had this sort of very rigid timeline of you get in on this date and you're out on this date. And what we learned was that that doesn't really work because every individual has sort of different advantages and disadvantages in terms of when they're going to finally get to a place of stability where they can move to the next step. So since that time, we've sort of lessened the rules about in and out and are spending much more time on the pathways to get them the tools they need so that they can make it to that apartment or that room or that home that they're gonna rent or purchase. And I have a couple of broad examples respecting privacy of some folks that have their objective success stories here. In addition to that, the council allocated about 300,000 to the salt mine for the remodel of a real professional shower and laundry facility at their location here on Lincoln Boulevard, which allows them to serve the homeless in a much more efficient way.

And the pastor Eric has come down a couple of times and shared the success of that project. Kind of covered this, this gives you kind of a general idea of how much work has gone into this just from a volunteer perspective. These are folks that I think started just wanting to clean up the Creek and ended saying, hey, we wanna see homeless people be served in a way that helps them to the next step of being housed. And the good news is, and I'll get to it in a moment, comes on the responsibility and is they still exist and operate, but their need of getting down there and digging out 400 thousands pounds of trash has been reduced to very low levels at this point. So let's talk about responsibility or enforcement.

What we learned during this journey is that not every individual wants to really leave homelessness or a way to another part of life. And so when they're ready to do that, we are willing to work with them to that next step. In the event that they're not, the different conversation it's had. So a couple of years ago, made a pretty aggressive decision. The camping situation at The Creek had gotten so bad that we instituted an ordinance, a camping ordinances council passed that set up some reasonable guidelines about if you're gonna be here because there's nowhere else to go, things like you have to limit your space to a 10 by 10 area, everything that you have must be portable and packed up during the day.

This isn't staking your land and creating your own facility here. And we found that some individuals down there were just unwilling to follow those guidelines. And so we cleared the Creek. We provided notice to all of them. We gave plenty of opportunities for alternatives and some folks ended up in our programs or other programs.

Many ended up back in a house situation with family or friends. Some unfortunately had warrants and went to jail, but the vast majority of them were moved out of the Creek and into some other scenario. So it was, I think that what we've learned is that it's not enough to simply offer a lot of the soft techniques to help people out of homelessness. You also have to have some real responsibility to the individual, especially when it's public space. And that's come in the form of making code enforcement.

Kim can probably tell you that the first year, years of her job here, what do you say Kim? 70% of your work? 70% of her work was related to homelessness. Kim is one of two code enforcement positions that do all the other code enforcement stuff in Lincoln, thousands of cases per year and they were spending three quarters or so of their time on this. A police department stood up a special response team, which was funded by the city council.

Those folks spent a good portion of their time during that time period working on various law enforcement related homelessness issues. Public works has spent a ton of time, whether it be gating areas of the Creek to limit some of the negative effects or cleaning out creeks or coordinating third parties that come in and do cleanups. And then I mentioned all of the Placer County folks that come out and help on a regular basis. The SRT was a really interesting decision by the city council because the reason it was put forward was we needed more law enforcement involved in working on this issue. Because many of the problems that you have sometimes in homeless encampments is all manner of crime that are occurring in camp and then a variety of other things that have occurred outside of camp.

But it wasn't designed simply to be the police showing up on a regular basis, arresting people. They built relationships with these people. They learned their names, same kind of story I already told you and has allowed them to have a better handle on the issue. And it was a major investment because that program still exists today. And the less resources that they're spending on homelessness, the more they're spending on other quality of life issues the SRT can deal with.

This is my favorite chart ever, okay. So these are point in time count data points. If you don't know, every year the federal government has almost every jurisdiction in California across the country do a point in time count of unhoused individuals in their jurisdiction. In 2020, we are count and this is not definitive, this is just a point in time, with 53 unhoused individuals in 2020. Today that number is more like 11.

So a 79% reduction in less than six years. One of the things I said when we first started this is the best part about the challenge of homelessness in Lincoln is that our population relative to our total city population is very small, which means that our ability for us to actually have meaningful impact is much greater because, you have 20 homeless people and it becomes 10, you've reduced it by 50%, very difficult when that number is 2,000, right? We think that it's worked for a variety of reasons. One is we've built partnerships with all of the different sectors, private, nonprofit, public, County, state on and on. We have focused on what the core, at least it relates to The Creek.

The core mission was to create safe public spaces for people. One of the things I used to hear all the time from people that grew up in Lincoln is, gosh, I used to love to go down to that Creek and hang out. And when I was a kid and I don't feel comfortable anymore, I don't feel safe. And we've heard that sometimes from homeless individuals that were down there. Sometimes I don't feel so safe down here.

So a lot of our decision making was related to how we address that particular issue. Improved environmental conditions, The Creek today compared to three years ago is a different place. Just as it's a, that is a preserved natural habitat, the Wildlife Heritage Foundation I believe holds that easement and it's really important that we hold up our end of the bargain keep it what it's supposed to be. Better coordination of services. We know a lot more today about who to call when someone has a unique issue.

So if you have an addiction issue, we now have relationships with grant wellness. We have relationships with the lighthouse. We have relationships with health and human services. We have people to call who are willing to help. On the law enforcement side, I kind of covered that. On the housing side, we're getting better every year. We're building relationships with whether it'd be nonprofits or faith based organizations to find creative ways to address what we have going on. And then we now are more proactive in outreach and engagement. We have just recently Kim was briefing me that we have a small encampment that's popped up again. Well, in the past we would have just kind of said, well, I don't know what there is to do about that.

Let's go talk to them and see if there's some sort of way to work this out. Now we have tried and true method of giving them options and opportunities for other pathways, or there's a responsibility. And I think we've said it a couple of times in these meetings that there's nothing wrong with a community deciding that it's unacceptable for people to live in substandard conditions. That's okay. And I think sometimes there's a stigma associated with that, but what you're really saying when you're saying that is I don't think that people should have to be surviving in 107 degree heat outside all day long, all summer or in the freezing cold during the winter.

I think that's an okay perspective to have. And so, but the numbers kind of speak for themselves, but what we're really excited about is now we're at a level where we can manage this. I don't like calling it a problem, but this condition that we have in our society in a way that actually serves individuals. So I just wanna give you a broad example about breaking any confidentiality. So we have individuals that have gone through our program that had been effectively homeless their entire lives since they were children.

So, and in some cases this is many decades over four or five. So quite literally, it's all some of these individuals have ever lived is versions of homelessness. And we've had some of them come into the program and fast forward months, six, eight, twelve months, we have some that now are fully employed that have dealt with us variety of medical issues they couldn't have dealt with before they were here that have recovered from a variety of addiction or mental health issues through various resources that we have. That some of them reach a point in the program where they begin to pay rent in the trailer they're in. That's not a lot of money, a handful of $100 a month, but it gets the person used to doing that, that there's value in paying for a place to have a roof over your head, right?

And then we've had a number that have left and have moved on to stable housing situations outside of the program. But what we've learned is we've succeeded because the flexibility of our program allows us to be a little bit more like view every single patient for lack of a better term and its own vacuum. Is, I don't have all of the studies associated with its data, but my understanding is that in traditional shelter scenarios where you check into a shelter and you may stay there for a defined period of time and then you got to figure it out. Failure rate of placing someone into permanent housing after that is between seventy and ninety three percent in this country. Meaning on the worst case, maybe one out of ten people might make it and the other nine don't go back into some form of homelessness.

And so our perspective is that we may have low numbers, but we can take the time with the numbers we have to get that percentage up we hope to fifty or something that would be objectively good. Last thing is just to get an idea about how much resources we put into this program. Much of this program was originally funded by the COVID ARPA allotment. I will remind everyone that many cities took those dollars and absorbed them into their general fund thereby making their budgets look a little more pretty for a few years. The city council at the time made a conscious decision outside of helping to accelerate fire department staffing.

Pretty much everything else was given out to business group, business grants and assistance, we did nonprofit assistance and then we spent a good chunk of that revenue to address this issue. But it's not simply federal dollars that have gone into this. The general fund has jumped in and the subsequent funding of code enforcement's time, special response team, and a variety of others. Some back of the napkin budgeting that I did last week, I think we've probably spent somewhere between federal dollars and our dollars somewhere in the neighborhood of 700,000 to $1,000,000 on this effort. So moving forward, the good news is if we kind of spent a lot of the base dollars we need to spend to stand this up.

And now what we're funding is just sort of relatively minimal ongoing operations. And our job now is to continue what we've been doing, keep working the sort of mind numbing work that it can be at times to continue to try to find new and innovative solutions. But also we've got to start leaning into things like a long term housing for folks that need it. No one likes to say it, but one of the primary issues with homelessness in California is simply the cost of housing and availability And of I know the council spends a lot of time thinking about that. And then my favorite thing at the very end here is the balance that we wanna continue to have of compassion and care for our people because they are our people, but also accountability that we are willing to help you but that doesn't mean that rules do not apply to you as well.

So I think that wraps up my presentation. I can go on and on. I really like this topic, but I'm happy to answer any questions and we're gonna make this available for public viewing. And we're gonna spend a little more time in the coming months pumping out information that just sort of makes the community aware because I think your average community member that doesn't track things real closely here at the City of Lincoln might say, hey, yeah. This is your parade and I'm going go sit down now.

Well, thank you, Sean. You know, this is this is, one of the most rewarding reports that I think I've I've heard in in a long, long time. I mean, what we've done is just, I suspect, unmatched in in this state. I would just, I just made a quick calculation over here. I took 11 unsheltered but divided by the 56, zero people and that means our homeless population ratio is point zero zero zero two.

I mean, is that is just incredible. Yep. And I think what it what it really says is that we have taken the time to create a workable program, not just throwing money at something. I look at what's going on in Sacramento and Sacramento County. You know, they think nothing of renovating a hotel to stick people in at $300,000 per room.

I mean, you can't make this stuff up. And at the end of the day, their success stories are abysmal, frankly. And we've taken our local resources with our people and gotten in there, rolled up our sleeves and made this happen. I mean, This, I think, is what sets Lincoln apart. This is a fabulous story. As I said, I believe it's probably unmatched in this state, what we've been able to accomplish. Because it hasn't been done just by the city. As you pointed out, you know, we have all the community groups that got involved, the faith based organizations. Everyone is pulling together to make this a success. And the things that we wanna do is to make sure that we don't retro and go back.

And I and by what you were talking about, we're not going to do that. We're going to continue doing. This certainly is always going to be people who are experienced being without without a home. And so if people want to do something to help alleviate that system by themselves, taking responsibility, work with them, you know, where it's it's not a handout, it's a hand up and I think what we've done is just fabulous. So, kudos to everyone in the who's done it City staff, private, individuals, and faith based organizations. Congratulations.

Questions? Yes. So, ditto to everything the mayor just said and I spend a great deal of time sharing with residents what we've done for our for our homeless population. And there's a couple things that have come back to me that I just I wanted to have you answer for the public's benefit. So the first thing is, we working on new partnerships with other churches so that we could implement more trailers? Because I know we have some that we haven't used yet because we need this space.

Yeah, think we've got two or three at a couple of churches that after the first one signed up were very interested. But and I don't blame any church for this. They all sort of took a pause and said, hey, we'd really like to see how this first one turns out. Because you think about it, you agree to this as a congregation and you cite this there and it doesn't work out well, it could have. Then they're there and you have a so there's like reasonable skittishness about it.

But I think now we have a good year and a half, two years of really positive experience in the area. Haven't, I could be wrong. So hopefully no one yells at me, but I'm not sure that we've had hardly any issues in terms of annoyance to the neighborhood at all. And there's sort of a no tolerance for that. We set that up to begin with and this is a place that you need to respect or you're not welcome. But yes, there are two others that have expressed interest and so we'll see.

So now that they've seen the success and that it's not a problem. Okay, great. So in this process that we've been going through the last few years and then also, with, you know, the issue that we're dealing with right now with the proposed project on 3rd Street, we've noticed, and and I mean, it happens in every town, but we've noticed over the last couple of years that every now and then a new homeless person will show up that's not from here, and roaming the streets. You know, the last probably year it's been a little bit more noticeable. My question is, how do we handle that?

It was one thing, and that's what I tell people all the time too is that our code enforcement and our law enforcement team and our Adopt A Crete volunteers, they knew these people by name, they know their dog's names, they know their story, because most of them were homegrown, they're ours here. When we have new people just show up and then they're like know spreading all their stuff out in front of our businesses, how do we handle that?

Kim McHugh. She really didn't want me to call her tonight, but she's the most appropriate While subject matter she comes up, think the answer to the question is we try to treat everybody the same regardless of whether or not they're from here. But the where and why is an important question that I think Kim tries to find out early on. Guys want speak to that a little Kim?

Yeah, go ahead. I

approach it the same way I approached initially getting to know the folks down at the creek when I first started getting down there. So you actually go up, you get to know them, you find out what the issues are. But then as far as I'm concerned, I treat folks in Lincoln the same way I parent, which is there's that accountability. Mhmm. And so I immediately let them know what their boundaries are here. We don't have we have a no camping ordinance. So they're not allowed to just set up a camp. They have to pick up and go.

Those who are here know that. Okay. Because just even yesterday and again there's another resident who works in Sacramento and she was driving back and forth and some of her employees have been in town and they say you don't have any homeless people in Lincoln. Like, yeah, it's very low. So we're very grateful for that. But yesterday I was over there at Mr. Pickles and there's an alley right there and there was a lady, never seen her before, big shopping cart full of stuff. She had just gotten a bunch of food from the Seventh day Adventist, which was great. But then I had the thought to myself, okay, well, I wonder where she's going, right? Like what's the plan for her?

So Yes, like I think what you're getting to is what the reason COVID was sort of an extenuating circumstance, but in a normal time, those people, this is why Kim is so good at what she does. Those people need to be contacted real quick because what we find is especially when The Creek was the main place is if you get to them four or five months after they've set up shop, it becomes a real push and pull sort of scenario to figure out what next step for them is. Her getting to them within the first, know typically people call a lot around here when this kind of thing happens and so she's usually in touch with them or PD is within the first few days that they're around and which has set the standard about look here's what it's acceptable to us and what is unacceptable to us and by the way we have all these options for you if you're interested. You minimize those individuals that end up kind of just hanging for a really long time.

Good, thank you. And then my last question is, as we've been sharing information, there was one resident who was criticizing us on social media, which is fine, it's their right to do that. And the question was, if what I was saying was true that our numbers were going down, which they have dramatically, I even cite from right before I got elected in 2018, we were probably up to about 80 people and so we've reduced homelessness by 90%. So why would we give the salt mine that money in partnership with them the numbers were giving them taxpayer dollars if the numbers were going down? So I already know the answer to one of those things is that it's not local tax dollars that came from ARPA money, right?

I mean it's technically all of our tax dollars that goes to the federal government, but to your point that the federal government was giving out COVID relief ARPA dollars to everybody and on a principled or theoretical standpoint, we would say that we wouldn't agree with that. But if the government is giving every city millions of dollars, well, we're going to take it and we're going to use it the way we did. And it was very beneficial to us. So setting that aside, right, it wasn't local tax dollars, was the ARPA money and we used it to build their shower and laundry facilities larger. But how would you answer the question, if our numbers are going down why would we give them that? I know the answer, but I want you to share Well, with the

guess I'd say two things. At the time, our numbers weren't going down.

Were They were still higher.

They were pretty elevated. Second is, you either have infrastructure and relationships and systems in place to address needs of unhoused individuals and therefore give yourself greater success in addressing it or you don't. And then you're playing from behind which is what we were doing in 2018 through about 2022. You're playing from behind, you're making stuff up, you're having to react versus having a system in place. Now, is it a lot of money, is it expensive?

Yeah, if you wanted to put out a pro rata share of every single dollar spent on homelessness and divide it by the actual population of homeless people, it would be a lot of money per individual. But that's sort of the standard that exists almost anywhere. It's a lot of money to spend to get people into a different frame of mind to improve their life. So my perspective is a couple things. First off, the salt mine is a critical resource because people view homelessness as just the folks that are living out somewhere where you can see them.

That's not even a, that's a fraction of the people they serve. They serve people that are couch surfing, living in garages, multiple families per home, etc. And then they also provide a safety net, because one of the things we've discussed at council is, you think about like Maslow's hierarchy of needs, right? You want to have like cleanliness, laundry, those things start the pyramid of self respect, right? And so that kind of service is critically important if you want to maintain relatively low homeless population to me, it's an investment.

Well, and the salt mine also to your point, helps a lot of people to keep them from becoming homeless. Right? So, right. And on the other side of that, the salt mine has been helping homeless individuals families in need that are on the verge of that for decades. They have done it with their own money, their own donations, their own congregants and all of that, that have served the community of Lincoln in the broader area.

And so in my mind when we had the opportunity to partner with them that was like the right thing to do because it's it we're partnering with them from the city to them but they've already been doing the work for decades and it was to me was the right thing to do. I appreciate you going through that and I'm probably going to post this video clip later because people need to understand that, like you said, know a of narrative in the media, that is really, unfair and false because we have done tremendous work, all of us together, from our volunteers who live here who just want to help people all the way up to the City Manager and the City Attorney and everybody in between. Because we care about people in this community. But you said it right, Sean, that compassion without accountability is disastrous and accountability without compassion is harmful. So there has to be a balance and I am very proud of Lincoln for for the balance that we have found in that, and we're going to continue to do the work because people are still people and we're never going to eradicate homelessness altogether no matter what we do, no community is going to.

But the fact that we have reduced the population by 90% and I imagine it will probably continue to drop as we continue to work, very proud of that. I'm thankful that you guys have put in the work, so that we can start, really telling the story to the community members and at large. Because frankly I'm sick of the negative spin. Because you know there entities and people that they want to have their way with us and we're not allowing them to do that right now, so they're trying to make us look bad but we have our head held high and we've done great work and we're going to continue to do that so thank you for the presentation and thank you for everyone for the years of this and we're going to just we're going to keep loving people and and doing what we do best.

John, other thing I just meant you mentioned 700,000 that we've invested so far, and I've I've all of sudden, just dawned on me. We were front loading success. Yeah. I mean, that's that's and when it comes down to that, mean, we spent the money upfront, and it's paying off. I mean, that's that's a great outcome.

Unfortunately, two of our council members who were part of those last city councils are passed now, but wherever they are, hopefully they're looking back because at the time I remember vividly bringing this to you with Christine and we told the Council this is a risk. This could be sunk money. We may not receive much intrinsic benefit from this at all. But it actually could serve, I think we'd have to figure out a way to package it a little more succinctly, but it could serve as a nice model for smaller communities that have a manageable population that you think maybe there's an opportunity to provide better services to them. And it doesn't need to cost you $10,000,000 or $300 a door.

It sounds sort of cliche, but you get all of these groups together that kind of want to do something and you can do pretty cool stuff. The nonprofits in particular and volunteers, If we were paying people to do all of this work, would have bankrupt the city a long time ago.

Comment.

I'm I'm extremely proud. And like my colleagues have said that I think it was well worth, and we're so appreciative of you taking the time even though it was only ten minutes of preparation to put this together. I know it took you a lot longer than that. And it has been very sad. I won't, you know, go into the weeds, but, you know, Council Member Andreata touched on the fact that there's been so much work, so many years, and I've witnessed it from different seats.

And, and I know how many hours of blood, sweat, and tears have gone into increasing the success and getting people to a better place, that seeing that get twisted and the misinformation and it not being appreciated and recognized, it's sad. But we can't change that other than just keep pumping out the truth and information and letting people know what we're doing. I think it's worth it. It does take time. It took a lot of time, I'm sure, to put this together.

And we've had I don't even know how many hours of conversations about this topic, but it's important for us to take the time to share it with everybody else because this is we're doing this not just for us, we're doing this for the community, we're doing this for our residents. And maybe this will help other communities learn from us and see the success because I do think that there is some, it's a special recipe of accountability and helping and kindness and compassion. You can't just throw money at a problem. And I think we've seen that across the state that, you know, it doesn't work. There are parts of the solution that cannot be disregarded or skipped.

You can't just keep pumping out money. And you sort of alluded to the fact that, you know, nonprofits have helped and been part of our success. I think part of that is that there isn't anybody profiting off of the situation here in Lincoln. So, you know, that's that's my 10¢. So I I am just so so proud of you all and our former council members and our our former city manager and our code enforcement and everybody that I don't Doctor Creek, it's just so many people have have put their I mean, sorry.

Sorry. City attorney and and all the volunteers. So thank you. We will definitely, I'm sure, speak for all of us keep supporting these efforts so that we can continue to be successful.

No, I just wanted to echo my colleagues comments and thank you for the presentation and express my gratitude to our team here, past and present, and most importantly to our community partners who again, they do it because of how they care about our fellow citizens regardless of their economic status or their housing status. And I just greatly appreciate all of their efforts because they make Lincoln what Lincoln is and they are why this was a success. So I just want to express my appreciation for that. Thank you.

You know, wasn't really going to say anything, but after Whitney said that you you can't profit off of something like this, It's absolutely true because the moment you come in and you try to say, I'm going to help you and then you find a way to monetize and and try to make money of it. You're going to find people that are not honest and you're going to find people that are you're you're it'll be ruining life and not helping it as much as you think you are going to be and that's anyways, I just, I wasn't wasn't going

to go there but you.

And I love the recipe comment over there. Recipe for success. We have any any cards, Hope?

No, speaker cards.

We have anyone in the audience who would like to make a comment.

Celebrate.

Incredible.

Yeah, I had to live in my car once. I didn't have money. It bit really, really hard. I mean, it was bad. But now, I mean, I mean, I have so many opportunities in life now and just to hear this, it makes me want to even do more in this city.

This is a this is a wonderful blueprint and my question is, how do we share this with other cities and counties? Because it it it seems like we have this wonderful blueprint and yes, the city took a risk. And no one's getting rich off of this. And it's it's a city project. It's people coming together which is so, I mean, that touches my heart. So, it's like, so, if we have this secret sauce, how do we share it? How do we do more? How do we build on top of this?

I think that's the next step in. That's exactly what we're doing. And I saw Aaron's making notes over here. We'll have a full program tomorrow morning.

He's the only person here that could do that actually. Mean, the reality is that, and I think this is the case for most cities of a size or greater, is that you know I've said this many times, if you go back twenty years ago, it didn't used to be that homelessness and homeless services was a city function. It was a county function. They receive health and human services dollars, we do not. So it never was a thing and then you know a couple years before COVID it really shifted as the numbers got much worse in California to being a city burden without funding to bear.

And fortunately, think we've set up something that's economical enough for us to keep going. Look, it may come to a place where it's no longer needed, but I think that's unlikely. And at least we have something that's reasonably scaled for Lincoln that we can keep using until such time as as there's no need for it anymore. Although I just don't think that's likely.

Thank you Ed. Thank you. Anyone else in the audience? Byron.

Thank you, mister mayor, council members, city staff, Byron Chapman, twelve Bridges. I do sometimes when you look at something that is so immense, it's really hard sometimes to just sit back and go, and how do you attack this? And what I've seen over the time and with the city and the community really once that word got out to everyone, not just once or twice, but wherever you meet, wherever you go to have coffee with somebody or a picnic day or whatever it is. Sometimes it's just a, you don't have to make a big two hour speech about it. You just have to go, wow, look at what this is doing and look at what that's doing.

I think one of the big issues is is that really for a number of years now, the city of Lincoln literally has a lot of a lot of things to use the term be proud of. Not not bragging but to be proud of. And I've seen that this the city government and those living here organizations and such. They really have the back of the community and more and more as I see this happening. More and more from my neighborhood to other people that I know in town.

You know, there are years ago where if you're up and down a residential area, you know, you would know 10 people on this side of the street and 10 people on that side of the street and it wasn't just a question of waving at them when you're going to work or when you're coming home. They they blow up alongside the road. What are you doing? You know everybody. And I kind of see some of that returning because that's what we want to foster is that. That's the only way it does it. And like I said, it's those small little bites of this is where we are, this is how good it's working. And oh, and by the way, if we keep doing this, it's going to get even better. And this is kind of the start of the proof. And the blueprint, I think, is probably a darn good one.

It's not a brag. It's just a matter of fact, and that's what you need to embrace. Thank you.

Thank you, Byron. Very well said as always. Do we have anyone else in the audience?

No hands raised.

Yes.

Quick question. I saw recently council member from, Roseville stating that, we are potentially dropping off homeless residents in Roseville. Is there any truth to that?

No. Captain Eaton, I know you're new, but I can't imagine that you've been ordering that app. Is not something

that A we

presentation would have taken a different turn if that were the case. That

is not something Lincoln PD participates in. No, I I could see something getting construed that there's some type of service that Roseville offers to where we would take somebody when they request to go go to a certain facility, but the practice of dropping people off in Roseville is not something that we do.

I didn't think so, but while we're spelling misinformation and rumors and the source was concerning to me. I wanted to make sure that we're not just picking up homeless people, random homeless members, and just driving them down the street and plopping them over the border. Is that doesn't seem like something that we would ever do or I

would say that that violates the concept of compassion that we have kind of as a cornerstone that you're not really compassionate about an issue or an individual if you just simply move them somewhere else.

Right.

With the same exact conditions.

And if I could just add one more piece to that, our officers do often give courtesy rides to people at their requests when we're not busy. So I could definitely see something getting misconstrued to the fact of when we do give somebody a courtesy ride that they say, oh, well, hey Lincoln PD dropped us off. That's something that we do when we have time to do that. So it's not that we're taking homeless people and dropping them off in another city. It's a lot of times we're doing it at their request because they have people that they know in the area. There's like I said, there's a certain shelter that they go to there. So we will then take them there, but that's not a practice that we do on a broad level.

Thank you so much.

Thank you for bringing that up. I just Googled how many homeless people there are in Roosevelt, they have two sixty. Do the math. Anyone on Zoom? That's okay. Information item. This was information. So thank you very much. Great presentation, Sean. Absolutely.

Yeah, I'm gonna be sharing

that too.

Okay, good. City manager reports.

Thank you. So two very brief, the best one, I guess I'll just re mention it, I hope I can get it on for next meeting, Give me a little grace if I don't, one of the next two meetings will get kind of an update and legislative update on e bikes to you for the community to have a broader discussion about it. Fun bit of news, first Street Elementary School was awarded the Gold Star School designation just this last week, which is I don't know a whole lot about it, but it's a pretty big deal. It's a national sort of identification of institutions that meet a variety of standards. So it's pretty cool.

Next meeting we have likely going to be a heavier agenda than we've had. Usually the way it works is we kind of have relatively light agendas for the first couple months of the year and then we really start cooking in the summer through the remainder of the year. So the packets are gonna look a little bit bigger. I believe we have urban water management plan on next meeting. If you're interested in reviewing that document, it's on our website, but we also have a paper copy at the city clerk's office if you'd like to come.

It's a big binder, so you'll need to spend a lot of time with it. But that's on the docket. We have fee schedules that are coming to you and a variety of other pretty important things as we get a little bit closer to budget. And I don't think I have any other substantive reports tonight. Thank you very If

I could steal the city manager's time, please.

Can we additive or deductive?

Fees. We're going to talk about eCheck fees. So

Yes, please, please. Okay.

So I just wanted to give an additional shout out to our community to let them know that we have been working diligently and we have eliminated the eCheck fee for our utility billing portal. And we are encouraging our customers to come back to AutoPay come on back. We have a staff available in the finance office five days a week to assist customers with either setting up their account or changing it so they could come back to AutoPay. We also at the same time after some intensive negotiations with the City Manager, myself and members of the bank, reduced the credit card fee from 3.5% to 3%. That one customers still have to pay.

It's a convenience using a credit card. But if you're paying with your bank account information through our portal, now free, free, free.

We'll be very happy to hear that $1.0.9 That's so good. Thank you, Nita. Very good. Thank you for that.

Okay, Council initiated business. Do we have anyone? I have one thing.

I know that streets are a thing, The funding is limited. I've been speaking to, in fact I actually saw one myself and I took a picture of it. And then I was speaking to some other Sun City residents, and I'm sure you know this Matt, but I promised I would bring it up and see what we could do. There are a few streets up there that have, they are not just like cracks, are like gaps in the street that are not good. And so I've got pictures to show you if you don't already have them I'll send them to you later.

But I thought I would just put that on the radar and see if we could get some of those repaired without a ton of cost. But it's, you know, when I saw one myself, was like, oh wow, that's interesting. Well, yeah, it's actually it's not just a crack, it's like there's a gap. And so you can see that they've been repaired, but we need to find a way to repair them so they're not gaps again in the next year. So anyway, I wanted to bring that to your attention.

I'd like to briefly respond. The mayor, about a month ago brought me to the Sun City Coffee with the mayor and where I reported that we are doing a pilot project to repair an intersection and a stretch of road in either direction of the worst area of the cracks in Sun City. We're also looking at having some additional funding to do some spot repairs on some of the worst cracks. We're targeting doing both of those this summer. One of the problems when Sun City was constructed was that the lime there was lime introduced in the subgrade soil and compacted and it becomes really hard and it has block cracking underneath and actually pulls the pavement apart on top.

Typically, there's an aggregate base layer in between and that is not a component of the structural section in some areas of Sun City. So that's why we're experiencing that issue. So we're gonna continue to address it, but this summer you will see some repairs being made.

Great, thank you, I appreciate that.

Thank you, Matt. Whitney?

Yes. So I was thinking about I just wanted to remind everybody in the public that if there is something that they see, like a pothole or cracks or anything of concern, we do have the the website. It's on the city website. Is that correct? There's it's on this public works page.

Report a

So yeah. Just to reiterate that if you see something, then it goes right to the source and get it taken care of. And then how would you recommend you know, we're doing our advocacy on our unhoused and homeless. How would you recommend if if there's residents? Because we'll we'll get emails and text messages, and then it just seems like it's not the most efficient way to get the information if there's a new person that's out and about to code enforcement? How do you recommend residents handle that?

It's not the most efficient, but honestly the reporter, it should be called report an issue section of our website is a pretty efficient tool in terms of depending on how that report comes in it could go to a couple different folks. If the idea like for example if you have a resident that says hey there's an abandoned camp on 3rd Street and no one seems to be there and it hasn't been cleaned up, well then the person that monitors that inbox will know well that probably should go to public works or some other department that deals with that. If the issue is hey there's a you know a homeless individual that's sleeping in the the park and I'm concerned for them then that'll probably go to Kim and PD and they'll start there. So it really that generalized report a concern inbox is really useful to us because they all go to a central place and then a certain person that you know that works in my office puts them to the right department to take care of them. We don't get duplicative work from multiple departments.

Okay, so recommending that it goes to the report a problem.

Kim, is it called report a concern or what is it called?

Yep.

Okay. Report a concern. But if it's somebody who is I mean, if there's different kind of levels of concern. If it's somebody who's maybe under the influence of something or appears to be severely mentally ill who is

That I would say is a non emergency dispatch call.

Yep. That's what I was gonna say. Okay.

We have people manning the phones 20 fourseven.

Okay. Yeah, that's it.

I don't have anything, John.

I was just gonna follow-up on that and a quick search pulls up a report a problem page. John? Yeah. So if you search for it as a report a problem page and there's public works report a problem, code enforcement report a problem, cyber crime report a crime, traffic concerns report a problem, and then Union Pacific Railway emergencies.

I think almost all of them typically end up in code enforcement or public works. They just want Maybe we'll create one additional one that is more specific. A couple How do you say it that way?

Maybe consolidate and rename.

Yeah. Or

consolidate and rename. Also I meant we have people staffing the phones 20 fourseven, not manning. I was corrected.

Nothing else. Nothing else. It's good. Okay, Ben? Ben?

Yeah. We received an award on Friday evening.

Yes. We received two awards actually, John do you wanna go through it?

Yeah, so I think we talked about the last one, last meeting we received an award from the California Economic Development Caled and that was for the school funding agreement in Village 7, that's the second award. And then the other one that's pretty cool is we received one on the commercial corridor of Village 5 for help me out Aaron, What was the competitiveness award? It was pretty cool. There were four awards given out that night and three of them were to private businesses that are in the Greater Sacramento region and one of them was given to public agency and that was us. So we went down to Sacramento and got our the seven seconds of fame and we should have brought it.

Do we have it with us? It's I should have brought it. It's downstairs. We'll bring it to the next meeting.

Bring it to the next Absolutely.

Yeah, so thank you all for going. You all know that was very sad not to be there. My daughter graduated from Boise State this weekend, so I was there with, you know, family comes first, but very proud of the work that our staff has done and the investments we've made. You guys looked wonderful in the pictures and so thank you for going and representing well. That was a great night. We

had a

very fancy Uber on the way

down there. We're not gonna go there. Okay. Committee reports, we'll start. Ben, anything?

Nothing significant.

I had PCA, it was a preliminary budget review, and LISSWA where we got a few updates on the capital improvement projects there.

And

also still moving through the process of looking for a general manager.

Whitney? We have LAVCO tomorrow, and that's when we're going to be going over our budget. And then if anybody's curious, I think I've already shared, but just in case, we received an application for the incorporation of North North Lake Tahoe, which is a pretty big project, pretty big deal. And we're gonna receive a presentation on that as well. So

It could have a big impact.

Yes. Very big impact on the whole county.

And I've just have Pioneer Community Energy will have a board meeting next week and we'll be talking about stuff. So that's it. Okay. Anything else for the good of the order? In that case, we're done folks. Thanks everybody.